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Meet Susan Barry. She’s an accomplished neurobiologist and a professor of biological studies at Mount Holyoke College. For 48 years of her life, however, Susan was visually stuck in 2-D world. You see, she was born with her eye crossed and could only see in two dimensions. Our eyes each produce an image, and since they’re […]
Yesterday, residents in many parts of the US were treated to a wonderful sight as the sun became wrapped in a rainbow halo. Like a brilliant all seeing eye, the sun cast its rays from a most privileged position prompting some unsuspecting people to believe an alien invasion is nigh. ZME Science folks, however, know […]
A great evolutionary leap forward in our lineage occurred once our hominid ancestors first began to hunt game to acquire meat, which once part of their diet greatly helped them to develop larger brains – especially cooked meat. When exactly this first occurred is controversial to answer. A team of archaeologists, however, have come across […]
A longstanding question in mathematics that has puzzled countless bright minds throughout the ages is the twin prime conjecture. The conjecture, that some believe was first stated by ancient Greek mathematician Euclid of Alexandria, says that that there is an infinite number of prime “twin pairs” – pairs of prime numbers that differ in value by 2. These […]
Only 2% of the human genome is comprised of genes, while the vast majority of genetic material is known as noncoding DNA – that is to say DNA that doesn’t code proteins. A complex plant, the carnivorous bladderwort plant, known as Utricularia gibba, recently became the center of attention for evolutionary biologists after a recently published paper by […]
The nucleus of an atom is closely shaped like a sphere or rugby ball, signifying that mass is evenly distributed inside it. What happens when you encounter an atom whose nucleus stays away from this conventional shape? Well, this would be a good hint to start finding alternative theories, and wouldn’t you know it scientists […]
A matter of great debate and ardent discussion in the field of evolutionary biology today is the transition of complex life from a watery environment to land. So far, there have been numerous speculations put forward in attempt to explain how tetrapods (four-legged land animals) first evolved and washed ashore to start life fresh as […]
Bone is a really awesome material, being hard and flexible at the same time. For something so ubiquitous and studied for so long, it might come as a surprise to some of you to hear that the molecular bone structure of bone has alluded scientists for such a long while. This is because, even though the constituent elements […]
How do you check a multi-billion dollar particle accelerator for defects or malfunctions? Sure, you could use various, equally expensive and sophisticated tools, but in some instances low tech comes in the aid of high tech, say a ping-pong ball. Wait, what ?! Yup, today researchers sent a carefully sterilized, slightly-smaller-than-regulation ping-pong ball through a 2-mile […]
Despite it makes up more than 85% of all matter in the Universe, dark matter, staying true to its name, has eluded scientists for decades ever since they’ve been trying to identify it with high power particle accelerators and detectors. Recent efforts seem to be paying off as various underground labs, as well as those […]
Scientists at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science have synthesized a form of niobium oxide that exhibits extraordinary energy storage capabilities, basically combining the tremendous advantages of lithium-ion batteries and supercapacitors all into one material, while at the same time stripping the individual disadvantages out of the picture. The material is […]
Paleontologists have discovered an ancient nesting site in China where the oldest fossilized dinosaur embryos to date have been found. The find is extremely exciting from multiple perspectives. For one, many embryos in various development stages have been found which will certainly help scientists better their understanding of how dinosaurs grew (how fast, what bones […]
Billions of dollars and decades worth of research have been invested in fusion propelling technology, so that one day we might breach current spaceflight limitations that offer little hope of straying too far from our planet. Researchers at Washington University have recently made great strides forward in this respect and have successfully tested each stage […]
While dinosaur walking and locomotion is a subject of great interest and study for paleontologists, whether some could swim too is a controversial matter. Recent evidence found by an US graduate student sheds new light on the subject and suggests some dinosaurs could paddle for long distances through water with coordinated leg movement. Scott Persons, […]
One of the most mysterious, and weirdest at the same time, phenomenae in quantum physics is quantum entanglement, in which two connected particles can share information instantly despite being separated, no matter the distance. Two particles, or so the theory holds, could be parted by light years in distance and still reflect each others’ stances instantly, […]
Scientists have always tried to answer how speech developed in humans or what are its evolutionary mechanisms, a mystery made even more difficult to unravel since none of our close primate relatives has been granted with even the most primitive forms of speech, or so it was thought. Researchers studying the gelada – a primate […]
