Latest Science News

As two galactic clusters merge, telescopes capture a unique view of dark matter.

Researchers create a 6-D hologram that responds to light and the viewer's angle.

The feds may have their hooks into him, but Guns 'N Roses leaker Kevin Cogill's real headache is still the band. Chances of him getting any jail time are slim, but Guns 'N Roses could bankrupt him -- if they want to.

As electronic gadgets get smaller, their designers are forced to make tradeoffs, in some cases coming dangerously close to the margins of safety. Case in point: Exploding batteries.

As the oceans warm, it's not just corals that are suffering.

Tropical Storm Gustav may reach Louisiana on Tuesday and skirt past New Orleans.

A California court dismisses a copyright infringement case against Veoh, ruling that the Digital Millenium Copyright Act could not possibly require sharing sites to be solely responsible for vetting the content they host. This could be good news for YouTube, which is facing a $1 billion lawsuit with similar facts by Viacom.

Repairing the Hubble Telescope will mean a massive technical undertaking for NASA—not to mention a death-defying mission for the group of astronauts chosen to perform the rescue.

Philippe Starck's latest creation — a plastic chair — earned its name on the first sketch: Mr. Impossible. The French designer said it simply couldn't be made. The challenge? The weld. Polycarbonate chairs are typically formed using a single mold, but Starck's translucent design required two: one for the legs, one for the seat. Fusing the parts using existing methods would mean an unsightly seam, so the engineers at Italian furniture maker Kartell had to forge a new technique. The key was a very big laser. Trained at specially formulated polycarbonate, it left a seam smooth enough to create the illusion Starck had imagined: a chair that appears to levitate. We reached across the ether to elicit the designer's thoughts. Like Starck's design, our conversation seemed to float on air.

Wired: What was the inspiration for Mr. Impossible?

Starck: The speed of evolution of our civilization and the dematerialization that rules all our production. Take the computer: It was the size of a room, then a briefcase. Now it's a credit card. You cannot dematerialize a chair completely, because you must continue to sit on it. But you can make it invisible. That's why I made the Mr. Impossible with a double shell — it's basically made of air.

Wired: Recently, you have begun to look at the environmental impact of your designs. How does a plastic chair fit in?

Starck: The stupidity of the ecological movement is that people kill trees for wood. It's ridiculous. The best ecological strategy is to make products of a very high creative quality, so you can keep them for three generations. I prefer to make a very good chair in the best polycarbonate than make any shit in wood that will be in the trash one year later.

Wired: Why not use recycled plastic?

Starck: It's a little joke of a material. You can do almost nothing with it. And I also refuse bioplastic, which comes from something that people can eat. Scientists agree that we have a real food problem, a famine approaching. It's a crime against humanity to take something you can eat and make a chair — or use it as gas for your SUV.

Wired: How do you reconcile those principles with your position as creative director for Virgin Galactic?

Starck: Every project should fit the big image of evolution. You can consider Virgin Galactic as something only for rich people, but you can also analyze the incredible help that it will give us. The exploration of space is a vital part of our evolution. We don't have any future if we don't go into space. This world will explode in 4 billion years. We have time, but not so much.

Hot, Flat, and Crowded, Thomas Friedman Calls for a Green Energy Revolution authorName= Garrett M. Graff creditType= photo credit= Greg Miller -->

Thomas Friedman is about to dive into the green-tech fray. In his latest book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded, the multi-Pulitzer-winning journalist says everyone needs to accept that oil will never be cheap again and that wasteful, polluting technologies cannot be tolerated. The last big innovation in energy production, he observes, was nuclear power half a century ago; since then the field has stagnated. "Do you know any industry in this country whose last major breakthrough was in 1955?" Friedman asks. According to the book, US pet food companies spent more on R&D last year than US utilities did. "The Stone Age didn't end because we ran out of stone," he says. Likewise, the climate-destroying fossil-fuel age will end only if we invent our way out of it.

But he's not suggesting a new Manhattan Project. "Twelve guys and gals going off to Los Alamos won't solve this problem," Friedman says. "We need 100,000 people in 100,000 garages trying 100,000 things — in the hope that five of them break through."

Our current efforts are not only inadequate, they're hopelessly haphazard and piecemeal. Friedman argues it'll take a coordinated, top-to-bottom approach, from the White House to corporations to consumers. "Without a systems approach, what do you end up with?" he asks. "Corn ethanol in Iowa."

The New York Times columnist, who keeps up a punishing travel schedule, is just back from the Middle East and London. "If you don't go, you don't know," he says. Such wanderings provided the material for his 2005 best seller, The World Is Flat. Now he has added two new terms to his diagnosis of global ills: the intertwined problems of climate change and population growth — "too many carbon copies," as he puts it.

In this new world, governments and companies that take the lead will find themselves with the single most valuable competitive advantage of our time.

