DigitalGlobe |
|
The WorldView-2 satellite photo at left shows an oil refinery near Concepcion, Chile,
on Feb. 27 after the area was hit by an 8.8 earthquake. A pre-quake image of the
same area, seen at right, was taken by the QuickBird satellite on Feb. 21.
|
How did the magnitude-8.8 earthquake in Chile compare with January's 7.0 earthquake in Haiti? Was Chile's quake 60 times stronger? 600 times stronger? And exactly how much time will we be losing every day because the 8.8 quake affected Earth's rotation?
If it's just a question of running the numbers, scientists can provide extremely precise answers. But the realities of earth science aren't always easy to pin down on a yardstick or a stopwatch.
CONTINUED >>
Michael West / ESO / ESA / NASA |
|
The elliptical galaxy ESO 306-17 looks like a fuzzball with a bright center and a
large halo in this image, captured by the Hubble Space Telescope's Advanced
Camera for Surveys. Click on the image to see a larger version.
|
Swirls of stars seem to surround a huge galaxy half a billion light-years from Earth. But that's just an illusion: In reality, the hazy galaxy spotted by the Hubble Space Telescope is a big fat loner. The big fat mystery is ... why?
CONTINUED >>
| |
Lemelson-MIT Program |
| |
MIT graduate student Erez Lieberman-Aiden holds models of DNA fractal globules and is surrounded by designs symbolizing other research interests, ranging from evolutionary graph theory to the iShoe.
|
Four amazingly inventive students have won $30,000 each for innovations ranging from a DNA puzzle-solver to a low-cost prosthetic arm to an "iShoe" that checks your sense of balance.
The monetary payoff came today from the Lemelson-MIT Collegiate Student Prize Program, which has rewarded inventors with cash prizes since 1994. But the biggest payoffs from the winning inventions are still to come, in the form of new medical therapies, more efficient energy storage devices and lives more fully lived.
A century ago, the stereotypical inventor was a Thomas Edison type, slaving away in a lab, trying to blend 1 percent inspiration with 99 percent perspiration to come up with a stroke of genius. Nowadays, the stereotype is more likely a Borg-type hive mind, in which legions of anonymous engineers come up with innovation by design.
Erez Lieberman-Aiden, a 30-year-old student winner at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, thinks the truth is somewhere in the murky middle.
CONTINUED >>
Getty Images |
|
Bottles containing poison could be found on household shelves a century ago.
|
If you think the investigators on "C.S.I," "Law and Order" and other cop shows have it tough, imagine what it was like a century ago - when a confessed poisoner went free because no one could prove he did it. Forensic science, as it's practiced today on television and in thousands of real-life crime labs, hadn't yet been invented.
"It wasn't just that they didn't have the tests," Pulitzer-winning science writer Deborah Blum told me today. "They didn't have the apparatus to do the tests."
Blum tells the tale behind the birth of forensic science in "The Poisoner's Handbook," a saga that literally lets readers pick their poison.
CONTINUED >>
AP file |
|
When it came to scooping up medals at the 2010 Olympics, Canada led the
pack in the gold category but Team USA won the most overall.
|
The gold medal for predicting the Olympic medal count goes to ... neither the math geeks nor the sports jocks. The clearest winners are the folks who shifted their forecasts after the Vancouver Games actually started and put their virtual money on Team USA. But the judges will have to make the final ruling - and that means you, gentle reader.
CONTINUED >>
NASA / JPL / SSI |
|
A stereo image from the Cassini orbiter shows the Saturnian moon Prometheus in
all its 3-D glory. Use red-blue glasses to see the stereo effect.
|
As the Cassini orbiter whirls past Saturn and its moons, it's racking up a growing inventory of cool imagery - including 3-D views that are worth pulling out your red-blue glasses to see.
CONTINUED >>
