> With so many incredible scientific advances and discoveries this year, Wired Science had a tough time choosing which 10 were the biggest. So, we went with the ones that stood out for us. From the amazing collective power of jellyfish, to a new human ancestor, to a cancer-detecting breathalyzer test, these [...]
2009 will go down as the sun’s third quietest year on record, under-shone only by 1913 and 2008. Two hundred-sixty of the year’s 365 days (71 percent) were sunspotless. Last year saw 266 sunspotless days, while the sun had no spots on 311 of the days in 1913. It was only a very active December that kept 2009 [...]
NASA selected three finalists on Tuesday to be the agency’s next cheap, robotic exploration mission. Depending on which wins, a probe will head for Venus, the moon, or a near-Earth object no later than 2018. The latter two missions would include the return of samples, while the Venusian lander would test the planet’s composition much like [...]
> This has been Wired Science’s most successful year, by far. We like to think this is the result of a combination of your excellent taste and our efforts to learn what you like to read. digg_url ="http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/12/topstories-gallery/"; We have often joked that the perfect Wired Science story is about robot sharks […]
For nearly 20 years, a government laboratory built a living, respiring library of carefully collected organisms in search of something that could grow quickly while producing something precious: oil. But now that collection has largely been lost. National Renewable Energy Laboratory scientists found and isolated around 3,000 species algae from construction d […]