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The UN's latest Climate Change Conference recently concluded after two weeks of intense negotiations in Durban, South Africa. There's going to be a new agreement to address climate change, but does that really mean anything? Let's break down what happened. More »
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One of the most important principles of radiation safety is that X-ray machines should only be used when there's a clear medical benefit. But now backscatter X-ray machines are found throughout America's airports. How did we get here? More »
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Today the Space Shuttle Atlantis lifted off from Cape Canaveral for STS-135, the final mission of the program. Mission Commander Chris Ferguson, Pilot, Doug Hurley, and Mission Specialists Sandy Magnus and Rex Walheim, will be the final United States astronauts to take off under the power of United States crafts, for the foreseeable future. Their destination will be the International Space Station, where they will deliver vital components to the orbiting platform, returning to Earth 12 days later. Once on the ground, Atlantis will join the remaining space shuttles, Discovery, Endeavour and the Enterprise, in their new lives as museum pieces around the United States. More »
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Yuri Gagarin's historic flight was just one of many Soviet victories in the Space Race, but the United States still won the big victory when they landed on the Moon. But what if the Russians had gotten there first? More »
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I've just returned from Texas, a state that blends old-school American values and high tech industries into a strange hybrid culture of digital cowboys. Is Texas the most futuristic state? More »
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Click to view The United States has existed for only a little over two centuries, which is a paltry amount of time when you consider that many nations and city-states have lasted for thousands of years (hello, Rome). Now it's starting to look like this brief experiment with human government is going to fail, and soon. Science fiction writers from William Gibson to Lyda Morehouse have written about a future where the United States no longer exists, or has been so heavily reorganized that it isn't recognizable. And Stanford futurist Paul Saffo recently told the San Jose Mercury News, "The U.S. may not exist in any recognizable form in the middle of this century." Though he didn't offer a long list of reasons, we know exactly what he means. There are good reasons to believe that the U.S. is falling apart, and we've got five big ones for you to mull over as you watch this once-powerful twentieth century empire slowly drip down the drain. More »
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These thunderheads are brewing over the midwestern United States, a region where thunderstorms can whip up pretty damn fast. Courtesy of NASA, this image is one of a series running on the Boston Globe's website to celebrate the work done by the International Space Station. Want to see what this kind of cloud looks like a little closer? More »
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It's just not an election season here in the United States — it's smartass t-shirt season. To celebrate the fact that fictional people and monsters would probably make better presidents than the real-life humans currently running, we've got a few choices for scifi presidential swag for you. First up is the lovely Firefly-themed "Reynolds/Washburn" ticket (that's the captain and pilot of the smuggler ship Serenity). Personally, we'd prefer Reynolds to run with his first officer Zoe Alleyne, but we'll go with this because their slogan is so good. Below we've got treats for those who are campaigning for Cthulhu or Battlestar's Admiral Adama. More »
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As the race for U.S. President starts to heat up, Barack Obama has continued to polish his image as the youthful candidate promising a hopeful future. And yet he's also on record saying "[U.S. Space Agency] NASA is no longer associated with inspiration." He's proposing cutting NASA's budget in order to fund early-education programs for kids under 5. It's hard to fault his desire to educate kids, but why sacrifice space programs to do it? If elected, is it possible that Obama, the "hopeful" candidate, will destroy our hopes for space exploration and colonization? More »
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