Research

In an extraordinary feat of ingenuity,  a team of Swedish researchers have converted an all too common commercial DVD drive into a fully working laser scanner microscope capable of performing blood sample analysis and cellular imaging. They achieved this simply by replacing a few hardware pieces in the drive and developing a software that perform the analysis tasks. [...]

The ever resourceful Kepler mission has recently unveiled several new possible Earth-like planet candidates, two of whom are favored by scientists with the best odds yet of supporting alien life. The pair actually orbits around the same star, called Kepler 62, after NASA’s Kepler spacecraft, which is smaller and dimmer than our own star. Kepler 62 [...]

Researchers Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine and the University of Toronto have demonstrated for the first time that is possible to confirm or independently assess clinical diagnoses of autism in children simply by analyzing their brain activity. Reliable and efficient, their method might be employed at a massive scale as a means of [...]

How do you check a multi-billion dollar particle accelerator for defects or malfunctions? Sure, you could use various, equally expensive and sophisticated tools, but in some instances low tech comes in the aid of high tech, say a ping-pong ball. Wait, what ?! Yup, today researchers  sent a carefully sterilized, slightly-smaller-than-regulation ping-pong ball through a 2-mile [...]

Despite it makes up more than 85% of all matter in the Universe, dark matter, staying true to its name, has eluded scientists for decades ever since they’ve been trying to identify it with high power particle accelerators and detectors. Recent efforts seem to be paying off as various underground labs, as well as those [...]

A topic of great interest in neurology and psychology is memory. While a lot of efforts have been made towards identifying what mechanisms and processes govern memory formation and retrieval, very few things are understood with respect to its storage. This is because our memories aren’t static, they always shift position and become either more [...]

Paleontologists have discovered an ancient nesting site in China where the oldest fossilized dinosaur embryos to date have been found. The find is extremely exciting from multiple perspectives. For one, many embryos in various development stages have been found which will certainly help scientists better their understanding of how dinosaurs grew (how fast, what bones [...]

While dinosaur walking and locomotion is a subject of great interest and study for paleontologists, whether some could swim too is a controversial matter. Recent evidence found by an US graduate student sheds new light on the subject and suggests some dinosaurs could paddle for long distances through water with coordinated leg movement. Scott Persons, [...]

This might strike some of you as a surprise, but turbulence, a phenomenon we all encounter on a daily basis  - be it while mixing coffee, starting your car (fuel and air mixture) or of course while flying – and which has been first scientifically described some 600 years ago, remains today one of the [...]

What’s the difference between a solid and liquid? You might find this question trivial – naturally, liquids flow and solids… well, they don’t. From a physical point of view, however, things aren’t that simple. Intrigued by some ever so often encountered exceptions in the current accepted theory that describes the differences between the states of [...]