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To most people, 3D printers are still sci-fi, and as a result, envisioning a 3D printer in every home is a huge stretch. But a study conducted by Michigan Technological University scientists concluded that personal manufacturing, like personal computers in their time, will become a common thing – soon. “For the average American consumer, 3D […]
A new study of 100 private water wells in and near the Barnett Shale showed elevated links of contaminants such as arsenic and selenium to fracking sites used for shale gas; the study, which was conducted by UT Arlington associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry Kevin Schug was published in Environmental Science & Technology. The […]
You hear a lot of anecdotal advice about how we can all ‘get by’ on just a few hours of sleep a night. Historic world leaders are said to have masterminded entire war campaigns on just two hours shut-eye. But modern scientific evidence broadly suggests we need a whole lot more. The usual recommendation is […]
The insertion of one gene can shut down the extra chromosome which causes Down Syndrome, according to a study published today in Nature. A dreadful disease Down Syndrome (DS), also known as trisomy 21, is a genetic disorder caused by the presence of all or part of a third copy of chromosome 21. It’s the […]
A new, unusual species of dinosaur has been discovered in the deserts of Utah. The 5m-long is a member of the triceratops family, and as fierce as they may look, this dinosaur was a herbivore. The huge ‘nose’ and exceptionally long horns are unlike any other dinosaurs previously described, which explains its name – Nasutoceratops […]
When global temperatures rise, ice starts to thin down, and sometimes, it breaks down. When a big ice shelf collapses in Antarctica, it opened up prime ocean real estate, and delicate but ambitious creatures called glass sponges showed up, pretty much seizing the opportunity. Hexactinellid sponges are sponges with a skeleton made of four- and/or […]
A new study has shown that European farmers used far more sophisticated practices than was previously thought. The Oxford research found that Neolithic farmers used manure as a fertilizer as early as 6000 BC. It has been previously assumed that manure wasn’t used in agriculture until Roman times. This technique is fairly complex, because dung […]
It may not seem like much, but by differentiating between bacterial and viral fevers, this new test could help doctors decide whether or not to prescribe antibiotics. Fevers are a common symptom in many infectious diseases, but it’s often difficult to know if the cause is bacterial or viral, and thus, antibiotics are often needlessly […]
Reefs, dunes and marshes – these are the key allies in protecting the threatened lives and property against storm surges and long-term sea-level rise. Two thirds of the US coastal area is protected by natural environments (coastal forests, reefs, sand dunes and wetlands) – not by man made structures. They defend both the lives, and […]
Water droplets, coffee granules, fragments of polystyrene and even a toothpick – all of these, and more, have been levitating and moving around in a Swiss laboratory lately; all of them lifted by sound waves, that is. This is the first time a device is capable of handling several objects simultaneously. This achievement was detailed […]
The king of all predators, the godfather of his time, la creme de la creme – Tyrannosaurus Rex (T. Rex) was the ultimate predator… or was he? When Jurassic Park came out, even though the cinema crowd went wild as T. Rex smashed and ate velociraptors (and the occasional human), at the time, there was […]
NASA and a company called Aerojet Rocketdyne recently finished testing a rocket engine injector created purely through 3D printing. The future – today 3D printing is pretty much what it sounds like – it is a process of making a three-dimensional solid objects of virtually any shape from a digital model. Adopting the technique even […]
An extremely challenging study published by a team of researchers from the Stanford School of Medicine claims that through some unknown mechanism mammals can bias the sex of their offspring in order to win the genetic lottery and produce extra grandchildren. The holy graal of modern evolutionary biology After analyzing 90 years of breeding records […]
Understanding how supercooled water acts can be very important for understanding basic processes during cryoprotection – the preservation of tissues and/or organs by liquid nitrogen, with the purpose of thawing without damaging them. A team from the University of Arkansas have found that surprisingly, when cooled at extremely low temperatures, water turns into an entirely […]
Lots of volcanoes erupted in 2009 – but one of them really screamed out. Its unique howls provide a glimpse into the very heart of the volcano, and also in some unexplained processes that accompany an eruption. It’s not unusual for swarms of small earthquakes to precede a volcanic eruption – it’s quite common. As […]
Less than 1.5 percent of our DNA is used in a conventional way, that is to encode for proteins – this was the common sense around this issue 10 years ago; recently, previous research has shown that 5-8% of the genome is conserved at the level of DNA sequence, indicating that it is functional, but […]
Autism is one of the biggest medical mysteries of the 21st century, and researchers are still trying to figure out the causes of this condition. UC Davis MIND Institute researchers have made a significant step forward in that direction, identifying some specific antibodies that target fetal brain proteins in the blood of women with autistic […]