Researchers at University of California, Davis have shown for the first time how whole cells and fragments orient and move in response to electrical stimuli like an electric field. Surprisingly enough, their results show that whole and fragments move in opposite directions, despite being governed by the same electric field. The findings help better our understanding […]
This might strike some of you as a surprise, but turbulence, a phenomenon we all encounter on a daily basis – be it while mixing coffee, starting your car (fuel and air mixture) or of course while flying – and which has been first scientifically described some 600 years ago, remains today one of the […]
For decades, the accepted theory was that the mountain chains running from Alaska to Mexico were created from fragments of land scraped off a huge tectonic plate moving eastwards, called the Farallon, that converged with North America and sunk below it over the past 200 million years or so. But alas, geologists and geophysicists aren’t […]
What’s the difference between a solid and liquid? You might find this question trivial – naturally, liquids flow and solids… well, they don’t. From a physical point of view, however, things aren’t that simple. Intrigued by some ever so often encountered exceptions in the current accepted theory that describes the differences between the states of […]
Since it was first described sometime in the 1960s, the ionic thruster has remained confined to hobbyists basements, shadowed by the century old jet engine. Recent research at MIT, however, shows that in some respects the ionic thruster overwhelms the jet engine in terms of efficiency, suggesting that it definitely worth of more attention. “Ionic wind” […]
A paleoclimate study has shown that a huge mass of warm water stretched out from Indonesia over to Africa and South America four million years ago had a huge impact on tropical changes, suggesting that current climate models are a too conservative. The Pliocene era started 5.332 million years ago and lasted until 2.588 million […]
It’s been discussed since the 70s – can hydrogen fuel be the much anticipated solution that ends our full dependence on fossil fuels? A team of researchers from Virginia Tech believes the answer is ‘yes’. They found a way to extract large quantities of hydrogen from any plant, bringing low-cost, environmentally friendly hydrogen-based fuel one […]
Driven by technological demand to breach the gigahertz (10^9 hertz) switching speed limit of today’s magnetic memory and logic devices, a team of researchers have devised a novel technique of switching magnetism that is at least 1000 times faster than that currently employed opening up the terahertz age (10^12 hertz). Hard drives, magnetic random access memory (RAM) and other computing […]
Our close primate relatives, chimpanzees, have been constantly amazing us with their incredible cognitive abilities and personality traits that are so similar to our own. If you believe much of what you undertake today is limited to human cognition only, think again. Chimps do it too – thinking about thinking that is, as the findings […]
A Sri Lanka researcher has discovered a new tarantula species, and it’s literally a big deal. Spanning across eight inches, this tarantula is big enough to cover your entire face and boasts a unique coloring. Ranil Nanayakkara, a local researcher, along with his team found the tiger stripped arachnid while on a typical arachnid expedition […]
A $1.6 billion cosmic ray experiment on the International Space Station has come across evidence of antimatter in space, a remarkable finding that was recently presented during a seminar at CERN and which might help probe the mysteries of dark matter – one of the major components that make up the Universe. The find was made using […]
Florida country radio morning-show hosts Val St. John and Scott Fish are currently serving indefinite suspensions and possibly criminal charges for what can only be described as a successful April Fools. They told their listeners that “dihydrogen monoxide” was coming out of the taps throughout the Fort Myers area – as I’m sure you all […]
New research by The Open University and Lancaster University showed that another type of volcanic eruption in Iceland could cause significant disruption throughout the Old Continent. Published in Geology, the study found magma that is twice as ‘fizzy’ as previously believed, which increases the likelihood of disruptive ash clouds from future eruptions. Magma can […]
Life on Mars The sedimentary processes on Mars have generally been governed by wind, not water – but is this the case where the Curiosity rover is searching for life at the moment. If this is the case (and Curiosity will either confirm or infirm this when it reaches Mount Sharp next year), then odds […]
Usually, the military taps into what science does and uses its technologies – but for once, it was the other way around. Using unmannes planes typically designed for city warfare, scientists were able to keep track of toxic volcanic fumes. The Dragon Eye remote-controlled plane weighs in at just under 6 pounds (2.7 kilograms), with […]
When you think of robots, the first thing you might think of are anthropological-looking tin cans that beep around and perform various tasks (you have SciFi shows to thank for that) or familiar modern day industrial robots that toil away day and night producing goods. As such, a puck-sized robot that doesn’t look like much might […]
In ancient times, Pluto’s Gate (Ploutonion in Greek, Plutonium in Latin) was a place most people would go to any length to avoid; it held a considerable importance in their mythology, celebrate as the gate to the underworld – Pluto being the Roman name for Hades. “This space is full of a vapor so misty […]
