An asteroid the size of a football field passed extremely close to Earth last week but it remained undetected until days later, according to astronomers.
A sizable asteroid zipped near our planet this month without anyone noticing because it traveled through an astronomical blind spot, scientists said.
Siphoning the computational power of the Internet, U.S. scientists have figured out a way to induce unwitting Web servers across the world to perform mathematical calculations.
Software that can make decisions without guidance from humans will guide a constellation of spacecraft that launch in 2002, according to NASA. The Artificial Intelligence program will direct three sibling satellites, allowing them to respond to events on their own, said NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which will manage the mission.
Combining quantum mechanics and laser technology, scientists have constructed a lightning-fast computer that could render conventional supercomputers obsolete. The new processor is said to be capable of conducting myriad computations simultaneously, unlike traditional electron-powered ones that must trudge through number-crunching tasks in sequence.
A handful of entrepreneurs have set their sights on some heavenly dividends, whether by strip mining the moon for energy, extracting platinum from asteroid mountains or distilling water from dormant comets. In the past those hoping to transform the final frontier into cosmic cash have drawn mostly snickers. But in recent years such mavericks have elicited something else -- respect and funding from major industries and governments in the usually exclusive club of space exploration.
Using modern quantum physics, scientists have determined that mysterious light particles could behave in a manner that smashes conventional roadblocks in the way of creating much more powerful computer parts.