Science and Technology

Scott Stringer: Let's Put Solar Panels on School Roofs

Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, who is likely to run for mayor, released a report yesterday that called for the installation of solar panels on the roofs of city public schools. Releasing reports -- it's the thing to do if you want to be mayor, apparently! This one here is one of tho ... More >>

Royally Fracked: Those 40,000 Comments on Hydraulic Fracturing Don't Change Anything

Remember how New York's citizens, many of them not too keen on having chemicals blasted into underground rock to extract natural gas, recently submitted 40,000 comments to the state's environmental agency? That public comment period on highly polemic hydraulic fracturing came to a close earlier th ... More >>

Scientists Grow Meat in Labs (OMG!)

Meat made in a petri dish is apparently a real thing. In what appears to be the culinary world's latest interpretation of Mary Shelley, scientists have already solved the riddle of making animal flesh in a lab, and are now figuring out how to sell it profitably, according to Food Safety News.

Frack! EPA Voices Concerns About Hydraulic Fracturing

The Environmental Protection Agency says that New York should set limits to the amount of radiation that can be in fracking wastewater before the drilling starts, according to The Associated Press [via The Wall Street Journal]. The EPA announcement comes just as the state's Department of Environme ... More >>

Man on a Mission

Seabrook Power Plant

Drunk Online Shopping Will Save This Wretched Economy!

Credit card debt? What credit card debt? Oh, pour yourself another drink. The latest fun -- and healthy! -- thing we're all doing under the influence of a little boozin' is...shopping on our own personal computers, from home, at night, after a hard day's work, with the jug of wine next to us. In a f ... More >>

Brooklyn Junior High Has the Most Sexting Suspensions in the City

​The unfortunately named (given what we're about to say next) "Edward B. Shallow" Junior High in Bensonhurst has the dubious honor of being the New York City school with the most suspensions issued for sexting in 2010. This is more suspensions for sexting than any other city school in the last ... More >>

Higgs Boson's Possible Discovery Announced Tuesday: How to Plan for the Paradigm Shift

via WikipediaA theoretical Higgs boson event or Laser Floyd​On Tuesday, scientists at Cern will reveal the latest results of their search for the elusive Higgs boson particle. Some are expecting the researchers, who have been working at the Large Hadron Collider, to announce that they have fou ... More >>

Watch This Morning's Total Lunar Eclipse [VIDEO]

People in the Western part of the country were treated to a total lunar eclipse this morning. Luckily you don't have to be a resident of California or an early riser to see it--someone already videotaped it for you. Check it out above.

Holiday Guide: Today's Hot Gadgets Will Be Tomorrow's Landfill

The fire next time

Christian Marclay and Otomo Yoshihide Clear the Decks

Face off at the Japan Society

Hot Dogs Against Fracking

Eat this choucroute to show you oppose fracking.​ Actually, it's choucroute against fracking. Bark Hot Dogs, in Park Slope, has teamed with the makers of the film Gasland and the anti-fracking group United for Action for a dinner and screening next Wednesday, November 9.

The iPod Turns 10

Every day I'm shufflin'

State Senator Diane Savino's Facebook Friends: An Important Announcement

​New York State senator Diane Savino, a Democrat representing Staten Island and Brooklyn, had some important breaking news to share with the media today. Her personal Facebook page has hit the 5,000-friend mark (a "social media milestone," it seems), which is where Facebook cuts you off. Follo ... More >>

What's So Special About Apple's Siri?

​Anticipation and hoopla surrounded the release of the iPhone 4S, but when people discovered Apple wasn't debuting the iPhone 5, the launch was dubbed a dud. 5 is one better than 4! Why are you robbing us of 5? On the evening Steve Jobs died, CNN.com's main headline was about how the iPhone 4S ... More >>

Air Conditioner Falls Out Of East Village Building

EV Grieve​Fall has begun and that means we don't have to worry about the same things we worried about during the summer: we won't be over-heated, our ice cream won't melt, and there's no way an air conditioner could fall out of the sky and potentially kill us, right? Wrong. Read on.

Amazon Probably Going To Announce Tablet This Week

​Amazon is going to have a press conference in the city Wednesday, which probably means it's going to show the world a new tablet, the New York Times reports today. But the question that looms is: will everyone be dying to have an Amazon tablet when there's already the iPad?

