Science

If you like someone just a teeny-weeny bit, this Cupid is your ticket to love on Valentine's Day.

Physics students at Brigham Young University crafted this nifty god from carbon nanotubes that are 10,000 times smaller than a human hair.

They began by laying down microscopic iron "seeds" to form a Cupid pattern. When they applied a heated gas to the iron, the seeds sprouted into the desired shape. … Read more

The magic of physics can turn the mundane into something marvelous. Mark French, a mechanical engineering professor at Purdue University, designed a supersonic air-powered ping-pong ball cannon that shoots the lightweight object at speeds so fast I would consider the device a lethal weapon of science.

A ping-pong ball reportedly blasts out of the special cannon at speeds equivalent to Mach 1.23 -- nearly as fast as an F-16 fighter jet. As evidenced in the video below, the high-speed ball can put a clean hole through a plywood paddle, a VHS tape, and other objects. The amount of energy delivered by the Mach-speed ping-pong ball equals the force of a baseball thrown at 125 mph or a brick falling from several stories up.… Read more

Antarctica isn't the friendliest place on earth. It's cold. It's snowy. It's tough on researchers and tough on their research stations. The cold continent has seen its fair share of stations abandoned as they're slowly consumed by layers of snow and ice. A new research station is looking to outlast its predecessors by crawling up above the snow when needed.

The Halley VI research station is the newest addition to the family for the British Antarctic Survey. It's known as the "first fully re-locatable research station in the world." That means it's got legs and it knows how to use them.… Read more

Beloved astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson is no stranger to the world of comic book superheroes, having already found the location for Superman's home planet. He has now turned his keen scientific mind to the Marvel world and the issue of just how much Thor's mighty hammer weighs.

Thor's hammer Mjölnir is said to be made of neutron-star matter. Tyson did the calculations and determined the hammer must therefore weigh as much as 300 billion elephants. That's not a common form of weight measurement, so we have to do some further calculations to translate elephants into pounds.… Read more

He's got blood flowing through him, but he sure isn't human. Meet Rex, the world's first complete "bionic man."

Rex has the face of a man; prosthetic limbs; a functional artificial blood-circulatory system; and artificial organs including a pancreas, kidney, spleen, and trachea. At 6.5-feet tall, Rex is valued at a whopping $1 million.

Created for the TV documentary series "How to Build a Bionic Man," Rex was constructed by a team of roboticists. The researchers say they wanted to test scientific boundaries and demonstrate how modern science is beginning to catch up with sci-fi in the race to replace body parts with man-made alternatives. … Read more

Moths, despite munching on wool sweaters, are pretty innocuous for the most part. Scientists from the University of Tokyo decided to up the ante and put some moths in command of their very own robot vehicle.

The male silkmoths didn't have to pass driver's ed first, they just had to use their natural instincts for tracking down the female moth's sex pheromone. That's right, male moths do pretty much the same thing male humans do when they get their first car: go cruising for girls. … Read more

Is your doggy a dummy? Probably not. Most dogs are adept at simple problem solving and recognizing commands. But if you want more details on exactly how your pet's mind works, a new company has you covered. Dognition, started by a professor at Duke University, makes a product that lets you test your dog's cognitive skills and record the results.

Purchasing the $60 Web app allows you to fill out a personality questionnaire and run your dog through a series of simple experiments. The science-based tests playfully measure a dog's intellect on several fronts -- from empathy to memory to reasoning skills. … Read more

When asteroids attack, dinosaurs lose. Though there are still competing theories as to why we lost awesome animals like Tyrannosaurus rex and Velociraptors, many scientists look to a long-ago asteroid impact to explain the wipeout.

A study published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters adds a new wrinkle to the asteroid assumption by suggesting that the dinos may have had to contend with not one, but two deadly balls of flying space rock. Titled "Morphology and population of binary asteroid impact craters," the study was lead by Katarina Miljkovic from the Institute of Earth Physics in Paris.

If you look out into space around Earth, you'll find that about 15 percent of asteroids are binary, meaning they're traveling in pairs. However, only 2 to 4 percent of craters on Earth have been labeled as binary impacts. Miljkovic believes this number is under-reported and that many binary asteroids have been overlooked because their craters overlap.… Read more

How well do you know the geography of the moon? This weekend brings a great chance for you to brush up on your lunar knowledge.

Starry Night Education points out that when the moon rises each night this weekend, we Earthlings can view a great angle of these jumbo lunar craters: Plato, Archimedes, Copernicus, Ptolemaeus, and Clavius. … Read more