Lifeboat Foundation

You nominated 300 cool stories of scientific surprise for Skunk Bear’s Golden Mole Award. Our shortlist has it all: circuits painted with light, imperceptible genitalia, and a terrifying frog.

I am not an astronomer or astrophysicist. I have never worked for NASA or JPL. But, during my graduate year at Cornell University, I was short on cross-discipline credits, and so I signed up for Carl Sagan’s popular introductory course, Astronomy 101. I was also an amateur photographer, occasionally freelancing for local media—and so the photos shown here, are my own.

Carl Sagan is aware of my camera as he talks to a student in the front row of Uris Hall

By the end of the 70’s, Sagan’s star was high and continuing to rise. He was a staple on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, producer and host of the PBS TV series, Cosmos, and he had just written Dragons of Eden, which won him a Pulitzer Prize. He also wrote Contact, which became a blockbuster movie, starring Jodie Foster.

Sagan died in 1996, after three bone marrow transplants to compensate for an inability to produce blood cells. Two years earlier, Sagan wrote a book and narrated a film based on a photo taken from space.

Continue reading “What has changed since ‘Pale Blue Dot’?” »

Today at the California NanoSystems Institute/ UCLA in Los Angeles, California, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) co-sponsored a look at humanity’s space future.

Isolating cancer cells is the new option for treating cancer.

We have new weapons to fight cancer, less invasive and smarter, since they use the operating behavior of the cells themselves and the immune system.

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“You can learn how to improve your novice pilot skills by having your brain zapped with recorded brain patterns of experienced pilots via transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), according to researchers at HRL Laboratories.”

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“James Batchelor believes science and art can work together, and he has hitched a ride to one of the most inhospitable places on the planet to prove it.”

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The Prius is an intentionally odd-looking car that gets odder with every generation; I’m pretty sure even ardent defenders of Toyota’s flagship hybrid could agree with me on that. So why not throw an equally odd paint color on top?

What you’re looking at here is the new Prius in “Thermo-Tect Lime Green,” which is more than your average upsettingly loud paint color. Toyota says that by removing the carbon black particles found in most paint and replacing them with titanium oxide, it has significantly increased the vehicle’s solar reflectivity — in other words, the car heats up less, which lessens the need for air conditioning, which in turn improves fuel economy. And fuel economy, of course, is what the Prius is all about.

White paint also does a good job of keeping the sun’s heat at bay, but Toyota actually says that its Thermo-Tect paint outperformed white in a two-hour summer test outdoors. Basically, this technology means that you might be able to get the color of your choice on your next car and still reduce your AC use. Granted, lime green may not be your first choice, but there doesn’t seem to be anything stopping Toyota from rolling it out to other colors as well.

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We’re making a tremendous progress in medical science and technology.

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Michelle Simmons is Australia’s answer to Canada’s Geordie Rose (CTO of D-Wave) — Simmons and four other female scientists are recognized.

Meet five Australian women at the top of their game on the first UN day honouring female contributions to the world of science.

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