science

SOCORRO, N.M.--Roswell gets all the glory. It has a UFO festival, a UFO museum, and a prominent place in the national mindset. Roswell happened back in 1947, but it wasn't really popularized until the late 1970s.

Before Roswell got famous, Socorro, N.M., made national news in 1964 after a very peculiar incident on an April evening.

Socrorro gets its own UFO Police officer Lonnie Zamora was chasing a speeding car near the outskirts of town when he turned off to investigate a loud roaring sound and a flame in the sky. What he initially thought was a car turned over in an arroyo turned out to be what he described as a shiny whitish object, shaped like an "O" with legs. … Read more

The scientists aboard the International Space Station "have the best view in the solar system," videographer Alex Rivest says. Maybe that is why he created this time-lapse video of exactly what the scientists see so people around the world can also gaze at the same view.

Hovering close to Earth and completing 15 orbits per day, the ISS provides dozens of photos and videos of the views it records -- the same stunning scenes captured in Rivest's video. The habitable satellite tracks rolling scenes of the multi-colored planet with images of long winding rivers, high mountain ranges, … Read more

"This is my daughter, who just turned 9. She's amazing, and I want her to grow up to be a mad scientist and to take over the world."

So begins writer Jordan Stratford's Kickstarter pitch video for "Wollstonecraft," the first of what he hopes will be a series of steampunky, historical novels for kids and young adults that will "inspire a generation of girls about imagination and science."

Stratford says he wants to give young girls like his daughter "actual historical role models that show them that math and science and imagination are incredible tools that can shape their world." And he's chosen as his two heroines Mary Shelley, of "Frankenstein" fame -- the world's first science fiction writer, he calls her -- and Ada Byron, whom some regard as the world's first computer programmer.… Read more

LOS ALAMOS, N.M. -- Many great masterpieces reside in museums. There's the "Mona Lisa" at the Louvre. "Nighthawks at the Diner" graces the wall at the Art Institute of Chicago. And the Cray-1 sits at the Bradbury Science Museum here in Los Alamos.

The first Cray-1 was installed at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1976 at a cost of $8.8 million. It set a new world record speed of 160 million floating-point operations per second and boasted 8MB of main memory. According to the museum, it was the first computer to break the megaflop barrier.

By today's hardware standards, the Cray-1 is a great lumbering beast. The dramatic lighting shining on it at the Bradbury exhibit shows off its curves and hulking size. But by 1976 standards, it was a svelte creation whose circular shape kept the complex wiring compact. … Read more

Roughly 20,000 years ago the great ice sheets that buried much of Asia, Europe, and North America stopped their creeping advance. Within a few hundred years sea levels in some places had risen by as much as 10 meters -- more than if the ice sheet that still covers Greenland were to melt today. This freshwater flood filled the North Atlantic and also shut down the ocean currents that conveyed warmer water from equatorial regions northward. The equatorial heat warmed the precincts of Antarctica in the Southern Hemisphere instead, shrinking the fringing sea ice and changing the circumpolar winds. … Read more

If you want to get more natural with your pics, Japanese researchers are working on a gesture-based mini camera that lets your hands frame the shot.

The group at the Institute of Advanced Media Arts and Sciences (IAMAS) in Gifu Prefecture recently showed off something they call the Ubi-Camera, a play on "ubiquitous" and "yubi" ("finger" in Japanese).

As the vid shows below, the simple prototype attaches to your index finger while your other fingers form a viewfinder around it. Push a button with your thumb to snap the shot.

Instead of a zoom … Read more

In years past, the go-to tools for researchers were specific to their field, whether it was a telescope or a microscope. Increasingly, it's computers and big data sets.

The White House today announced a $200 million big-data initiative to create tools to improve scientific research by making sense of the huge amounts of data now available. The programs are needed to improve the technologies for getting insight from complex and large sets of digital data, according to the White House.

"The initiative we are launching today promises to transform our ability to use Big Data for scientific discovery, … Read more

The White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy is launching a research and development program to collect and analyze reams of data, or big data.

The heads of seven federal science programs are scheduled to hold an online press conference this afternoon to discuss their work with big data. The event at the American Association for the Advancement of Science will have representatives from the Office of Science and Technology Policy, the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Departments of Defense and Energy, DARPA, and the U.S. Geological Survey. Commitments from the different agencies … Read more

Wonders of the Universe -- based on the BBC series of the same name from HarperCollins -- is an elegant and visually gorgeous app that lets you explore our known universe on your iPad. The app comes with more than 2.5 hours of HD video, dazzling 3D graphics of everything from subatomic particles to galaxies, and tons of information to read as you explore, and it offers an excellent use of the iPad's touch-screen interface to browse all the content.

We got a sneak peak at the app, but Wonders of the Universe will not be available until tomorrow in the iTunes App Store. HarperCollins says the app will be at the discounted price of $6.99 initially, but will go up to $9.99 sometime after the launch.

The app starts you off by explaining the touch-screen interface and how to navigate through all of the content.… Read more