When people talk about an “all of the above” approach to energy they’re usually referring to the sources we know – gas, hydro, nuclear, solar and wind. But a steady stream of emerging alternatives promises to take advantage of natural processes to produce zero-carbon electricity for untold millions. The latest entrant in this sounds-too-good-to-be-true energy sweepstakes: pressure-retarded osmosis, a kind of reverse water desalination that kicks off energy instead of consuming it.

I tried to figure out the precession of the perihelion of Mercury calculation out three or four times from my collection technical books on gravity.  There was never enough detail for me to follow their work.  The authors can rightly figure that anyone reading this part of their textbook is exceptionally good at physics compared to the general populace and will be able to fill in any missing details.

For those part-timers who wish to move beyond the "Brief History of Time" level of physics, this is an obvious thing to try and figure out.  Because gravity does not work instantaneously, there is a wee bit more wobble in the orbit of Mercury.  This blog hopes to provide all the detail needed.

Here's an astronomy puzzles: Rather than occupying orbits at regular distances from a star, giant gas planets, like Jupiter and Saturn in our solar system, appear to prefer to occupy certain regions in mature solar systems while staying clear of others, which results in “planet pileups” and “planet deserts."

Researchers identified high-energy radiation from baby sun-like stars as the likely force that carves gaps in protoplanetary disks, the clouds of gas and dust that swirl around young stars and provide the raw materials for planets. The gaps then act as barricades, corralling planets into certain orbits. 

If you are freezing eggs or ovarian tissue to delay childbearing for social reasons, society should reply 'thanks, but no thanks', according to a recent analysis.

It appears that a small cabal of  billionaires -- those who got rich through innovation and who feel loyal to the future -- are about to to fund a new effort worth some excitement and attention

Should robots behave politely? Because, to some, it’s a given that in the not-too-distant future large numbers of people will be interacting with robots (domestic, public, corporate and perhaps even law-enforcement/military) on a frequent basis.

ONO-4641, an investigational oral drug, reduced the number of lesions in people with multiple sclerosis (MS), according to the results of a phase two clinical trial to be presented this week at the American Academy of Neurology Meeting in New Orleans.

Tattoos and body piercings are so ubiquitous in western societies that they are more cliché than  edgy, but social scientists in France say they may be more than fashion trends - they may be harbingers of doom. Individuals who get them  are also more likely to engage in risky behaviors that include substance and alcohol use. 

The second-largest mass extinction in Earth's history, the so-called Late Ordovician mass extinction, coincided with a short but intense ice age during which enormous glaciers grew and sea levels dropped.

The Late Ordovician mass extinction occurred about 450 million years ago and was related to climate change, that has been known, but exactly how the climate change produced the extinction has not. A team led by scientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) has created a framework for weighing the factors that might have led to mass extinction and has used that framework to determine that the majority of extinctions were caused by habitat loss due to falling sea levels and cooling of the tropical oceans.