Life - a strong case for life on mars was presented sunday
posted by sourbrew on Feb 17, 2005 - 12 comments

It worked! Huygens has successfully landed on Saturn's moon Titan and the Cassini orbiter is sending good data back to Earth as I type. Isn't it amazing how we can take a probe the size of a compact car, send it on a 7 year journey in the most inhospitable environment imaginable, deploy a sub-probe that has been dormant for that entire time and land it where we had planned on another solar body so far away that it takes 67 minutes to get a signal back and forth. Exploration and research has never been so cool.
posted by tgrundke on Jan 14, 2005 - 37 comments

They're farther along than I thought... You may have heard about Nexia Biotechnology, who have put spider genes into goats to get milk with spider silk protein in it. I thought it was still in the research phase, but Nexia have apparently gone to market with the stuff. They've signed agreements with several manufacturers to produce spider silk protein-based products such as lightweight ballistic armor (like Kevlar, only lighter and non-toxic to produce) for the armed forces and super-strong sutures and prosthetic ligaments for medical supply companies.
posted by RylandDotNet on Jul 21, 2002 - 7 comments

Can the human mind affect random number generators? Sounds absurd (especially to a diehard skeptic like me), but this research is coming out of Princeton, not some fringe group. And here is an independent experiment which seems to confirm the effect. I've emailed CSICOP and The Skeptic Magazine about it, but haven't heard back yet. Anyone know anything about this stuff?
posted by grumblebee on Oct 2, 2001 - 20 comments

Speed of light broken. But it may be awhile before we can harness it for anything useful. Fascinating, nonetheless.
posted by scottandrew on Jul 20, 2000 - 13 comments

Can the speed of light be broken? It's not 1 April, so this actually might be true. It'll be interesting to see the paper in Nature, if and when.
posted by aurelian on Jun 5, 2000 - 5 comments