The US has issued a new national space policy that reflects a more aggressive and unilateral stance than the previous version, and flat-out rejects new agreements that would limit the US testing or use of military equipment in space. The new version also uses stronger language to assert that the US can defend its spacecraft, echoing an air force push for "space superiority" made in 2004.
A new study warns that a Pentagon plan to defend against high-altitude nuclear detonations could have the adverse effect of shutting down civilian and military communications and impairing Global Positioning System signals.
A controversial effort by the US Pentagon to develop ground-based anti-satellite lasers has been highlighted by Congressional hearings held this week.
A NASA-led search for Earth-threatening asteroids as small as 140 metres has been approved by the US Congress and is awaiting President George W Bush's signature. The bill provides no money, but survey telescopes are already in development.
Nuclear “bunker busters” could destroy enemy hideouts hundreds of metres underground but, if the target is in an urban area, a strike could lead to more than a million civilian deaths, warns a report from the US National Research Council (NRC)
A portable nuclear reactor that can meet the energy needs of developing countries without the risk that they will use the by-products to make weapons is being developed by the US Department of Energy.
Fifteen years after the first controversial claims hit the headlines, cold fusion refuses to die. A small cadre of die-hard advocates argues that experiments now produce consistent results. The physics establishment continues to scoff, but some scientists who have been watching the field carefully are convinced something real is happening. And now the U.S. Department of Energy has decided that recent results justify a fresh look at cold fusion.
A team of astrophysicists and palaeontologists says the pattern of one of Earth's worst mass extinctions resembles the expected effects of a nearby gamma-ray burst (GRB). Although other experts have greeted the idea with some scepticism, most agree that it deserves further investigation.
American defence contractors are developing a laser weapon for fighter aircraft that may be powerful enough to blind people on the ground, even if they are relatively far from the target.
The latest attempt to work out how much alien life is out there suggests there may be a lot more than most people thought. According to a new statistical analysis based on how quickly life got going on Earth, life will start on at least a third of Earth-like planets within a billion years of them developing suitable conditions. And with recent discoveries that planets are common around Sun-like stars, there's probably no shortage of prospective homes.