The wonder material could lead to a major breakthrough in telecommunications – dramatically accelerate internet speeds by up to a hundred times, according to new research by scientists in the University of Bath‘s Department of Physics. According to their research, which was published in Physical Review Letters, an incredibly short optical response rate can be […]
A trio of papers recently published in Science link hydraulic fracking and geothermal energy production to numerous earthquakes in the United States. Most of these events have been relatively small, with a magnitude of under 5.0, but a few were quite significant – including the 5.6 event that hit Oklahoma on 6 November 2011, damaging […]
The world, known as HD189733b, has a deep azure hue, probably the result of molten silicate glass rain in the atmosphere, which scatters blue light. The giant planet is one of the closest and most studied in the exoplanets recently discovered; it is a sauna, a hazy hothouse swept by blow-torch winds powered by the […]
Our close cousins, the Neanderthals, were much more similar to us than we imagined even a decade ago, fascinating the scientific world more and more with each passing year; now, a new study suggests that they also had a type of speech and language, something which was once considered to draw the decisive lines between […]
Scuba divers have discovered a primeval underwater forest off the coast of Alabama – a cypress forest which was incredibly well preserved for over 50.000 years. The bald cypress forest was buried under ocean sediments (almost certainly sand), isolated from oxygen (which is the main enemy of preservation), thus preventing them from rotting; however, the underwater […]
The otherwordly new video features one of the two Martian moons – Phobos, as it rises on the sky. Even though the movie only has 32 seconds, the action actually took place over the course of 27 minutes. Mars has two moons: Phobos (which is just 22 km wide on average), and Deimos, which is […]
Chersonesos was an ancient city on the Crimean peninsula, in today’s Ukraine; the name itself means ‘peninsula’, and Greeks founded it some 2500 years ago, to supply their homeland with grain and other strategic resources. The famed Greek city-states had much need of such resources in order to survive and thrive. Archaeologists from Aarhus (Denmark) […]
From the 1950s, and especially from 1975, the global surface ocean has shown a significant and steady warming trend. However, since 2004, that warming seemed to stall. Researchers measuring the Earth’s total energy budget (the energy coming in from the Sun and the radiated heat) and they noticed that more heat was coming in then […]
The overwhelming part of the universe is still a mystery to astronomers – and most of what we know is a result of deduction and analysis. So it should be no big surprise that when radio waves from 11 billion light years was received, they couldn’t pinpoint its origin. Their brightness and distance suggest that […]
It’s a dog eat dog out there, and any advantage you can get is more than welcome – as strange as it may be. According to a research published in Biology Letters on 3 July, Hawk moths create an ultrasonic noise that could be used to scare off an attacking bat and to jam the […]
It may surprise you to know that a life-threatening disability after complete spinal cord injury is urinary dysfunction – although numerous strategies and treatments have been tried, in the attempt of regrowing the severed axons, their success has been very limited. Now, researchers have finally come up with a solution that works, at least in […]
It’s the world of science fiction come alive – Swiss researchers have developed contact lenses which, when paired with special spectacles, bestow telescopic vision on their wearers. Cool, and very useful The contact-lens-and-spectacles have the ability of zooming in 2.8 times. The device was not created for Bond-like purposes, but rather to help people suffering […]
Pluto may not be a planet anymore, but it still has a few moons. The International Astronomical Union (IAU) is announcing that the names Kerberos and Styx have officially been recognised for the fourth and fifth moons of Pluto, which were discovered in 2011 and 2012. Both the names come from Greek mythology. Kerberos (or […]
The Fermi Space Telescope has catalogued the 514 most powerful objects in the Universe, that we know of. Astrophysicists don’t know what over 10% of them are. Why 514? The idea was to catalog the objects which emit γ-ray sources at energies above 10 GeV. What’s a GeV? It stands for Giga electronvolt, which […]
According to Wilhelm Hofmann and his team of researchers at the University of Chicago, self control is one of humanity’s most valuable assets – not only because it allows us to be better people, but because it makes us happier. Self control and happiness Self control is defined as “the ability to override or change […]
Although astronomers have identified less than a dozen potentially habitable planets so far, a new study suggests that our galaxy may be teeming with planets actually capable of hosting life. Based on data from NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft, researchers had previously predicted that there should be one Earth-sized planet in the habitable zone of each red […]
