Mark Strauss

NASA’s New Spacecraft Will Have A Star Trek-Like Cockpit

The new Enterprise bridge on Star Trek: TNG replaced buttons and switches with backlit touch panels. This “prophetic” technology was created because production designers didn’t have the budget to create and install individually lighted buttons. But, aboard the Orion spacecraft, sci-fi has once again become sci-fact. An article in the August issue of Air &…

Rotating Rooms Let You Redesign This House Whenever You Feel Like It

Normally, the phrase “push-button home” evokes images of a Jetson-esque lifestyle filled with futuristic gadgets and shiny automatons just waiting to do our bidding. But this house turns that concept on its head, allowing you to transform your home into a simple, quiet retreat in the midst of a bustling city. The Iranian architecture firm…

The “Kardashian Index” Measures Whether Scientists Deserve Their Fame

Everybody knows Kim Kardashian is “famous for being famous.” But one researcher worries that some in the scientific community are likewise “renowned for being renowned.” How could you tell if a scientist has an overblown public profile? Meet the Kardashian Index. Writing in the journal Genome Biology, University of Liverpool genomicist Neil Hall notes: We…

How Much Energy Would You Need To Replicate Elsa’s Powers In Frozen?

Not all of us are fortunate enough to be born with magical powers, but science offers us the opportunity to create our own. A physics student with an apparent case of Elsa envy decided to investigate the matter by calculating the amount of energy that would be required to freeze Disney’s Kingdom of Arendelle. Writing…

A Map Of The U.S., If There Had Never Been A Mexican-American War

In 1846, President James Polk, driven by a belief in Manifest Destiny, waged a war to seize land from Mexico and expand the nation’s boundary from Texas to California. But events could have plausibly gone very differently, resulting in a map of the U.S. that would be significantly unlike the one we have today. When…

​Recreation of Richard III’s Skeleton Shows Why He Was Called an Imp

Tourists visiting the Richard III Visitor Centre in Leicester can gaze into the empty grave where the king’s skeleton was discovered in 2012. His actual bones are being reinterred in Leicester Cathedral. But a 3D-printed replica is there, revealing details such as the late monarch’s twisted spine and mortal wounds. King Richard III was killed…

What Museums Will Look Like After the Apocalypse

The Guggenheim Museum is instantly recognizable in this photo—but instead of being surrounded by a Manhattan skyline, it sits in a barren landscape, teetering on the edge of cliff. The photo is part of a series called “Apocalypse in Art.” “The spirit of apocalypses holds sway over modern culture and is slowly infecting everything around…

The U.S. Economy Is A Casualty Of NSA Surveillance Programs

Ever since Edward Snowden revealed the true extent of the National Security Agency’s surveillance methods, the public debate has focused mostly on issues of privacy and national security. But new evidence shows that the fallout from the NSA backlash is wider than we thought, and could cost U.S. companies billions. [Image: Flickr] A report published…

A Winged Cat Helps Explain The Principle Of Evolutionary Trade-Offs

You can’t have it all. It’s a cliché, but it’s also a powerful principle in biology. Now, a set of new computer models reveal how evolutionary compromises (“trade-offs”) drive the diversity of life. “Biologists have long known that when species compete for limited resources such as food, they are pressured to diversify,” explains Chris Adami,…

A bill introduced in Congress could be an important step in clarifying property rights in outer space. The ASTEROIDS Act says that resources obtained from asteroids legally belong to the company or other entity that extracted them, but it has some kinks to work out, such as the legal definition of an “asteroid.”

World Map Reveals How Countries Are Divided Between Cat And Dog Lovers

Overall, most states in the U.S. have a balanced cat-dog ratio. But, it’s a different story when you look at the rest of the world, where the loyalty of some countries clearly favors one type of furry companion over the other. The marketing firm Euromonitor provided the Washington Post with data estimates of the pet…

Nearly 750,000 U.S. Weapons Are Unaccounted For In Afghanistan

A recently discovered database failure is certain to have lethal consequences: Many of the 747,000 weapons that the Defense Department provided to the Afghan National Security Forces were not properly labeled and tracked—which means that insurgents or arms dealers could easily get hold of them. According to a report published by the Special Inspector General…

Senate Abortion Hearing Reveals Junk Science Behind Women’s Health Laws

This month, a Senate committee held a hearing on whether to halt the growing number of state laws reducing access to abortion services in the name of protecting women’s health. The “expert” testimony revealed just how much these laws rely on fringe science and discredited research. Image by Zdorov Kirill Vladimirovich via Shutterstock The Women’s…

Play Spacewar!, The Pentagon-Funded Video Game From 1962

The launch of Sputnik prompted a U.S. government spending spree to achieve technological dominance over the Soviets. Among the recipients of this largesse were MIT engineers, who designed a computer simulation called Spacewar! Inspired by the sci-fi books of E.E. Smith, it was the world’s first videogame. The guys who created this simulation — using…

The Lunar Surface As You’ve Never Seen It Before

NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio has created this stunning, high-resolution portrait of the Moon’s south pole by combining, for the first time, gravity data from the GRAIL mission with topographic imagery taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. As NASA explains: If the Moon were a perfectly smooth sphere of uniform density, the gravity map would be…

Patent Trolling Is Worse Than Any Other Time in History

It’s the tech world’s version of ambulance chasing: firms that earn money by asserting patent rights against other companies, without manufacturing any useful products of their own. And, according to the latest numbers, the economic burden of patent lawsuits is now unprecedented in U.S. history. By filing one frivolous lawsuit after another, the trolls shakedown…

Russia Has Lost Contact With Its Gecko Sex Satellite

What began as a pleasure cruise has turned into a crisis as Russia attempts to reestablish control of a scientific satellite carrying five geckos, which are part of an experiment to study the effects of zero-gravity on animal mating. Less than a week after the Foton-M4 satellite was launched into space for a 60-day mission,…

The annual cost of U.S. forest fires has more than quintupled in the past two decades, with current govt spending levels at $3- $4 billion per year. The combination of warmer temperatures and dryer lands has been especially devastating in western states — and is expected to worsen as climate change induces more droughts.

Scientists have identified whale-ship collisions as a possible factor in why blue whale population numbers have remained low, despite international laws against hunting. One possible solution: speed restrictions in shipping lanes would give whales time to get out of the way.

How Would Christianity Deal with Extraterrestrial Life?

How would the world’s religions react to the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence? There is, of course, no single answer. But for Christians who believe in the redemption of humanity through a singular event—the Incarnation of God through Christ—the question poses an especially complex dilemma. To appreciate the conundrum, a good place to start is with…