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Last year, an astronaut named Don Pettit started an unusual, but very poetic and insightful writing project on NASA’s website: “Diary of a Space Zucchini” detailed the life and ‘thoughts’ of a zucchini onboard the International Space Station (ISS). “I sprouted, thrust into this world without anyone consulting me,” wrote Pettit in the now-defunct blog. […]
Patrick Blanc is a French botanist, typically wrongly credited as the inventor of the vertical garden (aka. Green Wall, Botanical Brick), a title which belongs to Professor Stanley Hart White at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (1938). Still, Patrick Blanc is certainly modern innovator of the green wall – a wall, either free-standing or part […]
You might think that the worst thing shampoo can do to you is sting your eyes or make your hair look bad, but as it turns out, a study has shown that some 100 well known shampoo brands include a carcinogen known as cocamide diethanolamine (cocamide DEA). “Most people believe that products sold in major […]
NASA’s black-hole-hunter spacecraft, the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, has located its first 10 supermassive black holes. The mission is the first ever which can focus the highest energy X-ray light into detailed pictures. If everything goes as NASA planned, then over the next two years, the mission will locate several hundreds of such […]
A study has shown a trade-off between mating prowess and parenting involvement – in other words, men with smaller testicles appear to be better fathers. Not only are fathers with smaller testicles more involved when it comes to taking care of their offspring, but their brains are also more responsive when they see picutres of […]
Ants are absolutely fascinating creatures. Not only have they discovered farming and animal husbandry thousands of years before us (sometimes even using bacteria to grow gardens), they also conduct executions for the good of the colony, follow Fermat’s principle of least time, and as it has been shown now, draft parasite ants as mercenaries. Just […]
Geophysicists trying to understand hotspot volcanoes have used a process known as seismic tomography and detected previously unknown finger-like structures of heat, some thousands of km long. The vast majority of volcanoes arises at contact zones between tectonic plates. However, another, entirely different type of volcano exists: hotspots are volcanic regions which can appear even […]
It may come as a shock to you to find out that the chemical make-up of human urine hasn’t been identified until now – but it shouldn’t. The study which led to this breakthrough took over seven years and involved 20 researchers; in the end, it revealed over 3.000 metabolites (small molecules resulted through […]
The more researchers study ecosystems, the more we learn that an ecosystem behaves, in many ways, just like a living organism: thousands of years after human hunters wiped out big land animals like giant ground sloths, the ecosystems they lived in are still suffering from the effects, much like a body suffers from past trauma. […]
It’s currently estimated that only 4,510 to 7,350 snow leopards remain in the wild – though estimates rely on outdated information and are pretty rough. Given the development of the local environment, the numbers are probably optimistic. Numerous agencies are working to conserve the snow leopard and its threatened mountain ecosystems which range across Asia, […]
Excavations conducted by the English Heritage have shown that Stonehenge has nothing to do with Sun worsipping and that the circle we see today was once complete. According to them, they discovered an important piece of the jigsaw puzzle in understanding Stonehenge – Englands greatest prehistoric site, and one of the most significant in the […]
Though built in 1933, the Fossil Cabin near the dinosaur graveyard at Como Bluff is, in a way, the oldest building in the world: the walls of the building were built out of 5,796 mortared-together dinosaur bones, dug from nearby areas. Initially, the building was part of a gasoline filling station along US 30 by […]
If you were to look at them from the safety and serenity of your home, the gas giants of our solar system seem to be quite peaceful. Their surface appears smooth, unscathed by meteor impacts or other such phenomena – but this couldn’t be further from the truth, as they sometimes show us. In 2010, […]
It’s clear that our political ideologies warp our ability to think clear – but we’re just starting to understand just how deep the problem really is. According to a new paper, our political beliefs can undermine even our most basic reasoning skills – including math. The study, which was led by Yale professor Dan Kahan […]
Many deep sea animals, such as the infamous anglerfish, use parts of their bodies as decoys, to attract unsuspecting prey. Now, researchers have found that a certain squid can do this as well – its tentacle tips flap and flutter as if swimming on their own. Biologists believe that the mesmerizing movement of the tentacles […]
A team of evolutionary biologists at Indiana University has shown for the first time that asexual lineages of a species are doomed not necessarily from a long, slow accumulation of new mutations, but rather from fast gene conversions which unmask preexisting genetic mutations. The groundbreaking research started with the sequencing of the entire genomes of […]
