Science

Looking out my window, it's a beautiful sunny day. Perhaps it's even a bit sunnier than usual here in New Mexico. Turns out, there may be a reason for that. The Earth is as close to the sun today as it will be for the whole year of 2013.

How close is close? The Earth is a mere 91,402,560 miles away from the sun today. Usually, we're right around 93 million miles. The phenomenon of getting all cuddly with our closest star is called perihelion. "Peri" means near and "Helios" was the Greek god of the sun. … Read more

We already know how to explore planets with relatively low gravity, like Mars. The Curiosity Rover is engineered to hang onto the planet's surface, despite it having just 38 percent of the gravity we enjoy on Earth. What happens if you want to check out a small moon or an asteroid with a fraction of that gravity? You design a robotic hedgehog, of course.

Stanford University researchers and NASA are working together on spiky space balls that could dance across the surfaces of moons and asteroids whose low gravity and rough surfaces would bog down a regular rover. … Read more

The Mars Curiosity rover recently detected signs of organic compounds on the Red Planet, but NASA won't call the findings definitive. One holdup is the issue of contamination. The trace amounts may be the result of contamination from the rover itself.

The contamination issue could rear its head again should the rover or future expeditions turn up any microbes. Finding microbes on Mars would be a cause for scientific celebration, but a study published in "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America" shows that Earth microbes could very well survive in the brutal conditions on Mars.… Read more

What if everything around you had the potential to generate small amounts of energy?

We've seen flexible, even stick-on photovoltaic cells before, but these decal-style solars are compact and fun.

In a recent article in Scientific Reports, Stanford University mechanical engineering assistant professor Xiaolin Zheng and colleagues describe thin-film solar cells that can be peeled and stuck anywhere.

The researchers manufactured them on a reusable silicon and silicon dioxide wafer and then stuck them on paper, plastic, and window glass.

The original cell efficiency of 7.5 percent was maintained, and the manufacturing uses existing processes and materials. That … Read more

Next time you see a cockroach, don't scurry away faster than it can flee. In fact, if you're a lover of the weirder side of life, the intrusive insect could represent one heck of a science project.

For example, artist Brittany Ransom created Twitter Roach -- a discoid cockroach that can be controlled through tweets that it receives on the popular microblogging service. … Read more

People don't like to be disconnected from the Internet, even when they're cruising along at 30,000 feet in the air. Boeing knows this, so the airplane manufacturer ended up knee-deep in spuds to test its new developments in providing Wi-Fi access to flyers.

Tech developed in a Boeing lab looked like it could bolster Wi-Fi signals in the cabin of a plane. To test it out, Boeing engineers took over a decommissioned airplane and, naturally, filled the seats up with sacks of potatoes. Wait, what? Turns out there was a good reason for the grocery shopping spree.… Read more

You might agree that the complex design in a snowflake appears almost comparable to a work of art. Do you know how that tiny frozen masterpiece comes to life, though? If you're like me, you may never have witnessed a complete representation of that journey from cloud to ground before.

The trip isn't as simple as you think. … Read more

Last year, a scientist cracked the mystery of how Santa Claus manages his gift-delivery feats using futuristic technology. This year, dedicated scientists have finally revealed an explanation for how Rudolph, Santa's lead reindeer, got his red nose.

If you recall the legend, Rudolph was a bit of an outcast thanks to his bright and shiny red nose. All of the other reindeer might not laugh and call him names if they knew his nose was really the result of an issue with the microvascular flow in his nasal mucosa.

A collection of Dutch scientists contributed to a paper titled "Microcirculatory investigations of nasal mucosa in reindeer Rangifer tarandus (Mammalia, Artiodactyla, Cervidae): Rudolph's nose was overheated." … Read more

Jan Scheuermann can't use her limbs to feed herself, but she's pretty good at grabbing a chocolate bar with her robot arm.

She's become the first to demonstrate that people with a long history of quadriplegia can successfully manipulate a mind-controlled robot arm with seven axes of movement. Earlier experiments had shown that robot arms work with brain implants.

Scheuerman was struck by spinocerebellar degeneration in 1996. A study on the brain-computer interface (BCI) linking Scheuermann to her prosthetic was published online in this month's issue of medical journal The Lancet.

Training on the BCI allowed her to move an arm and manipulate objects for the first time in nine years, surprising researchers.

It took her less than a year to be able to seize a chocolate bar with the arm, after which she declared, "One small nibble for a woman, one giant bite for BCI." Check it out in the video below. … Read more