Blog

Tag: science

  • July 17th, 2012 1:13pm


    discoverynews:

    VARIES: The Fastest Starship to Proxima Centauri?

    The problem with space is that it’s big. Really, really big. To get to the nearest planet in our solar system takes months at best. But say if you wanted to travel to the nearest star?

    This question is currently being considered by a team of scientists and engineers from Icarus Interstellar Inc., one of a group of organizations chosen to spearhead DARPA’s 100 Year Star Ship (100YSS) project.

    The aim of 100YSS is to formulate plans to send humans to in interstellar destination — such as Proxima Centauri, a little over 4 light-years from Earth — within the next century.

    But Richard Obousy, President and Co-Founder of Icarus Interstellar, introduced the Vacuum to Antimatter-Rocket Interstellar Explorer System (VARIES) — an unmanned prototype starship — to Discovery News readers on Monday as one of the projects Icarus is working on to make our interstellar dreams come true.

    With the help of the stunning artwork by Adrian Mann, take a look at how this futuristic technology may be able to unlock antimatter from the vacuum of space and use it to propel the ultimate interstellar spaceship.

    keep reading

  • July 11th, 2012 7:59pm


    reuters:

    Scientists are using the world’s biggest telescope, buried deep under the South Pole, to try to unravel the mysteries of tiny particles known as neutrinos, hoping to shed light on how the universe was made.

    The mega-detector, called IceCube, took 10 years to build 2,400 meters below the Antarctic ice. At one cubic km, it is bigger than the Empire State building, the Chicago Sears Tower – now known as Willis Tower – and Shanghai’s World Financial Center combined.

    Designed to observe neutrinos, which are emitted by exploding stars and move close to the speed of light, the telescope is attracting new attention in the wake of last week’s discovery of a particle that appears to be the Higgs boson – a basic building block of the universe.

    “You hold up your finger and a hundred billion neutrinos pass through it every second from the sun,” said Jenni Adams, a physicist at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, who works on IceCube.

    READ ON: Giant ice telescope hunts for dark matter’s space secrets

  • April 12th, 2012 12:32pm


    inothernews:

    BRIGHT-ON BEACH  Glowing bioluminescent plankton in the tide line washes up onto a beach on Vaadhoo Island, Raa Atoll, Maldives, with stars above and a ship’s lights on the horizon.  (Photo: Doug Perrine / Barcroft Media via The Telegraph)

  • March 16th, 2012 3:08pm

    But there’s another reason: I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time – when we’re a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition.

    — Carl Sagan – The Writing Life