• Technology

    PharmaSat to Test Drugs in Space

    By Paul Adams Posted on 5.4.2009 4 Comments

    It's miserable enough to be under the weather in the comfort of your home, but imagine coming down with a bad cold when you're stuck inside a small crew module 200,000 miles from Earth. You're coughing on your fellow astronauts and that space food you ate half an hour ago is now floating around your zero-gravity spacecraft. Luckily, mission control packed some antibiotics into your survival pack... but will they work in space?

  • Gadgets

    AT&T vs. Verizon: The iPhone Dilemma

    By Paul Adams Posted on 5.4.2009 24 Comments

    With delicious rumors circulating recently about Apple goods finally coming to the Verizon faithful, I'm on the fence now more than ever about my impending iPhone purchase. You see, I must have one and it's only a matter of time before I do. My iPod Touch is fun for playing around with apps and hopping online via WiFi, but it's no Jesusphone. I've been a Verizon prisoner customer ever since getting my first cell phone back in 2000.

  • The Environment

    Preparing for Tsunamis in California

    By Paul Adams Posted on 4.30.2009 1 Comments

    The tsunami that struck Crescent City, California, on April 25, 1992, wasn't a destructive one -- the waves were relatively small, and no loss of life or significant damage resulted. But it was still an important tsunami event, in that it illustrated how quickly a wave can arrive at nearby coastal communities and how long the at-risk period can last. The tsunami occurred after a 7.1 earthquake shook the coast of Cape Mendocino on California's north coast, generating a series of tsunami waves.

  • The Environment

    Endangered, But There's Still Hop

    By Paul Adams Posted on 4.29.2009 0 Comments

    Seventeen thousand Kihansi spray toads once lived in a lush home under the mist of the Kihansi Gorge waterfalls in Tanzania. The tiny yellow toads, less than an inch long, were perfectly adapted to the humid jungle where they probably evolved millennia ago. But in 1999, the Tanzanian government rerouted the Kihansi River to build a hydroelectric dam, and the gorge dried up. Without the waterfall's cooling spray, the toad's habitat changed and, by 2000, nearly 90 percent of the population had died.

  • DIY

    Ramps, a Wild Harvest

    By Paul Adams Posted on 4.28.2009 2 Comments

    One of the ways that we know for sure that spring has sprung is the appearances of ramps on the trails and at the markets. Ramps, Allium tricoccum, are also known as wild leeks, ramson, and ail de bois. They appear in the springtime in deciduous forest areas from South Carolina to Canada and as far west as Missouri and Minnesota. West Virginia in particular is known for its celebration of this seasonal delicacy. Ramps grow in patches in cool shady areas with moist soil rich in organic materials. They begin to appear in late March and can be found through the end of May.

  • Science

    The Pros and Cons of Asexual Reproduction

    By Paul Adams Posted on 4.27.2009 7 Comments

    Making babies requires a male and a female, a sperm and an egg, right? Well, the wild world of animals is often more creative than the lot of us humans when it comes to making whoopee. In fact, some animals don't have sex at all, thank you very much. Just this month, bug biologists found the first all-female ant species, Mycocepurus smithii. The queen ant clones herself by making eggs that develop into adult females without fertilization. Some of those females will then become queens themselves. Apparently the species has been sexless for enough generations that the ants might not be able to mate even if they wanted to. Dissections showed that a key female sex part that normally interlocks with a male organ during mating had shrunken to a ghost of its former self.

  • Cars

    Driven: the 2010 Jaguar XKR Coupe and Convertible

    By Paul Adams Posted on 4.24.2009 2 Comments

    It's difficult to dispute the notion that in winemaking, handcrafted artisanal production tends to yield a finer, more complex wine. Similarly, when one gets behind the wheel of the 2010 Jaguar XKR, the craftsmanship and care are more than apparent. I invoke the wine analogy because I was fortunate enough to be flown to the South of France to test-drive the new 510-horsepower supercharged 5.0-liter V8 Jaguar XKR.

  • Science

    Hackers: the China Syndrome

    By Paul Adams Posted on 4.23.2009 26 Comments

    At 8 a.m. on May 4, 2001, anyone trying to access the White House Web site got an error message. By noon, whitehouse.gov was down entirely, the victim of a so-called distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. Somewhere in the world, hackers were pinging White House servers with thousands of page requests per second, clogging the site. Also attacked were sites for the U.S. Navy and various other federal departments.

  • Science

    A Lousy Reason for Asthma and Allergies

    By Paul Adams Posted on 4.22.2009 4 Comments

    The incidence of asthma and allergies are on the rise. In the United States alone, asthma rates have doubled since the 1980s. And, according to a recent article by the BBC, doctors once estimated 15 percent of the population had some type of allergy, but now believe the figure is closer to 40. More patients are also suffering from multiple allergies than ever before. The reason for this trend has been widely disputed, but a new study points the finger at a surprising culprit: lice.

  • Science

    100 Days of Science

    By Paul Adams Posted on 4.22.2009 3 Comments

    In his inaugural address, President Obama said: “We will restore science to its rightful place and wield technology's wonders to raise health care's quality and lower its costs. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age.”

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