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NASA astronomers captured a beautiful image of Mars on May 12, when the planet was just 50 million miles away from Earth. Bright snow-capped polar regions and rolling clouds above the rusty landscape show that Mars is a dynamic, seasonal planet, not an inert rock barreling through space.
Few drugs have had a more undeserving bad rep as LSD, but acid is finally making a comeback, it seems.
Kinda looks like the Sarlacc, doesn't it? Well take your geek hat off cause it isn't a sarlacc. Now put your paleontology geek hats on because this is Fossil Friday and we're talking about Zaphrentis phrygia.
ALOS (nicknamed “Daichi”) is a Japanese Earth-observation satellite, developed by JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency), with the main objective of mapping the Earth’s surface, monitoring disasters and providing resource surveying. But now, instead of taking advantage of this satellite’s massive scientific potential, let’s indulge ourselves in some great imagery from it: The Sahara desert The […]
When it comes to photography contests, few do it as good as National Geographic. The Travel Photographer of the Year Contest is now accepting entries, and the competition is already spectacular. Here are just some of the most beautiful entries from the Nature section: “Our Travel Photographer of the Year program is a way to […]
No matter how bad you are at math, you should be able to recognize an equation when you see it, right? Well, that wasn’t the case for a passenger on the plane from Philadelphia to Ontario. This passenger saw a saw a man “suspiciously” writing down a complicated looking formula on a piece of paper and notified […]
Diptera are still alive and kickin' today, and some of them are getting coated in amber as we speak! A nice reminder that fossils are still being formed for future paleontologists to uncover.
It’s the perfect tattoo for people who forget to water their plants: Ukrainian illustrator and tattoo artist Rita Zolotukhina creates “botanical fingerprints”, using actual plants for designs. To create the tattoos, she dips the plants in ink, then presses them on the customer’s body, basing the tattoo on this imprint – much like a stencil. “We don’t […]
Self-driving car tech is moving fast -- so fast the laws haven't had time to catchup.
A team of engineers piggy-backed photosynthesis using a nifty pot called the Bioo Lite. Just place almost any plant inside, add water and plenty of sunlight and you'll be able to charge your phone via the provided USB port up to three times a day. Or so they claim.
As anyone who grows plants in an apartment will tell you, it can be quite a challenge. Space is limited, as is light and it’s so easy to make a mess – this is why I love this new project. It’s really easy to set up a small, cute garden in only minutes. It’s called Livi. […]
A photo posted by Michael Patrick (@mike_pgregory) on Jun 8, 2015 at 6:07am PDT Few things in life are as rewarding as leaving everything behind and going camping. The sheer serenity and pleasure that often accompanies camping is something that’s hard to rival – and hard to replace. I was quite happy to see the #ourcamplife […]
The GIF was first posted by Dr. Christina Hibbert, a clinical psychologist and author of several books. I’m not sure if it helps with anxiety, but it’s quite satisfying to watch – over and over again. It starts out as a simple line, then blooms into a triangle, then a square, pentagon, hexagon, heptagon and […]
It's hard to believe that something so cute can lie at the bottom of the sea, but don't let the appearances fool you.
Elon Musk is one of the most influential entrepreneurs in the tech industry. Here's his one-page resume.
When a species almost one hundred times bigger than you, who has access to nukes and can go to space, discovers your remains a few million years after you die and still decides to call you "monstrosus" you must be doing something very right survival-wise.
They say Australia is the Dry Continent, but you wouldn’t guess that based on this image: The image was created with QGIS using data for 1.3 million streams from Geoscience Australia GEODATA TOPO 250K vector datasets [GitHub code]. This is North-west Queensland: … and the North-east Murray-Darling Basin: But there’s a catch: not all these rivers are permanent […]
Eelume company developed a snake-like robot for underwater maintenance tasks. The deceptively simple robots could drastically reduce operating costs for deep sea rigs.
The world has spoken and the vote has been cast: people want to name the new British Antarctic research ship “Boaty McBoatface”
Each team is defending one hemisphere!
Today, Disney heroines are a lot sassier and willing to take their fate into their own hands, but a problem still persists: even when they have the starring role, they peak only a minority of the dialogue, considerably less than what they did in the '30s and '50s.
"That's not a capitalist market economy anymore," he warned. "That's a feudalist system and it scares … me."
If you don’t travel a lot it’s easy to forget just how big and diverse the world really is – and sure, everyone knows about Paris, London or New York, but villages were where humanity’s culture and spirit was preserved for centuries. Here are just a handful of villages and small towns which brilliantly exhibit the serenity […]
Every picture you're likely to see of it shows planets and moons too close together prevents you from getting a feel of the size of our solar system. A group of friends plans to change that, however.
Helicoprion is an extinct genus of shark-like, cartilaginous fish that lived from the early Permian (~290 m.y. ago) all through to the massive Permian-Triassic extinction episode (roughly 250 m.y. ago.)
That's not how the internet should work...
