Enlarge / The Nobel Prize-winning first direct detection of gravitational waves announced in 2016 is being called into question. LIGO calls shenanigans. The first direct detection of gravitational waves was announced on February 11, 2016, spawned headlines around the world, snagged the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics, and officially launched a new era of so-called "multi-messenger"…
Enlarge / Virgil C. Summer Nuclear Station, Unit 1 Though economics might not favor nuclear power in the US, policy makers do. Last week, the House passed a bipartisan bill that originated in the Senate called the Nuclear Energy Innovation Capabilities Act (S. 97), which will allow the private sector to partner with US National…
A natural gas fracking well near Shreveport, Louisiana. The US Energy Information Agency (EIA) recently published two interesting sets of maps to show how the US energy mix has changed state by state between 2007 and 2017. That decade saw the rise of cheap natural gas that lead many utilities to switch away from coal,…
Enlarge / A Falcon 9 rocket launches in September 2018. The first satellite launched into orbit, Sputnik, launched from a spaceport in Baikonur, Kazakhstan. The Central Asian country was then a Soviet republic. Later, the first human to fly into space, Yuri Gagarin, also launched from Kazakhstan. Today, despite its independence, this spaceport remains the…
The World Bank will offer loans up to $1 billion and seek partners for an additional $4 billion to finance batteries in the developing world, it announced Wednesday at the United Nations General Assembly. The bank aims to finance 17.5 gigawatt-hours of battery storage capacity by 2025, which is more than triple the 4.5 or…
Enlarge / The position of Barnard's star relative to the Earth and its other neighbors. IEEC/Science-Wave/Guillem RamisaFrom the phenomenal success of the Kepler mission and a proliferation of ground-based telescopes, we now know that planets are common in our galaxy. But the methods we've used to detect most of them are biased toward finding large…
Enlarge / Finding a distraction is key for young children trying to resist the marshmallow. The psychologist who famously demonstrated the importance of being able to delay gratification to achieving later success in life died on September 12 in New York City. Walter Mischel, emeritus professor of psychology at Columbia University and self-proclaimed "Marshmallow Man,"…
Enlarge / A bike of roughly the same vintage as the author's. We tend to think of technology as something that moves electrons around. But I'm going to take a little diversion into technology that is used to move us around (and yes, our electrons as well, you pedants). The humble bicycle has been in…
Enlarge / Parking assist in action in a BMW 640i GT. Eric BangemanYou know all that safety stuff on new cars? Lane-keep assist? Adaptive cruise control? It has a downside... if you get in an accident. Cars with advanced driver-assistance technology are more expensive to repair than their less-autonomous counterparts, according to a study by…
WHEN the women who fill the beds in Panzi hospital heard that Denis Mukwege had won the Nobel peace prize, they got up and started dancing. Laughter and clapping echoed through the hospital wards. Many women are recovering from internal damage caused by rape. One 30-year-old, suffering intermittent bleeding after being raped in a forest,…
