Swarming spacecraft to self-destruct for greater good. "Future space probes that operate in cooperative swarms must commit hara-kiri if they begin to fail and risk damaging their comrades, says a
recent patent application by NASA.
The agency foresees a day when space missions are undertaken not by one large spacecraft but by swarming formations of much
smaller, cheaper ones. Such craft could collectively provide a "floating optics" system for a space telescope comprising separate craft flying in formation, for instance.
However, should one spacecraft in such a swarm begin to fail and risk a calamitous collision with another, it must sense its end is nigh and put itself on a course that takes it forever away from the swarm – for the greater good of the collective."
posted by Fizz
on Sep 6, 2010 -
34 comments
So this new
critter, the
Symbion pandora, has such a bizarre life cycle and is just so bloody weird -unlike anything we had come across before- that its
discovery in 1995 lead to the creation of a whole new phylum in the Animal Kingdom. Meet the little
monsters.
If your weird-o-meter is humming, keep reading
Zoologger, a new column in NewScientist magazine that writes about about weird animals from around the globe. Selective abortion in pipefish, single-cell giants that enslave bacteria, amphibious cats, you name it.
posted by Cobalt
on Apr 28, 2010 -
38 comments
16% of US science teachers believe human beings have been created by God within the last 10,000 years. 25% of science teachers spend some time teaching about creationism or intelligent design. 12.5% teach it as a "valid, scientific alternative to Darwinian explanations for the origin of species". 2% say they do not cover evolution at all. Teachers who have taken more science courses themselves devote more time to evolution - "This may be because better-prepared teachers are more confident in dealing with students' questions about a sensitive subject."
posted by Artw
on May 19, 2008 -
205 comments
Advanced methods of bomb detection and investigation.
New equipment developed to scan cars and people, such as a parking lot device which
quickly bathes the car's trunk in invisible neutrons, a procedure that makes materials inside the trunk emit gamma-rays that would indicate the presence of explosives.
Also,
a bomb disposal robot which take[s] fingerprints before blowing [a] package up.
posted by mcgraw
on May 3, 2004 -
17 comments
DREAM WORLD
Given that green tea provides a more effective and environmentally-friendly method of preparing computer hard disks, pulsars are used to study gravitational waves with great precision, solar cells made from nanocrystals are found to be much more efficient, and scientists have discovered evidence for the earliest known wildfire in Earth's history, 443 to 417 million years ago, it would be hard to make the case that what we are living in is not, in fact, a Dreamworld.
posted by mcgraw
on Apr 27, 2004 -
29 comments
New Scientist reports that a virus has been built up from mail order components. Other reports on this are in
USA Today and
Nature. This isn't time life has been created in the lab,
as previously linked.
What's interesting is that this study was funded by the
Department of Energy to produce a completely man made lifeform that can create hydrogen or consume greenhouse gasses.
The present virus is an artificially created copy of a naturally occurring virus.
posted by substrate
on Nov 14, 2003 -
7 comments
Today the
British government released a
major report on the safety of genetically modified foods. According to
New Scientist, "existing genetically modified crops and foods pose a 'very low' risk to human health and are 'very unlikely' to rampage through the British countryside", but
others disagree.
posted by turbodog
on Jul 21, 2003 -
58 comments
Enslaved by free trade. The founding myth of the dominant nations is that they achieved their industrial and technological superiority through free trade. Nations that are poor today are told that if they want to follow our path to riches they must open their economies to foreign competition. They are being conned.
posted by badstone
on Jun 24, 2003 -
31 comments
Grub: The seti@home of search engines? According to the
New Scientist:
"A distributed computing project called
Grub, which harnesses individual users' spare computing power and internet bandwidth, began cataloguing millions of web pages this week."
Grub
has thus launched before
HyperBee, a similar distributed search project.
This link was
previously posted on MeFi when it was still in the conceptual stage.
The project is being run by
LookSmart (along with its own open directory project called
zeal) but as the New Scientist article notes: "Website information collected by Grub is already being fed into one of LookSmart's search services, called
WiseNut. But the collected data are also freely accessible to the public, so they can be incorporated into any web site or desktop application."
Possible Google competition or doomed from the start?
posted by talos
on Apr 21, 2003 -
10 comments
This 'news'... it vibrates? Yes, more than six months after it appeared
here on MeFi, New Scientist has just found out about the vibrating broom. I can feel my confidence in them dripping away...
posted by twine42
on Apr 3, 2003 -
6 comments
We like the cars, the cars that go "Vroom" All that quiet too much for you to take when you're tooling around town?
These inventors have reverse engineered the noise reduction technology to make a
product that can reproduce "the endearing and unique audible sound signatures of 1950s, 1960s and 1970s classic cars and motorbikes."
Hot Wheels will probably want a piece of the action to help save wear and tear on kids' vocal chords as they play
Fast And the Furious.
Would anyone pay for this hi-fi feature? Or is this a non-starter only good for a few cheap laffs and links?
posted by chandy72
on Oct 21, 2002 -
18 comments
There is no more excuse not to know at least where to look for it, --with graphic
topography and description of the top entertainment spot, the famed G. Do you know how to find it?
posted by semmi
on Jul 5, 2002 -
12 comments
Rejection reduces IQ "To live in society, people have to have an inner mechanism that regulates their behaviour. Rejection defeats the purpose of this, and people become impulsive and self-destructive. You have to use self-control to analyse a problem in an IQ test, for example - and instead, you behave impulsively"
posted by zeoslap
on Mar 17, 2002 -
21 comments
New Scientist release a copyleft article on......wait for it......copyleft. In it, they discuss what's going on in the world of Open Source and how the meme is spreading from software into other areas, like encyclopedias and law. It concludes saying that open source is currently good for things that don't need to be confidential and do need to be consistently upgraded/changed. Does open source have a chance, or is it just a passing fad?
via slashdot
posted by taumeson
on Jan 31, 2002 -
2 comments
Mathematician Bums Out Entire Scientific Community His "Omega" number--infinite and incalculable--guts hopes for pure mathematics, physicists' hopes for a Theory of Everything, and is just in general kind of bafflingly cool. Builds on the whole Godel/Turing foundation of hopelessness!
posted by Skot
on Mar 15, 2001 -
35 comments