After scientists have devised materials that rend objects optically invisible, researchers in Spain have developed a method that allowed them to cloak 3-D objects from sound waves for the first time. While sound cloaking has been demonstrated before, this was the first time that a full 3-D object was concealed. The findings might help engineers […]
If you know your physics (or optics, to be more specific), you’ve probably heard a lot about Fermat’s principle (or the principle of least time). Basically, what it states is that the path taken between two points by a ray of light is the path that can be traversed in the least time. A ray […]
There’s a lot of fuss about climate modeling is definitely a hot one, with the validity of certain models (and models in general) often being brought to question. So how could you test if the today’s models are correct, except for waiting? That’s still a debatable question, but if we were to look at past […]
A while ago, we wrote about the ongoing efforts to pinpoint the cause that gives rise to the thousands of so called “fairy circles” scattered around hundreds of square miles from the edge of the Namib Desert in Angola to South Africa. These great rings of grass that cover whole patches of arid desert have […]
A team of researchers from the US claim they have finally found tangible evidence that will once and for all end the controversy surrounding the Geobacter sulfurreducens, a bacteria that conducts electricity along thin protein filaments, just like a metal. In the scientists’ paper, it’s reported that aromatic amino-acids are central to both the electrical and respiratory functions […]
A team of researchers working at Harvard has measured the magnetic moment of the antiproton with unprecedented precision. “That is a spectacular jump in precision for any fundamental quality of the antiproton measurements. That’s a leap that we don’t often see in physics, at least not in a single step,” said Prof Gerald Gabrielse of […]
It may be a little off to talk about invisibility when we’re not even in the visible spectrum, but ‘invisibility cloak‘ sounds just to awesome not to use it. Using a new kind of cloak that uses a very thin multilayer dielectric coating made of natural material (as opposed to metamaterials which are often used), […]
For more than 50 years since its discovery, the single-celled organism Tetrahymena thermophila has stirred curiosity around its seven sexes. UC Santa Barbara biologists have now found how the creature picks its gender from the slew, and apparently it’s not a matter of choice since the Tetrahymena gender distribution is as random as a game of roulette. The team […]
An international team of physicists have used one of the world’s most powerful lasers to create an unusual kind of plasma made out of hollow atoms, by using a breakthrough technique which involved emptying atoms of electrons from the inside out, instead of working from the outer shells inwards. This bizarre physics experiment shows once again […]
The Iberian lynx is the only wild cat listed as critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), numbering no more than 200 specimens, all of whom are entirely confined to southern Spain. Researchers from the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (IZW) in Berlin recently salvaged embryos and egg cells from a pair of captive […]
Since Einstein first postulated his theories of general relativity, physicists have constructed models describing the Universe that mainly revolve around the idea that the speed of light is constant through vacuum. Two new studies, yet to have been published in peer-reviewed journals, suggest that light through vacuum actually fluctuates, albeit the deviations are infinitesimal. Still, if […]
Aerogels are fantastic materials – typically, they are synthetic porous ultralight material derived from a gel, in which the liquid component of the gel has been replaced with a gas. They are ultra-light, and have numerous practical applications – most notable as insulators, but also in the pharmaceutical and cosmetic industry, in biology and chemistry […]
You’ve probably heard it a few times: the climate is indeed warming up, but it’s all good, because the rate at which it is warming up is slowing down. But a new study published in Geophysical Research Letters analyzing ocean warming (which represents 90% of global warming) claims otherwise. Accelerating global warming Contrary to the […]
When two fluid jets meet, they might coalescence or not depending on a number of factors. The 19th century born John William Strutt, 3rd, also known as Lord Baron Rayleigh made a number of significant contributions to physics during his lifetime, some of his most notable work being in the field of fluids dynamics. It was […]
While taking a walk with her parents on U.K.’s Isle of Wight (map) in 2008, Daisy Morris, who was then no more than 5 years old, came across blackened “bones sticking out of the sand”. Her family took the bones to paleontologist Martin Simpson at the University of Southampton, who, with the help of colleagues, […]
The current leading theory that explains the mass extinction of the dinosaurs – once the dominant group of animals on Earth for millions of years – states that an asteroid impact some 65 million years ago brought their demise, wiping them out along with 70% of all life on the planet. A new study, however, […]
In one of the first articles I’ve ever written on ZME Science, all the way back in 2007 (has it really been 6 years? Wow!), I was telling you about an interesting plan of cooling global temperatures by fertilizing the world’s oceans with iron. This would in cause turn a phytoplankton explosion, which would suck […]