Study: Texting's Popularity Didn't Surge This Year Overall

​According to a new study by the Pew Research Center, texting -- beloved, good old American texting -- is starting to be slightly less new and exciting. The average number of texts per day sent and received by Americans only increased a tiny bit this year, though it's still more than 40. (Fort ... More >>

Watch a Space Capsule Undock and Begin Its Descent to Earth [Video]

The above video shows a Russian-built Soyuz space capsule detaching from the International Space Station late Thursday night. The capsule contained two cosmonauts, Andrey Borisenko and Alexander Samokutyaev, and one American astronaut, Ron Garan. Since canceling the Space Shuttle program, this kind ... More >>

Called Anti-Science, Rightbloggers Reply That Science is a Liberal Plot

With the ascension of Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum, and other GOP candidates who don't cotton to this evolution or climate change stuff, people have begun to ask if Republicans and conservatives are actually becoming hostile to science. It doesn't help that one of those people is Repu ... More >>

Seeing a Supernova With Your Own Eyes: A Guide

via the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory​Starting this weekend, you will be able to see a cosmic phenomenon without the aid of a mountaintop telescope or highly politicized university grant. Researchers at the Palomar Observatory in Southern California found a white dwarf star about 1.4 t ... More >>

The Other Koch Brother

In the shadow of his brothers' Tea Party fame, Bill Koch seems almost like a normal billionaire.

Radio Hits One: Raising The Bar For "YouTube Platinum"

Justin Bieber and Ludacris: Congratulations. A lot of people watched your video.​On August 28, MTV will throw the 2011 installment of its Video Music Awards, honoring achievements in the art form that used to make up the majority of its programming. While it's all too tempting to note the iron ... More >>

Collision of Galaxies Imminent

via NASA's Image of the Day Gallery​The galaxies you see in the image to the right, VV 340 North (top) and VV 340 South (bottom), are careening towards each other and on a cosmic collision course. The Hubble Telescope took the photo and it shows the two galaxies "in the early stages of their i ... More >>

Military's Hypersonic Aircraft Goes Really Fast, Gets Lost

via DARPA's news release.​An unmanned aircraft engineered to go 20 times the speed of sound was lost on its second test flight Thursday. The BBC reports that scientists lost track of the Falcon Hypersonic Test Vehicle 2, or HTV-2, shortly after it detached from a rocket high above the Californ ... More >>

Satellites and Debris: Star-Crossed Lovers

​Each week, Death by Science sends out an all-points bulletin for the latest science and technology news, tracks it down, and beats a confession out of it. This week, we look up to the stars, readjust our focus, and look closer at satellites. They are the reason you are able to read this right ... More >>

Traces of a 19th-Century Village Have Been Excavated in Central Park

​Think about this when you're relaxing in Central Park over the weekend: An entire community once lived there, with homes and several churches and at least one school, right in the park (before it was the park). We're talking about Seneca Village, a largely African-American community of some 2 ... More >>

100 & Single: How Digital Changed The Charts, From Gwen To GoonRock

Spotify's top tracks (left) and albums on Friday, July 15.​The headline-grabbing music story of the week isn't on the Billboard charts—it's the U.S. debut of Spotify. With the streaming-music service less than 48 hours old here, it's a bit too soon to analyze what songs are getting the m ... More >>

GLAAD Stops Supporting AT&T Merger with T-Mobile

​Last month, the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation got in a lot of trouble when they backed a merger between AT&T and T-Mobile, after their full relationship with Ma Bell was exposed. GLAAD had received $50,000 from AT&T in donations and had a former AT&T executive and lobbyist on its ... More >>

Spotify Launches In The States; Has Your Life Been Changed Yet?

The Top Tracks list is not nearly as twee as this "hi there" image would imply. ​After lots of whining from music-biz pundits and whinging from the "make music free for meeee" crowd, the Sweden-based streaming-music service Spotify launched today in the States. Those in search of invites to th ... More >>

Was the Space Shuttle Program a Success?

​Each week, Death by Science sends out an all-points bulletin for the latest science and technology news, tracks it down and beats a confession out of it. This week, we wake up, rub the sleep out of our eyes, roll over in bed and ask the Space Shuttle, "So, now what?" (We had sex with the Sp ... More >>

Barack Obama Speaks on Dismal June Unemployment Numbers

​In a humbling morning for our country today, President Obama spoke to the press about the dismal June unemployment numbers -- we're now at 9.2% unemployment, with a mere 18,000 jobs added last month -- while Americans stood by to watch the bittersweet launch of the Atlantis, marking the last ... More >>

How Often Do Air Conditioners Fall Out of NYC Windows and Kill People?

