Science

Here's a thought for parents of young children: forget skiing lessons. Teach your kids to swim. The newest predictions on Europe's Alpine glaciers tell us they'll soon be much reduced. And there well may be serious flooding down at the bottom.

The World Glacier Monitoring Service in Zurich now says most Alpine glaciers could melt by 2037. One expert said, "The future looks rather liquid." He then said mountains less than fourteen thousand feet tall would lose all glaciers.

The thirty-one tallest European Alps could thus retain some permanent snow and ice. That includes the … Read more

About a month ago, we wrote about the HomeStar Pro Planetarium, which uses LEDs to project the night sky on your ceiling. Here's another one for the astronomy buffs: Laser Stars, a projector that beams star and cloud formations onto your wall or ceiling of choice with laser technology and holographics. For those of us who live in brightly lit cities where we can't really see any real stars at night, it's a cool idea.

The Laser Stars projector looks to be less for nuts-and-bolts astronomy buffs than for people who just like to look at a … Read more

There's a newly discovered piece of land in Greenland, according to The New York Times. It's one of the new islands being found around the Arctic as shoreline glaciers melt away. This new island in Greenland was first noticed in 2005. Old maps show it as part of an ice-covered peninsula. No longer.

Cartographers can't keep up. Several new islands in Greenland have been recently uncovered, literally. And there's at least one new island in Norway's Svalbard archipelago.

Greenland alone has more than 27,000 miles of coastline. More islands could be appearing soon. If … Read more

European history was altered by a bacterial infection in someone's stomach, according to a report from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center.

The stomach in question belonged to Napoleon, and the infection led to ulcers, which likely caused the French dictator to get cancer and die. Even if Napoleon had managed to escape from house arrest on the island of St. Helena, where the British stuck him after the 1815 battle of Waterloo, he would have been too weak to mount a comeback, the researchers added.

The study also cast doubt on the theory that Napoleon was poisoned … Read more

If global warming wasn't bad enough, scientists have more unsettling news.

According to a study released Monday by the National Research Council, scientists won't be able to predict events like hurricanes unless the United States upgrades its satellite system that monitors the Earth's environment and climate. The study, according to Reuters, said that the United States must invest $3 billion annually from 2010 to 2020 to maintain the current observation system. It includes 29 Earth "missions"--meaning a single satellite or cluster of satellites--run by NASA and the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration.

If left … Read more

In what seems like a no-brainer, technology still can't outdo people when it comes to gauging the weather.

According to a report released Tuesday, satellites have yet to replace people and their rain gauges--devices installed in backyards across the United States--for collecting weather data. And now those 2,500 volunteers in 14 states--who measure the amount of rain in their backyard daily and then add the data to an online database--will mushroom to 20,000 people nationwide in the next three years, according to scientists.

The 10-year-old volunteer program, called the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail and Snow Network (CoCoRaHS), … Read more

BP (formerly British Petroleum) announced on Friday that it plans to build wind power projects at five sites around the United States.

The company says that, when complete, the projects will generate a total output of 550 megawatts of power. The projects, which include building facilities in North Dakota, Central Texas and West Texas, and the repowering of an existing wind farm in southern California, are expected to be under way this year.

Construction of a fifth facility of 274 wind turbines in Weld County, Colo., has already begun. Building of that facility is expected to be finished in the … Read more

Dark matter--that strange, nearly invisible mass that makes up about a quarter of the Universe--is now on the map.

Cosmologists at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, have pieced together the first three-dimensional map of dark matter from hundreds of slightly overlapping images collected from the Hubble Space Telescope's Cosmic Evolution Survey (COSMOS), according to Nature, which published the map this week.

Dark matter is not readily seen because it doesn't emit or reflect enough electromagnetic radiation. Rather, the presence of dark matter is inferred from its gravitational effects on visible matter, thanks to the bright features characteristic … Read more

NASA said Friday it has named its ninth director of the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. William Parsons, who managed the space shuttle program's return to space after the 2003 Columbia tragedy, will take over for James Kennedy, who is retiring.

NASA's Washington Administrator Michael Griffin, who appointed Parsons, applauded the move. "(Parson) is the right person to take Kennedy Space Center through the end of the shuttle era and into the era of lunar exploration."

Parsons, 49, joined the Kennedy Space Center in 1990 as a launch site support manager in shuttle operations. … Read more