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Anti-baldness treatments available today work by stimulating hair follicle health or slow down hair loss. There is no available method that promotes the growth of new hair, however. You might have heard of hair transplants, but this typically involves transplanting hair from another area of the hair, like the back of the head, to the […]
Yeah, I know – for heaven’s sake is there an app for this too now? It seems so. Draper Laboratory, a not-for-profit research and development lab based in Cambridge, Mass, is currently testing a mobile app that may one day actually see the battlefield and help soldiers order airstrikes simply by using their smartphones. The better […]
Some of you might find it surprising to hear that a lot of animals engage in homosexual behavior. Close to 1,500 species, ranging from primates to gut worms, have been observed engaging in such behavior and this is well documented for 500 of them. No one comes close to insects and spiders, though, which have […]
A 2013 study by MIT indicates that 53,000 early deaths per year occur because of vehicle emissions. Cleaner, more efficient vehicles have been a priority for automakers for years now, but these cars still directly pollute anyway. Electric vehicles, while with current technology still indirectly pollute through their carbon footprint during manufacturing and charging (remember […]
Merging road cars with airplanes into a two-in-one purpose vehicle may seem like a SciFi endeavor, but how truly crazy is this idea? Although we’re far from seeing people hovering to work in a Jetson’s-like craft or mid-air traffic jams like in the Fifth Element, some people believe street-legal cars that can both run on […]
German researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) have achieved a new world record for wireless data transmission after they successfully reached 100 gigabits/second over a distance of 20 meters and at a frequency of 237.5 GHz. This translates into a transfer rate of 12.5 gigabytes per second – equivalent to exchanging the contents of a blue-ray disk or […]
Scientists at Rice University have developed a method that combined graphene nanoribbons (GNRs) and a polymer to produce a lightweight storage medium for compressed gas. The resulting material may prove to be extremely useful in the auto industry where manufacturers are trying use compressed natural gas to its fullest potential or in the beverage industry […]
After analyzing thousands of tissue samples, scientists from the UK have found that there may be twice as many people carrying variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob prions – the human form of mad cow disease. According to the researchers, this is the most robust prevalence measure to date across a wide range of age groups. Mad cow disease, or bovine […]
An art project offers a glimpse into how felines might see the world.
Also known as the paiche or the pirarucu, the arapaima is one of the most fascinating species of fish in the world. It’s one of the largest freshwater fish in the world, and certainly the biggest in South America, being a native to the Amazon Basin and nearby lakes and swamps. These arapaima are absolutely huge, most spanning 2.5 […]
What’s the first thing you notice when you first look at a person? Is it the shoes? The eyes? The nose? The mouth? There’s one thing to consciously notice and another to passively acquire data, something the brain constantly does. Harvard researchers have found that the first things the brain recognizes when interacting with other […]
Ever found yourself in a heated debate with a friend where facts and reasonable arguments simply don’t seem to register? It can be extremely frustrating, shouting makes it even worse. It’s even worse when this happens in an official setting where the stakes are much more important than convincing a family member or friend, like […]
Prosthetic limbs have gone an incredible long way in recent years. Brain-computer interfaces, couples with incredibly articulated artificial limbs can now allow a disabled individual to move an artificial hand (with up to seven degrees of freedom!) and individual fingers just by thinking about the movement the person wants to the limb to perform. Powerful […]
Reconciling modern western science, which deals with matters pertaining to the external, physical realm, and ancient monastic studies, which delve into the inner self , can be daunting task if not … impracticable. For the past three years, however, the Dalai Lama and a group of Tibetan monks have been making multiple stays at Emory […]
While there’s a lot of talk and debate around medicinal marijuana, dispensed for its curative properties against cancer and other ailments, not much is discussed on how marijuana addiction can be treated. Marijuana abuse has always been used by governments as a wild card for keeping it illegal, although the actual extent of it has […]
Right after World Space Week ended just last week – an event that celebrates the anniversary of the signing of the Outer Space Treaty that prohibits the militarization of space – Russia made a test launch for one of its new types of intercontinental ballistic missiles; missiles capable of launching their nuclear warhead payload from outer […]
Scientists from Germany have developed by accident a peculiar new substance consisting of 12-sided, non-repeating atomic units. Typically this weird structure is called a quasicrystal, a chemical structure thought impossible a few decades ago. Pioneering work on this subject landed Professor Daniel Shechtman the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2011. Klaus Meinel, Stefan Forster and Wolf Widdra, scientists […]
