Science

Mars has established a pretty pervasive image for itself. It's the big Red Planet. It's the Clifford the Dog of space. You don't confuse it with all those other, less glamorous, planets. Still, Mars isn't all that it seems. Scratch the surface and it appears to have more in common with the skin tone of an elephant than the ruddy glow of a tomato.

The Curiosity Rover recently broke new ground by drilling into a rock sample, the first time such an activity has been accomplished on a planet other than Earth. What lay beneath wasn't the familiar rust color of the surface, but a decidedly dull gray.… Read more

It's not news that cell phones harbor bacteria, but there's a difference between knowing that about your device and seeing the germs up close in all their furry, florid glory.

Molecular biology undergraduates at the U.K.'s University of Surrey recently got a stark view of just how much bacteria crawls on their phones when instructor Simon Park had them imprint their devices onto petri dishes filled with a bacteriological growth medium and wait a few days to see what bloomed. … Read more

One feature on the beleaguered Boeing 787 Dreamliner is its electrochromic dimming system that lets passengers make windows on the aircraft more or less opaque at the touch of a button.

Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) says that while these smart windows can take about 30 seconds to change, it has a new stick-on window film that can go from reflective to see-through in only 5 seconds.

The switchable mirror device can change states when a low voltage is applied. … Read more

Hair of the dog? Lots of water? Cup of coffee? The quest for an effective hangover cure has never really led to a Holy Grail fix-it-all solution. What if you could counteract the impact of alcohol in your system before you ever even got to the hangover stage? Newly published research shows one potential path to the creation of a "sober pill."

We're a long way off from popping down to the local drug store and grabbing a bottle of B-Sober-Now pills, but the use of nanocapsules to reduce the blood alcohol content in mice might be the first step in that direction.… Read more

Want to find out where every meteorite recorded since 2,300 B.C. has fallen on Earth? A new map will help you out.

Javier de la Torre, co-founder of software companies Vizzuality and CartoDB, has posted a heat map showing where the meteorites have fallen over the last several thousand years. According to The Verge, which first reported on the map and spoke with de la Torre, 34,513 individual impact points are recorded on the map.

De la Torre claims that it took him only 30 minutes to record the impacts. He used OpenStreetMap, a crowdsourced platform, for the map, and then input impact sites from data collected by the Meteorological Society.… Read more

It's no secret that the standard hand-eye coordination tests doctors use to monitor neuromuscular deficits -- typically when a patient is injured or as a patient ages -- can be subjective, relying on, say, descriptions of reflexes and cognitive status such as "mild," "moderate," and "severe."

So researchers at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard, the Beth Israel Medical Center, and Hebrew SeniorLife have been developing what they call a rapid neuroassessment device, nicknamed NeuroAssess, to measure neuromuscular performance quantitatively instead of qualitatively.

They've recently tested it on 150 … Read more

A good hearty conspiracy theory can shine a sharp light on two of humanity's most enduring traits.

One, of course, is humanity's boundless imagination. The other is humanity's essential suspicion of humanity.

So while you might be deeply immersed in Bill Nye's explanation of the Russian meteorite, those with darker sensibilities have filled the Web with their fears and hauntings about the phenomenon.

There are few nations with greater awareness of dark sensibilities than Russia. The fact that there seems to be little evidence of meteorite fragments on the ground has encouraged some Russians to offer their own suspicions.… Read more

The sky is totally falling.

As if it weren't enough that a meteor boomed across the Russian sky today, shattering windows and injuring about 1,000 people, an asteroid 150 feet across is about to sideswipe our planet.

Asteroid 2012 DA14, while unrelated to the meteor, is just as scary. It will graze us at just 17,200 miles from the surface, passing between Earth and our geosynchronous weather and communications satellites.

Possible asteroid strikes are no joke, and if you ask me (or the dinosaurs), they represent the biggest threat to our planet aside from human stupidity.

Fortunately, some non-stupid humans are finally getting serious about countering this threat. … Read more

New research out of UC Davis suggests that when couples who are romantically involved interact, their heart and respiratory rates sync up.

But that doesn't mean you should bring a pair of heart rate monitors to scout out potential partners on your first date. When study participants were paired with someone outside their relationship, neither their heart rates nor their breathing closely matched.

To conduct their research, which was funded by the National Science Foundation and published in the International Journal of Psychophysiology and Emotion, the psychologists in one study placed couples a few feet apart in a quiet, calm room and instructed them not to talk or touch. In another, the couples were asked to mimic each other without speaking. In both instances, heart and respiratory rates were closely matched.… Read more