STEM

The NASA SPHERES satellite drifts like a puck on an air hockey table, spinning slowly as its canisters release puffs of CO2 to steady its course. A Google Project Tango phone, which acts as the satellite’s eyes and brain, displays a heat map view of its surroundings. Its world is limited: a 6x6x6 foot cube Continue Reading →

IBM and the New York Genome Center announced a partnership to test whether Watson, the computer that won on Jeopardy, can sift through the genomes of cancer patients and help doctors pick drugs. This effort could hold the key to making DNA sequencing for cancer affordable, but there is a vast amount of work to Continue Reading →

A piece of food falls on the floor. Do you toss it out – or immediately pick it up and eat it, claiming the “five-second rule”? The idea that food is still relatively germ-free if it’s been on the floor for less than five seconds has been more of a pop-culture theory than something science Continue Reading →

There is so much to learn about the animal kingdom! These five mobile applications cover live cameras, facts and popular myths about animals, endangered species, and even the basic cellular structures in animals. Although ants are not cute and cuddly, their industriousness carried them a spot on this list. Pocket Zoo HD ™ with Live Continue Reading →

Feeling guilty about the hours you’ve wasted on Candy Crush Saga? Relax. A mathematical analysis of the notoriously addictive video game reveals that it belongs to a class of fiendish computational problems – and playing it might one day help solve them. Launched in 2012, the Candy Crush Saga game draws a staggering 93 million Continue Reading →

The Linux Foundation announced that it would be working with edX, a non-profit online learning site governed by Harvard and MIT, to make its “Introduction to Linux” course free and open to all. The Linux Foundation has long offered a wide variety of training courses through its website, but those can generally cost upwards of Continue Reading →

NASA is plotting a daring robotic mission to Jupiter’s watery moon Europa, a place where astronomers speculate there might be some form of life. The space agency set aside $15 million in its 2015 budget proposal to start planning some kind of mission to Europa. No details have been decided yet, but NASA chief financial Continue Reading →

Adobe has joined President Obama’s ConnectED initiative to help bolster technology education in US schools. The company plans to contribute $300 million in software to teachers and students, including Photoshop Elements, Premiere Elements, Presenter, Captivate, and even EchoSign, which Adobe hopes will help improve schools’ administrative processes. “We believe in the power of media creation Continue Reading →

For the first time in its history, Berkeley saw an introductory computer science course with predominantly female students – 106 women vs. 104 men. This slight turnaround signals a promising trend in the male-dominated STEM world. To be sure, Berkeley is an exception: according to the National Science Foundation, just 18.4% of computer science degrees Continue Reading →

The world’s forests are being rapidly destroyed, and a new map hopes to help conservationists figure out everywhere that it’s happening. Using technologies from Google Maps and Google Earth, the World Resources Institute has created an interactive map that shows forest coverage almost in real time, marking where coverage has increased and — more often Continue Reading →