Warning: Standing in line can cause extreme boredom, annoyance and even rage, which is precisely why there is a fascinating science devoted to what makes people tick -- and ticked off -- when forced to wait.
You may not know it, but the seemingly mundane task of forming a queue at the airport, a fast-food joint or a post-Thanksgiving midnight sale is the subject of careful study by experts in the field of queuing psychology.
The US space agency NASA said it successfuly conducted a first test of a deep space communications network modeled on the Internet. "This is the first step in creating a totally new space communications capability, an interplanetary Internet," Adrian Hooke, NASA's manager of space-networking architecture, technology and standards, said in a statement.
Monday was unpacking day for the astronauts at the international space station. Among the top items to be hauled into the space station: a new toilet and a contraption that purifies urine and sweat into drinkable water at the orbiting outpost.
Space shuttle Endeavour docked Sunday with the international space station, where the shuttle crew will help install more living space. The shuttle, also carrying mission specialist Sandra Magnus to replace station flight engineer Greg Chamitoff, docked with the station just after 5 p.m. ET about 212 miles above northern India.
Researchers have developed a new anti-reflective coating that boosts the efficiency of solar panels and allows sunlight to be absorbed from almost any angle. Scientists from the Future Chips Constellation (FCC) at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York have created the coating using nanotechnology -- engineering devices on a molecular scale.
NASA scientists announced last night they could no longer communicate with the Phoenix Mars Lander and were calling an effective end to its five-month-plus mission on the Red Planet.
Mission engineers last received a signal from the lander on Nov. 2, the space agency said.
RACIAL barriers have toppled at a very elite club. Two anonymous men, one Han Chinese, the other Yoruban from Nigeria, have become the first non-white, non-celebrities to have their full genomes sequenced.
The startling case of an AIDS patient who underwent a bone marrow transplant to treat leukemia is stirring new hope that gene-therapy strategies on the far edges of AIDS research might someday cure the disease.
The world nudged closer to an era of Frankenstein science after an animal killed and frozen 16 years ago was cloned.
Ethical watchdogs branded the experiment disturbing and warned it could lead to people being 'brought back to life' after decades or centuries in deep freeze.
Just two weeks after a Nobel Prize highlighted theoretical work on subatomic particles, physicists are announcing a startling discovery about a much more familiar form of matter: Scotch tape.
It turns out that if you peel the popular adhesive tape off its roll in a vacuum chamber, it emits X-rays. The researchers even made an X-ray image of one of their fingers.
