Large asteroid zipping past Earth towing moon
May 31st, 2013
05:06 AM ET

Large asteroid zipping past Earth towing moon

An asteroid is whizzing past Earth on Friday - and it's traveling with its own moon in tow.

1998 QE2, as NASA has named it, will not come anywhere near enough to collide with our world.

The closest it will come is about 3.6 million miles away - that's over 15 times the distance to our moon. It will reach that point just before 5 p.m. ET.

But it's giving astronomers the "best look at this asteroid ever," NASA said.

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Filed under: Discoveries • In Space • News • Science Friday
May 31st, 2013
04:52 AM ET

Will mammoths be cloned?

Remember when woolly mammoths roamed the planet? No? Well don't worry if you missed the last ice age - scientists have moved one step closer to possibly bringing the beasts back to life with the discovery of liquid blood in a well-preserved mammoth carcass in Siberia.

Researchers from the Northeast Federal University in Yakutsk found the 10,000-year-old female mammoth buried in ice on the Lyakhovsky Islands off the coast of northeast Russia.

Scientists say they poked the frozen creature with a pick and dark liquid blood flowed out.

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Filed under: Discoveries • News • On Earth • Science Friday
April 19th, 2013
04:51 PM ET

What happens to a wet washcloth in space?

By Matt Dellinger, CNN

Astronauts on the International Space Station get to do the coolest experiments. And sometimes the simplest ones can be the most impressive.

Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield demonstrates what happens when you wring out a soaking wet washcloth in zero gravity. The idea came from two high school students in Nova Scotia who won a contest to design a simple science experiment to be conducted on the ISS. The experiment had to use materials that were already available on the space station and was selected out of almost 100 entries.

Watch the video above to see the incredible effect of weightlessness on the water absorbed by the washcloth.

What are some simple experiments you would like to see conducted in space? Let us know in the comments below!

(The Science Seat will resume next Friday)

Global Warming is epic, long-term study says
A scientist looks at an ice core from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet Divide coring site.
March 8th, 2013
05:29 AM ET

Global Warming is epic, long-term study says

Global warming has propelled Earth's climate from one of its coldest decades since the last ice age to one of its hottest - in just one century.

A heat spike like this has never happened before, at least not in the last 11,300 years, said climatologist Shaun Marcott, who worked on a new study on global temperatures going back that far.

Things are poised to get much worse.

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What's special about nanotechnology
Rizia Bardhan studies nanotechnology at Vanderbilt University.
January 25th, 2013
05:37 PM ET

What's special about nanotechnology

By Matthew Rehbein, CNN

At 29, Rizia Bardhan is already making her mark on one of the scientific community’s most exciting and fastest-growing disciplines: nanotechnology. Researchers in this field are innovating on scales that seem impossibly small: One nanometer is just a fraction of the width of a human hair.

Last year Forbes listed Bardhan among its notable “30 Under 30 in Science & Innovation” for her work in nanotechnology. Bardhan accepted an assistant professor position at Vanderbilt University last August.

Bardhan spoke with CNN about her research in nanotechnology and about the tremendous advancements that are possible with it in the fields of medicine and energy. Here is an edited transcript:

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Filed under: On Earth • Science Friday • Voices

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