Some 600 feet deep, at the bottom of the Loch Ness lake in Scotland, researchers have found the much famed monster... but it's not the monster you're thinking of. It's only a prop from the 1970 movie The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes.
Weather forecasts have gotten significantly better in recent years – not because we have a much better understanding of weather has gotten much better, but rather because advanced computers allow us to develop more complex models. You can generally predict weather for 2-3 days, and in some cases of up to 7-10 days. Anything that goes […]
This huge destroyer is apparently too stealthy for its own good – at least at peace. The U.S. Navy’s new Zumwalt-class guided missile destroyer (DDG 1000) is so hard to detect that its crew plans to sail with giant reflectors just to make sure other ships can see it. The USS Zumwalt (DDG-1000) is the lead ship of the Zumwalt […]
The first Earth Observing System (EOS) satellite called Terra (previously AM-1) was launched on December 18, 1999. ASTER data contributes to a wide array of global change-related application areas including vegetation and ecosystem dynamics, hazard monitoring, geology and soils, hydrology, and land cover change. It’s also perfect background material for your home PC. But it’s not […]
Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn is one of the most talented and famous artists in human history. It's been almost four centuries since he created his unique masterpieces. Now, a team of artists, researchers and programmers wanted to see if they can create a new Rembrandt painting - through a computer algorithm.
Composite metal foam (CMF) is light, but strong -- it can even stop bullets!
Enercon's E-126 turbine towers 125 meters high and can generate a staggering 7.58 MW of electricity.
Laser hair removal has picked up a lot of steam, becoming one of the most popular cosmetic treatments in the world. It’s the process of removing unwanted hair by means of exposure to pulses of laser light that destroy the hair follicle… but how does that work? This video explains it, in almost excruciating detail (hair […]
NOAA has released a photograph of this year's golden retriever migration. The animals are returning to shore after their mating run, where a new generation of puppies will be born.
Researchers from Poon University in Seoul have figured out why some of the plants in Korea’s capital seem to grow much better than others, despite living in the same conditions and being given the same nutrients. It’s all about the dirty talk, they report. “There’s something about swearing which motivates plants to grow better, it’s like […]
Scientists have identified several new species of spider in the southern United States which can pose dangers to citizens – one species especially, Arachnia Donaldrumpfus is believed to be extremely dangerous. Biologists have suspected for quite a while that potentially dangerous wildlife lurks in urban and sub-urban North America, so Michigan Circular University researcher Christian Aucus […]
You know those maps of the world with horizontal lines across the ocean, “this is what you see when you look across the ocean”? Well yeah, they’re no good. As cartographer Andy Woodruff indicates, they’re way, way off. When you look at the ocean, what are you seeing on the other side? It would be tempting to […]
India-based company Bakeys has started producing edible spoons to try and fight world-wide plastic waste from disposable cutlery. Not only eco-friendly, but also delicious!
A new nanomaterial printing method could make it both easier and cheaper to create devices such as wearable chemical and biological sensors, data storage and integrated circuits -- even on flexible surfaces such as paper or cloth. The secret? Plamsa.
They say you can’t fold a paper seven times, because its resistance gets too strong. The Hydraulic Press Youtube Channel set up to see if that myth really is true – with a hydraulic press, of course. The result was quite surprising (more info after the video): The first folds went pretty easily by hand, […]
Ammonite fossils are among the most common in the world, with their characteristic shape and chambered shell. But did you ever wonder what the deal is with those chambers? Ammonites are a group of cephalopod animals that lived as swimmers in the shallow parts of the ancient oceans. They were extremely successful, emerging in the early […]
Well, technically if you're not a space pirate, you'll be prosecuted by the laws governing your home country. On the International Space Station, that's another story.
If you've ever seen one up close you probably know that corals are insanely beautiful, but not exactly action packed -- these animals live at their own pace, one so slow that to a human being they might seem frozen in time. But what would coral look like if it lived in 'normal' speed?
What does a weird tendon on your inner wrist have to do with evolution? This video explains.
Los Alamos is always blowing stuff up. The Lab burst into the public consciousness 70 years ago with the biggest explosion known to humanity—the world’s first atomic bomb. Since then, Los Alamos has continued to lead the nation in explosives science and engineering. Now, some of the researchers working there went to answer questions on […]
The European Meteorological Satellite Organization (EUMETSAT) in collaboration with the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released a time-lapse 4K video of the weather of 2015 -- and it's awesome.
A new type of metamaterial that can grow when stretched, with possible applications for medical equipment and satellites, was inspired by an unlikely source -- ancient Islamic art.
Most of us know Alan Alda for his iconic portrayal of Hawkeye Pierce, the sharp-tongued but kind-hearted field doctor from the series M.A.S.H. But Alda is increasingly involved in science communication, being a visiting professor at the Alan Alda Centre for Communicating Science, at Stony Brook University in New York. This is a recent interview with […]
Researchers have manipulated the genome of chicken embryos so that they develop dinosaur-like bones in their lower legs.
