Science

Danish artist Kristian von Hornsleth is going to send human blood and hair sealed in a spooky-looking capsule to the bottom of the Marianas Trench.

Something about this strikes us as a phenomenally bad idea. It could be that the artist's name, "Hornsleth," sounds a little too close to "Innsmouth." It could be the strange, spiky, angled sculpture loaded up with human body parts. It could be that those body parts are headed for the deepest part of the ocean.

Either way, it's hard to know if any of those things have occurred to the artist, who has spent years building the Deep Storage Project. He says that his plan is that the 8-meter-cubed sculpture will give eternal life to the more than 5,000 volunteers who surrendered a drop of their blood and a hair from their head. … Read more

Who among us hasn't -- just once in our lives -- put a couple of things in a test tube, a bottle, or our mouths and wondered what might happen?

Occasionally, this might have difficult consequences. But rarely does someone try to arrest us for it.

16-year-old Kiera Wilmot wasn't so lucky.

This student at Bartow High School in Florida allegedly thought she'd put a couple of household chemicals in an 8-ounce water bottle, just to see the reaction.

The reaction was that she was expelled and marched off in handcuffs, accused of felony possession/discharge of a dangerous weapon.… Read more

If you're looking to attract attention, setting a Guinness World Record is probably a good way to start.

That was the goal -- attracting attention, that is -- for a group of IBM Research scientists who recently set out to make what turned out be the Guinness World Record-certified smallest stop-motion film ever.

Called "A Boy and His Atom," the animated film features a small boy having a good old time as he bounces around, playing catch, and dancing. The twist? The film was shot at the atomic level and features 130 atoms that were painstakingly placed, atom by atom, as the researchers shot 250 individual frames. The images were created at a temperature of negative 268 degrees Celsius and were magnified 100 million times. … Read more

NASA released the most detailed images ever seen of a gigantic hurricane that scientists believe has existed at Saturn's north pole for years.

NASA's Cassini spacecraft snapped the spectacular pictures this past November from a vantage point approximately 261,000 miles from Saturn -- a distance so extreme that the above picture has an image scale of about 1 mile per pixel.… Read more

To my fellow geeks who've long dreamed of having a lab-quality digital microscope that mounts to your phone, the time has come.

Oregon-based optics manufacturer Bodelin will begin shipping its brand-new ProScope Micro Mobile on May 1. One version fits the iPhone 4, 4s, 5, and iPod Touch; another the iPad; and another the iPad Mini. Whatever size, it will set you back $149.… Read more

Humans have a lot in common with magpies. We gravitate toward shiny things.

It's easy, then, to see why the Glowing Plants project on Kickstarter has more than doubled its goal and still has 38 days to go. It's a fascinating mix of botany, science, and unexpected glowing things.

Some people can boast a green thumb, but very few people can boast a glowing green thumb. For a pledge of $40, Glowing Plants will send you 50 to 100 seeds to let you raise your own glowing plant at home. The project's creators say that this is a one-off opportunity and the seeds will not be available commercially later on.… Read more

Using what they are calling "mechanical agitation," researchers out of the Georgia Institute of Technology say they've developed arrays that can sense touch with the same level of sensitivity as the human fingertip, which could result in better bots and prosthetics.

The transparent and flexible arrays use about 8,000 taxels, which are touch-sensitive transistors that can generate piezoelectric signals independently -- meaning they emit electricity when mechanically agitated. As the researchers report this week in the journal Science, each of those thousands of transistors comprises a bundle of some 1,500 zinc oxide nanowires, which connect … Read more

Rockstar certainly knows how to draw out a bit of PR for the fullest effect.

Today, the above image arrived in our inbox with no additional info except to confirm that the trailers are coming on April 30.

There aren't many companies and not many games that could get away with this, but when you're talking about the next Grand Theft Auto, all bets are off.

As a quick reminder before these new trailers arrive next week, here are a few things that we already know about GTA V: … Read more

It sounds like a monster from a Victorian penny dreadful: a revolting, stinking mass of gelatinous glop lurks under the streets of London, threatening the citizenry. What's to be done?

Burn it with fire! Well, use it as an alternative energy source.

Fat and oil that accumulate in the city's drains and sewers -- forming large clogging masses called "fatbergs" -- are to be harvested and used to generate electricity at the largest plant of its kind in the world. … Read more