Science

The Tragic Death of Dr. Manhattan’s Real-Life Counterpart

In the Watchmen comic book (and forthcoming movie), one of the most intriguing characters is the omnipotent Dr. Manhattan, a superhero who can manipulate the physical laws of the universe as the result of a strange accident involving “atomic physics.” After being exposed to radiation, Dr. Manhattan is suffused with a blue glow and can…

io9 Annalee Newitz Sep 9

Stephen Hawking Bets Against Large Hadron Collider’s Success

We know the LHC won’t end the world, but in an amusing note before its big switch-on tomorrow Stephen Hawking (he of the physics brain the size of a planet) has admitted he’s got a $100 bet that the machine won’t succeed in one of its big goals: finding the very mysterious Higgs boson.In a…

Physics & Chemistry Kit Eaton Sep 9

Athletic Performance Enhancer Turns Out to Be Effective Memory Booster

The drug erythropoietin (EPO), whose ability to increase blood production has made it the center of several sports doping scandals, turns out to be a memory-enhancing drug. In fact, researchers today announced that it might turn out to help in the treatment of people who suffer from schizophrenia and Alzheimers. Hannelore Ehrenreich of the Max…

io9 Annalee Newitz Sep 8

Mars Phoenix Will Bravely and Passionately Twitter Until the Final Beat of Its Adorable Electronic Heart

The Mars Phoenix Lander has been Twittering away its mission details since landing on Mars in May. But lately, you can see a sense of impending doom starting to creep in, slowly: “It’s noon, Sol 81. I’ve spotted frost around my landing site in AM,” tweeted Phoenix a few weeks ago. “Seasons are longer here…I’ll…

Space & Spaceflight John Mahoney Sep 8

Military Exo-Suits Are On the Way

U.S. military troops won’t have to wait decades for useful exoskeleton robo-suits. According to the U.S. Army Soldier Systems Center (SSC), development plans are on track to deploy the suits in a few years. Which soldiers will get the suits, and what roles will our cyborg supersoldiers play?SSC (also known as Natick, for the Massachusetts…

io9 Ed Grabianowski Sep 8

Fringe Preview Screeners Measured Audience’s Emotional Responses

When Fringe premieres tomorrow night, what you’ll see on screen isn’t just a product of the collective minds of JJ Abrams, Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman. It’s also the product of biometric audience testing, to fine-tune just how addictive the show can be made to America at large. Is this the new scientific face of…

Television Graeme McMillan Sep 8

A Fleet of 1500 Cloud-Seeding Ships Could Stop Global Warming, Say Scientists

Using a fleet of 1500 wind-powered ships that cruise the oceans autonomously, spraying massive plumes of salt water into the air, we could reverse the effects of global warming within years. So says John Latham, a researcher at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, U.S., who has worked with colleagues to develop a…

io9 Annalee Newitz Sep 8

Israeli Students Design “Batsuit” That Lets You Fly out of Airplanes

Click to view In Batman and countless other caped superhero movies, there’s always a moment when our hero jumps from a plane or high building and uses the cape on his suit to fly safely to earth. Now a group of space engineering students at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology say they’ve got a working…

io9 Annalee Newitz Sep 8

Anyone Who Thinks the LHC Will Destroy the World is a T***

Particle physics professor Brian Cox of the University of Manchester has pretty much the final word on Large Hadron Collider fear-mongering with the above quote. What prompted such an outburst? Death threats against scientists working on the LHC. Perhaps an even better question – what does “t***” stand for?Numerous studies have found that the LHC…

io9 Ed Grabianowski Sep 6

Why Nature Prefers a Small Man to Mate with a Big Woman

If you watch enough TV, you get the idea that the ideal mating combination is a skinny little woman and a burly man. But a new evolutionary study published in American Naturalist shows that’s not what nature intended. In fact, the humble New Zealand weta (a relative of the cricket) demonstrates that evolution often pushes…

io9 Annalee Newitz Sep 5

The Mysterious “Arcs” of Saturn’s Moons

Saturn’s moons Anthe and Methone are getting in on the ring action that made the planet they orbit so famous. As you know, Saturn sports a whole series of glamorous rings, so huge and reflective that astronomers have been seeing them for centuries. Now it turns out that Saturn’s moons Anthe and Methone have accumulated…

io9 Annalee Newitz Sep 5

The Latest in Space Tourist Fashion

When file-sharing destroys the movie biz, at least special effects designers will still have work — in the aerospace industry. Orbital Outfitters, the first company to manufacture special pressurized spacesuits for civilians, is hiring special effects designers from Hollywood to help. This swanky suit that you see here, created with help from special effects maven…

io9 Annalee Newitz Sep 5

Attack of the Robot Spiders!

British scientists have learned some interesting things about the way animals respond to traumatic experiences and how trauma affects their daily lives. What was the key to their groundbreaking research? Robot spiders that hug bumble bees. Seriously.In the wild, bumble bees can fall prey to crab spiders, which are able to camouflage themselves to match…

io9 Ed Grabianowski Sep 5

Where Is My Cure for Cancer?

