Science

Google’s Spending $1 Billion on an Old NASA Hangar, No One Knows Why

Planetary Ventures LLC, a Google shell company, just signed a very expensive lease on a very large building and airfield in Silicon Valley. The lease in question will cost the search giant $1.16 billion over the term of 60 years. The building and airfield in question is the Moffett Field, where Google’s founders have been…

Hubble’s Latest Images Reveal a Rich Seam of Galaxies

Hubble’s latest images reveal the detail of a super-rich galaxy cluster called Abell 1413. And isn’t it damn pretty? Nestled between the constellations of Leo (The Lion) and Coma Berenices, this collection of over 300 galaxies is over 2 billion light-years from Earth. This particular image is dominated by a large elliptical galaxy called MCG+04-28-097,…

You Can Make Diamonds Out of Peanut Butter

Diamond’s are beautiful but, sadly, rather expensive. Now, though, Dan Frost of the Bayerisches Geoinstitut in Germany has discovered that you can make them from peanut butter. No, really. BBC Future reports that Frost has been working hard to replicate the complex crystalline structures that can be found in the lower mantle of the Earth.…

Report: Elon Musk Is Next In Line To Connect The Third World

It’s never been a better time to be a budding third-world internet entrepreneur: Google’s trying to use balloons to bring you online, Facebook wants to use drones to upload your selfies, and now a third big Silicon Valley name is lending a helping hand. According to a WSJ report, Elon Musk is planning to launch…

What Actually Goes Down on the International Space Station

The main purpose of the International Space Station is to provide an international laboratory for experiments within the space environment. Which, despite all our technological advances, is nearly impossible to replicate here on Earth. Because for many of those experiments, the key parameter is—you guessed it—weightlessness. While we do have a vacuum chamber tower facility…

New Software Will Give Doctors a Panoramic View Inside Your Bladder

Images of long sandy beaches, breathtaking mountains, and even bustling cities come to mind when you think about an extra wide panoramic photo—not the inside of somebody’s bladder. But new software promises to give doctors a better view inside a patient’s plumbing by stitching countless images from an endoscope together, making it easier to spot…

Healthcare.gov Is Being Hacked—By the Government

Healthcare.gov wasn’t the Obama administration’s finest moment. But ahead of a second enrolment period which kicks off November 15th, the team behind the website are making sure the same problems don’t happen again—by hacking their own site. The AP reportsthat weekly white-hat hacking sessions are being used to simulate real attacks and ensure that the…

Bats Can Use Sonar Jamming to Steal Food From Each Other

Using sound to hunt for food is a pretty ingenious adaptation for bats flying at night. But it doesn’t work if another bat is messing with you. Scientists have discovered that a species of bats can purposely jam the sonars of others to keep rivals away from their insect prey. Aaron Corcoran, now at Johns…

A Radically New Particle Accelerator Could Have 500 Times the Power

If you know anything about the Large Hadron Collider, you know that it is huge. Massive. 17 miles of tunnels under Switzerland. Traditional accelerators need all that space to get particles to smash into each other at close to the speed of light. But scientists at Stanford have come one step closer to a new…

A Hippo Learns The Only 100% Effective Birth Control is Abstinence

As part of their management of their animals, zoos get together to create breeding recommendations for each species. But sometimes the animals have their own plans. Despite being on contraceptives, a Los Angeles Zoo hippo delivered a surprise baby on Halloween. When the zoos that comprise the Association of Zoos and Aquariums get together to…

Man’s first space civilization envisioned in this INCREDIBLE Lego city

Andrew Hamilton and Tim Goddard have shared the most kick ass micro build of a place they call Panduro City. Heavy use of Mindstorms automates all sorts of things in this build. You can not fully appreciate it in just photo form, the video must be watched! You’re reading Leg Godt, the blog with the…

This Wearable Counts Calories For You From the Comfort of Your Ear

There are more options than ever if you’re in the market for a wearable fitness tracker that will encourage you to get off the couch and get active. But what if you really enjoy the couch? For those who want to get healthy minus all the physical fitness, researchers at the University of Alabama are…

Yes, Time Travel Is Possible; Here’s How

Time travel’s been one of man’s wildest fantasies for centuries. It’s long been a popular trend in movies and fiction, inspiring everything from Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol to H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine to the Charlton Heston shrine that is The Planet of the Apes. And with the opening of Interstellar today—n0t to spoil…

How Astronauts Use Laptops on the International Space Station

When the ISS was being designed, its architects wisely concluded that installing physical interfaces into the structure of the ISS was not a good idea. It’s very hard to upgrade and/or repair interfaces that are part of the vehicle, whereas if laptop computers are used, upgrading or repair is as simple as launching a CD-ROM,…

Watch What Would Happen If Two Black Holes Collided in the Milky Way

If you’ve ever wondered what the end of the Milky Way might look like, then perhaps it’s a little like this. You’re looking at a simulation of what would happen to our galaxy if two black holes somehow collided within it. Created by the Simulating Extreme Spacetimes (SXS) project, the animation models how two black…

The Soviet History of the Failed Antares’ Engines

Turns out, the Antares launch vehicle that exploded during lift-off last week was riding on refurbished disco-era rockets that not even the vaunted Soviet Space Program could manage to get off the ground. The Antares itself is a product of the Orbital Sciences Corporation. Designed to launch a Cygnus spacecraft with an 11,000 pound payload…

Saturn’s two largest moon—Rhea and Titan—line up for the Cassini orbiter. Rhea’s pock-marked surface provides a beautiful contrast to the golden glow of Titan—though they’re both actually made up of largely similar material. [ESA]

A New Material Uses the Cold Darkness of Outer Space To Cool Your House

In today’s awesomely brutal-sounding material science news, Stanford engineers have created a building material that exploits that “cold darkness of the Universe” to cool itself—even when the sun is shining. Stanford calls it a “cosmic fridge,” and it could replace air conditioning. In a fascinating paper published yesterday in Nature, Stanford’s Shanhui Fan and Aaswath…

Watch the Biggest Sunspot in 24 Years Traverse the Sun

You’re looking at the largest sunspot since 1990 as it crossed the surface of the Sun. Captured between October 17th and 29th, the spot was big enough to see without a telescope. Interestingly, despite its size and production of lots of flares, it “did not produce any significant coronal mass ejections,” according to Alex Young…

Can Brown Bears, House Cats, and Gorillas Teach Us About Human Health?

The fact that humans and animals suffer from many of the same diseases is no longer controversial. But do they have similar causes? How do factors like air quality, social stress, and the built environment contribute to health and illness in people and animals? We live-tweeted the Zoobiquity conference today, which was devoted to discussing…