How do organs such as the heart or kidneys know when to stop growing? A number of theories have been proposed to answer this, the most entrenched of which dating back from 1952, when the infamous Alan Turing used math to show how biological cell patterns form and how these knew when to stop division. Turing […]
Recently the Times Higher Education global ranking of the top 400 universities in the world has been unveiled. For the third time in a row, California Institute of Technology ranks on top, while Harvard University, Oxford University, Stanford University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology round out the top five schools in the 2013–2014 rankings. The Times […]
Drinking until the early hours of dawn may be exhilarating for some, however the next day everything seems to tumble over as the mind is assaulted by a barrage of hangover attacks. There are a number of popular home-brewed remedies against hangover: eating eggs, sipping a bit of castor oil, Vitamin B effervescent pills, tomato […]
A joint project between scientists at NASA and MIT is focusing on creating a new kind of microscope that uses neutrons instead of beams of light or electrons to create high-resolution images. Since the subatomic particles are electrically neutral, such a microscope would allow scientists to peer through places otherwise inaccessible today, like inside metals […]
Using ultrasound radiation, researchers at University of Bristol (UK) have devised a computer interface that basically allows users to interact with a digital screen without touching it. Sure the Kinect or Leap Motion does this already, the catch is that this system also provides haptic (touch) feedback. So, whenever a user traces a motion in […]
Through the halls of TedxDetroit last week, participants were introduced to an unfamiliar and unlikely guest – a remote controlled cyborg cockroach. RoboRoach #12 as it was called can be directed to either move left or right by transmitting electrical signals through electrodes attached to the insect’s antennae via the Bluetooth signals emitted by a smartphone. […]
Just a few moments ago, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics to Francois Englert and Peter Higgs on Tuesday for their 1964 postulation of the existence of the Higgs boson. The elementary particle was finally confirmed in 2012 by a team of international researchers using the Large Hadron Collider […]
Yesterday was Neil deGrasse Tyson’s 55th birthday, an astrophysicist, director of the Hayden Planetarium, and popularizer of science. Nearly two years ago, during one of his Ask Me Anything’s on reddit, deGrasse Tyson answered one of the questions posed there by a fellow redditor asking “Which books should be read by every single intelligent person on […]
In theory, the philosophy regarding the value of a human life is rather straightforward: all human life should be treated equally and offered equal rights. Now, in practice this doesn’t necessarily happen. We all have prejudice, we all are afflicted by bias and in case of a dire situation, most people would first try to […]
A common assumption in human evolution is that our early ancestors first developed bipedal locomotion and only then did they developed dexterous hands capable of using tools, since these were free to be used no longer being required for walking. A new research by a team of Japanese scientists proved this long-standing assumption wrong, however, […]
Physicists have been dreaming of achieving controlled nuclear fusion for decades, and year by year we’ve been getting closer to turning it into reality. A recent paper published in the journal Physics of Plasmas reports improvements in the design of an experimental set-up capable of igniting a self-sustained fusion reaction with high yields of energy. Researchers at […]
A team of scientists, part of a collaborative effort involving multiple Universities from the U.S., are proposing to take 3D printing one step further by adding a new dimension – time. Their work involves building a new class of materials that can morph, change their physical properties and functionality over time based on external stimuli […]
Last week we showed you some great fluid dynamics at work – water bridges between two beakers connected to high voltage current. Water and fluids in particular sometimes behave in amazing ways under certain conditions. Today, I’d like to show another dazzling display: the Leidenfrost effect. This is a phenomenon that occurs when liquid, say […]
Researchers at the Chinese University of Hong Kong have developed a new type of microbots approximately the size of a human cell that can carry more targeted drugs than other such options. These can be guided wirelessly through magnetic field manipulation. The Chinese designed microbots as well as other micro or nano-scale alternatives are meant to […]
A team of brilliant researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University have demonstrated a working particle accelerator, used to accelerate particles like electrons or protons to extremely high energies and probe the Universe’s secrets, which is the size of a typical silicon chip. Typically, particle accelerators range from a […]
After they identified precise groups of cells in mice brain that induce eating and others that curb it, a team of researchers caused full mice to continue eating and hungry mice to stop eating simply by stimulating one of these areas. Their findings could aid in the development of novel drugs that target eating disorders […]
In a mind boggling act, spiders are capable of “ballooning” themselves using silk strands and fly for miles, both in altitude and distance. Small and big spiders alike can do this, although smaller ones are capable of traveling further, and scientists have long theorized the mechanisms of spider ‘flight’. Peter Gorham at the University of […]
