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A team of international researchers from US and China have employed a novel method to link enzymes together and then encapsulate them in a polymer shell. This enables the enzymes to work sequentially in chemical reactions, just like in nature. To illustrate their enzyme batch, a group of mice were intoxicated with alcohol and then injected […]
Researchers at University of Utah have recently demonstrated that it is indeed feasible to construct a topological insulator from organic compounds. Topological insulators are deemed very important by scientists because of their unique property of conducting electrons on their edges, while at the same time acting as an insulator on the inside. These capabilities make it […]
Astronomers at NASA‘s Chandra X-ray Observatory were delighted to come across one of the rarest events in the Universe, after they came across an atypical kind of supernova. To top it over, the supernova’s remnants may have given birth to the Milky Way’s youngest black hole estimated thus far. After a massive star, say ten times […]
Chances have it, if you’re working in the field of manufacturing, medicine, research or even sales, that some of your co-workers are robots. Which is no wonder, since robots today are a lot cheaper and efficient than most humans when simple or repetitive tasks are required, or on the contrary when high precision and delicate […]
Using 21st century nanotechnology, researchers have discovered a new mineral in samples from a meteorite discovered in Antarctica in 1969. The meteorite is 4.5 billion years old and originates from an asteroid orbiting between Mars and Jupiter. The new mineral has alluded scientists for some time since its discovery by a Japanese expedition team to Antarctica […]
MIT engineers have created genetic circuits in bacterial cells that not only perform logic functions, but also remember the results, encode them in the cell’s DNA and pass it on for generations to come. Biotechnology The circuits, which are described in Nature Biotechnology could have a swarm of appplications, most notably long-term environmental sensors, efficient […]
Researchers at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, have developed a three-legged silicon robot that uses chemical reactions to help it leap up to 30 times its own height. Combustion is typically used in hard systems like internal combustion engines where the heat generated by the chemical reaction can be withstood, but this latest demo proves that […]
Obviously there has to be a limit to how much to a tree can grow, but what exactly influences and in term limits the height of a tree? For a long time researchers have noticed that the taller the tree, the shorter its leaves. Recently, a team of scientists found that there has to be […]
Underneath hundreds of meters of Antarctic ice lie a slew of lakes, completely isolated from the outside world, some for thousand of years. For years, scientists have been trying to imagine what life in such a system might look like, if any. Just recently an US Antarctic expedition found a small body of water huddled in […]
There’s a common stereotype that depicts athletes as being grunts that are all brawn and no brain. In reality, the truth couldn’t be farther. Athletes, the good ones at least, seemingly posses an above average intelligence, and a recent study by cognitive scientists at University of Montreal adds further weight to this statement. In the study […]
For the past twenty years there’s been a debate whether the mammal explosion that eventually made the class of animals dominant on Earth happened before or after the end of the dinosaur reign. Scientific papers and various evidence supporting both views have surfaced along the years, but a recent massive study conducted by a collaborative […]
It’s remarkable what astonishing finds archaeologists today still manage to discover. A few years ago, no less than 17 new pyramids were discovered in Egypt. Recently, in neighboring Sudan a most impressive site filled with densely packed pyramids was unearthed, proving once again that there are still many hidden relics left in the world. The find was […]
The Kepler mission has proven to be invaluable to science today thanks to its formidable discoveries of exoplanets in our galaxy. It’s rather remarkable how scientists can tell so much from so little, like the size, mass, orbit and sometimes even composition of a distant planet all by analyzing light. On other hand, it’s frustrating […]
A new carbon dating technique developed by Australian scientists may warrant a new extinction theory for the Neanderthals, which according to the researchers made their last stand some 50,000 years ago or 15,000 years earlier than previously thought. If this is indeed a fact, then our distant extinct relatives may have never interacted with modern […]
The remains of the legendary Richard III have been found beneath a Leicester car park – where else? DNA, carbon dating and the whole shebang showed, beyond reasonable doubt, that the remains belong to the king, explained lead archaeologist Richard Buckley, from the University of Leicester, so the finding I was telling you about a […]
They say that the bully is actually the victim – and studies on adolescent rats seem to support this idea; younger rats subjected to a stressful environment turn out to be aggressive adults, behaviors that may be explained by accompanying epigenetic changes and altered brain activity. Whoa, let’s slow down a little. Much like humans, […]
