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Scientists generally draw a distinction between consciousness and intelligence. Consciousness is defined as a state of self-awareness; whereas intelligence is seen as a measure of the quality of the awareness. I suggest that the distinction is one of level, not one of kind. Being sufficiently intelligent about cause and effect will include an awareness that […]
The 2012 London summer Olympic games are just a few weeks away, and as millions are set to flock to the city and other hundreds of millions will rejoice on the web and TV at the world’s grandest spectacle of athletic performance, it’s pretty clear this is one of the most anticipated events of the year. Every […]
A stash of 300 year-old jewelry was unearthed by archaeologists near the biblical, ancient city of Megiddo, where the New Testament predicts the final battle of Armageddon. Firstly, archaeologists unearthed a jug which didn’t seem to have anything special – but after they were able to clean it, and safely open it, they found pieces […]
Some 250 million years ago, life on Earth passed through its toughest time so far, as 96% of all marine species and over three quarters of land vertebrates went extinct. According to British researchers, the mass extinction was so severe that it took life 10 million years to recover. With less than 10 percent of […]
A new study conducted by NASA indicates that large molecules containing carbon came to Earth from Mars – molecules which are a key ingredient for life as we know it. Studying meteorites that landed on Earth and originated on Mars, the Carnegie Institution for Science alongside NASA researchers concluded that the reduced carbon – carbon […]
Analysis of crystal formed in the molten rocks of a volcano might predict volcanic eruptions with as much as a year in advance, researchers claim. Mixing Seismology and Petrology Drawing data from the volcanic activity of Mount Helens from 1980 through 1986, geologists found that iron- and magnesium-rich crystals grow before an eruption, and by […]
Well the title may be a little over the top, but Loyola University psychologist concluded that people with a taste for organics are more likely to be insufferable, and that a type of diet might make you more judgmental. The new study by Kendall Eskine claims that people who ate foods declared as organic tended […]
You too can get a genetic test kit for your samples! A new university-based project seeks to investigate cryptic species, such as yeti for example, in an attempt to show if these species can actually exist or not; and they want to do this through DNA research. Researchers from Oxford University and the Lausanne Museum […]
I’ve studied geology for four years – and I still haven’t had the chance to see a T-Rex skeleton; this is just one of the reasons why I believe such valuable fossils belong in museums, where they could serve the higher purpose of education, and not in some personal collection, where they serve only the […]
Nothing short of extraordinary, two people paralyzed from the neck down controlled a robotic arm to perform actions of various complexity, like manipulating objects, simply by using their minds. One of the participants involved in the demonstration of the brain to robotic arm set-up actually controlled the arm to retrieve a coffee recipient and eventually drank from […]
Researchers from New Zealand working in remote Cambodian mountains are shedding new light on the lost history of an enigmatic unidentified tribe by studying their eerie burial rituals. The University of Otago scientists have been working since 2003 to geo-locate and survey 10 interment sites and to used radiocarbon dating on samples of coffin wood, […]
Last year, we reported on one of the most gruesome and horrific acts that goes on in nature; it seems so unreal, like if some sort of SciFi monstrous scenario transcended into the realm of reality, that one has a hard time wrapping his head around it. Yes, as some of you might have read previously, I’m […]
One of the most sophisticated parts of a robot is its navigation system, why requires precise sensing and processing of the information, if an anthropomorphic robot is to walk around a house safely or a rover trek through the rocky wastelands of Mars, for instance. Billions have been dedicated to this field, and naturally technological […]
An interesting conversation can instantly make a turn for the worst when bad breath hops into the scene. We’ve all had our share of bad experiences whether we were more or less forced to tolerate the repulsive stench of bad breath or we had a case of bad breath ourselves. Scientists at Nippon Dental University, […]
The Yellowstone super volcano, which basically outlines the whole Yellowstone National Park, is part of one of the most active volcanic regions in the world. A recent research conducted by a joint team of international scientists from Washington State University and the Scottish Universities Environmental Research Centre is set to cast doubts on the frequency of eruptions and, most importantly, super eruptions […]
During the tumultuous Cretaceous and Jurassic periods if you could only choose one word to describe the world, it would’ve certainly be ‘big’. Big dinosaurs, big plants, big trees, big fish and big insects, of course. Chinese scientists have found almost perfectly preserved fossils of two previously unknown extinct flea species in Inner Mongolia, which are roughly […]
