Shorties

Camera traps positioned in the rocky terrain from Afghanistan recently caught surprising photographs of a Persian leopard, a top predator, but which was long thought extinct from the area. However, this series of images shows beyond the shadow of a doubt that the predator is still, against all odds, alive and kicking. But sadly, despite [...]

You’re probably wondering what a Pallasite is; well Pallasites are is a type of iron meteorite, quite rare, made out of large olivine crystals in an iron-nickel matrix – and they look just fabulous. Olivine is a a magnesium iron silicate quite common in our planet’s subsurface, but which weathers fast when exposed to the surface. [...]

IBM has recently developed a new 1.6-petaflop high-performance computer for the National Center for Atmospheric Research with the purpose of installing a new supercomputing ability and help the center’s research in atmospheric and climate change. A pentaflop is a unit of measure of a supercomputer’s performance; it is basically the ability to do a quadrillion [...]

What you are looking at is a gathering of 100.000 Theravada Buddhist monks who are ‘praying’ for a better world. The reason why I am adding the apostrophe is because they are not literally praying, there is no deity to whom they address. This happened at a temple in Bangkok.

A giant mountain, three times taller than Earth’s highest peak marks the southern polar regions of Vesta, a relatively well studied asteroid spotted by NASA’s Dawn Science Probe. The mountain is depicted in the picture below. Dawn orbited around Vesta, which is located in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter in July, and since [...]

I was recently telling you about Mount Etna erupting. But what I didn’t know was that last time it erupted, in 2000, she was really chill, just blowing out smoke rings – an extremely rare phenomena. Seriously, it just looks like some giant or titan is sitting inside blowing smoke rings. There have only been [...]

As an European, it often seems to me like the US is a land of striking contrasts – it is in fact the land of opportunities. Matter of fact, I was absolutely shocked to find out that the US is still allowing milk from cows which were given artificial growth hormone, especially since this hormone [...]

There were a lot of firsts during the initial lunar landings, especially during the very first Apollo 11 mission. There was, of course, the obvious first famous moon walk by Neil Armstrong, the first country to land on the moon, the first word spoken from the moon, and so on. A new genesis of gestures [...]

The Timena genus is remarkable from numerous points of view; they are walking stick insects which have been around for almost two million years, out of which for the last 1.5 million years they have been asexual. Biologists from the Simon Fraser University wanted to find out exactly what is it about this celibate insect [...]

Immigration pays off, especially if you are interested in science and math; a report conducted by the National Foundation for American Policy, a nonprofit research group in Arlington, Va., states that many immigrant parents emphasize hard science and math education for their children, viewing them as a very serious and sure pathway towards success. The [...]