Artist and self-styled experimental philosopher Jonathon Keats is hoping to persuade the art world to join scientists in the Copernican Revolution—nearly 5 centuries late. In 1543, Nicolaus Copernicus made the humbling observation that the Earth revolves around the sun. Modern physicists often cite the “Copernican principle” that, as nature’s rules are the same everywhere, the [...]

This story appeared in Science Magazine [pdf] and online [html]. NASA is unlikely to be the operator of the next spacecraft to land on the moon, but the U.S. space agency is considering sending along some red tape. As dozens of private teams race to return to the moon as soon as next year, spurred [...]

I had a Random Sample about using microbes to restore artwork in Science Magazine: [html] or [pdf] and below… Microbiologist Rosa María Montes Estellés once infected a church mural with bacteria. But it was for a good cause: The bacteria ate their way through 4 centuries of grime encrusted on a mural at Santos Juanes [...]

Whipping around the moon in the solar system’s loneliest spaceship, Apollo 8 astronaut James Lovell saw something in 1968 that he shouldn’t have: a gentle illumination, like a sunrise or sunset on Earth, hovered where the sun’s light cast its sharp shadow on the moon’s surface. Yet the moon has no atmosphere to catch the [...]

Pikas in the Pacific Northwest, kiss your privacy goodbye. This spring, Gregg Treinish, wildlife biologist, founder, and director of Adventurers and Scientists for Conservation (ASC), recruited 22 hikers on the Pacific Crest Trail from Campo, California, to Manning Park, British Columbia, to spy on the small, furry mammals. The hikers are recording pika sightings, straw [...]

One might think that the managers of the Australian Synchrotron would be panicking given the news that neither the federal government nor the Victoria state government has addressed in their just-released budget proposals how the facility will be funded beyond June 2012, when its original 5-year financial plan ends. After all, the two governments currently [...]

EISRIESENWELT, AUSTRIA—Tracing his glove along a chalky layer in a house-size block of ice that lines this cave in the Austrian Alps, Michael Behm can feel all that is left of an ancient warm spell. The ice, likely formed over the decades or centuries as calcium-enriched rainwater trickled deep into the cave and froze, must [...]

REYKJAVIK—As a brown cloud of ash drifts down from the slopes of Eyjafjallajökull toward their truck, Hanna Kaasalainen warns a colleague that their gas masks won’t be much good against carbon dioxide. The masks filter out poisonous gases released by magma such as sulfur dioxide, but carbon dioxide can simply displace oxygen in the air, [...]

I went to Iceland  in April to report on volcano monitoring during the Eyjafjallajökull eruption for Science Magazine. That story, which appeared 23 April 2010,  is here. A pair of photos from my field trips appeared in my aunt’s Long Island newspapers (L&M Publications) the week of 26 April. See them here. A first-person essay [...]

Thoroughbred horse owners now have a new tool to predict how their nags will perform on the track. Last week at the Irish Thoroughbred Breeders’ Association Expo in County Kildare, a new company called Equinome rolled out a €1000 DNA test of a muscle factor derived from the Horse Genome Project. Muscle growth is governed [...]