via John Constine, TechCrunch The White House wants you to hack for a better America. Last month it announced the National Day Of Civic Hacking on June 1-2 where many government agencies will liberate data for citizens across the U.S. to use to build tech that helps their communities. Twenty-seven cities have planned events where … Continue reading
via Andres Jauregui, The Huffington Post NASA announced Thursday that its Messenger probe has discovered new evidence of water ice on Mercury. In the announcement, Sean Solomon, principal investigator for the Mercury Messenger program, said the probe had uncovered new evidence that deposits in permanently shadowed regions of Mercury’s poles is water ice. The ice … Continue reading
via Elizabeth Landau, CNN If the Curiosity rover had been sent to Mars in ancient times, it might have found itself sinking in a stream. The 2,000-pound super-rover, which made its now-legendary landing on Mars on August 6, has come across stones in conglomerate rock suggesting that water must have flowed there in the past. … Continue reading
via Robert Lee Hotz, The Wall Street Journal Precisely on time and target, NASA’s Curiosity rover touched down safely on Mars Monday to begin an ambitious two-year trek through a mountainous crater that promises to reveal whether the red planet was ever hospitable to life. The one ton, $2.5 billion Curiosity is the most scientifically … Continue reading
via W.J. Hennigan, L.A. Times In a pivotal moment for private spaceflight, a towering white rocket lifted a cone-shaped capsule into space early Tuesday on a mission to the International Space Station. SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket carried the unmanned Dragon capsule into space after a 3:44 a.m. EDT launch from Cape Canaveral, Fla., marking the … Continue reading
via Malcolm Ritter, AP Scientists have found two Earth-sized planets orbiting a star outside the solar system, an encouraging sign for prospects of finding life elsewhere. The discovery shows that such planets exist and that they can be detected by the Kepler spacecraft, said Francois Fressin of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. … Continue reading
The tantalizing possibility of of life on Mars, our planetary neighbor, has been a cultural fixation going back at least as far as the publication of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds in 1898. If they were out there, what would they be like? Who would they be? As the saying goes, we’ve met … Continue reading