Chicago Council on Science and Technology

Courtesy: The Chicago Tribune/Associated Press The president of the Adler Planetarium says the institution on Chicago’s lakefront is in the running to receive one of three soon-to-be retired space shuttles. Adler president Paul Knappenberger said Wednesday that the Adler is one of 21 planetariums and museums around the nation under consideration by NASA. The retiring shuttles are being [...]

Oceanographers have also criticized the Obama administration over its reluctance to force BP, the oil company responsible for the spill, to permit an accurate calculation of the flow rate from the undersea well. The company has refused to permit scientists to send equipment to the ocean floor that would establish the rate with high accuracy.

At the scale of the very small, physics can get peculiar. A University of Michigan biomedical engineering professor has discovered a new instance of such a nanoscale phenomenon — one that could lead to faster, less expensive portable diagnostic devices and push back frontiers in building micro-mechanical and “lab on a chip” devices.

Last July, a glint of sunlight from Saturn’s moon Titan sped through space and fell upon the sensors of the Cassini spacecraft, starting a process of discovery that is now strengthening the idea that the icy moon harbors liquid seas.

Silicon nanoparticles were a natural choice for researchers for various reasons, the primary ones being that silicon has the highest energy density of any element and it is cheap. Replacing graphite with silicon nanoparticles increases the amount of energy that can be packed into a battery by 10-fold.

Economists from Harvard, Stanford and other leading universities will present research to about 150 government policy analysts who would ultimately help steer U.S. climate policy, including representatives of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Office of Management and Budget and the energy, transportation and treasury departments.

On the evening of April 20, the oil rig Deepwater Horizon exploded about 50 miles off the Louisiana coast in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 workers and injuring 17 more. Two days later it sank in 5,000 feet of water…
As the crisis has unfolded, confusion has soared about the oil spill’s gravity, the potential effects on coastal residents, the risks to wildlife and who will foot the costs of the cleanup.