A political stalemate that threatened to boot the United States off the International Space Station eased on Thursday after U.S. lawmakers passed an exemption allowing NASA to buy rides from the Russians, agency officials said. Without authorization to spend tax dollars on Russian Soyuz spacecraft and other space services, NASA would have been forced off [...]
Plants facing stressful conditions like drought produce their own aspirin-like chemical, US researchers say. The chemicals are produced as a gas to boost the plant’s biochemical defences, say scientists from the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado. They suggest that monitoring this could give farmers early warning of possible crop failures. However, they also [...]
Scientists have hailed a successful switch-on for an enormous experiment which will recreate the conditions a few moments after the Big Bang. They have now fired two beams of particles called protons around the 27km-long tunnel which houses the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The £5bn machine on the Swiss-French border is designed to smash particles [...]
It’s a discovery that would make even Sherlock Holmes proud. British scientists have developed a new crime-fighting technique that allows police to lift fingerprints from bullets even if a criminal has wiped down a shell casing. Authorities in Britain and the United States used the method to re-open three cold cases, including a U.S. double [...]
Tropical Storm Gustav started revving up in the warm Caribbean on Friday as it left flooded Jamaica and churned toward the Cayman Islands, headed for the Gulf of Mexico on the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s deadly strike on New Orleans. The storm, which killed at least 72 people in the Caribbean, plowed toward superheated [...]
Astronomers have shed light on how stars can form around a massive black hole, defying conventional wisdom. Scientists have long wondered how stars develop in such extreme conditions. Molecular clouds – the normal birth places of stars – would be ripped apart by the immense gravity, a team explains in Science magazine. But the [...]
A wild dolphin is apparently teaching other members of her group to walk on their tails, a behaviour usually seen only after training in captivity. The tail-walking group lives along the south Australian coast near Adelaide. One of them spent a short time after illness in a dolphinarium 20 years ago and may have picked [...]
NASA has abandoned plans to get its replacement for the retiring U.S. space shuttles into service by 2013 because of a lack of additional funds and technical issues, officials said on Monday. The U.S. space agency had hoped to fly astronauts to the International Space Station aboard a new spaceship called Orion as early as [...]
Scientists in the US say they are a step closer to developing materials that could render people invisible. Researchers at the University of California in Berkeley have developed a material that can bend light around 3D objects making them "disappear". The materials do not occur naturally but have been created on a nano scale, measured [...]
The new iPod video became famous due to its huge memory and the capacity of playing video, due to its slim design and longer life battery. Still, there are voices that point out some disadvantages and highlight different negative aspects. Taking into account that there are few perfect things made by the human [...]
Google Inc said on Tuesday it is an offering an upgraded version of the hardware appliance its sells to companies and government organizations for Google-style Web search of office documents. The Web search leader said the latest version of the Google Search Appliance, a pizza-sized box that holds a self-contained search system for managing an [...]
Skywatchers around the globe can see a total eclipse of the Sun on Friday. A dark shadow will sweep across the surface of the planet in a broad arc as the Moon passes directly between the Earth and our star. The eclipse begins in Canada’s high Arctic and ends in northern China’s Silk Road [...]