To illustrate, Friedman tells the story of a Marine Corps general in Iraq who requested solar panels to power his bases. Asked why, he explained that he wanted to win his region by "out-greening al Qaeda." Instead of trucking in gas from Kuwait at $20 a gallon — money that fuels oppressive petro-dictatorships — in convoys that are vulnerable to roadside bombs, why not beat the insurgents by taking away their targets and their funding?

Coming out months before the presidential election, Crowded is sure to bigfoot its way into the campaign. "McCain and Obama come from the right side of this debate," Friedman says. "They have the right instincts, but neither is quite there yet. They haven't yet thought it through fully." The battle over "green," he believes, will define the early 21st century just as the battle over "red" (Communism) defined the last half of the 20th.

1963: The world's longest floating bridge, the Evergreen Point bridge, opens. It connects Seattle with communities on the east side of Lake Washington.

Pontoon bridges have been around since ancient times. Lash some boats together side-by-side in a stream or river, put some planks across them, and you've got a serviceable bridge. Armies love 'em because they can be deployed quickly so troops and equipment can be deployed quickly.

For a large, permanent bridge, the concept is scalable, but not easily. However, if you need to bridge a deep body of water that has a soft bed, a more conventional design might not be feasible. That's what faced Washington state engineers who set out to bridge Lake Washington. And they'd done it before, with the shorter Lake Washington Floating Bridge, opened in 1940. (A few miles south of the Evergreen Point bridge, it now carries the eastbound lanes of I-90.)

Starting in August 1960, construction crews ashore built 33 hollow, concrete boxes, each 15- or 16-feet high and about the length of a football field. These huge pontoons were floated and then towed into position, where they were linked by thick steel cables to anchors to hold them in place. The 62 anchors, buried deep in the lake bed, weigh about 77 tons each. Building the bridge cost a relatively modest $21 million ($154 million in today's money).

The bridge has a retractable drawspan in the middle that is raised to protect the structure from strong winds. But at 7,578 feet, the floating portion is essentially a 1.42-mile barge with a road on top of it.

That road is state Route 520, which links Seattle with Bellevue and Redmond, where a somewhat well-known software company later made its headquarters.

Seattle's growth, of which the tech boom is no small part, has put a huge load on the bridge. Designed to carry 65,000 vehicles a day, it now carries 115,000. That wear and tear, coupled with storm damage, has led to costly repairs.

Crews have patched more than 30,000 linear feet of cracks in the concrete pontoons since a huge storm on the day President Clinton was inaugurated in 1993. The drawbridge section got stuck in the open position for a while in March 1999.

The Washington State Department of Transportation says if the bridge were to sink, the average commute between Seattle and Redmond would increase from its current 33 minutes to 55. WSDOT has determined that retrofitting the Evergreen Point Bridge to current seismic and safety standards would be more expensive than building a new one.

So, it plans to construct a new floating bridge just north of the current one, starting next year. The new Evergreen Point bridge would have six lanes (plus a bike and pedestrian path) instead of four, cost about $4 billion, and open in 2014.

Perhaps they'll call it Evergreen 2.0, or Evergreen 2-Pont-0.

Source: Various

The FBI arrested a California man Wednesday on allegations he broke federal copyright law by uploading to the internet nine Guns N' Roses songs before their official release. Kevin Cogill, of Culver City, faces a maximum three years if convicted of violating the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act of 2005.

When tropical cyclones cross the Gulf of Mexico, it's cause for serious concern.

Three days before the three-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina's landfall, the Gulf of Mexico braces for another storm that could hit the energy industry particularly hard. Kinetic Analysis Corporation, a disaster risk-management company, estimates that there is a one-in-three chance that Gustav will hit with sufficient force to shut down 10 percent or more of total U.S. oil production this year.

3-D films have been around since 1890, but unless you like watching your TV with red and blue glasses, the technology hasn't progressed much. Thankfully, Sean Hellfritsch and Isaiah Saxon of Encyclopedia Pictura have teamed together to show you how to create a DIY home 3-D theater rivaling the 3-D technology you'll find at your local Imax.

The seedy bloodsucker lifestyle surfaces in HBO's upcoming show based on Charlaine Harris' Sookie Stackhouse books.

Microsoft released the latest beta version of its next browser Wednesday. IE8 Beta 2 shows off some new features -- some of which feel oddly familiar -- as well as some innovations that make the browser easier to use for everyday surfers.

Bell Labs' fundamental physics research lab, a Nobel Prize magnet for its countless contributions to computer science and technology, is shut down as its parent company shifts from basic science research to more marketable areas such as networking and nanotechnology.

The net's most infamous document-leaking site has thousands of e-mails about the Venezuelan government, but this time, the site isn't publishing them for the world to see. Instead, they are being auctioned -- an experiment that's raising ethical questions.

Cells transformed inside a diabetic mouse become successful insulin-producers.