Blogs / Discoblog

· You can buy land on Mars. Seriously. You just have to figure out how to live there.

· The world’s space agencies might not speak the same language, but one small box could connect them all.

· The Simpsons was right—bottlenose dolphins are vicious killers.

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·Are electric cars so quiet they can sneak up on pedestrians?

·Show us the money: Music label threatens to stop licensing songs to Rock Band and Guitar Hero unless they get more cash.

·Global warming comes to your living room—you can buy a stranded polar bear on a rug.

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Can you power an entire dance club with dancing? The British are about to try.

The Boston Globe unveils the science of the perfect nap. Even thinking about taking an afternoon siesta seems to improve your mood.

Dear Presidential candidates: Why no love for economists?

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“If I could rerun the tape of life from the origin of unicellular organisms… would terrestrial life originate at all? Would we get mobile creatures that we could call animals?”
–Stephen Jay Gould, “Fungal Forgery” in Natural History, 1993

“Are there universal laws of life, much like the fundamental laws of physics, which govern or limit the characteristics that make it–in any form–possible?”
–Blurb for “Looking for the Laws of Life” panel discussion at the World Science Festival

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When NASA’s Phoenix Lander touches down on Mars this weekend—presuming it survives the hot and harrowing descent to the surface—scientists hope that it finds more evidence of water. A new study in Science uses an Idaho gorge to suggest that the surface of Mars may have once been covered in huge quantities of water, though that may not be as good a portent for finding life on the Red Planet as it might sound.

While the Colorado River gradually carved the Grand Canyon over the last five or six millions years, there’s more than one way to scoop out a chasm. Short but massive deluges of water can do it, too. That’s how Michael Lamb and his team at the University of California, Berkeley think that Box Canyon in eastern Idaho was created.

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