Physicists at the University of California, Berkeley, have built the world's smallest radio out of single carbon nanotube one ten-thousandth the width of a human hair.
Researchers say the tiny radio needs only a battery and a pair of earphones to hook listeners up with their favorite radio stations. But that's not all the new device could be good for.
A comet that unexpectedly brightened in the last couple of weeks and is now visible to the naked eye is attracting professional and amateur interest. Paul Lewis, director of astronomy outreach at the University of Tennessee, is drawing students to the roof of the Nielsen Physics Building for special viewings of Comet 17P/Holmes.
A spacewalking astronaut fixed a ripped solar energy panel on the international space station Saturday in a difficult and dangerous emergency procedure. Spacewalker Scott Parazynski installed five improvised "cufflink" braces on the torn wing and clipped the snarled wires that had ripped it in two places as it was being unfurled Tuesday.
He then watched as the crew slowly deployed the wing to its full 115-foot length, watching closely for more problems. The wing was about three-quarters unfurled when the crew noticed the damage on Tuesday.
U.S. and Philippine scientists exploring a deep ocean basin in search of species isolated for millions of years discovered a tentacled orange worm and an unusual black jellyfish, media reported Wednesday.
Project leader Dr. Larry Madin said that U.S. and Philippine scientists collected about 100 different specimens in a search in the Celebes Sea south of the Philippines.
NASA's senior managers cleared space shuttle Discovery for liftoff Tuesday, overruling a safety group that called for further studies and wing repairs, if necessary, before next week's launch.
The potential problem is with the critical thermal shielding on Discovery's wings. A new inspection method uncovered possible cracking just beneath the protective coating on three of the 44 panels that line the wings.
Engineers were evenly split on whether Discovery's flight to the International Space Station should be delayed, shuttle program manager Wayne Hale said.
A Russian rocket blasted off from a launch facility in Kazakhstan on Wednesday, carrying an American, a Russian and a Malaysian to the international space station. The Soyuz-FG rocket soared into a darkening sky above the Kazakh steppe.
Aboard were Peggy Whitson of Beaconsfield, Iowa, who will be the first woman to command the space station, veteran Russian cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko, and Dr. Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor, the ninth Muslim in space but the first from Malaysia. They will arrive in two days.
Having coaxed all the life they can out of an 8-year-old ultraviolet light-detecting space telescope, scientists will reluctantly turn it off later this month.
After that, NASA's Fuse observatory will be "just another piece of space junk," orbiting the Earth every 100 minutes until it falls back to Earth in about 30 years, said Bill Blair, the Fuse operations chief and an astronomy professor at Johns Hopkins University.
A crew that includes Malaysia's first astronaut and an American who will become the first woman to command the international space station prepared Monday for blastoff later this week.
The Soyuz-FG rocket is scheduled to blast off from the Central Asian steppe on Wednesday night to take Malaysia's Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor, Peggy Whitson of Beaconsfield, Iowa, and Russian Yuri Malenchenko into orbit.
A piece of outer space named for George Takei is in kind of a rough neighborhood for somebody who steers a starship: an asteroid belt. An asteroid between Mars and Jupiter has been renamed 7307 Takei in honor of the actor, best known for his role as Hikaru Sulu in the original "Star Trek" series and movies.
"I am now a heavenly body," Takei, 70, said Tuesday, laughing. "I found out about it yesterday. ... I was blown away. It came out of the clear, blue sky -- just like an asteroid."
Quality not quantity. No matter how much your mother tells you that you need eight hours of sleep, if you're not tired and you can't truly relax, your sleep time will be worthless.
Robin Lloyd of Live Science reports that at the 2006 National Institutes of Health Consensus Conference, experts agreed, according psychiatry professor Daniel Kripke of the University of California, San Diego on the following recommendations for obtaining optimum sleep value:
