Science

A powerful enough engine can make a spacecraft move faster and faster. That familiar phrase contains a trap: it seems that any speed will eventually be reached if the engine runs long enough. Special relativity says the opposite. A spacecraft with non-zero mass can approach the speed of light in a vacuum, conventionally written as … Read more

Before the bulldozers entered the Ivanpah Valley in California’s Mojave, just before the Nevada line, biologists walked around and counted. Their first survey of the 3,500-acre footprint found 16 desert tortoises. Refined estimates raised the likely total to a few dozen, with 32 commonly cited as the upper limit. Federal regulators wrote the permits accordingly: … Read more

To replicate information, life tends to have pretty simple ways of doing things. To copy DNA, DNA is generally used as a template. To make RNA, cells generally use DNA as a template, while the RNA, in turn, provides the instructions for making proteins. But now a bacteria has revealed a different path, and it’s … Read more

The mystery that had biologists crawling under wind turbines in southern Alberta was a simple contradiction: dead, unmarked bats. A bird found under a turbine often looks like what happened to it. Broken wings, blunt force trauma, the signature of a collision with the tip of a blade moving at highway speeds or faster. But … Read more

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida — Now it’s the moon’s turn to put on a disappearing act. After being left out of this month’s total solar eclipse, the Americas will have the best seats in the celestial house when Earth’s shadow briefly envelops the moon. Almost the entire lunar surface will be masked from Thursday night through … Read more

A crocodile lies motionless in shallow water near a colony of nesting birds, with most of its body underwater, so the only thing a passing egret sees is what looks like a floating log with some sticks on top. The bird, looking for twigs to build its nest, reaches out to grab one. The trunk … Read more

A road junction in Sendai, Japan, in the early 1990s. The traffic light turns red, a line of cars stops, and a crow appears on the road just in front of a front tire. He drops a nut, then flies back to the sidewalk and waits. The light turns green, a tire passes over the … Read more

Massive Hail Becomes More Common in Warmer Climate We at The Weather Channel are used to seeing hail damage to homes, but imagine a hail the size of an Xbox crashing through your roof. Ice bombs are called megacryometeors; in other words, large icy rocks fallen from the sky. They may have small ice bubbles … Read more

The desert sands of Egypt have been dry for thousands of years. However, as difficult as it is to imagine now, much of that desert was once submerged beneath a sea that covered much of the northern perimeter of the African continent. Nor was it a dead sea; Evidence suggests that, during the Cretaceous period, … Read more

We all know that a dropped or shaken can of soda carries the risk of causing a fizzy rash. People use different techniques to prevent these bubbly explosions, including tapping the top of the can. This advice has been bandied about for years, but does it really work? The answer lies in the physics of … Read more