Who is Carl Sagan

Scientific American 

Lightweight 'triple-zero' house produces more energy than it uses

NEW YORK--Overlooking the city of Stuttgart in southern Germany, a four-story modern glass house stands like a beacon of environmental sustainability. Built in 2000, it was the first in a series of buildings that are "triple-zero," a concept developed by German architect and engineer Werner Sobek, which signifies that the building is energy self-sufficient (zero energy consumed), produces zero emissions, and is made entirely of recyclable materials (zero waste). [More]

Scientists Respond to "Climategate" E-Mail Controversy

With all the "hot air" surrounding climate change discussions, none has been hotter in recent weeks than that spewed over a trove of stolen e-mails and computer code from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in England. Longstanding contrarians, such as Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), who famously dubbed climate change a "hoax" in a 2003 speech, has pointed to the stolen e-mails as information that overturns the scientific evidence for global warming and called on U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson to halt any development of regulation of greenhouse gases pending his investigation into the e-mails. And recent polls have found that fewer Americans today than just two years ago believe that greenhouse gases will cause average temperatures to increase--a drop from 71 percent to 51 percent . [More]

Bogus Brainteaser

Hi, Steve Mirsky here with the previously promised part two of this week's podcast, namely TOTALLY BOGUS. Here are four science stories, but only three true. See if you know which story is TOTALLY BOGUS. [More]

Bright, long-lived blast appears to be elusive pair-instability supernova

A luminous flash in the sky that appeared in 2007 seems to fit the bill for an unusual but long-predicted type of supernova, according to a new study. So-called pair-instability supernovae, in which stars more than 140 times the mass of the sun collapse and ignite a thermonuclear explosion, have been predicted by theory for years, but actually observing one requires finding these massive stars that existed early in the universe but are much rarer now. [More]

EPA Set to Regulate Wastewater from Coal-Fired Power Plants

Next to a national wildlife refuge, Indiana's Gibson Lake provides a prime fishery for bass and an attractive rest spot for hundreds of species of birds, including endangered least terns. [More]

Early sketch of ARPANET's first four nodes

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Molecular movies: New software animates gene expression data

As more is uncovered about the dynamic inner workings of genes and proteins, researchers now face the happy--if sometimes vexing--problem of working with too much data. But in the onslaught, crucial connections can be missed and findings repeated. [More]

The Internet at 40

Although the Internet did not get its name until the mid-1980s, December 5, 2009, marks the 40th anniversary of the day when the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) connected four computer nodes to create a "network of networks"--a fateful link-up that would evolve into the Internet [More]

DARPA Challenge Competitors Already Mobilizing Social Networks

Tweets and status updates have been buzzing for weeks about DARPA's Network Challenge , even though the event does not officially kick off until 10 A.M. Eastern time Saturday when hundreds of technophiles will compete in an effort to be the first to track down the locations of 10 large red weather balloons positioned across the U.S. throughout the day (pdf) . [More]

Vint Cerf: Connecting with an Internet Pioneer, 40 Years Later

Forty years ago--on December 5, 1969--the U.S. Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) connected four computer network nodes at the University of California, Los Angeles, (U.C.L.A.), the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, Calif., U.C. Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah for the first time . This doubled the size of the embryonic ARPANET , the network that would grow over the years into the global nexus of interconnected computers we know today as the Internet. [More]