I recently came across a piece of paper which described how the city of Seattle will (probably) look like in 2012; the message was hidden in a time capsule which was buried 50 years ago, in 1962. The first tackled problems are mortgages and loans: Conventional bank loans—Up to 75% appraisal and up to 25 […]
Most digital devices today, like displays or blue-ray disks, use lasers which emit the colors red, green and blue, which when combined can render any color in the visible spectrum of light. However, current technology requires a separate laser for each color, since they produce monochromatic light. A team of researchers at Brown University has […]
Evolution, in very loose lines, is defined as the process which allows a species to survive by passing on the differentiating traits most likely to help offspring adapt to the world through means of natural and sexual selection. Considering the world around us has been shaped so much by human hand, a lot of people […]
After two decades of careful breeding and examining, scientists have declared a microscopic algae-eater to be one of the world’s oldest living organisms, and human’s most distant relative. The elusive creature evolved about a billion years ago and, as far as researchers can tell after twenty years of studying, it doesn’t belong to any of […]
Large wind farms might have a warming effect on the local climate, a research conducted in the US claims, casting a shadow on the long term sustainability of this type of renewable energy. Wind farms and warming Wind farms have quite an unusual way of heating the surrounding environment: by drawing the hotter air from […]
“Would you make the same decisions in a foreign language as you would in your native tongue?” asks Boaz Keysar, a psychologist at the University of Chicago, who recently published a study that discusses this highly interesting question. The scientists involved in the study found that, indeed, counter to popular belief thinking in a foreign […]
In another sci-fi accomplishment, Swiss scientists have demonstrated how a partially paralyzed person can control a robot using only thought power, a step which promises to one day allow immobile people to interact with their surroundings through so-called avatars. Similar projects have already taken place in the US or Germany, but they involved either able-bodied […]
There’s gold in the asteroids – and there’s also platinum, cobalt, iridium, and many, many other precious or industrial metals; for this reason, they have been irresistible for a long time not only for scientists, but also for engineers, futurists, and more recently – tech billionaires. Who wants to mine the solar system’s asteroids People […]
Scientists have described and proven how many of the world’s phenomenae function, from the very fundamental laws of Newtonian mechanics, to the discrete behaviors of quantum physics, eventually peering through some of the Universe’s most well kept secrets. It’s remarkable then, how little we know about how heat is conducted through and between materials. A better […]
The age-old question of who came first – the chicken or the egg – has been pondered countless times, and put great thinkers throughout history in a predicament. An oddity of nature which recently occurred on a Sri Lankan farm may offer clues towards answering the riddle. There a hen gave birth to a chick without […]
One of the cutting edge technologies currently used today in manufacturing allows for printing materials directly onto a surface to create electrically functioning devices which are very thin and flexible. The best example of such an application are organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs), widely used as displays for most new generation smartphones commercially available now. The […]
Graphene has been countless times hailed as the material at the forefront of the coming technological leaps ahead in the future, thanks to its extraordinary properties and countless applications. Electronics is where graphene shines the most, though, and now scientists at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee have managed to synthesize a semiconductor variant of graphene which might lead […]
Dmitri Krioukov, a physicist at University of California in San Diego, was recently fined by a police officer for allegedly driving through a stop sign. Confident that he did nothing of the sorts, Krioukov sought justice like most of us would, in court that is, however during the hearing he presented a somewhat atypical piece of […]
When the administration gives you budget cut lemons, make a different scientific lemonade – that’s pretty much what NASA is trying to do in light of these decisions. Less money, more problems Citing lack of funds, the Obama administration is cutting healthy chunks of the NASA budget, placing a big question mark on many important […]
Of all the skills that athletes and sportsmen possess, the most underappreciated ability is a sportsman’s mental acuity. While sports and games of all types require a great amount of physical ability, what separates a good player from a great player is how they analyze the game on the field. Let’s take a deeper look […]
Sometime at the beginning of the year I mentioned in post that once stepping into the age of Terahertz electromagnetic waves (T-rays), which can penetrate any molecule and and then interpret it for identification, we will come to know a slew of new, grand applications, from surveillance , to medical, but possibly the most interesting […]
