Noise levels, fine particulate matter that leads to smog and traffic volumes are a big concern to  urban planners and residents now but they will be even bigger issues in the 'city of tomorrow'.

Three-dimensional tools will soon make it easier to simulate those issues: as the user virtually moves through his city, the corresponding data are displayed as green, yellow or red dots.

Astronomers believe they have found the answer to the mystery of a powerful ‘superwind’ which causes the death of stars.

Stars like our own Sun end their lives with a ‘superwind’ 100 million times stronger than the solar wind, which occurs over a period of 10,000 years, and removes as much as half the mass of the star. At the end, only a dying and fading remnant of the star remain.

Not to worry. The Sun won't begin to throw out those gases for around five billion years.

Men and women of good conscience cannot sit silently by and allow these things to happen. This is abuse and torture and, still, people support these. Still the Massachusett's State House supports it. Believe it or not, some parents of residents continue to speak out in favor of the use of these shocks.

A new observatory, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), is still under construction but it has already given astronomers a major breakthrough in understanding a nearby planetary system and provided valuable clues about how such systems form and evolve.

 Astronomers using ALMA have discovered that planets orbiting the star Fomalhaut are much smaller than originally thought. 

For once I allow myself some self-advertising... I just published on the Cornell arXiv the preprint of a proceedings paper I wrote for the Bormio 2012 conference on Nuclear Physics, where I presented the most recent results from the CMS experiment in a review talk. The paper is titled "Recent Results of the CMS Experiment".

The paper is 33-pages long, and thus configures as a general review of the results that CMS produced from the analysis of data collected during 2011, the 5 inverse femtobarns of proton-proton collisions, which among other things granted a first feeble but trustworthy evidence of a Higgs boson when read together with similar ATLAS results.

Global spending on cleaner energy grew to a record $263 billion in 2011, a 6.5 percent increase over the previous year, according to new research by The Pew Charitable Trusts. The United States reclaimed the top spot among all G-20 nations, thanks to $48 billion primarily in government subsidies, but with $45.5 billion in private investments, China is the real hub of clean energy activity - leading the world in wind energy investment and deployment, as well as wind and solar manufacturing.