This is just a very small section of sky, smaller than the diameter of the full moon as seen from earth. It looks empty and black to the unaided eye, but the Hubble Space Telescope photographed all these galaxies in it. When I studied science in high school more than 50 years ago, we learned [...]

There has been tremendous progress in robotics recently. Here’s one that plays pool. A robot, of course, is just a machine of any kind that is controlled by a computer. The computer is its “brain”. So it’s very significant to robotics that a computer named Watson recently beat the two all-time champion humans on Jeopardy. [...]

This is not the only example of a “ring species” by any means. A more familiar one to many people is the encitina, a California salamander. It probably originated in Oregon around ten million years ago, and migrated south through the redwood forests of northern California to the northern end of California’s great central valley. [...]