The building blocks of life pervade the solar system, and probably the universe, locked up in planetary polar ice caps, crouching in the interstices of ancient volcanic rocks, zooming around on comets and meteorites, drifting between galaxies in interstellar space, or wafting gently down in cosmic dust.
The war with Iraq could allow the United States to debut a new -- and perhaps revolutionary -- class of weapons that can cripple an enemy's ability to fight without harming people or destroying buildings.They are known collectively as "high-powered microwave weapons" (HPM). They use bursts of electromagnetic energy, delivered by low-impact bombs or "ray gun"-like devices, to disable or destroy the electronics that control everything from an enemy's radar to its laptops.
The United States is highly vulnerable to terrorist attacks on its livestock and food crops and needs a national plan to identify threats, direct research, gather intelligence and respond to outbreaks, according to committee of experts from the National Academy of Sciences.
Scientists for the first time have managed to remotely direct the movements of rats by using implanted electrodes to control their behavior -- in effect transforming living animals into robots. The technique has potentially important implications for activities ranging from land mine detection, earthquake recovery and spying to the emerging field of "neural prostheses" -- using electronics to bridge nervous-system gaps caused by spinal injuries, strokes or other physical infirmities.
Researchers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory have reported that asteroid 1950 DA, a gigantic, near-spherical boulder hurtling through space on an elliptical orbit around the sun, had a one-in-300 chance of smacking into the Earth on March 16, 2880. One-in-300 is as close as the odds have ever been for for an asteroid collision.
Scientists yesterday reported the creation of the world's first molecular-scale transistor, a tiny device that could push the miniaturization of electronics to the threshold of its final frontier.
Rapid advances in electronics and other fields have enabled scientists to integrate animals and microelectronics. These experiments envision a range of applications -- using bacteria attached to computer chips to map pollutants, insects as part of sensors to detect land mines, chemical weapons and narcotics, and rodent brains to help identify new medicines.
Researchers have released digital organisms in a computer environment to watch them "evolve" and record the results in a controlled experiment, the most elaborate use to date of the "artificial life" technique.