7.9 Quake hits Indonesia

7.9 Quake hits Indonesia
A day after an 8.0 magnitude earthquake struck the Pacific territory of Samoa, killing 99, a 7.9 temblor flattened buildings, knocked out bridges, damaged an airport and killed at least 75 people in Sumatra, Indonesia. This quake was about 375 miles from and occurred along the fault line that triggered...

Big Quake and Tsunami Strike Samoa

Big Quake and Tsunami Strike Samoa
Scientists and officials talk about today’s earthquake and tsunami. An 8.0 magnitude earthquake shook the island of Samoa early today and triggered a tsunami that wiped out villages and has killed about 20 people with many more unaccounted for so far. A tsunami warning for Hawaii and the west...

FlashForward’s Timely Physics

FlashForward’s Timely Physics
Cast of ABC Television's Flash Forward, courtesy of ABC When the ABC Television series FlashForward pushed the collective consciousness of the world (in the context of the show) forward six months, the book on which the action-adventure series is based flashed up the Amazon book ranking last week. The...

Mouthrinses Awash in Controversy

Mouthrinses Awash in Controversy
New research coming from Johnson & Johnson shows that Listerine antiseptic not only kills germs that cause bad breath and gum disease but also could prevent those germs from entering the bloodstream where they can lead to diabetes, heart disease and pneumonia. This follows on the heels of an Australian...

Water on the Moon

Water on the Moon
Three separate missions examining the moon have found clear evidence of water there. On October 9th, NASA’s Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite mission will try to detect water directly by crashing a Centaur rocket onto the moon.

President Obama Vows to Fight Climate Change

President Obama Vows to Fight Climate Change
President Obama Addresses UN Climate Summit In what could be considered his most strongly-worded warning about the threat of climate change, U.S. President Barack Obama told the United Nations that there is little time to act before permanent environmental damage is irreversible. In a stirring speech,...

Synthetic Biology Takes on a Life of Its Own

Synthetic Biology Takes on a Life of Its Own
A Yeast Cell with Synthetic Genes, courtesy of Dr. Pamela Silver, Harvard Medical School Life is often stranger than fiction. But the direction that biology is heading, synthetic life could be stranger than science fiction. The emerging field of synthetic biology is moving closer and closer to creating...

Hubble Reveals New Cosmic Pics

Hubble Reveals New Cosmic Pics
After being upgraded and outfitted with a new, more powerful camera, the Hubble Space Telescope has begun sending higher resolution and more spectacular photos from deep within outer space. A fully rejuvenated Hubble telescope kicked off its new life on September 9, with a flurry of stunningly clear...

Discovering an Ocean of Medicine

Discovering an Ocean of Medicine
Amy Wright Collects Samples While Diving, courtesy of Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute at Florida Atlantic University Cures to the most mundane and deadly illnesses have been found deep in the jungles, high in the mountains and hidden in the rainforests. But until recently not many scientists were...

Dan Brown’s Quantum Entanglement

Dan Brown’s Quantum Entanglement
Entangled Photons and The Lost Symbol Avid fiction aficionados have anxiously awaited author Dan Brown’s latest rip-snorting adventure through the mysterious. The Lost Symbol is Brown’s new book, which features the largely unknown field of noetic sciences as a means to move his plot along. Loosely...

Backyard Science: Lava Lamp 101

Backyard Science: Lava Lamp 101
As the school year begins, many Freshmen dorm rooms will have the perennial lava lamp gracing a bookcase or desk. With more students tightening their budgets here is an easy and cost-effective way to build your own lava lamp. See the world’s biggest lava lamp in Soap Lake, Washington.

Drilling for Heat Triggers Quakes

Drilling for Heat Triggers Quakes
AltaRock Energy Site in California The search for a renewable form of Earth-generated power keeps hitting a snag. The process to create geothermal heat seems to cause earthquakes–a lot of them. After hitting a fault in Basel, Switerland and triggering a 3.4 earthquake that shook the city, Markus...

Life and Death of Cells

Life and Death of Cells
Apoptosis in Action Apoptosis is essentially cell suicide. It is the natural process by which damaged or unfit cells get expelled, making rooms for robust healthy cells. This field of biological study has been around for a long time. But scientists are just starting to unravel the highly complex processes...

Storing Carbon at the North Pole

Storing Carbon at the North Pole
Scientists on Svalbard near the North Pole are drilling one kilometer into the ground where they hope to store carbon dioxide, given off by a coal-fired power station. The project is part of a new wave of technology designed to cut greenhouse gas emissions and combat global warming. This decade’s...

Jaws Appears off Massachusetts Beaches

Jaws Appears off Massachusetts Beaches
Massachusetts officials are using high-tech tags to track the movements of two great white sharks near Cape Cod — the first time the fearsome fish have ever been tagged in the Atlantic Ocean. Bringing the scary shark movie Jaws to mind, great white sharks are common in cold Atlantic waters and...

New Ocean Observatory Initiative Gets Funding

New Ocean Observatory Initiative Gets Funding
The University of Washington is spearheading a giant construction project to create a power and Internet grid along the ocean floor as part of the Ocean Observatories Initiative that will dramatically change the way we do ocean research. The National Science Foundation grant of $126 million is the...

Monkey Music

Monkey Music
Cotton-top Tamarin, courtesy of University of Wisconsin, photo by Bryce Richter Music is an important part and key ingredient of our culture. But it might also extend to the animal kingdom. New research by University of Wisconsin-Madison psychology professor Charles Snowdon has found that while monkeys...

Retractions on the Rise

Retractions on the Rise
Hwang Woo Suk's Fake Cloned Human Embryonic Stem Cells Scientific papers are the hallmark of any scientist’s career and achievements. And having a published paper retracted spells trouble. Do rising retraction rates hurt the public trust in science? Or does closer scrutiny signal improved safeguards...

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