Russ McBee

A group called Science Debate 2008 sent a list of questions about science and technology policy to Barack Obama and John McCain, covering such topics as science education, stem cell research, the politicization of science, space exploration, and numerous other topics. Both candidates responded to the list of fourteen questions; their answers are ...

Every year, agricultural runoff from Midwestern states pumps extraordinary amounts of nitrogen and phosphorus into the Mississippi River. These chemicals collect at the mouth of the river, in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Louisiana. This causes a dead zone in the Gulf, in which low oxygen levels decimate marine life, rendering it devoid of ...

Three stories showed up today, and none of them should come as a surprise: 1) Today is the 100th anniversary of the Tunguska event; on this day in 1908, something (either a small asteroid or a small comet) exploded in the air over Siberia. Although it never impacted the ground, and the object itself was only a few meters across, the blast ...

NASA's Phoenix mission to the polar regions of Mars landed flawlessly this weekend. The mission's goal is to drill beneath the frozen surface and extract samples of ice and soil, which the lander can then subject to a battery of chemical tests. This is one more exciting mission in NASA's spectacular portfolio of robotic planetary exploration. The ...

Despite the fact that creationism and its dark twin intelligent design are nothing more than religious dogma tarted up to look like science, a disturbingly high number of science teachers in US schools insist on presenting that propaganda to their students as a scientifically valid theory. A Penn State researcher has conducted a study of US ...

A couple of physicists in Italy have developed an explanation for poltergeist activity, which suspiciously always seems to happen around children; it has to do with quantum mechanics and the chemical changes that occur in the brain around the time of puberty: Brovetto and Maxia hypothesise that the changes in the brain that occur at puberty ...

Three very cool stories caught my eye today. 1) Researchers have managed to decipher and play back a recording made nearly two decades before Edison's phonograph. The phonautogram was made in France in 1860 and represents the earliest known recording of any sound. Although the recording (and others like it) have been known for a long time, only ...

This TED video of Roy Gould and Curtis Wong highlights Microsoft's WorldWide Telescope, which is a mashup of the best images of the universe from all the world's telescopes, blended together in an interactive, zoomable, and feature-rich interface. It will include Web-linked information on the various galaxies, nebulae, and stars depicted, and it ...

At last year's TED conference, one of the presenters was Carolyn Porco, the leader of the Imaging Team on the Cassini mission to Saturn. Her presentation focused mainly on a tour of the discoveries regarding two of Saturn's most intriguing moons: Titan and Enceladus. For centuries, Titan had been a mystery, its surface completely shrouded in a ...

TED is always a site full of provocative ideas. This video clip shows how little we really understand about the undersea world; most of the clip relates to visual camouflage and bioluminescence as tools for attraction, conveying information, and defense. Check this out: The octopus camouflage at the end is jaw-dropping, and the squid ...