Paleontologists have long faced a daunting obstacle to their research: Fossils are usually embedded in rock. To manually wrench the fossils out, scientists use an array of tools, from needles to dentist’s drills to dissolving acids, often with destructive results. Swedish paleozoologist Erik Jarvik, for example, famously took 25 years to create a precise, anatomically […]
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On February 22, festival-goers at Melbourne’s dusk-to-dawn White Night celebration lined up in droves outside the State Library of Victoria for an intimate evening with herpes. And they got it, in a big way: Bobbling around on the 40-meter-diameter central dome on the ceiling of the library’s La Trobe Reading Room was a bright and
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For doctors who treat trauma patients, prediction is key: Will a patient die in the next 30 minutes? Why or why not? What about the next six hours? And after that? What’s the best treatment? How might the patient respond to that treatment in the best- and worst-case scenarios? Then what? These are mortal questions:
Almost every device that needs energy also wastes energy. Cars get their zip by burning gasoline, but that process heats up the car — and that heat is wasted energy. Computer batteries get hot when they’re in use; so do cell phones and kitchen appliances. All that hot air adds up: The U.S. Department of Energy estimates
Erik-Jan Bos, a philosopher at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, unearthed research gold with an Internet search. In putting together a critical edition of René Descartes’ correspondence, due out in 2014, he discovered a stolen, never-before-published letter from the seventeenth- century French philosopher and mathematician. In the run-up to Descartes’ 416th birthday on 31 March,
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We won’t be driving the cars of the future; more likely, they’ll be driving us. They’ll park themselves, run on electricity, never get lost, and come when you call (with an app, on your phone). Meet the cars of the future in this story from Science News for Kids.
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