Imagine being the project scientist for a NASA experiment and getting an email telling you that a 3,100 lb. defunct spy satellite dating back to the Cold War might crash into your baby?

That's what happened to Julie McEnery of NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope,  which maps the highest-energy light in the universe, a year ago. When she checked her email on March 29th, 2012,  she had an automatically generated report from NASA's Robotic Conjunction Assessment Risk Analysis (CARA) saying that in about a week Fermi might be hit by Cosmos 1805. 

In America, only two political parties can win the presidency. For that reason the two parties tend to have a 'big tent' mentality and embrace a lot of fringe members in return for votes. The perfect shouldn't be the enemy of the good, the saying goes.

Due to that structure, and that a tiny percentage of 'swing voters' determine a winner, the opposing sides tend to vilify and stereotype each other as much as possible, including in ways that are tailored to the audience. For example, Democrats hate business and are anti-science, while Republicans hate minorities and are anti-science. 

Wait, they're both anti-science? Sure, just about different things. 

In the modern regulatory environment, start-ups and smaller companies tend to be less well-known. The costs are increasingly high and its hard to get venture capital funding without  knowing how long it can take to clear government hurdles so if things look promising, companies are acquired instead. 

But some are sticking it out and they are trying to gain momentum as they advance their technologies and produce significant clinical data on the road to eventual commercialization of their technologies. 

As planets age the general rule is that they become darker and cooler - but Saturn is an exception. Why it looks so young for its age has been a space science topic since the late 1960s but a paper in Nature Geoscience says it has some answers.

The Windows® NTFS disk filing system was first introduced in 1993, but despite its undoubted sophistication, not everyone is convinced that it is perfectly tuned for all possible eventualities. Prompting Dr. Fanglu Guo and Dr. Tzi-cker Chiueh from Symantec Research. Laboratories, Culver City, USA to develop their DAFT disk operating system.

As a researcher in the fields of exact science and philosophy, I am obsessed with “truth”, which is a label of approval we assign to concepts that we judge to be consistent in a certain sense (Example 1 below). How we do that is thus important for the progress of these disciplines.

Love: An Almost Scientific Investigation


What Is Love ?

If I could answer that long-standing question in precise scientific terms with error bars I would be sure to get a Nobel prize and lynched.

Direct current (DC)

In a DC (direct current) circuit where the electricity flows in one direction, we can think of a battery as a storage tank like the water tower in your neighborhood. If nobody turned on their faucet, the water in the tower would just sit there. Forever. Physicists like to think of this as "potential energy." Like a boulder at the top of a hill, it will just sit there, forever, until someone pushes it over the hill or an earthquake shakes it from the top of the hill or erosion undermines it starting it to roll down the hill. When the boulder is rolling down the hill, physicists like to think of this as kinetic energy. So, the water will just sit in the top of the water tower until you turn on the faucet to your water hose.

Elsevier and the Integrated Earth Data Applications facility at Columbia University have announced a competition to improve preservation of and access to research data in the earth sciences. 

Members of the international geosciences community who have worked on preservation and improved access of research data, particularly dark data, can share their work and advise on ways that these data are being processed, stored and used.