Power outages Every summer, when power grids are pushed to the limits by air conditioning, there’s millions or possibly billions of failures which can occur. A single failure in the system can cause massive power outages throughout entire neighborhoods – or even cities. To be honest, usually, a single failure doesn’t really cause this kind […]
Idaho State University researchers have created uranium crystals by crushing nuclear fuel pellets and heating them in a furnace. This was made with the purpose of studying a single uranium crystal, understanding how heat would flow through it, and ultimately develop safer fuels for nuclear reactors. Uranium crystal. Credit: INL Eric Burgett, a professor at […]
Scientists from Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Oxford have analyzed the compositions of Martian meteorites found on Earth and data from NASA’s rovers, and they reached the conclusion that the Red Planet had an atmosphere pretty rich in oxygen 4 billion years ago. They compared Martian rocks with meteorites, and the fact […]
Rock permeability in the geologic fault that unleashed China’s 2008 quake shows that fractures mend quicker than was thought. A devastating earthquake The 2008 Sichuan earthquake struck at 02:28:01 PM China Standard Time, with a magnitude of 8. It came as quite a surprise, as the area is not particularly active from a seismic point […]
The Voyager 1 has truly gone where no man has gone before – the brave shuttle is now more than 11 billion miles (18 billion kilometers) from the sun, closer and closer to becoming the first man-made object to reach interstellar space. To me, it’s just baffling that we sent something 18 billion kilometers from […]
A near-Earth object (NEO) is a Solar System object whose orbit brings it into proximity with Earth; now, the 10.000th near-Earth object, asteroid 2013 MZ5 was discovered, on the night of June 18, 2013, by the Pan-STARRS-1 telescope located on the summit of the Haleakala crater on Maui. Out of the 10.000 discovered NEOs, over […]
Mammals can naturally regenerate the very top of their fingers and toes after amputation; starting from this idea, researchers have demonstrated the mechanism that describes this process, and explain how stem cells from nails could play a pivotal role in future regeneration of entire fingers. A study conducted on mice showed that the chemical signal […]
Is there something that graphene can’t do? It’s the world’s strongest material, even when it has flaws, a graphene aerogel is also the lightest material known, it’s great for sensors, for headphones, it repairs itself, and boasts a swarm of other features and capabilities. Now, researchers from Manchester University have shown that they can create […]
Leprosy, or Hansen’s disease (HD), is a chronic infection caused by the bacteria Mycobacterium leprae and Mycobacterium lepromatosis. It was quite a common disease in Europe until the 16th century. Now, researchers have extracted DNA from skeletons that were 1,000 years old, analyzing the disease genetic code and comparing it to that of new strains, […]
Scientists at The University of Nottingham have come across what can be a monumental discovery, demonstrating for the first time a new layer of the human cornea. The layer, which was described in a paper in Ophthalmology, could help surgeons to dramatically improve outcomes for patients with severe cornea affections and those undergoing surgery. The […]
More and more discoveries seem to hint at a watery past for Mars. Now, NASA research shows that hunks of frozen carbon dioxide (dry ice) may glide down some Martian sand dunes on cushions of gas similar to miniature hovercraft, plowing away as they go down. This study could explain one of the mysteries of […]
Typically on Earth, days usually have a temperature maximum somewhere after lunch, and a minimum during the night. But for Mars, things are pretty different: “We see a temperature maximum in the middle of the day, but we also see a temperature maximum a little after midnight,” said Armin Kleinboehl of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory […]
Astronomers have discovered 26 likely black holes in the Andromea Galaxy – the biggest number of black holes ever found in a galaxy except for our own. Black holes are pretty difficult to detect, because they emit no light of their own – they are only observed by light given off by material which falls […]
Hours and hours spent at computers or gaming consoles do have their advantages – not only do they train reaction times and adaptation, but they also train the brain to make better and faster use of visual input, according to Duke University researchers. “Gamers see the world differently,” said Greg Appelbaum, an assistant professor of […]
A new study conducted by researchers from Ohio University concluded that both men and women will lie about their behavior to match cultural expectations. Well now, this is a new one – who would have thought people actually lie to have sex? But it gets even better – they used student behavior for this study. […]
It seems to me that we’ve just began to scratch the surface of what we know about autistic spectrum disorder (ASD). It’s been recently shown that autism is linked with child prodigies and that for some reason, autism rates continue to increase, especially in male population. Now, according to researchers at Vanderbilt University and the […]
As we told you on ZME Science a while ago, we are nearing a global coffee crisis – if today’s trends continue, computer models show that Arabica coffee will become extinct in 70 years. Still, the taste for the drink increases more and more, even as more and more shadow is cast on its supposed […]
