Bloom with a View: Robot Subs Help Researchers Study Mysterious Antarctic Sea Life [Slide Show]

After decades of riding icebreakers in Antarctica’s icy waters hoping to better understand the fragile ecosystem on and around this frigid continent scientists have begun delegating data collection to satellite-guided robotic subs. The hope is that these sea gliders, which can dive hundreds of meters and stay in the water for months at a time, [...]

The Immortal Ambitions of Ray Kurzweil: A Review of ‘Transcendent Man

Against a swirling montage of cosmic birth and destruction, and newsreel-style stills from his personal history, the celebrated inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil sits in silhouette, contemplating death. He broods over mortality’s toll in waste and pain, and the hopelessness and loss that people must experience in their last moments of life. "It’s such a [...]

Origami Observatory: Behind the Scenes with the Webb Space Telescope (preview)

The mirror, a perfect hexagon of gunmetal gray, stands vertically on a low platform. It is about two inches thick and more than four feet wide, a precisely carved slab of beryllium that gleams in the low light of this optics laboratory near San Francisco Bay. My guide, chief engineer Jay Daniel, watches my footing [...]

Filming the Invisible in 4D: New Microscopy Makes Movies of Nanoscale Objects in Action (preview)

The human eye is limited in its vision. We cannot see objects much thinner than a human hair (a fraction of a millimeter) or resolve motions quicker than a blink (a tenth of a second). Advances in optics and microscopy over the past millennium have, of course, let us peer far beyond the limits of [...]

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