Monthly Archives: February 2005

Talented technicians often turn the images returned by space probes into works of art. This has most certainly been the case with many of the images returned by Cassini from the Saturnian system. Technicians combine images from different filters to … Continue reading →

Spam. EBay has policies against it, search engines and email clients are constantly upgraded to filter it out, and most people just hate it. Now it turns out that they might be hampering the work of those linguists who have … Continue reading →

In a little over a week, Cassini will pass within 1,179 km of another Saturn moon, Enceladus. Images already returned have revealed a young water ice surface lacking craters. The wrinkles and ridges in the image are tantalizing indicators of … Continue reading →

When asked recently “What ideas, if embraced, would pose the greatest threat to the welfare of humanity?” by Foreign Policy magazine, Dr. Francis Fukuyama, professor of international political economy at the John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, author, and … Continue reading →

When I was in high school I thought I had important things to tell everyone. The teacher advisor for the school paper humored me and published the monthly column I wrote called “Leis on Life.” The title is a play … Continue reading →

Scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), have successfully built and tested a “muscle-powered” microdevice that merges silicon technology with biology. The contraption was made of a silicon microdevice connected to “legs” made of bundles of rat heart … Continue reading →

On the Earth and other bodies with poles, the polar regions are their coldest locations. While 91 Kelvin (-296 degrees Fahrenheit) may be colder than most people can imagine, Saturn’s south pole turns out to be the hottest spot on … Continue reading →