Vaccines have become synonymous to needles, and for a lot of people they’re the subject of horror stories since childhood. Typically, a vaccine works by injecting an inactive virus into the body, such that when the real virus reaches the host body, the immune system will be quick to act and destroy it before it gets a […]
The advent of antibiotics has spared humanity of a great deal of suffering and has saved countless lives through the years. Infectious diseases do not bore too easily and have always put out a fight, though. The bad news is that they’re winning and as the battle rages on, more and more strains become resistant […]
As of 2008, just about one in 100 people in the US is currently living in jail. This amounts to millions and millions of people currently incarcerated or roughly half of the total number of jailed people in the world. As to what are the social and legal causes that have lead to such an […]
Though Siberia stretches across about 10% of the world’s land surface, it’s only occupied by 0.5% of the world’s population, which isn’t too hard to explain why. Recent temperature measurements read on average -25°C for the month of January, but it’s not unheard of to experience temperatures below -40°C. Extreme weather, temperatures and terrain, however, call […]
If there’s something ever wrong with ping-pong guns is that they fire too slow. So, Mark French, a mechanical engineer at Purdue University in Indiana, along with a couple of his graduate students took it upon themselves to finally design a gun that can fires ping-pong balls at supersonic speeds. Of course, this makes for […]
For a few years now, Google has been developing what it claims to be the next generation in user interface, set to revolutionize the way to interact with the world. The project is called Google Glass and apart from a few incredible demos, these is still very little known about the product, apart from the […]
Oil spills, especially the big ones, can cause irremediable damage to the local ecosystem. Unfortunately once in a while, there’s a catastrophic disaster either from an oil rig or oil tanker leak, but these are the big ones – the ones you hear about on TV, since frankly anyone today with an internet connection can […]
It’s a bird! No, it’s a plane! No, it’s… microbes ?! High up in the atmosphere, 10.000 meters above ground, researchers have found over 100 species of bacteria doing just fine in stormy clouds. Each year, hundreds of millions of tons of dust, water and man-maned pollutans make their way into the atmosphere, often traveling […]
Scientists at Cornell University may have stumbled across the cornucopia gene for crops, after scientific investigations revealed that a certain gene allows some plants to photosynthesize 50% more efficient than most common plants, including crops like wheat or rice. The researchers hope through genetic manipulation that they may transfer this gene to crops, allowing for […]
Dung beetles just climbed another ladder on the animal coolness scale – they are the only known species to navigate via the Milky Way. The tiny insects can orient themselves to the bright stripe of light generated by our galaxy, and move in a line relative to it, according to experiments conducted in South Africa. […]
I remember years ago, when I got my first computer – it had a storage capacity of 40 MB. A few years after that, I got a 1 GB hard drive, and nowadays, 1 TB is quite the standard – that’s a growth by a factor of about 250.000. However, data storage capacity has slowed […]
A group of researchers at MIT have devised a new method for infiltrating cells with large molecules such as nanoparticles or proteins that is a lot more non-intrusive and doesn’t damage the cell. Imaging target cells or growing more stable stem cells might thus be possible with this method. Every cell has a membrane, which […]
Hydrogen is an extremely appealing energy source, despite the immense hurdles than come with storing it. Still fuel cells based on hydrogen are extremely useful, and a team of researchers at University at Buffalo may have found the fastest and most effective way of obtaining this element. Basically, it’s as easy as adding water. The scientists […]
Researchers looked at data that described people involved in car accidents and, after balancing factors like airbag and seat belt, found that obese people are at a much greater risk of dying during a collision than people of normal weight. The study holds a rather important significance since it might prompt car manufacturers to rethink […]
As computing power grows and becomes ever more accessible, passwords become easier to crack day by day. If you want to make it really easy for hackers and automated crawlers to retrieve your secure information then input passwords like common names, pets, sequences of numbers and symbols or birthdays. Yup, they’ll gobble these right up. […]
Exactly 50 years ago, Cambridge researchers Watson and Crick published a monumental paper that for the first time described the intertwined double helix DNA structure which carries the fundamental genetic code for life. The discovery led to an explosion of advancements in the fields of genetics and health, but also in chemistry or computing. Now, researchers, […]
Researchers at Duke University studied the telomeres – the tip of chromosomes that protect them – in a group of children and found that those who had experienced trauma had their telomeres shorter than those that hadn’t. These chromosome tips, which can be viewed akin to shoelace tips, have been linked by scientists with aging […]
Using combined imagery delivered by the High-Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) and recent color channel data, the European Space Agency has recently discovered the vestiges of an ancient river that used to flow through Mars’ highlands. The river is 1,000 miles long and at some points 4 miles wide and 1,000 feet deep. The images are simply […]
