science

Speaking before a standing-room-only crowd at Stacey's Bookstore in San Francisco on Wednesday, William Gibson, the man generally credited with coining the term "cyberspace" in 1982, said the prefix cyber is going away. He said "it's going away like the word 'electro' or 'electra' was used to modify products." He also said the word "digital" is rapidly becoming obsolete as well.

Gibson is on tour for his new, present-day novel Spook Country. The book includes high-tech international terrorism among its many threaded plots. He also makes fun of the word cyberspace within … Read more

In a move to replace manual inspection, NASA has built wireless scanners to automatically detect cracks or imperfections in the thousands of heat tiles that protect the space shuttle.

The space agency said on Tuesday that it will use the wireless scanners for its first mission Wednesday, when Endeavour launches from the Kennedy Space Center.

Thermal heat shields are critical to space flight. The space shuttle Columbia, for example, exploded during re-entry into the atmosphere in February 2003, when a hole in its outer surface caused the craft to break apart under extreme temperatures.

In the past, NASA said its … Read more

If the number of shark documentaries on cable is any indication, people love to obsess about man-eating fish. Now, Australian scientists are taking the obsession one step further.

Scientists in the New South Wales Department of Primary Industries are developing a 3D computer model to test the "bite force" of the Great White, the world's largest predatory fish. Taking data from sharks caught off the Australian coast, the researchers are attempting to illustrate the cranial mechanics, bite force and feeding behavior of the sharks through the use of computer simulations, according to a news release from Science … Read more

Most studies on cell phone towers try to determine whether emissions can be linked to cancer in humans. (This one says it's not.) But a new three-year study tracks their effects on people's anxiety, tension and fatigue.

The conclusion of the study is that emissions from phone masts do not cause accelerated heart rate or higher blood pressure in people, according to a team of scientists at the University of Essex in England.

The scientists tested 44 people who had said previously that they were sensitive to cell phone technology, and another 114 people who had not reported … Read more

It was her eyes that caught my attention. She had the most incredible green eyes, just one shade this side of being unnaturally too green. The skin on her face seemed to glow in the diffuse light, framed by auburn hair.

She was standing just inside a department store, smiling at people walking past her but obviously watching for someone.

It wasn't me. As I walked in, she gave me that same soft half-smile she'd given an elderly woman moments before, briefly making eye contact before her gaze flicked past me, scanning for somone in the open space … Read more

In a poker contest of man vs. machine, the results are in. Humans-2. Polaris-1. (And one draw.)

On Tuesday night, Phil Laak and Ali Esmali, two professional poker players, faced off against a computer program called Polaris, which was developed over 26 years at the University of Alberta. The contest, held at the American Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) conference in Vancouver, Canada, was one of the first scientific poker contests involving real players.

In the end, Polaris beat Laak and Esmali in the first match of 500 hands; tied the second match; then lost the last … Read more

People with life-threatening allergies to peanuts might be able to rest easy at their friendly neighborhood Thai restaurants soon, if research announced this week proves true.

A release from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University says researcher Mohamed Ahmedna has developed whole, roasted peanuts in which the allergen is completely inactivated and that serum from people with severe peanut allergies did not react to the processed peanuts at all. The university paper does not explain the process at all. However, it claims the technique inactivates peanut allergens without degrading the taste or quality of treated peanuts.

Between 1.5 … Read more

A team of researchers has developed a computer program that can learn to decipher sounds the way a baby does.

The impetus behind the program was to better understand how people learn to talk, or more specifically, to see whether language is hard-wired in the brain.

Tests of the computer model back up a theory that babies learn to speak by sorting through different sounds until they understand the structure of a language, according to James McClelland, a psychology professor at Stanford University who wrote a paper on the subject that appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of … Read more

On Monday, according to a Reuters story, NASA launched some trash into space. No, don't read that sentence again.

The trouble, the story says, was that there isn't enough room on the space shuttle to bring back a 1,400-pound machine containing ammonia and a piece of obsolete video equipment weighing 212 pounds. Although flinging the waste into the galaxy was not exactly NASA's first choice, the organization felt it had no other option.

So International Space Station flight engineer Clay Anderson launched the items from the space station, with radars attached to the rubble to monitor … Read more