Urban areas are currently responsible for ~70% of the global energy-related carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, and rapid ongoing global urbanization is increasing the number and size of cities. Thus, understanding city-scale CO2 emissions and how they vary between cities with different urban densities is a critical task. While the relationship …
Even as the recent photographs from the Hubble Space Telescope made news, radio observations made over the last three years by the NASA Deep Space Network anten- na at Goldstone, California, and the Very Large Array - a collection of radio telescopes outside Socorro, New Mtsdw - turned the spotlight …
AN ARRESTING array of photographs released by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) on November 2 provides amazing insights into the wonders of the cosmos. Captured through the Hubble Space Telescope, the images - of events thousands of years old but reaching the Hubble only this April - are …
J C WILSON of the University of Denver has found that the first and only commercially run supersonic airliner - the Concorde - emits loads of sulphur particles in the atmosphere. He says that the discovery may compel engineers to alter the design of the engine and the fuels to …
THE British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has made history by broadcasting what are thought to be the first radio programmes to be picked up in deep space. Two 15-minute news-and-current-affairs programmes in Spanish for the Americas, BBC Primera Hora (now BBC International) and Via Libre, were detected by a National Aeronautics …
THERE comes a day when every American president has his shot at immortality. Twenty years ago, in August 1975, Jimmy Carter, one of bullyboy America's rare presidential doormats, desperately wanted an unique event to pump steroids into his image of a gentle, bumbling urpacifist. He also wanted something to immortalise …
Atlantis and Mir did an intimately interlocked fandango for 5 days, and its crew of 6 Americans and 4 Russians sprinted through an impeccably and precisely scheduled series of 28 experiments, 15 of them aboard the Atlantis shuttle: the Atlantis' 60-feet-long bay carried a huge (by spartan extraterrestrial standards) laboratory …
THOMAS Crapper, the inventor of the commode, had never anticipated the headache involved in the act of hitting the pot in space. There has been a steady and gainless drain of US $3 million on R&D; on the no-gravity commode before every blastoff. The Russians, with more on their minds …
CONVERTING GARBAGE: Deliverance from stinking garbage dumps in Calcutta has finally become a possibility, thanks to a planned Rs 4.5 crore project for bio-converting solid waste into fertilizers. To be set up by the Eastern Organic Fertilizer Private Limited at the Dhapa dumping grounds, the plant will have technological backing …
NASA is sorely disappointed with its European partners. The European Space Agency (ESA) appears to be dragging its feet over its proposed contribution to the setting up of an international space station. A meeting of the ESA council, in late March in Paris, was expected to thrash out differences and …
Since the '70s, camera makers and photography enthusiasts have dreamt of a 1-chip camera that does everything. Thanks to the efforts of 3 scientists from nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, this dream may soon be a reality. The team, led by Eric …
The early sci-fi image of robots taking over hazardous tasks so far done by human beings came a step closer to realisation with the success of NASA's (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) Dante 2 robot in exploring an active volcano in Alaska. Descending more than 180 metres into the crater, …
The ongoing US-Russia joint space programme negotiations are progressing, quite literally, at lightspeed. The 2 countries are now shipping hardware to each other. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) space shuttle and Mir, the decade-old Russian space station in orbit, have a dance ahead of them. The purpose of …
CYRIL Ponnamperuma, a luminary in the field of science and technology, spent most of his life delving into the mysteries of Earth's past. When he died in Washington on December 20, 1994, at the age of 71, the world lost a rare scientist: one who believed in the ability of …
For the victims of Alzheimer's disease, Japan's Eisai Co brings good tidings. It has teamed up with the American Pfizer Inc to develop a drug to treat the disease. The medicine, to be manufactured from Eisai's compound E2020, is currently in phase II trials in Japan. It functions by increasing …
SO FAR, a great deal of US space exploration has been the hegemony of massive spacecraft such as those used in the Apollo moon exploration programme, the Voyager flybys of the outer planets and the latest Galileo and Cassini missions. However, a severe resource crunch is compelling the National Aeronautics …
The NASA Earth Radiation Budget Experiment (ERBE), flying aboard multiple satellites, is providing new insights into the climate system. Monthly averaged clear-sky and cloudy sky flux data derived from the ERBE are used to assess the impact of clouds on the Earth's radiation balance. This impact is examined in terms …
Colorless, odorless, and poisonous, carbon monoxide is one of the six major air pollutants regulated in the United States and in many other nations around the world. When carbon-based fuels, such as coal, wood, and oil, burn incompletely or inefficiently, they produce carbon monoxide. The gas is spread by winds …
Rain, snow, hail, ice, and every slushy mix in between make up the precipitation that touches everyone on our planet. But not all places rain equally. Precipitation falls differently in different parts of the world, as you see in NASA's new video that captures every shower, every snow storm and …
