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Op-Ed: Tornado Scientist Risks Life for Ph.D.
Storm-chasing scientist Reed Timmer describes an encounter with a surprisingly strong tornado that was nearly catastrophic but yielded great data for his PhD work.
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Ed Rendell
Internet Intercedes to Make Solar Cheaper
A new internet service provides instant online solar quotes, organizing would-be solar buyers into groups who get a collective bargain. The site addresses the soft, mushy costs of doing business that help make distributed solar power more expensive ...
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World's Largest Earthquake-Safe Building
A new 2-million-square-foot terminal at an Istanbul airport is the largest building in the world to sit on high-tech seismic isolators designed to help the building survive earthquakes intact.
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Plastic Boat: The Making of a High-Tech, Eco-Stunt
They'll sail 60 feet of recycled plastic bottles, reconfigured as a catamaran, across the Pacific.
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Environment
Eco Goats
Comet Hunter's Last Look at Earth Is Haunting
The European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft took a final look at Earth before heading out to explore a comet.
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Giant Asteroid Impact Could Have Stirred Entire Ocean
An enormous asteroid that hit the Earth 2 billion years ago, when all the continents were gathered into one super continent, may have really stirred things up in the deep ocean.
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The Spider Awards: Wired.com's Arachnid Hall of Fame
Wired.com rounds up the biggest, baddest, weirdest, fiercest, cutest and cuddliest spiders in the world. With excellent photos.
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Out of the Blue: Islands Seen From Space
This collection of images taken from space by astronauts and satellites showcases some of Earth's most beautiful and interesting islands.
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http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2009/11/cant-commit-to-a-family-pet-try-a-triops/
If you’re in the market for a low-cost, low-maintenance, low-commitment but high-interest pet, you can’t do better than triops.
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Global Warming Caused Radical North Sea Change
A major shift in the North Sea's food web goes relatively unnoticed for years. Now, scientists say it's caused by climate change.
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Environment
Global Warming
Climate Change
Taking Earth's Temperature With a 30-Mile Thermometer
Technology originally created to monitor oil wells is now being used by scientists to study some of Earth's most inaccessible places, from desert pools to Antarctic ice.
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Why Pygmies Are Small
New Research suggests that high death rates in the past caused pygmy ancestors to mature and reproduce earlier, and they gradually became smaller.
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Bird Cam Captures Albatross, Killer Whale Rendezvous
Tiny digital cameras attached to four Antarctic albatrosses uncover an unusual pattern of bird behavior: Albatrosses appear to follow killer whales across the open ocean, scavenging for fish scraps left behind by the mammalian predators.
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Infrared Video: 500,000 Bats Emerge From Cave
Mesmerizing infrared video of bat colonies allow scientists to pin down exactly how many bats are living in the caves of the southwest.
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Teen's DIY Energy Hacking Gives African Village New Hope
In a down-and-out village in Malawi, a teenager builds a windmill from an old textbook to power light bulbs and pump water. The world is inspired by the story and now a new book delves deeper into the changes wrought to his life and village by his ...
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Malawi
Earth's Hum Might Help Map Mars
The Earth hums at a frequency of 10 millihertz — and it turns out that noise can be used to map its interior. Now, scientists are wondering if a hypothetical Martian hum could help us understood that planet's geology.
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Throwaway GPS Data Reveals Snow Depth
A data artifact that GPS researchers had long tried to suppress turns out to provide critical information about the depth of the snow around around a receiver, a new paper suggests. That's an important variable in climate calculations, particularly in ...
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Weird, Rare Clouds and the Physics Behind Them
See some of the most beautiful, strange, and rare clouds with explanations from scientists about how they form.
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Four-Winged Fossil Bridges Bird-Dinosaur Gap
A fossil with four wings and evidence of a slew of feathers pushes the date of the earliest known feathered dinosaur by millions of years.
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Green Living
Gap
9 Environmental Boundaries We Don't Want to Cross
Scientists have focused a lot of research on determining acceptable CO2 levels in the atmosphere, but now a group of experts has estimate thresholds for six other key environmental parameters, including water use and ocean acidification, and proposed ...
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CO2
Dust Storm Slams Sydney: "It Was Like Waking Up on Mars"
An extreme dust storm blanketed Sydney Wednesday morning, turning the city a bright orange. Our readers sent in their photos of this strange event.
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The Hunt for Extraterrestrial Life Gets Weird
We may have been looking for extraterrestrial life in all the wrong places, say a group of Austrian astrobiologists who are studying non-water solvents that might be able to support life. Instead of searching for signs of Earth-like life on other ...
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Waterboarding Doesn't Work, Scientists Say
Painful interrogation techniques like waterboarding don't work, according to a new review of the psychological literature. The belief that "enhanced interrogation" produces valuable intelligence information is just "folk neurobiology," the lead ...
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Stunning Views of Glaciers From Space
The glacier is the geologist's window into the Earth's soul. Here's what some of them look like from space. Not bad, eh?
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Cave Divers Risk Their Lives to Explore the Underworld
Photographer and diver Jill Heinerth takes us on a photographic tour of her cave diving exploits, and the technology she uses to stay alive.