Scientists at Duke University have devised a metamaterial that uses microwaves to image objects or scenes in real time, all through a set-up no larger than a book. Currently, the same imaging is being made with robust, huge machinery – the kind you see in airports used to scan people before they board flights – […]
At his recent keynote 2013 Consumer Electronics Show (CES), Las Vegas, Tim Huckaby dazzled the audience with his predictions for the future in user interface and technology. His presentation was initially structured as a showcase of possible developments in the next five years, but Huckaby didn’t stop there and also talked a bit about how […]
Scientists have developed a new surface, which they call “superomniphobic”, that can repel virtually any liquid, even the most troublesome like blood or highly concentrated acids. Their findings brings us a step closer to manufacturing stain-proof, spill-proof clothing, protective garments and other products. Currently there is a wide range of clothing and garments that are water proof and offer protection […]
In an amazing breakthrough, scientists at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) have for the first time demonstrated an extremely appealing, yet still obscure concept – intelligent molecules. By definition intelligence is the ability to learn and understand or deal with new situation and the latter is exactly what the researchers’ polymer molecules can do, namely react to external stimuli and reversibly […]
Researchers at University of Toronto and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zurich) have recently published a paper that claims exotic plant species do indeed eliminate native plants from the wildlife ecosystem, contrary to previous reports that found the threat unreal. The ecologists argue that reports heralding invasive plants as non threatening are based […]
The whole point of technology is that of aiding mankind, and it has done so since the advent of fire and will continue to do for a long time. In today’s fast pacing world, however, technology is evolving so fast that it has caught the workforce by surprise. Of course, we’re primarily referring to robots, […]
Along the years DARPA has proposed, tested and implemented a slew of preposterous sounding projects like the Minority Report-like interface threat detection system, the firefighting robot or the surrogate soldier program that aims at deploying robots that bind to a soldier’s will just like the movie Avatar. Yes, the agency seems to have a thing for movie […]
A materials science researcher at MIT has devised a novel technique using nanoparticles that allows heat flow to be treated much in the same way as light. This means that like electromagnetic waves, heat was successfully focused and reflected. The findings could help spark further research which might one day aid in the development of […]
Astronomers from Britain’s University of Central Lancashire have recently published a landmark paper that describes the largest known structure in the Universe, a group of quasars so large it spans 4 billion light-years across at its longest end. The study holds broader consequences, not just because of the encountered astronomical milestone, since it challenges Albert Einstein’s Cosmological […]
Researchers who had performed the first high detail 3-D reconstruction of early tetrapod (four-legged animals) backbones claim the first land based animals moved by dragging themselves around the ground much in the same way modern day seals behave. The scientists used the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble to bombard 360-million year old fossils with high […]
The ultimate goal of all current Mars missions and observations is that of finding evidence of life or, on the contrary, collect data that would once and for all flag the planet as barren and devoid of life. Recent findings from scientists at University of Florida both help ease and complicate this quest after it’s […]
Children are veritable knowledge sponges that can appropriate an intense amount of skills in a short amount of time. As we age, starting from the end of puberty, people seem to loose their ability of learning new skills as intense as children do. For instance, if a 30 year old French man decided to starting […]
It should be no surprise for anybody that a major earthquake is way overdue in LA; a study has shown that the area has a 99% chance of a big earthquake in the next 30 years (well, 25 years, since the study was conducted in 2008). Even with what should have been a huge wake […]
Besides being a great family time activity and an awesome display of art for some who have way too much time on their hands, dominos are also a great mathematics exercise. Although most dominos are the same size, it’s well documented that the first domino piece can topple a second larger domino piece, which in […]
Hearing loss is a grave healthcare problem around the world, with 50 million cases in the US alone. The most common type is sensorineural hearing loss caused by the degradation and loss of sensory hair cells in the cochlea (the auditory part of the inner ear). While implants and various other hearing aids can improve hearing […]
A recent study conducted by Californian and Japanese seismologists claims that stable fault areas might not be so stable, in terms of earthquake generation. The controversial findings suggest that creeping fault behavior (more on this in the next paragraph) is actually not only instable, but also capable of creating fast slipping earthquake ruptures. Faulty issues […]