Death is ubiquitous and inevitable, and people have learned to cope with it in various ways. In some places of the world, however, death is a more immediate prospect than in others. A team of researchers at Michigan State University led by marketing professor Ayalla Ruvio found that people faced with a mortal threat such as a […]
Researchers at Purdue University found that a local bus system running on natural gas is more economically feasible and less harmful to the environment than the currently employed diesel model. The team lead by Purdue University energy economist Wally Tyner also concluded that natural gas is a better fit than electric-hybrid. The analysis was was specific […]
The World Solar Challenge is a biennial race from Darwin to Adelaide, spanning 3000km of the Australian outback. It attracts teams from around the world, mostly from universities, with 37 teams from 20 countries participating in the 2011 race. What so special about it? All cars need need to be completely solar powered. Innovative and edgy, […]
The state of climate change was recently released by the Intergovernmental Panel on climate change. Among important insights covering global warming, the U.N. panel of scientists have reached an unprecedented consensus stating there’s a 95% probability that all climate change is caused by human activities. The IPCC was established by the United Nations in 1988 to […]
Stanford chemical engineers have developed a theoretical model that sheds light on the electrical conductivity properties of polymers. Their work provides a valuable first step for other researchers to build on, providing an experimental setting for those looking to expand the electrical conductivity of certain polymers (typically plastics) for use in the industry. The word […]
A lot of complex organisms, be them long extinct like dinosaurs or still alive like mammals, present what can only be referred to as a face – a symmetrical arrangement on the head of the animal of eyes, nose and, most importantly, jaw and cheek-bones. Human are particularly adapted to recognizing faces. Thanks to our […]
Orville and Wilbur Wright are credited as the first men who built an aircraft capable of manned controlled flight. The first manned flight by airplane (powered, controlled and heavier than air) occurred on December 17, 1903, when Orville flew at 120 feet (37 m) over the ground for 12 seconds, at a speed of only 6.8 miles per hour […]
In an inspiring breakthrough, Stanford researchers have created the first ever working computer made entirely out of carbon nanotubes. The technology is still very infant, as the computer operates on just one bit of information, and can only count to 32. Theoretically, however, it can be scaled up to perform billions of operations given enough memory. […]
Coma patients, be it inflicted from trauma or initiated by doctors to preserve bodily functions, have their brain activity regularly monitored using electroencephalography (EEG). When in a deep coma the brain activity is described by a flat-pattern signal- basically minimal to no response, one of the limits that nearly prompts establishing brain death. A group […]
An Oxford study that assessed the risks that the introduction of automation in work sectors currently managed by people might have on employment found that 47% of jobs in the U.S. could be replaced by computers/robots. Most of these jobs are low-wage and routine-based, however the study stresses that once with the advent of […]
Using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, followed by observations done with NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and ground-based optical telescopes, astronomers have identified what’s considered to be the densest galaxy found so far in the nearby part of the Universe. Classed as an “ultra-compact dwarf galaxy” and dubbed as M60-UCD1, the density of stars in the galaxy is about 15,000 greater […]
The Issus coleoptratus or issus for short is a small hopping insect that can leap at tremendous speeds and lengths compared to its tiny size. Actually, it’s one of the fastest accelerating creatures known to biologists, capable of accelerating at nearly 400 g’s—a rate more than 20 times what a human body can withstand. To achieve this […]
The experiment: two identical glass beakers filed with deionized water are put into contact. A voltage is applied ( 10,000 to 15,000 volts DC ) to the water inside the beakers and these glasses are slowly moved apart. An amazing physical phenomenon is then observed – a water bridge between the two beakers is formed, as […]
We sleep for roughly a third of our lifetime. All complex organisms sleep, one way or the other, and clearly this is a highly important aspect of biological functioning, otherwise nature wouldn’t had allow it. Oddly enough, we still know very little about what happens during sleep and it’s key functions. For one, it’s been […]
A Harvard longitudinal study that looked at 734,889 people who were diagnosed with cancer between 2004 and 2008 found that married patients were more likely to recover that those that weren’t. The findings don’t particularly suggest that the emotional support itself helps with the healing, but rather the attention offered by the spouse typically prompts patients […]
When the Sahara comes to mind, lush greenery and gorgeous, fast flowing waters might be the last scenery that crosses you. Not too long ago (geological frame), however, the region known today as the Sahara may have been crossed by three giant rivers the size of the Nile, according to a recent palaeohydrological model made […]
