Last year, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates schwacked  the Air Force’s plans to develop a new stealth bomber that would enter service in 2018. Now, it looks like the spirit of Gen. Curtis “bombs away” LeMay lives on: Over the next five years, the Pentagon will be pouring $4 billion into “long-range strike” options, including a next-generation bomber. In a press conference yesterday, Gates... 

Jeanne Calment (February 21, 1875 – August 4, 1997) Jeanne Cament was born in Arles, France, to a well-to-do family, her close family members also unsurprisingly lived to an advanced age: her brother, François, lived to the grand old age of 97, her father, Nicolas, 93, and her mother, Marguerite, 86. In 1896, she decided to marry her second cousin (grandson of her great-uncle) Fernand Calment,... 

The world’s oldest known living tree, a conifer that first took root at the end of the last Ice Age, has been discovered in Sweden, researchers say. The visible portion of the 13-foot-tall (4-meter-tall) “Christmas tree” isn’t ancient, but its root system has been growing for 9,550 years, according to a team led by Leif Kullman, professor at Umeå University’s department... 

On October 13, 2000, a small team of paleontologists led by Paul Sereno of the University of Chicago clambered out of three battered Land Rovers, filled their water bottles, and scattered on foot across the toffee-colored sands of the Ténéré desert in northern Niger. The Ténéré, on the southern flank of the Sahara, easily ranks among the most desolate landscapes on Earth. The Tuareg, turbaned... 

An artist from Pittsburgh named Cliff Maynard, that’s also a tattoo artist, is making portraits by using marijuana joint ends. The portraits are of famous people like Bob Marley, Snoop Dog and John Lennon, to mention a few.  Read More »

A Sumatran tigress and her cubs took a special interest in a World Wildlife Federation camera, sniffing and possibly licking it during a brief sequence released in late December. The video was released as a prelude to the WWF’s Tx2: Double or Nothing campaign to call attention to plight of the tiger species. There are as few as 400 Sumatran tigers left in the wild, and they remain vulnerable to... 

The history of biology traces the study of the living world from ancient to modern times. Although the concept of biology as a single coherent field arose in the 19th century, the biological sciences emerged from traditions of medicine and natural history reaching back to ancient Egyptian medicine and the works of Aristotle and Galen in the ancient Greco-Roman world. This ancient work was further developed... 

May 19, 2009—Meet “Ida,” the small “missing link” found in Germany that’s created a big media splash and will likely continue to make waves among those who study human origins. In a new book, documentary, and promotional Web site, paleontologist Jorn Hurum, who led the team that analyzed the 47-million-year-old fossil seen above, suggests Ida is a critical missing-link... 

Teotihuacan is an enormous archaeological site in the Basin of Mexico, containing some of the largest pyramidal structures built in the pre-Columbian Americas. Apart from the pyramidal structures, the archaeological site of Teotihuacan is also known for its large residential complexes, the so-called “street of the dead”, and its colorful well-preserved murals. Teotihuacan was, at its apogee in... 

Tyrannosaurus Rex (extinct 65 million years ago) Tyrannosaurus rex was one of the largest land carnivores of all time, measuring up to 43.3 feet long, and 16.6 ft tall, with an estimated mass that goes up to 7 tons. Like other tyrannosaurids, Tyrannosaurus was a bipedal carnivore with a massive skull balanced by a long, heavy tail. Relative to the large and powerful hindlimbs, Tyrannosaurus forelimbs... 

The Amazon is the greatest river in the world by so many measures; the volume of water it carries to the sea (approximately 20% of all the freshwater discharge into the oceans), the area of land that drains into it, and its length and width. It is one of the longest rivers in the world and, depending upon who you talk to, is anywhere between 6,259km/3,903mi and 6,712km/4,195mi long. For the last century... 

Santorini Panorama This panorama shows the vista from which NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity spent five weeks in November and December 2008 while the sun was nearly directly in between Mars and Earth. Opportunity is approaching the fifth anniversary of its landing on Mars, continuing a surface mission that was initially scheduled to last three months. The rover landed on Jan. 24, 2004. Opportunity... 

When human injection of carbon into the atmosphere reaches 1 trillion tons, dangerous climate change with average global warming of more than 2 Celsius degrees will likely occur, a new analysis finds. And humans are hurrying toward that 1 trillion mark. So far, We’ve added about 520 billion tons of carbon to the atmosphere. With the addition of an estimated 9 billion tons of carbon a year — a... 

Mercury was once seen as a cold, dead little world, spinning around the sun unchanged for the past 4 billion years. No longer: Observations from the Messenger spacecraft say it’s anything but. NASA’s orbiter is sending back evidence of massive volcanism, strange impact craters and magnetic tornadoes that funnel plasma directly from the sun to the planet’s surface. “It’s definitely not this... 

If you’re one of those weird and sometimes gloomy people (like me) who get the urge to close the curtains on even the nicest of days, a new solar development will give us a new excuse to do it: It might help the environment and save us a few bucks. Sheila Kennedy, a faculty member of MIT’s School of Design, has developed new solar textiles and used them to create the first sustainable,... 

You will probably find this weird, but most people have never seen a real cave in their whole lives; still, those who do remain permanently fascinated by this amazing display of natural force. Caves are definitely a wonder of nature themselves, but every once in a while you hear about one that’s so amazing you wouldn’t even believe it’s real. So is the case with the following caves, which I... 

If you’re thinking McLeod, you couldn’t be further from the truth. What you have to do is think small; not microscopic, just big enough to see with your naked eye. Turritopsis nutricula is a hydrozoan, and it’s considered by scientists to be the only animal that cheated death. Solitary organisms are (according to current belief) doomed to die, after they completed their life cycle. Hydrozoa... 

American spacecraft had to dodge space debris four times in 2008, NASA revealed Tuesday, a fact that highlights both the extent of the space junk problem and the primary mitigation option open to NASA. By tracking pieces of debris larger than around four inches, space engineers can identify some dangerous space junk and meteoroids. If a satellite or spacecraft is in danger of getting hit, they simply... 

An ancient script that’s defied generations of archaeologists has yielded some of its secrets to artificially intelligent computers. Computational analysis of symbols used 4,000 years ago by a long-lost Indus Valley civilization suggests they represent a spoken language. Some frustrated linguists thought the symbols were merely pretty pictures. “The underlying grammatical structure seems similar... 

The strangest monument in America looms over a barren knoll in northeastern Georgia. Five massive slabs of polished granite rise out of the earth in a star pattern. The rocks are each 16 feet tall, with four of them weighing more than 20 tons apiece. Together they support a 25,000-pound capstone. Approaching the edifice, it’s hard not to think immediately of England’s Stonehenge or possibly...