With so many exciting celestial bodies in our solar system and beyond, it's easy to take the moon for granted. Sure, NASA crashed a probe into the lunar surface for science recently, but no human being has set foot on the moon since Apollo 17 in December 1972.
Now Ian Crawford of Birkbeck College in London and his colleagues have co-authored a paper making the case for a return manned mission to the moon, to augment the many remote-sensing spacecraft sent into lunar orbit over the last ten years. |  |
The End of the World and the Absurdity of Death
Seeking A Friend For The End Of The World" confronts our worst nightmare: death.
But it's worse than that; it's not only you. All of your friends, family and pets are going the way of the dinosaur. This morbid scenario doesn't sound very funny -- death, after all, is as funny as taxes, both of which are the only two certainties in life (and both are deeply unfunny) -- so why is the comedic genius Steve Carell starring alongside Academy Award nominee Keira Knightly in what is being billed as a "doomsday comedy"?. |  |
It's Not Just Summer, World Keeps Warming
The world's political and environmental leaders gather in Rio de Janeiro tomorrow to assess the state of the planet's health 20 years after the first such gathering in 1992. But if science is any guide, Earth still needs some help.
Several new climate studies reveal various aspects of the same foreboding problem: the atmosphere continues to warm, glaciers continue melting and seas keep rising. |  |
Pictures: "Emergency" Gold Treasures Found in Holy Land
Though separated by a thousand years, two newfound "emergency hoards" from Israel—including gold jewelry and coins—may have been hidden by ancient families fleeing unknown dangers, archaeologists say.
Revealed late last month, these 3,000-year-old rings (foreground) and earrings, from the older hoard, were found in a ceramic jug among the ruins of a house. Though unearthed in 2010, the vessel concealed its cargo until late last year, when scientists began molecular analysis of the contents. |  |
Ancient Indian manuscripts being preserved using a scanner-equipped bus
Rama Budihal is creating digital history on wheels. "In India, we don't care about history, because we have too much of it," says Budihal, a Bangalore-based engineer and inventor. "I want to build recognition of the wealth of treasures we have here."
His first stop: digitally preserving the roughly five million ancient manuscripts across the country, using a bus kitted out with a scanner, GPS and navigation, and systems that connect a network of historians and scholars in Delhi and Bangalore. Since 2007, the team has scanned more than a million scripts. The data is annotated and stored in the National Manuscripts Data Centre. |  |
The Humans With Super Human Vision
An average human, utterly unremarkable in every way, can 
perceive a million different colors. Vermilion, puce, cerulean, periwinkle, chartreuse—we have thousands of words for them, but mere language can never capture our extraordinary range of hues. Our powers of color vision derive from cells in our eyes called cones, three types in all, each triggered by different wavelengths of light. Every moment our eyes are open, those three flavors of cone fire off messages to the brain. The brain then combines the signals to produce the sensation we call color.
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June 20 2012
Marijuana Plan Appears Doomed in Albany
ALBANY — Facing resistance from the Republican-controlled Senate, a proposal by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo to decriminalize the possession of small amounts of marijuana in public view appeared near defeat on Monday as lawmakers approached the end of this year’s legislative session.
Threat to 'web of life' imperils humans, UN summit told
RIO DE JANEIRO — A feared mass extinction of wildlife also endangers billions of humans who depend on them for food and livelihood, according to a new assessment of species loss issued Tuesday at the Rio+20 conference.
Experts presented a grim tableau of the planet's biodiversity as world leaders were to arrive for a three-day summit on Earth's environmental problems and enduring poverty. Out of 63,837 species assessed, 19,817 run the risk of following the dodo, they said. |  |
Feds file lawsuit to get tyrannosaur skeleton sent back to Mongolia
Federal attorneys today filed a civil lawsuit that seeks to wrest a tyrannosaur skeleton valued at more than $1 million away from its sellers and return it to the Mongolian government.
The skeleton was sold at a New York auction last month for $1.05 million to an unidentified buyer, even though a federal district judge in Texas issued a restraining order to hold up the sale. The auction house behind the offering, Texas-based Heritage Auctions, made the sale contingent on the outcome of Mongolia's court challenge — and since then, the skeleton has been held in legal limbo. |  |