June 16th, 2012 We’ve set sail! Here’s proof: You can also tell by this graph of the ship’s speed over the last few days. The few hours before we set off were full of tying down all the science equipment and negotiating with customs officials to get a piece of equipment that had been shipped. [...]

Back in February 2011 the Sun underwent a so-called X class solar flare event, prompting the following Life, Unbounded post. I thought I’d bring it out to air again in light of the solar flare events happening right now, and the potential for some disruption of our Earthly activities. There are also interesting implications for [...]

With relevance to homegrown, lone operator terrorist threats highlighted by the April 15 Boston Marathon bombings, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced a series of initiatives Wednesday aimed at defending the U.S. against increasingly ambiguous threats. Whereas its core mission will remain the same—researching new types of technology for the military—the cutting-edge agency [...]

Space: the beneficial frontier. That was the underlying theme of a panel called “The Future of Space,” which I moderated at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting at Davos, Switzerland. It was the first such session on space services in the formal part of the program at this meeting of leaders in policy and business—and [...]

The 2012 New York City Marathon may not be televised, but it is being organized on an unofficial basis by men and women who have banded together to run anyway. The official race was belatedly cancelled on Friday in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. Teams from Canada, Germany, and Switzerland (identifiable because they carried their [...]

Norman F. Ramsey may not be a household name, but he was a giant of 20th-century experimental physics. His basic-science work earned him the 1989 Nobel Prize in Physics and laid the foundation for technologies now used by millions of people. He died last Friday at the age of 96. In exploring how atoms and [...]

My favorite element of the electric grid is the method by which it gathers information about power outages. It seems the electric utilities have legions of trained mammals, and when power goes out, mammals in different areas press buttons, and the buttons make a bell ring at the utilities. For pressing the right button the [...]