Category: Space
In recent years, the government has made moves to support making the results of taxpayer-funded research available to taxpayers for free. A new bill in Congress attempts to pull the plug.
Tomorrow morning, if all goes according to schedule, NASA will launch the Kepler mission, which according to noted astronomer Alan Boss in his new book, The Crowded Universe, is likely to discover many Earthlike worlds orbiting in their stars' habitable zones.
As I wrote recently, Stephen Quake has been writing about conflicts of interest in research over at The Wild Side blog. He proposes solving these problems with peer review. I like the article, and he has many thoughtful things to say on the topic, but I don't really understand this proposal.
The problem of conflicts of interest in science is not going to go away.
My friend and fellow children's author Tanya Lee Stone has put all of her passion and research skills into a book that is guaranteed to change the lives of young women who dream of great achievements in science and technology. Not only do I recommend the book, but I also recommend that readers in the DC area mark their calendars for Tanya's speaking events next month.
What's in the Stimulus Package for science?
While waiting for high-energy outbursts and cosmic explosions, NASA's Swift Gamma-ray Explorer satellite is monitoring Comet Lulin as it closes on Earth. For the first time, astronomers are seeing simultaneous ultraviolet and X-ray images of a comet.
There is more than one way to make a dwarf galaxy, and NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer has found a new recipe.
A small but important uptick in electrical output from the solar panels on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit this month indicates a beneficial Martian wind has blown away some of the dust that has accumulated on the panels.
During the next decade, a delicate measurement of primordial light could reveal convincing evidence for the popular cosmic inflation theory, which proposes that a random, microscopic density fluctuation in the fabric of space and time gave birth to the universe in a hot big bang approximately 13.7 billion years ago.
Data from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) suggest the discovery of ancient springs in the Vernal Crater, sites where life forms may have evolved on Mars, according to a report in Astrobiology.
Astronomers using NASA's Swift satellite and Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope are seeing frequent blasts from a stellar remnant 30,000 light-years away.
A new NASA mission set to launch later this month will help scientists better understand the most important human-produced greenhouse gas contributing to climate change: carbon dioxide.
Astronomers today celebrated the formal acceptance of the first North American antenna by the Joint ALMA Observatory. ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, is a gathering armada of short-wavelength radio telescopes whose combined power will enable astronomers to probe with unprecedented sharpness phenomena and regions that are beyond the reach of visible-light telescopes.
THE SCIENCE SHELF NEWSLETTER
News about the Science Shelf archive of book reviews, columns, and comments by Fred Bortz
Issue #29, Back from Hiatus edition, February 2009
