Billions of years after going on a cannibalistic binge, our own Milky Way galaxy has been implicated by the stale crumbs it left behind. Astronomers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, used Hubble Space Telescope data to spot the crumbs – ancient stars thought to be remnants of a dwarf galaxy engulfed by our…
I started writing this post when I discovered one of my fittest friends, Rick*, a 50-year-old Ironman triathlete and veteran marathoner, has a surprisingly unfit heart. So unfit, that he didn’t show up for the Sunday morning run, a ritual rarely missed in our running community unless there’s a race to attend or a death…
Earlier this month, I joined biologist Steve Haddock and his research group from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute for a daylong cruise aboard MBARI’s R/V Rachel Carson. We left from Moss Landing, CA and travelled about 15 miles out into Monterey Bay, passing pods of porpoises and sea lions along the way. Haddock takes these cruises roughly every six…
The Obama administration may urge Congress in March to invest billions of dollars to develop biotechnology and nanotechnology tools for the creation of comprehensive maps of brain activity that can help diagnose and treat brain diseases. The plan has already ignited debate, with critics questioning the massive expenditure for a single, high-risk project in the…
Detectives look to insects for clues to crack cases A lot of dead bodies turn up on Mount Hamilton and in the Santa Cruz Mountains, two natural areas near San Jose, Calif. Some bodies are found decomposed beyond recognition. Jeffrey Honda has worked on a number of these cases. He searches for subtle clues that…
In the future, scientists want to be able to send spacecraft to study asteroids such as the one that will approach the Earth on Friday. A concept for these landers may look familiar to anyone who grew up in the 1970s. Egg-shaped and weighted at the bottom, the landers – prototype designs for a possible future NASA…
I’ve had the same name my entire life. It was printed out on my birth certificate, right next to a stamp of my teeny tiny foot. Nothing changed when I got married, but ironically this lack of action threw some members of my family for a loop. During the holidays, when their confusion reaches its…
Protecting endangered species is tough enough when it’s not easy to agree on what’s endangered and what’s not. But what about cases where it’s tough to define “species”? California tiger salamanders (Ambystoma californiense), a threatened native species, has had to contend with an unwelcome house guest, the barred tiger salamander (Ambystoma mavortium) for over 60…
While covering Stanford’s Global Climate and Energy Project symposium last fall, I learned a term that has been bouncing around in my head ever since: Gandhian engineering – the development of technology to benefit the world’s poorest citizens. The concept led me to a growing trend in engineering and design, often called frugal innovation. Here’s…
I’m sure I was not the only person relieved to see November headlines with news of bendy cell phones set to hit shelves sometime in 2013. Now, with fewer consequences than ever, I will be free to drop my phone, step on it, fold it into my back pocket, all without breaking its screen. This…
