HackingTheUniverse

You are browsing the archives of Science.

We use a variety of terms to qualify what we consider to be intelligent life: intelligence, consciousness, self-awareness, higher consciousness. There seem to be two primary ingredients common to most of the definitions of intelligent life and those are: Intelligence as some level of analytical reasoning ability and perhaps also the experience or knowledge necessary [...]

“The Little Prince” is a short novel written by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry in 1943. The story describes encounters by a little prince who has come to Earth from a small planet known as Asteroid B612. The B612 foundation is a group dedicated to finding asteroids that pose a threat to Earth and preventing catastrophic impacts [...]

A planet made of diamond – [manchester.ac.uk] A once-massive star that’s been transformed into a small planet made of diamond: that is what University of Manchester astronomers think they’ve found in the Milky Way. The discovery has been made by an international research team, led by Professor Matthew Bailes of Swinburne University of Technology in [...]

Considered to be the father of modern taxonomy, and one of the fathers of ecology, Carl Linnaeus was a Swedish botanist born in 1707. He created a standardized system of classification and nomenclature to organize the data he collected on plants and animals. Linnaeus published a book called, “Systema Naturae” which began as an eleven [...]

The Google Lunar X-Prize (GLXP) or Moon 2.0 is a competition funded by Google and organized by the X-Prize foundation, which calls for landing a robotic craft on the Moon and then exploring the surface and transmitting data back to Earth. The first X-Prize of $25,000 was won by Charles Lindbergh in 1927 for flying [...]

For the first time, 3D printers have been tested in a zero-gravity environment. MADE IN SPACE successfully completed two suborbital flights that tested several 3D printers through a series of zero-gravity parabola maneuvers. 3D Printers Tested in Zero-G – [madeinspace.us] ELLINGTON FIELD, TX – July 28, 2011 – MADE IN SPACE, a start-up dedicated to [...]

The NSS (National Space Society) blog article linked below references an article in “The Economist” which claims the age of space exploration is largely over. The Economist could not be more wrong. It would be like saying the aviation age was over when the Wright brothers packed up their equipment at Kitty Hawk and went [...]

Networking protocols such as TCP/IP allow data packets to be routed across a network using various network pathways and then re-assemble the packets into their original form when they all arrive. But it expects this to happen within a specific timeframe and when delays exceed this limit, the process “times out” and aborts. This works [...]

Space shuttle flight STS-133 is now scheduled to launch on Feb 24, 2011 and when it does, it will carry into space Robonaut2, a 300 pound humanoid robot made of nickel plated carbon fiber and aluminum. Robonaut – [nasa.gov] What is a Robonaut? A Robonaut is a dexterous humanoid robot built and designed at NASA [...]

A voltaic pile is a group of galvanic cells that are joined together as a circuit in series, forming an electric battery. While it is possible that primitive batteries were in use for several thousand years prior, Alessandro Volta, assembled the first well documented working battery. Volta was following up on Luigi Galvani’s famous experiment [...]