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Crossing the riverbed of Carrizo Creek in Oklahoma, a series of tracks made by a two-legged dinosaur have been preserved in time for 150 million years. The tracks reveal a most clumsy scene, as the dinosaur in question slipped for a second before going back to his beaten path. When first analyzedin the 1980s, paleontologists […]
Some people are better navigators than others, i.e. men better than women. Whether you can make your way effortlessly through the woods to reach a safe house or get seemingly lost on your way home from a different bus stop, it doesn’t make that much of a different at a sensory level. Navigation is often […]
There’s been a lot of praise and finger pointing alike around the hydrogen economy, and whether or not fuel cells can be scaled to reasonable levels i.e. becoming actually useful. There are a lot of problems with fuel cells in terms of their economy. Fuel cells are some of the most efficient energy converters current […]
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. […]
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 […]
A giant platypus fossil, measuring more than 1m long (3ft) was discovered in Queensland, Australia. The animal lived 5-15 million years ago, as paleontologists explain in the journal Vertebrate Paleontology. Until now, the oldest fossil was dated 100.000 years ago. As if the evolutionary status of the platypus wasn’t extraordinarily complicated as it is, this […]
Healthy wildlife populations aren’t always good news. Sweden’s largest nuclear power plant had to be shut down for three weeks in September after a mass of jellyfish clogged its cooling water inlet. A swarm of baby jellyfish essentially destroyed Northern Ireland’s farmed-salmon population in 2008 through stings and oxygen deprivation. A Japanese trawler capsized in […]
Any dog lover will tell you if you see a dog wagging its tail it’s a sign that the dog is happy. Apparently, there are subtle signals given off by variations in tail wagging and these are used to communicate with other dogs what their stance is. Researchers at University of Trento, Italy found that happy dogs […]
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 […]
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 […]
Looking close at suspicious marks and cuts present in the skulls of saber-tooth like cats which roamed North America millions of years ago, paleontologist Clint Boyd of the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology found what he believes are clear signs that the animals used to ambush and kill their own kind. Fierce predators native […]
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 […]
A new study made by a team of international scientists found that English-speaking toddlers learn the concept of number “one” faster than than Japanese- and Chinese-speaking kids, while Arabic and Slovenian speaking kids learned to grasp the idea of number “two” faster than their English-speaking counterparts. The study provides a new set of evidence supporting the […]
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 […]
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 […]
A group of paleontologists believe that the same event that killed off the dinosaurs some 66 million years ago also caused a widespread extinction in bee populations. Currently, the widely accepted theory is that an asteroid or comet struck our planet 66 million years ago (the Cretaceous-Paleogene event, or K-Pg event), the impact and its […]
It’s not the workload that usually causes depression – it’s an unfair boss and an unfair environment which usually does the trick. Researchers handed out questionnaires to 4,500 public employees at Danish schools, hospitals, nurseries, offices, etc and also conducted interviews with employees suffering from clinical depression; they also conducted lab research on their saliva, […]
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
A new, controversial analysis of a skull suggests that Homo habilis, Homo rudolfensis and Homo erectus were in fact the same species, something which would force scientists rewrite a big page of anthropology. Researchers compared the anatomical features of the of a 1.8-million-year-old fossil skull with those of four other skulls from the same excavation […]
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 […]
Millions of years ago, the wild savannas of Africa were teeming with carnivore wildlife, much more diverse than what we see today: lions, hyenas and other large-bodied carnivores. Paleontologist Lars Werdelin at the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm suggests the carnivore species decimation that began roughly two million years ago can be attributed […]
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 […]
Just 1 out of 5 children in Britain are still connected to nature, and there’s no reason to believe that things lie any differently in the western world. What does ‘connected to nature’ mean? Saying that someone is or isn’t connected to nature, at an intuitive level, is often times fairly simple. But making that […]
Lots of children have imaginary friends, something which is generally frowned upon by adults and seen as a bad thing. But now, a study published in Experimental Child Psychology has shown that young children’s habit of talking to imaginary friends develops their inner dialogue that helps them to deal with challenging tasks now and later […]
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 […]
Not as unique as we thought An “emotionally competent” young ape rushes to hug another juvenile that has just been attacked. I think the idea of animals doing something “like humans” is pretty outdated as it is – so many things that we thought were unique to us have been proven to be if not […]
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 […]
Ötzi the Iceman goes by lots of names – the Similaun Man, the Man from Hauslabjoch, the Hauslabjoch mummy, etc – but most people just call him Ötzi; he’s a well-preserved natural mummy of a man who lived about 3,300 BCE, found in the Ötztal Alps (hence the name) near the border of Austria and […]
Finding mosquitoes trapped in amber is truly exciting, but it’s not really unique – there have been several reported cases all around the world, and some people are even selling such samples (which I don’t think is a good thing, but that’s another discussion). But finding a fossilized mosquito in sediment… now that’s unique! It […]
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 […]
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 […]
Martin Karplus, Michael Levitt and Arieh Warshel won the 2013 Nobel Prize For Chemistry on Wednesday “for the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems.” Chemists used to create atomic models using balls and sticks. Some 40 years ago, Martin Karplus, Michael Levitt and Arieh Warshel laid the foundation for the powerful programs that […]
For the first time, researchers have found evidence of a comet entering Earth’s atmosphere and exploding, obliterating everything in its path before ultimately crashing down into the Sahara. Comets and asteroids Many people will probably be asking themselves “Didn’t we find comet evidence on Earth before?”. No, not really – if you did wondeer that, […]
It may not look like much, but this weird looking coal-like thing is actually a 4.000 year old preserved brain, which was “scorched and boiled in its own juices.” “The level of preservation in combination with the age is remarkable,” Frank Rühli at the University of Zurich, Switzerland explained, adding that most archaeologists simply don’t […]
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 […]
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. […]
Even an area so studied as Hawaii sometimes yields surprises – a recent study conducted by researchers at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST) and the University of Rhode Island (URI) changes the very foundation of how the Hawaii islands were formed: it is the eruptions […]
Researchers at MIT have recreated Mars-like conditions within a three-story-tall cloud chamber in Germany, adjusting the temperature and humidity to match those on Mars – basically creating Martian clouds. Judging by the images Curiosity has sent us, Martian clouds look quite similar to ours – the gauzy, high-altitude wisps look a lot like the cirrus […]