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Deep-Sea Robot Plumbs Unexplored Depths
A new high-tech rover returns from its first month-long journey along the ocean floor. Scientists hope the robot can help them learn how so many creatures can survive in the ocean depths with so little light or nutrients.
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Flying Transformers: Birds Gear Up for Migration
Birds transform themselves in order to be able to migrate long distances. Their guts expand and contract, muscles swell and wither, metabolism shifts up and down. It's akin to a person going from powerlifter to ultra-marathoner in a couple of weeks.
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Video Reconstructs How Swine Flu Spread
Video simulations show how swine flu spread around the globe based on genetic mutations in virus samples.
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Thin-Film Solar Startup Debuts With $4 Billion in Contracts
A solar company backed by Google's founders made its public debut today, pushing a long-promising type of ultracheap solar cells nearly into the marketplace.
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Green Living
Forget Apple, Here's the Real Snow Leopard
As most of the tech world focuses on Apple's new Snow Leopard operating system, the real animal struggles to survive.
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Green Living
Apple
Use Your iPhone to Help Scientists Track Crickets in NYC
Calling all citizen scientists in New York City: USGS researchers are asking for help with a comprehensive survey of the urban crickets and katydids. On Sept. 11, participants will go outside and identify cricket calls, and then submit their data to ...
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New York
Telegraphs Ran on Electric Air in Crazy Magnetic Storm 150 Years Ago
The most massive geomagnetic storm of modern times struck Earth 150 years ago, today. As auroras spread across the sky and telegraph service was disrupted, an important new connection between the heavens and a newly high-tech Earth was made.
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Hammers, Water, Lasers Make Deep Drilling Easier
The process of punching a well hasn't changed in a century. The search for oil, gas, or water may extend more than 7 miles, but it's still done with a tricone bit —three grinding cones angled inward and downward, with spinning teeth. This ...
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Environment
Water Conservation
Oil Drilling
Lizards Use Third Eye to Steer by the Sun
Light-sensitive cells on the tops of lizards' heads function as a sun-detecting compass. Make the lizards' third eye blind and they can't find their way around.
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Ecuador Regreens the Galápagos
The islands that inspired Charles Darwin's theory of evolution are being loved to death. Every year, more than 140,000 tourists descend on the isolated archipelago to ogle its cactus-studded scenery and bizarre wildlife. And amid the ...
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Ecuador
Happy 150th, Oil! So Long, and Thanks for Modern Civilization
It was 150 years ago Thursday that Edwin Drake sunk the first oil well in America, signaling a major shift in the way the humans use energy. Now, we're facing another transition as the world's cheap oil runs out.
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Environment
Oil Drilling
Tool: Power Winch for Landing Huge Fish
What it is:
Shimano Tiagra reel with Elec-Tra-Mate 1380-GH drive
What it's used for:
plucking large fish from the sea
It takes more than elbow grease to ply the ocean depths for big game. Commercial deep-drop fishing requires using ...
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Energy/Transportation
Wind Power
Old American Dams Quietly Become a Multibillion-Dollar Threat
More than 2,000 American dams are in need of serious repair, but tight budgets prevent the necessary maintenance from getting done.
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Mysterious Tubular Clouds Defy Explanation
Nobody knows what causes Morning Glory clouds in northern Australia. A photo taken from a plane shows the long, tube-shaped clouds that can grow to be 600 miles long.
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Australia
Erupting Volcanoes Seen From Space
Astronauts and satellites have spotted some pretty awesome volcanic eruptions over the years. We've gathered 10 of the most interesting photos of erupting volcanoes, taken from space.
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Toxic Soup: Plastics Could Be Leaching Chemicals Into Ocean
Although plastic has long been considered indestructible, some scientists say toxic chemicals from plastics that begin to break down in only one year may be leaching into the sea and harming marine ecosystems.
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Adopt an Acre to Fight Deforestation
Destructive logging, farming and mining practices are destroying our planet's valuable forests. Fight deforestation by supporting a nonprofit, "adopt an acre" program.
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Deforestation
Behind the Scenes at Harvard's Museum of Natural History
Go behind the science of Harvard's natural history museum and see the world's biggest egg and other treasures.
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Carnivorous Plants Are DIY Ecosystem Monitors
Because of their extreme sensitivity to environmental factors — nitrogen levels, for instance — the carnivorous pitcher plant can be used as a cheap biosensor to monitor the health of an ecosystem.
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NASA Drone Uses Radar to Map Quake Faults in 3-D
NASA begins experimenting with a special aircraft equipped to provide sophisticated scanning of earthquake faults.
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Environment
NASA
Asteroid Impacts on Earth, Seen From Space
Wired Science has collected images taken from space of some of the oldest, biggest and most interesting asteroid impact craters on Earth.
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In the Bowels of Carnivorous Plants, a Tiny Model of the World
For insight into fabulously complex ecological dynamics, Harvard University biologist Aaron Ellison peers into the cupped leaves of carnivorous pitcher plants.
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Scientists Track Down Source of Earth's Hum
The Earth's steady hum appears to be coming from the crashing waves along the Pacific coast of North America.
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Satellite Data Could Overturn Plankton Bloom Hypothesis
New satellite data shows that plankton counterintuitively blooms in the winter, not in the spring as was believed. The discovery has implications for ocean productivity as the globe warms and could change the way we model climate.
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