Like many people, from the very young to the very old, I was fascinated by the ideas and writings of Sir Arthur C. Clarke. He was a very prolific writer, with close to 100 books and over 1,000 articles. He was also involved in many ways with the film industry, from his landmark 2001: Space Odyssey with director Stanley Kubrick in 1968 to numerous documentaries about space and the future. He was also an inventor and a futurist — who met presidents, popes, and entrepreneurs alike. [ read more ]

Efforts to repair a giant breach in the stratosphere could make global warming worse.

Decades of chemical pollution have damaged the ozone layer of the upper atmosphere that shields Earth from the harmful effects of the sun’s ultraviolet rays, each summer eating a hole over the South Pole that expands to nearly the size of Antarctica. But since 1996, when an international treaty banned the culprit chemical refrigerants and propellants (known as CFCs, or chlorofluorocarbons), the size of the seasonal tear has been shrinking—and scientists predict it may stop forming by the end of this century.

You would think that was good news. But atmospheric scientists caution in a new study published in Science that sewing up the rift in the ozone (a type of oxygen) layer may exacerbate another environmental woe: climate change. [ read more ]

Researchers outline project to send long-distance, ultrasecure messages on Earth via the International Space Station

Researchers hope to send an experiment to the International Space Station (ISS) by the middle of the next decade that would pave the way for transcontinental transmission of secret messages encoded using the mysterious quantum property of entanglement.

When two particles such as photons are born from the same event, they emerge entangled, meaning they can communicate instantaneously no matter how far apart they are. Transmitting entangled pairs of photons reliably is the backbone of so-called quantum key distribution—procedures for converting those pairs into potentially unbreakable codes. Quantum cryptography, as it is known, could appeal to banks, covert government agencies and the military, and was tested in a 2007 Swiss election. [ read more ]

Colossal structures larger than the visible universe – forged during the period of cosmic inflation nearly 14 billion years ago – may be responsible for a strange pattern seen in the big bang’s afterglow, says a team of cosmologists. If confirmed, the structures could provide precious information about the universe’s earliest moments.

In the first instant after its birth, the universe is thought to have experienced a rapid growth spurt called inflation. During this period, space itself expanded faster than the speed of light. [ read more ]

[ read more ]

A California aerospace company plans to enter the space tourism industry with a two-seat rocket ship capable of suborbital flights to altitudes of more than 37 miles (60 kilometers) above Earth.

The Lynx, about the size of a small private plane, is expected to begin flying in 2010, according to developer Xcor Aerospace, which planned to release details of the design at a news conference Wednesday.

Xcor’s announcement comes two months after aerospace designer Burt Rutan and billionaire Richard Branson unveiled a model of SpaceShipTwo, which is being built for Branson’s Virgin Galactic space tourism company and may begin test flights this year. [ read more ]

When Arthur C. Clarke died last week at the age of 90, science fiction—hell, science in general—lost one of its greatest, most forward-looking masters. In his honor, PM’s resident geek and sci-fi buff analyzes the most eerily predictive, prescient films of the future. They’re not necessarily the best movies—just the ones that got the science right, or will sometime soon. [ read more ]

[ read more ]

Lisi, who is speaking at the TED conference in Monterey, California this week, rejects string theory — currently the dominant model of the universe. Instead, his unification theory places all known particles and the four fundamental forces of nature (electromagnetic, the strong force, the weak force and gravity) onto an exceptionally complex 248-point mathematical model known as E8 that was formulated in the late 19th century. [ read more ]

[ read more ]