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Are we smarter than the dinosaurs? Former NASA astronaut and now an asteroid hunter Edward Lu says the jury is still out. There are about a million sizeable asteroids in Near-Earth orbit, each capable of wiping out a major population centre, and yet we have discovered less than half of one percent of them. Within five years, Lu鈥檚 could start mapping thousands and thousands of large asteroids, giving us warning of approaching danger, but will we have the foresight to support his mission? 聽聽Photo 漏 All rights reserved by aspeninstitute-internal.聽

What if there is a proportion of dark matter which interacts with ordinary matter much more strongly than we鈥檇 thought? Harvard physicist Lisa Randall says that new data will soon become available from cosmic observations and terrestrial experiments which will shed light on her new theory about . If proven correct, there is a chance that dark matter might even influence the paths of comets through the Solar sytem. 聽Photo 漏 All rights reserved by aspeninstitute-internal

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Imagine trying to measure the effects of cosmic jitter at a scale billion billion times smaller than an atom. (That鈥檚 right, a billion billion times!). This is what Craig Hogan鈥檚 team at in Batavia is attempting. If successful, it should give us fundamental insights into the nature of space itself: is it classically smooth or in discrete units, like grains of sand on a beach? 聽Photo 漏 All rights reserved by aspeninstitute-internal

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