Science

Researchers at the University of Cape Town in South Africa have developed a pill that can wipe out malaria with a single dose. It’s a development that could save millions of lives in Africa alone, not to mention the rest of the world. But there’s a teensy weensy little hurdle that must first be overcome: Continue Reading →

Sleep appears to play a key role in helping the brain consolidate the memories it forms during the day. While past research has indicated that you can’t form new memories during sleep, a new study has found that the brain can establish new associations while sleeping. There’s a catch, though: its capacity may be limited Continue Reading →

Neil Armstrong — who has died at the age of 82 — was best known as the commander of Apollo 11, but his career at NASA began nearly a decade earlier as a research test pilot. A trained aerospace engineer, Armstrong was a self-described “white-socks, pocket-protector, nerdy engineer” who worked at the cutting edge of Continue Reading →

You can’t win ’em all. Such is the case with the Curiosity rover, anyway, as diagnostics have revealed that its wind sensors have sustained damage. NASA engineers aren’t fully sure what caused this minor setback to the otherwise successful landing, but hypothesize that stones might’ve been kicked up during the rocket-powered landing, which then struck Continue Reading →

It’s that time again: time for Carnegie Mellon to roll out the red carpet and welcome the crème de la crème of the robotics world into its halls. Since 2003 the school has been selecting the best of the best and inducting them into the Robot Hall of Fame. Past honorees have included everything from Continue Reading →

NASA plans to launch a relatively modest Mars lander in 2016 that will make a rocket-powered descent to the surface to study whether the red planet’s core is solid or liquid and whether the planet has tectonic plates that slowly move like continents on Earth, agency managers said Monday. The primary goals of the cost-capped Continue Reading →

A scientist from the Indiana University School of Medicine has been awarded a grant from the U.S. Army to design a nasal spray designed to suppress thoughts of suicide. Read the full story at Mashable Continue Reading →

For as long as we’ve bothered to care about heavenly bodies other than our own, we’ve thought that the size of the Sun varies throughout its 11-year solar cycles. Intense magnetic forces, the theory went, rendered it as malleable as a sturdy stress ball. That was a good theory, backed up by decades of data. Continue Reading →

Imagine a nuclear powered machine that travels nine months and more than 350 million miles through the galaxy. Upon arriving at its target planet, the 2,000-pound machine suddenly hurtles downward in a guided entry pattern, in a period called “The Seven Minutes of Terror,” enduring temperatures as high as 3,800 degrees… Just milliseconds before landing, Continue Reading →

[wpaudio url=”https://media.shellypalmer.com/wp-content/images/usrn/120807_SHELLYPALMER_GEN_BED.mp3″ text=”Click to play … ” dl=”0″] NASA’s new Mars rover, Curiosity, has finally landed on the red planet, after over 14 years of planning. The project, which cost 2.5 billion dollars, had seen years of launch delays and problems with funding. But landing on Mars is no easy task. Many previous missions have Continue Reading →