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Mars Express was launched by the European Space Agency (ESA) in 2003 on a mission to explore the surface of the Red Planet from both orbit and ground level. The ground-based inspection didn’t exactly go to plan, but that hasn’t stopped the probe from spending a decade painstakingly mapping the surface of Mars from every conceivable angle. Now the ESA ...

A mysterious barge has materialized near San Francisco, and naturally, has been generating a lot of speculation. Moored off of the Treasure Island pier, the massive barge is reported to be part of a new Google project to create floating data centers. Other sources are saying that it is actually going to be some sort of a maritime office, or ...

Deep below Paris, in a vault that can only be opened by the simultaneous turning of three keys held by three different people, is the international prototype kilogram — the kilo against which all other kilos are based. The kilo is the last SI unit that is still defined by a physical artifact, rather than a constant of nature, but ...

If you’ve ever wondered how much energy it takes to perform a full body scan, consider this: a new MRI designed to probe the deep structure of the brain uses a magnet more powerful than the ones inside the Large Hadron Collider. This magnet could pick up a 60-metric-ton tank. It could create a field strong enough to affect the ...

At MIT, members of the DarkLight project are preparing to create tiny amounts of dark matter using a particle accelerator, to finally prove once and for all just how dark matter operates. As it stands, the generally accepted theory is that almost 27% of the universe is fashioned out of dark matter, compared to just 5% for ordinary matter. We ...

Using their new lunar laser link, NASA and MIT have succeeded in beaming data from the Moon at 622 megabits per second. This impressive feat is an important step in moving away from radio communications, which have reached the limit in the face of the new data demands for work in space. In shedding the need for large antennas, communications ...

Stanford professor Marc Levoy, fresh off a two-year leave to work on Google Glass, recently spoke to a packed house at Stanford’s Center for Image Engineering (SCIEN) about the new era of photography that Glass, and other increasingly powerful wearable cameras, have begun to usher in. While many of the new applications have been talked about — like first-person videos ...

At first glance, with the Apple Reality Distortion Field at full power, the iPad Air seems like an impeccable, immaculate device that could only ever be conceived by the magicians at Apple in California. The iPad Air is some 30% lighter and 20% thinner than the iPad that it replaces, while still retaining the same Retina display and 10 hours ...

As human civilization continues to creep into what was once remote wilderness, the impact of wildfires is becoming more severe. The problem is only expected to worsen as global climate change results in longer, drier summers. A group of scientist from UC Berkeley think they’ve found a space-based way to mitigate the loss of property and life that can result ...

Some researchers would have us believe that the reason for Albert Einstein’s remarkable genius was his ample endowment of corpus callosum — the large fiber tract that, at least in most of us, connects the two halves of the brain’s cerebral cortex. However, as those that read the journal Neuroimage already know, the remarkable mind of king of the megasavants ...