The “Mummies of the World” exhibit opens in Los Angeles featuring 150 specimens of human and animal remains and related artifacts from across the globe.

Mummy Science

Cedars-Sinai Medical Center partnered with the German Mummy Project to perform CT scans of the mummies included in the exhibition.

“If the mummy is from a culture where it is bandaged or wrapped in layers of textiles, it is always interesting to see what it under the wrappings.” — Heather Gill-Robinson, scientific curator for the German Mummy Project

Astronauts can order books on Amazon or watch movies on Netflix, even while orbiting the Earth on the International Space Station. NASA just hooked up the Internet last week and already the astronauts have been tweeting up a storm.

NASA also unveiled live streaming aboard the space station, starting today.

President Obama’s first State of the Union address was long as these speeches go but short on science. With only a few mentions of science, science education and innovation, the Monday morning science quarterbacks criticized the President for not including more science.

But two teenage future scientists — Gabriela Farfan and Li Boynton — proudly sat near the First Lady during the State of the Union, representing the President’s commitment to science and science education.

Next week, the true science state of the union will become clear as the National Science Foundation and NASA release their budget requests for 2011.

Photo: 19-year-old Stanford University Freshman Gabriela Farfan and 18-year-old Houston High School Senior Li Boynton, the day after the State of the Union. Courtesy of Intel.

President Barack Obama’s first State of the Union Address, January 27, 2010.

A group of geoscientists from leading research universities just received a grant to travel to Haiti to study the aftermath of the 7.0 Haiti earthquake that devastated the capital of Port-au-Prince on January 12.

Led by Eric Calais from Purdue University, the team will take measurements of the changes along the fault line that ruptured during the quake and they will learn whether a bigger quake may be on the way.

Eric Calais talks about Haiti’s recent earthquake

You can follow along as they detail their experience in the Geophysicists in Haiti blog.

There are growing signs that outer space is going to become the domain of private enterprise. Since the U.S. space program began, it has been largely controlled by the federal government. But that’s all changing.

The first spaceport just broke ground in New Mexico. The first commercial spaceline is being built and citizen-astronauts are ponying up a lot of money for a ride to sub-orbital space. There is even one hotelier just waiting to start building space resorts.

The personal spaceflight industry kicked off five years ago when Burt Rutan won the Ansari X PRIZE, the first in a series of commercial competitions to solve big human problems. X PRIZE founder Peter Diamandis has been pushing for private enterprise to join the space race and now it appears NASA may be more open to outsourcing some parts of the space program to commercial interests.

Photo of Dr. Stephen Hawking with Peter Diamandis in zero gravity, courtesy of Diamandis

The man behind the recent hoax captured our attention but smeared amateur science in the process. Fame-hungry Richard Heene used his son and some faked backyard science to launch his reality TV career.

Most people thought it was highly unlikely that a 40-pound boy stowed away in the balloon and floated 50 miles away at over 7,000 feet in the air. But everyone gave this family the benefit of the doubt.

Until the facts stopped adding up.

Just how mad is this amateur scientist? Well, a science reality TV show proposal helps paint the picture. But a YouTube series, called The Psyicence Detectives showcases Heene’s knowledge base when it comes to science. It appears he favors the paranormal, alien and conspiracy theories over real science.

Brilliant minds have been challenging people to embrace math for centuries. But one man made recreational math fun and has been inspiring legions of followers for decades.

His name? Martin Gardner. This mathemagician has been transforming frightening formulas into fun.

But recreational math doesn’t just fill free time. It challenges the mind and even informs real science.

The Zebra Puzzle--a famous math puzzle

The following puzzle is a fine example of a detective math puzzle. Based on clues supplied in a narrative, answer a question by applying simple, man-on-the-street logic to the information (not all of it relevant) supplied.

On an odd little street in the town of Somewhere, there are five house in a row. Each house is a different color, each is inhabited by a woman of different nationality, and the owners of the houses also have their differences: each owner has a different pet, prefers a different drink and works in a different profession. A detective, charged with the task of discovering who drinks water and who owns the Zebra, gathered the following information, itemized for your convenience:

1. The Englishwoman lives in the red house.
2. The Spaniard owns a dog.
3. Coffee is drunk in the green house
4. The Ukrainian drinks tea.
5. The green house is immediately to the right of the Ivory house.
6. The engineer owns the snail.
7. The diplomat lives in the yellow house.
8. Milk is drunk in the middle house.
9. The Norwegian lives in the first house on the left.
10. The doctor lives next to the owner of the fox.
11. The diplomat lives next to the owner of the horse.
12. The teacher drinks orange juice.
13. The carpenter is Japanese.
14. The Norwegian lives next to the blue house.

Now it’s your job to find out Who owns the zebra and who drinks water.

Route of Ocean Watch Through the Northwest Passage

Ocean Watch, the 64-foot sailboat that also doubles as a voyage of scientific discovery is traveling over the top of North America, in an effort to traverse the rapidly melting yet still dangerous Northwest Passage.

The fabled shipping route has been long sought by explorers as a quick way from Europe to the far East. Thanks to a little help from Mother Nature in the form of climate change the passage is now passable for a few weeks each summer.

And sailors of all levels of experience are flocking to the far north in an effort to be part of an elite group traveling through this largely unexplored area.

Despite annual melting of the sea ice, sailing through the Canadian archipelago is a tricky business.

REALscience continues its coverage of the voyage of Ocean Watch as it makes an attempt to circumnavigate North and South America.

Looking for a way to make extra money and help further medical research?

Try becoming a medical test subject and give yourself over to the warm embrace of science where you can make up to $50,000 a year.

Before starting, go here:

BioTrax.com

and here…

GPGC.net

to see if you qualify.

The fittest do survive.

But new research from Indiana seems to indicate that what makes a creature fit can be driven by other secondary characteristics.

This can lead to rapid speciation.

A group of University of Washington engineers have built a school of fish.

The underwater robots look like fish, act like fish and thanks to some clever programming, move like fish.

Hungry engineering students in Japan decided to make a noodle bowl using microscopic pieces of carbon, called nanotubes.

The bowl comes with noodles but they aren’t edible. They do make for a good picture. And, this one was entered in a microphotography contest.

Ocean currents are complex systems that change climate and determine fish populations.

Long studied by scientists to help fishermen predict sardine and anchovy populations, knowing currents is vital to the fishing industry.

But often the predictions were wrong. Now the discovery of a new current is starting to explain some of that fishiness.

After a lucky break in data gathering during hurricane heavy 2005 scientists got a glimpse of new dynamics from Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita that may help better forecast the tropical monsters in the future.

As a general rule hurricanes can gain or lose intensity with startling quickness, a phenomenon never more obvious than during the historic 2005 hurricane season that spawned the remarkably destructive Katrina and Rita.
Researchers flew through Rita, Katrina and other 2005 storms trying to unlock the key to some of the intensity changes. Now, data from Rita is providing the first documented evidence that such intensity changes can be caused by clouds outside the wall of a hurricane’s eye coming together to form a new eyeall.

“The comparison between Katrina and Rita will be interesting because we got excellent data from both storms. Rita was the one that showed the eyewall replacement,” said Robert Houze Jr., a University of Washington atmospheric sciences professor and lead author of a paper detailing the work in the March 2 edition of the journal Science.