With new insights derived from Game Theory, University of Pennsylvania biologists offer a mathematically based explanation for why cooperation and generosity have evolved in nature. Their work relied on the work of John Nash, who proposed the famous Nash equilibrium and advanced Game Theory in the 1950, as well as those of computational biologist William […]
Land clearing and human habitation put significant pressure on local species – combine this with globalization and a general recklessness of the population, and you get a big, negative impact (both environmental and economic) from invasive plants. But invasive plants aren’t something new – they’ve been around for hundreds of millions of years. Scientists have […]
Some 5.000 years separate us from the birth of Ancient Egypt, in 3.100 BC. Add another 5.000 years, and you still haven’t reached the date when Göbekli Tepe was built. The temple (now in southern Turkey) took shape over 11.000 years ago, around the same time Plato’s hypothetical Atlantis goes under, 5 millennia before the […]
Of course any architect does a lot of mechanics and all that, but he also shouldn’t miss the optics classes: a high-end Jaguar has partially melted after it was parked in the sizzling-hot reflections coming from London’s newest skyscraper. Yep, a luxury car has partially melted due to the reflections from a nearby skyscraper – […]
Ever since 2010, I’ve been telling you about a group of scientists and investors which wants to send people to Mars – on a one way trip, that is. But in early 2013, this took a huge step forward, materializing in the form of Mars One – a non-profit organization that plans to establish a […]
Somebody in Tokyo is reading Game of Thrones: the Japanese government has announced plans to create a wall of ice underneath the contaminated area to contain the water leaks from the Fukushima nuclear plant. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said his administration will provide the money for this. “The government needs to resolve the problem by […]
A 350 million year old fossilized scorpion has become the world’s oldest known land animal to have ever walked the supercontinent Gondwana. Ancient history It’s 350 million years ago – take a moment to ponder that. Take a long human lifespan of 100 years, and multiply it by 100, and again by 100 – now […]
For infertile women everywhere, regardless of age, health and status, one thing was sure – they were never going to have children; and I say ‘were’ because now we have a precedent, a way through which that can be changed: an infertile Australian woman is now pregnant after growing new eggs in ovarian tissue transplanted […]
The government of Ecuador has abandoned a plan that would have kept part of the Amazonian rainforest off limits to oil drilling – as it turns out, one of the world’s biggest and most special natural parks lies on top of one of the world’s biggest (yet) unexplored oil fields; a classic case of nature […]
A new study has shown that young men are threatened when their female signficant others are more successful than them, ultimately triggering their fear that the partner might leave them – and it’s exactly this fear which usually gets them. The researchers conducted their study, published online in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, […]
Snoring is a universal problem that affects a huge chunk of the population around the world. It doesn’t matter how rich you are, how smart you are, if you snore – you snore. There are various causes for snoring. As is the case with the other common conditions that affect a large number of people […]
For some reason which continues to elude me, people are eating less and less fruit – but perhaps the increasing consumption of juice has something to do with this. Now, a new study led by Harvard School of Public Health researchers has shown that eating more fruits, particularly blueberries, grapes, and apples, was associated with […]
MIT and Chilean researchers working together have developed a fog harvesting system which can provide drinkable water for even the world’s driest regions. In the full drought areas, where rainfall is extremely rare or virtually non existent, a few specialized plants and insects have devised ingenious strategies to cope with the harsh conditions and get […]
Pollution is real, and it’s a global phenomenon; it doesn’t happen only in the Captain Planet cartoons, and it’s not restricted to Africa or China. Sobering data from MIT’s Laboratory for Aviation and the Environment has shown that air pollution is having a dramatic impact on American health: over 200.000 lives are claimed early because […]
As we know by now, most galaxies, including our own, have a supermassive black hole at their center. However, the one in our galaxy, Sagittarius A* (pronounced Sagittarius A-star) has a surprisingly small appetite, something which has puzzled astronomers for years. Sagittarius A* is 4 million times as massive as the sun, but it is […]
Just like we get a tan and our skin gets darker in response to sunlight exposure, whales increase the pigment in their skin as well, but not only do they do this, they also accumulate damage to the cells in the skin as they get older, just like humans. “Whales can be thought of as […]
Physicists have successfully reproduced a pattern resembling the cosmic microwave background radiation in an experiment which used ultracold cesium atoms in a vacuum chamber. This is the first experiment which recreates at least some of the conditions from the Big Bang. “This is the first time an experiment like this has simulated the evolution of […]