Welcome back to Ask a Biogeek, a column where you ask biology researcher Terry Johnson any question you want – no matter how weird. Reader Charlie writes: How about an article on the current cutting edge cancer research/treatments? Is there anything out there that is promising? Will there be a cure in our lifetimes? Sadly,…

io9 Terry Johnson Sep 4

Screw the Large Hadron Collider, I’ll Take the Large Helical Device

We’ve all been wowed by the remarkable photos of the apocalypse-bringing Large Hadron Collider (set to run next Wednesday!), but it’s not the only piece of insanely-large scientific equipment that’s easy on the eyes. Japan’s Large Helical Device was designed to “conduct fusion-plasma confinement research in a steady-state.” Also, it looks amazing. Sure, it doesn’t…

Gadgets Adam Frucci Sep 4

T-Shirts That Advertise Atomic Structures

Uranium is one of the most notorious elements — it’s gotten a pretty bad rap due to its tendency to show up in nuclear weapons. Also, it’s kind of radioactive. That’s probably why it’s such a great element to show your support for in t-shirt form. Woot! has uranium tees that pay tribute to this…

io9 Annalee Newitz Sep 4

200,000 Core Supercomputer to be Built, Still Not As Clever as HAL

Recently green-lit to be built at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IBM’s future Blue Waters supercomputer is peta’d all over. It’ll have up to 2-petaflops processing speed, more than a petabyte of memory and a 10 petabyte disk storage system. It’ll also have more than 200,000 processor cores, and cost around $208 million, which…

Tech News Kit Eaton Sep 4

Scientists Do Extreme Close-Up On Milky Way’s Black Hole

Forget “pretend” black holes in optical cables: astronomers at MIT have taken the highest-ever resolution imagery of the region of space near the giant black hole at the center of our galaxy, as shown in this image. In fact, the bright spot in the center is what they were looking at: it’s a funky space-object…

Physics & Chemistry Kit Eaton Sep 4

Possible Cure for Ebola Could Revolutionize Antivirals

Ebola is the poster virus for outbreak scares because it spreads extremely fast and kills 90 percent of its victims by causing them to bleed uncontrollably. Featured in science-scare book The Hot Zone and countless cheesy movies, Ebola is considered ripe for development into a bio-weapon. But now it seems that a group of U.S.…

io9 Annalee Newitz Sep 3

The Wind-Swept Clouds of Mars

The Phoenix Lander look a series of photographs of the polar skies this week, and researchers have turned them into a short movie that gives you a shivery sense of what it would be like to stand under Martian skies. Those are ice water clouds, swooshing overhead very much the way clouds do on Earth.…

io9 Annalee Newitz Sep 3

The Tragic Death of Dr. Manhattan’s Real-Life Counterpart

Stephen Hawking Bets Against Large Hadron Collider’s Success

Athletic Performance Enhancer Turns Out to Be Effective Memory Booster

Mars Phoenix Will Bravely and Passionately Twitter Until the Final Beat of Its Adorable Electronic Heart

Military Exo-Suits Are On the Way

Fringe Preview Screeners Measured Audience’s Emotional Responses

A Fleet of 1500 Cloud-Seeding Ships Could Stop Global Warming, Say Scientists

Israeli Students Design “Batsuit” That Lets You Fly out of Airplanes

Anyone Who Thinks the LHC Will Destroy the World is a T***

Why Nature Prefers a Small Man to Mate with a Big Woman

The Mysterious “Arcs” of Saturn’s Moons

The Latest in Space Tourist Fashion

Attack of the Robot Spiders!

Where Is My Cure for Cancer?

Screw the Large Hadron Collider, I’ll Take the Large Helical Device

T-Shirts That Advertise Atomic Structures

200,000 Core Supercomputer to be Built, Still Not As Clever as HAL

Scientists Do Extreme Close-Up On Milky Way’s Black Hole

Possible Cure for Ebola Could Revolutionize Antivirals

The Wind-Swept Clouds of Mars

Southwest Is About to Limit Power Banks on Flights

Damn, the ‘Power Rangers’ Reboot Could’ve Had Four Movies

The Live-Action ‘One Piece’ Team Wants to Go the Distance

‘Lee Cronin’s The Mummy’ Will Please Gross Horror Fans

Somehow Paramount’s ‘Avatar’ Movie Has Leaked, Too

The World Is Basically Begging for Another iPod

Anker’s EufyMake E1 Finally Brings Printers Out of the Dark Ages

OpenAI Says Elon Musk Is ‘Injecting Chaos’ with Recent Legal Maneuver

This Loud-Ass Party Speaker Almost Got Me High AF

Asus Zenbook A16 Review: Start Considering Snapdragon on PC, for Real

Aqara Thermostat Hub W200 Review: Almost Better than My Ecobee

HP Omen Max 45L Review: 4K60 Gaming Has Never Been So Easy

Ecovacs Winbot W3 Omni Review: Window Cleaning Robots Have a Long Way to Go

AirPods Max 2 vs. Bose QuietComfort Ultra Headphones (2nd Gen): Which ANC Headphones Win?

The Best Gadgets of March 2026

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