Science & Innovation

Open University, studying topics from geology to systems theory. In 2003, she founded the Bristol Science Café and, in her spare time, sustains the work of the national and international network of science cafés, running the website and supporting and mentoring new café organizers. In January 2009, she started work on an interdisciplinary PhD research project, based at the University of the West of England, Bristol, seeking ways to bring Open Science and public engagement together in a fruitful and symbiotic way. The research project is funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).

NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) has taken and received its first images of the Moon, kicking off the year-long mapping mission of Earth's nearest celestial neighbor.

A new class of black hole, more than 500 times the mass of the Sun, has been discovered by an international team of astronomers. The finding in a distant galaxy approximately 290 million light years from Earth is reported today in the journal Nature.

String theory has come under fire in recent years. Promises have been made that have not been lived up to. Leiden theoretical physicists have now for the first time used string theory to describe a physical phenomenon. Their discovery has been reported this week in Science.

A team of researchers from the University of Alcalá de Henares (UAH) has shown scientifically that human beings can develop echolocation, the system of acoustic signals used by dolphins and bats to explore their surroundings.

An international team of researchers led by a UC Riverside astronomer has completed the largest ever survey designed to find very distant clusters of galaxies.

A group of researchers from the British Antarctic Survey have collected individuals from a wide range of species commonly found in Antarctic waters and subjected them to increasing levels of water temperature to learn how each species is prepared to cope with the conditions that they are likely to experience in the future.

Historical collections that include everything ever written in a dozen American and British newspapers since they started are now available electronically. Donald MacQueen from Uppsala University, Sweden, has carried out the first comprehensive study that makes use of this resource in order to track changes in language usage, a method that makes it possible to attain an entirely new degree of precision in dating.

Robert C. Reedy, a senior scientist at the Tucson-based Planetary Science Institute, is mapping the moon's surface elements using data gathered by an advanced gamma-ray spectrometer (GRS) that rode aboard the Japanese Kaguya spacecraft. The data promise to show chemical elements on the moon that have never been identified before, and Reedy and the Kaguya GRS team already have found uranium signatures in the data, an element not seen in previous moon-mapping efforts.

Sam Harris and Philip Ball discuss the conflict between religion and science. They do not agree…

The mysterious 1908 Tunguska explosion that leveled 830 square miles of Siberian forest was almost certainly caused by a comet entering the Earth's atmosphere, says new Cornell University research. The conclusion is supported by an unlikely source: the exhaust plume from the NASA space shuttle launched a century later.

Water vapor jets that spew from the surface of Saturn's icy moon Enceladus are not really geysers from an underground ocean as initially envisioned by planetary scientists, according to a study led by the University of Colorado at Boulder.

With the whoosh of compressed gas and the whir of unspooling wire, a team of Boulder scientists and engineers tested a new instrument prototype that might be used to detect groundwater deep inside Mars.

New data show that enrollment in U.S. science and engineering (S&E) graduate programs in 2007 grew 3.3 percent over comparable data for 2006--the highest year-over-year increase since 2002 and nearly double the 1.7 percent increase seen in 2006.

Today, Team Part-Time-Scientists announced its official entry into the Google Lunar X Prize competition, marking Germany’s debut in this new race to the Moon. The team joins the $30 million contest that challenges space professionals and engineers from across the globe to build and launch a privately funded spacecraft to the Moon.