Climate scientists cannot attribute any single weather event—whether a drought, wildfire or extreme storm—to climate change. But extreme events, such as Hurricane Sandy, are glimpses of the types of occurrences ...
Nov 07, 2012
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As black holes go, Sagittarius A* is relatively low-key. The black hole at the center of our galaxy emits very little energy for its size, giving off roughly as much energy as the sun, even though it is 4 ...
Nov 06, 2012
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For the kinds of animals that are most familiar to us—ones that are big enough to see—it's a no-brainer: Is it better to sit around and wait for food to come to you, or to move around and find it? Larger ...
Nov 01, 2012
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Twitter's home page features a regularly updated list of topics that are "trending," meaning that tweets about them have suddenly exploded in volume. A position on the list is highly coveted as a source of ...
Nov 01, 2012
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In mid-October, a Gallup poll of likely voters nationwide showed former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney leading President Barack Obama by a 7 percent margin. That same week, a poll by the University of Connecticut ...
Nov 01, 2012
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In the event that a giant asteroid is headed toward Earth, you'd better hope that it's blindingly white. A pale asteroid would reflect sunlight—and over time, this bouncing of photons off its surface could ...
Oct 26, 2012
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Much has been made of graphene's exceptional qualities, from its ability to conduct heat and electricity better than any other material to its unparalleled strength: Worked into a composite material, graphene ...
Oct 23, 2012
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Condensers are a crucial part of today's power generation systems: About 80 percent of all the world's powerplants use them to turn steam back to water after it comes out of the turbines that turn generators. They are also ...
Oct 22, 2012
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The glowing green molecule known as green fluorescent protein (GFP) has revolutionized molecular biology. When GFP is attached to a particular protein inside a cell, scientists can easily identify and locate ...
Oct 22, 2012
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During the opening ceremonies of this summer's Olympic games in London, a musical performance culminated with a stage-set house rising into the rafters to reveal Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World ...
Oct 22, 2012
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When it comes to the integrity and accuracy of voting systems in the United States, the good news is that widespread technological upgrades have largely eliminated the voting-machine problems that were so ...
Oct 18, 2012
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With the 2012 campaign in the home stretch, the presidential race and many congressional matchups are too close to call. To hear more about them, MIT News spoke this week with Charles Stewart III, the Kenan ...
Oct 12, 2012
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A new approach that allows objects to become "invisible" has now been applied to an entirely different area: letting particles "hide" from passing electrons, which could lead to more efficient thermoelectric ...
Oct 12, 2012
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About 4.6 billion years ago, the solar system was little more than a tenuous disk of gas and dust. In the span of merely 10 million years, this soup evolved to form today's massive, complex planets. In the ...
Oct 11, 2012
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