Turning up the heat: windfarms lead to local nighttime warming
Relative to most other forms of energy, windfarms have a pretty minimal environmental impact, with the deaths of birds and bats generally capturing the most attention. But as a new...
SpaceX to webcast static rocket firing today in preparation of Dragon spacecraft launch
SpaceX will fire all nine engines of the Falcon 9 rocket currently on the pad at Cape Canaveral, Florida today as part of a full-on dress rehearsal for the second launch...
Saturn may have snagged Pluto’s cousin, turned it into a moon
Saturn's moon Phoebe might be a planetesimal—a remnant of the rocky building blocks of the planets in our Solar System. A new study by Julie C. Castillo-Rogez et al. from Cassini...
Researchers build an RGB laser using quantum dots
Lasers produce nearly monochromatic light. However, not all applications demand pure, single-color light—digital displays and other devices require a wide range of colors. While it is possible to combine red...
Hate fossil fuels? Then buy up the reserves
Those with a desire to see a reduction of greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels could do worse than to buy up reserves, according to a paper published this month. Researcher...
Weird Science turns to rugby to protect all its popes
When it comes to Welsh rugby, define "pope" broadly: Most of the stuff we cover here at Weird Science is inadvertently amusing, but researchers aren't beyond using the literature to have a bit of...
The week in science is counterintuitive
This past week, our biggest story was a scoop that we got to ahead of most major news outlets: a bunch of billionaires were backing a company that planned to...
Going organic hurts veggies, OK for legumes
How could organic stuff not be better? Eschewing pesticides and fertilizers is better for consumers, farmers, the environment, and all the denizens of the ecosystems that comprise it—everyone knows that....
Thinking in foreign language makes decisions more rational
To judge a risk more clearly, it may help to consider it in a foreign language.
A series of experiments on more...
Small objects blasting a path through Saturn’s F ring
From a distance, Saturn's rings look flawlessly smooth, as if they've been in their current state indefinitely. But as the Voyager and Cassini probes have witnessed, the rings are incredibly...
Harvard Library advises its faculty to go open access
The problems with state funding may be hitting public schools hard, but even some parts of elite private institutions are feeling the sting of rising prices. That was the message sent by the Harvard...
How science failed during the Gulf oil disaster
When the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded two years ago in the Gulf of Mexico, many scientists, including me, stepped outside...
