THIS ARTICLE IS republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Many of us have witnessed unusual and even antisocial behavior at an airport or on a flight. These may range from benign acts such as sleeping on the floor or doing yoga in front of the flight information display system to serious incidents…
The optimal fuel route for Mars involves arriving when the two planets are roughly on opposite sides of the sun. This launch window repeats every 18 months, and the journey time of nine months means any problems onboard will need to be fixed by the crew, with no rescue option. Faster routes can be achieved…
Science is, in its very nature, collaborative. Many consortiums and alliances within scientific fields cross borders and language barriers. Some labs may be able to find additional funding from alternative sources such as the European Union. But it is unlikely that a continued withdrawal of NIH funding could be plugged by overseas support. And Big…
Investigators are scrambling to figure out why a military helicopter and a passenger airplane collided and plunged into the Potomac River in Washington DC late Wednesday, the first major US air crash in 16 years. From the little that’s known, human error likely played a role, raising questions about a chronic shortage of air traffic…
What could go wrong with eating an extremely high-fat diet of beef, cheese, and sticks of butter? Well, for one thing, your cholesterol levels could reach such stratospheric levels that lipids start oozing from your blood vessels, forming yellowish nodules on your skin. That was the disturbing case of a man in Florida who showed…
Slowly but surely, we are making good on the gadgets we imagined, as kids, that the future would hold. Penny Brown’s video watch from Inspector Gadget? Check. The Starfleet tricoder from Star Trek? Almost there. But web-shooting? Web-slinging? That wasn’t one we really thought would make the crossover. And it wasn’t exactly in the plans…
All the tech we rely on, from cars to smartphones, was engineered using physics. You don’t need to know the science to use these things. But a well-rounded human should understand at least some of the key concepts—along with some music, art, history, and economics. Robert Heinlein said it all in Time Enough for Love:…
All the tech we rely on, from cars to smartphones, was engineered using physics. You don’t need to know the science to use these things. But a well-rounded human should understand at least some of the key concepts—along with some music, art, history, and economics. Robert Heinlein said it all in Time Enough for Love:…
“President Trump is trying to downsize the WHO, and the question is whether other high-income nations like those in Europe, Australia, Japan, and elsewhere, pick up some of the slack,” says Vermund. “Will the Gates Foundation, which has been a very generous donor, pick up some? It’s conceivable that others will tide things over until…
But that wasn’t obvious. They’d have to analyze a special set of functions, called Type I and Type II sums, for each version of their problem, then show that the sums were equivalent no matter which constraint they used. Only then would Green and Sawhney know they could substitute rough primes into their proof without…