Who still has VHS tapes, anyway?​Ah, New York City in the summer! Generally, we really do love it, despite the on-the-way-to-work sweatiness and fish-in-an-old-sweat-sock smells. But with summer comes air conditioners, and with air conditioners come inept installations into apartment windows, ... More >>

Most Americans are Pro-Space Travel, Poll Says

​As Atlantis gears up for what will be America's final space shuttle mission on Friday, a recently released poll shows that most of the country thinks the space program is the bee's knees. The Pew Research Center found that 58% of Americans polled responded that they think space exploration "i ... More >>

Matthias Poehm, Hero, Establishes Political Party to Destroy PowerPoint

​Everybody hates PowerPoint. There is no disputing this. The only thing anyone has ever learned from a PowerPoint presentation is the fact that PowerPoint is worthless. Most of us just weakly accept that we can't escape Microsoft's juggernaut and continue to live in a world where animated tran ... More >>

Watch the Space Station Pass Overhead Tonight

​The International Space Station will be visible from the ground tonight and tomorrow as it passes overhead. According to Space.com, the $100 billion station should be easy to see because it is 25 times brighter than the brightest star in the sky, Sirius, and often as bright as Venus. Use the ... More >>

Cuomo Attempts to Lift Ban on Hydraulic Fracturing

​When Governor Cuomo signed the landmark same sex marriage bill into law last week, you probably thought, "There's no way the 'gov is topping this." Guess again! The New York Times reports his administration will announce their attempt to lift what is effectively a statewide ban on hydraulic f ... More >>

Robert Burnham Jr.'s 1983 Testament: An Astronomer-Recluse Inscribes His Universe (Part II)

Burnham in his Prescott, Arizona home lab, circa 1960.​ Yesterday, we published the first half of a 24,000-word "self-interview" by Lowell Observatory astronomer Robert Burnham, Jr. on what would have been his 80th birthday. Burnham died in 1993 at the age of 61. He was known not only for hi ... More >>

Robert Burnham Jr.'s 1983 Testament: An Astronomer-Recluse Inscribes His Universe (Part I)

Burnham, circa 1960, at the telescope Clyde Tombaugh used to find Pluto 30 years earlier​ Today, June 16, 2011, would have been Robert Burnham Jr.'s 80th birthday. Burnham was an Arizona astronomer who produced one of the most unusual, and most beloved, set of books of science, his Burnham's ... More >>

CBS Discovers Blogs Like It's 1999

​CBS has this awesome vintage report from the '90s today. It's about blogs, or as people used to say, "weblogs," and how they're gaining power and clout and whatnot. Interesting to see how new and exciting it was back in the beginning. LOL, the "blogosphere." Hold up, the dateline says this ... More >>

Endeavour Lands in its Final Mission [Video]

Space Shuttle Endeavour has landed its final mission. There's something so old-school nostalgic, yet amazingly powerful, about this video, taken in the dark of night, when the shuttle landed at 2:35 a.m. Maybe it's the quiet tones spoken from mission control; the "Houston, Endeavour: Wheels stopped" ... More >>

Robert Burnham Jr.'s Strange, Wonderful Manifesto Coming in One Month

Burnham, circa 1960, at the telescope Clyde Tombaugh used to find Pluto 30 years earlier​ One month from today, the Voice will make public for the first time a 24,000-word autobiographical essay written by a man named Robert Burnham, Jr. Burnham died in 1993 at the age of 61. On June 16, had ... More >>

Space Shuttle Endeavour Launch Postponed

​ The much-awaited final launch of the space shuttle Endeavour has been put on hold for 48 hours. Mission STS-134's launch was to be attended by Shuttle Commander Mark Kelly's wife Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, President Obama, and an estimated 700,000 spectators. It was scrubbed due to an issue wi ... More >>

Cracker-Sized Satellites Are Perfect for Modern Space Travel, Mini-Pizzas

​Tomorrow's Endeavour launch signals the end of the space shuttle program, but it may usher in a new era in satellite technology. Three tiny orbiters roughly the size of saltines will be released by the shuttle, Space.com reports. They are rudimentary prototypes, but how they react in space an ... More >>

R.I.P., Friendster, the Social Media Site of Our Relative Youth

Turn that smile upside down!​Remember Friendster? One time we met someone on Friendster, a date, in fact, and we went to a vegan restaurant in the West Village (not that we were vegan), and we ate something that looked like meat but wasn't, and was really weirdly chewy, and then we never spoke ... More >>

Today in El Diario: New Yorkers Shafted by Con Ed on "Green" Fund

​Green flight: Energy fund leaves city Con Edison clients in New York have been billed for $342 million since 2004 to subsidize renewable energy. But less than 1 percent of that money -- $ 8 million -- has been used for area green electricity projects, the Spanish-language daily reports. New ... More >>

New York to Get a (Never Been to) Space Shuttle

Not Enterprise, as it is preparing to go into space.​Last month we reported on the different museums and institutions vying to display America's retired space shuttles. The Wall Street Journal reports that NASA is going to announce this afternoon that New York will soon be home to one of those ... More >>

Government Shutdown Totally Messin' With Space Shuttle Launch

​The government will possibly shutdown tonight at midnight, and you've surely read about how this will affect your life. Tax refunds may be delayed, which is annoying, but the IRS is good for it, right? National parks will close, but everyone knows Yosemite doesn't get poppin' till late May. M ... More >>