I wanted to spend some time really talking about fuel cells, particularly hydrogen-based fuel cells. To catch you up, that kind of fuel cell uses hydrogen and oxygen to create electricity. The only other byproduct is water vapor. Since the…

A couple of weeks ago, I caught an interesting story on NPR about a phenomenally precise clock. It’s really well done — you should check it out. It hits several of the points we made in our own episode about…

UPDATE (12:59 p.m. EST): Philae has returned a photo from the descent stage, about 3 kilometers (1.86 miles) from the surface! See the photo here: http://www.esa.int/spaceinimages/Images/2014/11/ROLIS_descent_image UPDATE (12:52 p.m. EST): No pictures from the surface yet. Also, according to ESA…

We’ve spent a lot of time on Fw:Thinking talking about how to make machines better understand our intentions. Ideally, our devices will be able to not only detect but to anticipate our needs, providing for us the things we want…

On March 26, 2014, we published a Fw:Thinking video about scientists with the BICEP2 project finding evidence of gravitational waves, lending support to a particular variation of the Big Bang theory. Since that amazing find, scientists and researchers have brought…

Want to send a message to the surface of an asteroid? Here’s your chance — and you’ve got until September 30th to make it happen. In 2016, NASA will launch a spacecraft called the Origins-Spectral Interpretation-Resource Identification-Security-Regolith Explorer, a.k.a. “OSIRIS-REx.”…

In the movies, scientific study flashes by in an instant. From a cinematic point of view, this makes sense — you can’t just have the camera linger on a group of researchers indefinitely as they toil over petri dishes and…

Mountain View, California is a tech-heavy place. That’s the location of the Googleplex, Google’s high-tech campus. It’s also the location of a group of engineers controlling a satellite from an old, abandoned McDonald’s restaurant. No, really! What’s better is that…

In the future, blood may be manufactured in labs — and designed to be more shelf-stable than Velveeta. Forget Tru:Blood. This stuff could be given to all patients, regardless of blood type, and stored for years without refrigeration in case…

We’ve said it many times on Fw:Thinking – the quantum world is weird. From electron tunneling to superposition to entanglement, things happen on the quantum scale that defy common sense. And just when I think I’m starting to get the…