Fatal overdoses due to painkillers have reached epidemic levels, greatly exceeding those from heroin and cocaine combined, becoming the worst drug epidemic in US history. Prescriptions for painkillers in the United States have nearly tripled in the past two decades, and the results are dreadful. In 2012, enough painkillers were prescribed to keep every single […]
Farms produce food to feed the urban population but with some relatively simple modifications they are capable of supplying significant amounts of energy to the urban areas as well. This is being done in several ways across the United States, but in all fairness, the US is lagging significantly behind even third world areas in […]
Geophysical data from Greenland have revealed the existence of a canyon comparable in size with the Grand Canyon beneath the ice sheet. The canyon has the characteristics of a winding river channel and is over 750 km long and it is often as deep as 800 m. This immense feature is thought to predate humanity […]
Usually, it’s scientists who gather the data, but this time, they were the data themselves – a poll of 3700 American researchers showed that a significant portion of scientists are receiving less federal help than they were three years ago, despite spending much more time writing for grants and applying for projects. Nearly one-fifth of […]
A surprisingly diverse range of life forms exists deep in the oceanic crust, but they live at an extremely slow pace. Long lived bacteria, which reproduce only once in 10.000 years, have been found in rocks 2.5km below the ocean floor, rocks which are 100 million years old. Viruses and fungi have also been found […]
It has been previously shown that during ovulation, women tend to increase their attractiveness to men (though not necessarily conscious). Not only do they change their voice pitch [1], but they also tend to dress more fashionable [2]. A new study published in Psychological Science adds to this growing body of research by suggesting that […]
While in the Amazon, a certain pointy fish that crawls up a certain male organ sends shivers in the spines of potential swimmers, in Scandinavia, another Brazilian fish is threatening the genitals of unsuspecting skinny dippers; it’s not the famed piranha, but its cousin – the Pacu. The Pacu naturally has a small mouth, eating […]
I’ve written about our incredible biological ability to gather information about our environment by sensing electromagnetic radiation. As complex as our eyes are however, light holds far more information than what we are able to perceive with our eyes. Science has given us the means to determine far more than just that there is a […]
What do volcanic eruptions, oil spills, sewages and chimneys all have in common? Not much at a first glance – but if you ask Peter Baines, a scientist at the University of Melbourne in Australia, they are tightly connected; in all these events, a fluid rises into a environment stratified by density (like the atmosphere […]
A 52-year-old, part-time graduate student with no previous training in psychology and little training in math aside from high-school has discredited a very cited paper published in 2005 in American Psychologist. The paper, then written by Barbara Fredrickson and Marcial Losada suggested a mathematical ratio between positivity and happiness, claiming that humans thrive when ratio […]
Modern humans started ‘replacing’ Neanderthals some 40.000 years ago, and for a long time, it was thought this came as a result of the more advanced human intelect and a better ability to adapt; but as more and more studies unfold, the Neandertals’ capabilities are still greatly debated. Many scientists now argue that Neandertals had […]
A fossil of a small, forest-floor-dwelling animal called Megaconus puts a big question mark on the evolution of mammals – it suggests that its group predated animals, while another one, from its tree dwelling ‘cousing’ Arboroharamiya shows the group belonged to the mammals. The two fossils have paleontologists scratching their heads, not knowing where to […]
I have never in my life eaten a crab or a lobster, because ever since I was a kid, boiling an animal alive seemed extremely cruel; it just didn’t make sense that an animal doesn’t feel pain – and even today, it doesn’t, to me. Pain is your body’s way of telling you something is […]
Mona Lisa is probably the most well known picture in the world – it’s been painted thousands of times, inspired countless artists, and her enigmatic smile still puzzles researchers and artists alike; but never before has it been painted on such a small canvas. Demonstrating a very potent nanotechnique, researchers have made a miniature Mona Lisa […]
It may not look like much, but this material has wonderous properties, according to Swedish researchers. The magnesium carbonate is extremely porous, setting new records in terms of surface area and water absorbtion, potentially having all sorts of applications, from controlling moisture in electronic and medical procedures to gathering up pollutants from oil spills. Still, the practical, […]
Dolphins are simply stunning creatures – they think, and empathize; they have names, hang out in cliques, they talk like humans, and they almost always try to rescue their wounded friends. They can go without sleep for 15 days, and every day they show us that they are simply ‘non human persons’. Now, another research […]
The Sun is gearing up for a major polarity switch, NASA announced: the North Pole which was in the northern hemisphere, has now started pointing south. The solar magnetic polarity reversal cycle has an 11 year period, which is still not fully understood. “This always happens around the time of solar maximum,” says David Hathaway, […]
