Libraries and other archives of physical culture have been struggling for decades to preserve diverse media — from paper to eight-track tape recordings — for future generations. Scientists are falling behind the curve in protecting digital data, threatening the ability to mine new findings from existing data or validate research analyses. Johns Hopkins University cosmologist Alex Szalay and Jim Gray of Microsoft, who was lost at sea in 2007, spent much of the past decade discussing challenges posed by data files that will soon approach the petabyte (1015 — or quadrillion — ...

On July 21, at the Euroscience Open Forum in Barcelona, members of the European astronomy community participated in a discussion about why their space program has failed to engage public interest in a manner comparable to programs in the United States. Organized by Dirk Lorenzen, a physicist turned journalist for German public radio, the session was titled “Reaching for the Stars: Research in Heaven, Communication in Hell.” Lorenzen, a longtime reporter on space science and technology, began by pointing out that the public, both in Europe and elsewhere, knows little of the w...

Excerpted comments from a panel discussion at the World Science Summit that addressed the topic of the role of science in foreign affairs. Among the participants were the esteemed scientists Harold Varmus, David Baltimore and Nina Fedoroff.

Who will win the election in November? A technique from baseball stats may predict the answer.

During the whole of a dull, cramped and wearisome flight from Israel to New York, as the night pressed heavily against the airplane windows, Ariel Rubinstein had been toiling through a singularly dreary article on game theory; and at length the economist found himself, as the sharpness of his focus waned, seeking respite from the tedium in Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Purloined Letter.” But the economist’s work, it seemed, wouldn’t let him rest. For in the middle of the detective story, Poe launched into an analysis of game theory! Rubinstein read: “I ...