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A lot of Americans are buying into the electric car dream. As noble as this may be, despite the fact that EVs are far from being pure ‘green’, there are numerous challenges faced by the industry which have deterred a lot of folks from switching to electric cars such as the one offered by Tesla Motors. […]
India is a sort of economic paradox. Its general population is among the poorest in the world, yet it is still wealthy in many respects. It wouldn’t be a mistake to call India a space superpower, at least in the way the term gets tossed in the press. Attesting this fact is the country’s recently […]
The U.S. is not only the biggest energy consumer per capita in the lord, but also the leading media consumer. An estimated 6.9 zettabytes of media flows to individuals and households in a year or 6.9 million million gigabytes. That’s almost twice as much than in 2008 and according to the latest “How Much Media? 2013 […]
After performing an exhaustive quantitative research across numerous plant species, scientists at UCLA’s College of Letters and Science have found that leaf design is governed by a set of fundamental mathematical expressions, underling once again the elegance of nature. The basis of their research was “allometric analysis”, that is to say the study of an object’s evolution […]
Although the Kepler Space Telescope itself is defunct due to a malfunction that rendered it out of operation some months ago, the mission goes on as scientists churn through massive amounts of data gathered by Kepler, enough to keep them busy for years to come. One of the fruits of Kepler is an exoplanet called Kepler […]
What is creativity? Although definitions vary, one might be inclined to say that creativity, ultimately, is anything that has to do with ideas – generating them, building them, transforming them into reality. There are a lot of tests that measure creativity and chances are if you’ve been to a job interview recently you might have […]
A team of researchers at Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca, Romania (Transylvania) claim they have developed artificial blood which has so far behaved promisingly during preliminary tests on mice. If actually found effective in the long-run on humans as well, the new kind of artificial blood might aid in battling blood transfusion shortages all over the world, […]
What difference does a grade make? Quite a lot, if we’re to consider the latest findings from Duke University researchers. According to their study, the age at which attention problems emerge makes a critical difference in a child’s later academic performance. Other studies have noted the link between early attention problems and academic achievement. But the […]
Researchers at University of Cincinnati have developed an unique all-in-one nanostructure: it can both diagnose cancer cells and deliver its drug payload for treatment at the same time. Other nano carriers are typically built to serve one of the two purposes, not both at once. To achieve this, the researchers fashioned a double-sided surface, called […]
Each of NASA’s Great Observatories – Hubble, Spitzer and Chandra – have been designed to peer through the Universe in a characteristic manner. The telescopes have provided along the years massive amount of astronomical data and have helped scientists make important discoveries. What if you combine each of the telescopes’ strong points to assemble one […]
In science we have what are called “laws”, be them Newton’s Laws of Motion or Archimedes’ Principle, because these mathematical expressions describe systems in a rigid set of boundaries, essentially helping predict how these systems will behave in the future. What about overly complex, highly dynamic systems; could we use a single mathematical equation to […]
Infertility affects 7.3 million people in the U.S, representing 12% of women of childbearing age, or 1 in 8 couples. Medical advancements in the field have sought to correct infertility anomalies, some with staggering results. For instance, we reported last month how an Australian infertile woman became the first person to get pregnant through ovarian […]
More than on one occasion, the Enterprise’s chief medical officer Dr. Leonard McCoy laments how barbaric surgeons of the XXth century must have been to actually cut patients during surgery. While many of Star Trek’s memorabilia are far from having become reality, medicine has made important strides forward in some aspects comparable to Doc. McCoy’s […]
Capable of illuminating in a wide array of pure colors and operating at high efficiency, quantum dot LEDs are set to become the future’s foremost illuminating medium. However, at this time, these fantastic quantum dot light emitting diodes are limited by a physical effect which triggers after a certain photon barrier is crossed, becoming highly […]
Mysterious and elusive, dark matter has escaped scientists time and time again; yet confirming its existence is quintessential to current efforts of studying the Universe. With this in mind, detecting dark matter has become one of the foremost goals in the physics of the 21st century. An experiment at MIT, called DarkLight, aims to prove […]
One of the greatest mysteries scientists have been trying to reveal is how inanimate chemicals joined to produce life. It’s definitely one of the biggest questions scientists are trying to answer, and the challenges are numerous since it’s very difficult to appreciate what the exact conditions necessary for this to happen were billions of years […]
Craig Venter may just be the most arrogant high-profile scientist today, but in his defense the man has a lot to show for. You might not remember the name, but you might remember his hallmark achievement – the creation of the world’s first synthetic life. Now, with the release of his second book, Life at the […]
Miners trapped inside a mine following a collapsing tunnel or skiers covered in deadly snow after an avalanche might be found and rescued in the future by search teams using an improved form of radar device inspired by dolphin echolocation. The resulting radar can track things more accuracy and at a greater speed than conventional radar. […]
Paulo Lozano, of MIT’s Space Power and Propulsion Laboratory, is a space enthusiast for as long as he can remember, growing up with Carl Sagan’s Cosmos and spending much of his childhood in bookstores studying science and other worlds in our solar system. His passion and hard work eventually landed him a job at MIT where […]
The 19 days long Government shutdown was finally lifted recently, as thousands of employees returned to their day jobs. The consequences of this stalemate period are long and broad, despite its seemingly short time frame. I won’t go into the politics and mechanics of this rather unpleasant event which will most likely go down in […]
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 […]
