The folks behind NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have put out pictures of the area where the Mars Polar Lander disappeared nine years ago - and are inviting people to see if they can find it.
Back in 2005, the pros thought they saw signs of the lander in lower-resolution imagery, but they retracted the claim months later. So far, MRO has not turned up a smoking gun, or a smoking crater. Nevertheless, it's continuing the search.
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Now that the presidential primary season is winding down, the effort to organize a national candidates' forum on issues relating to science and technology is shifting to the post-convention phase of the campaign. A survey conducted for ScienceDebate 2008 and Research!America indicates that most Americans are hungry for such a debate, with health care leading the list of topics. Despite that, the debate never came together during the primaries.
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Prediction markets have been known to outdo the pollsters when it comes to handicapping political campaigns, and they can also be used to predict how bad the next flu epidemic can get, how well the next product will sell - or even how long the latest celebrity marriage will last. (Are you listening, Mariah Carey?)
But are these markets legit? That’s what researchers and regulators want to find out.
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GWAP.com / CMU |
The Squigl game involves having two players outline
the same object in an online picture. Points are
awarded based on how close their outlines match.
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Researchers are enlisting Internet users to try out a new set of games that will help them develop smarter search engines and sharper-eyed machines. It’s kind of like playing "Hot or Not" … for a scientific cause.
Games With a Purpose, or GWAP, is the brainchild of computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University - including Luis von Ahn, one of the creators of the CAPTCHA filter to distinguish between real humans and machines. As part of their plan to elevate machines to the next level of human-style intelligence, von Ahn and his colleagues hope to capitalize on the all-too-human desire to get to a multiplayer game's next level.
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msnbc.com |
Click for video: Msnbc.com's Dara Brown reports
on the beta release of the WorldWide Telescope.
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After years of thinking and months of internal testing (and occasional tears), Microsoft Research is releasing its WorldWide Telescope software for the public to download and play with. The program requires more computer firepower than other free online astronomy guides, such as Google Sky or Stellarium. But the payoff for the eyes, ears and mind is high enough to make me think about upgrading my hardware.
The last time I caught upgrade fever, the motivation was to watch online video without the computer going into a stall. This time, I'll need to get more memory for my home computer so I don't miss out on the audio and text as I take a tour of the final frontier.
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Today marks the sixth anniversary of Cosmic Log's founding. In the past year, we've set new records for visitors and comments, thanks in part to those darn glowing cats and other scientific weirdness. In honor of the birthday, I'll point you to the same old quiz I've run over the past few years. How well do you know your Cosmic Log lore? Take the quiz and find out. Then check out these links to some of my favorite subjects:
You can't always judge a quake by its numbers. Two of the magnitude-7-plus quakes recorded in the past six months illustrate the complexities behind scientific statistics. As terrible as it was, last November's magnitude-7.7 quake in Chile ended up killing two people. In contrast, the estimated death toll from today's magnitude-7.9 quake in China, which doesn't sound as if it should be that much stronger, is at 8,500 and rapidly rising.
Although magnitude figures are an easy way to quantify the power of a quake in a headline, it takes something more to tell the whole story of an earthquake's strength.
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