Part of a study which sought to see how deeply rooted is our psychological projection inherited from our ancestors when faced with a physical situation, scientists concluded that holding a knife or gun causes one to be perceived as bigger. Anthropologists consider this behavior as evidence, coupled with other studies, that backs up the idea according to which humans, […]
Quantum technology is the future, no doubt. The impact of computing devices based on quantum effects finally entering service would be vast and of immense positive consequence to the scientific world, and hence mankind, comparable with the invent of the microchip. While this future might still seem far fetched, judging from the number of successful […]
I don’t know if you’re thinking it, but I definitely am: lizardmen! I’m scared of lizardmen just like the next guy, but all my life I’ve lived with the idea that they are just figments of the imagination which sometimes occur in Star Trek episodes or RPG games – but according to Ronald Breslow, Ph.D., […]
An 8.6-magnitude earthquake and powerful aftershocks struck the coast of Indonesia today, resurrecting fears of a big tsunami like the one responsible for one of the biggest modern disasters ever. However, this earthquake, which struck at 2:38 p.m. local time (4:38 a.m. ET), about 270 miles (435 kilometers) off the coast of the Indonesian island […]
A study performed last year observed that identical twins, who share 100% of the same genetic material and had the same upbringing, expressed a very similar attitude towards civic behavior and care-giving, whilst fraternal twins, who share 50% of their genes and, again, had the same upbringing, did not necessarily share the same pro-social attitude […]
It seems 3-D printing is growing into a phenomenon, and rightfully so. We’ve seen jaw bones perfectly reconstructed and used as medical implants, and even nanoscale objects masterfully made by 3-D printers, and if you’ve yet to witness the potential, wait until you hear about the latest project spun off MIT. Scientists there have initiated […]
Researchers at North Carolina State University have developed a new technique of cooling electronic devices which they claim and prove through their findings that it can lead to an increase of performance by improving the rate of heat exchange, while also lowering the cost of manufacturing. The scientists’ findings might lead to a new generation […]
She was a sacrifice, so you can look at it this way: the Inca chose her to go and live with the gods. But you can look at it this way too: the Inca brutally killed a 15 year old girl, for no other reason than religion. Furthermore, grim evidence showed that the Inca fattened […]
It’s been pretty quiet lately at the LHC, despite the fact that things seemed to be getting pretty hot, as the elusive Higgs boson appeared to be cornered. However, CERN cracked up the volume, announcing they achieved a record collision energy of 8 TeV. LHC recap The Large Hadron Collider is the world’s largest and […]
A remarkable paleontological discovery surfaced from China recently, after scientists reported they’ve found fossils belonging to the Yutyrannus huali,a very close relative of the Tyrannosaurs Rex, which prove that its entire enormous bus-sized body was covered in feathers. This officially makes it the biggest animal covered in feathers ever found, and also forces paleontologists to rethink […]
While on the macro-scale conventional scales make us of gravity to measure mass, on the microscale there are a myriad of factors that interfere with measurements. Scientists at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona have successfully created a scale made out of a single carbon nanotube which can accurately measure the smallest unit of mass, a yoctogram (one […]
The Sandman would have certainly approve of the latest experimental tech to come off MIT. Researchers from the university have demonstrated how tiny computer pellets, just a few millimeters in size, were automatically bound together to form a simple 2-D shape. The same algorithm might be used in a future refined version which could allow this kind […]
After James Cameron, the director of movies such as Titanic and Avatar, became the first man to perform a solo voyage to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, the deepest point on Earth, another Hollywood director is set for an astonishing feat; but Steven Spielberg won’t be hitting rock bottom – instead, he will be […]
The most complex object on Earth is the human brain. However, even though it’s intertwined by billions of nerve fibers almost in a chaotic fashion, scientists who have used sophisticated mathematical analysis of advanced imaging data found that the neural pathways that carry electrical signals through the brain are arranged in a very simple manner, resembling […]
Boston Dynamics is at the forefront of robotic research and development at the moment, fact very easily attested just by checking out a few of their amazing robots developed during the past year alone, like the cheetah-bot which broke the robot land speed record, the gecko-like bot which can climb walls effortlessly or the terrifyingly […]
Billions of years ago, the Earth was unrecognizable from the life supporting paradise it is today. Fossilized raindrops from some 2.7 billion years ago, conserved in time as rain dropped onto volcanic ash during an eruption, which eventually solidified into rock known as tuff, has revealed some very interesting facts about Earth’s ancient atmosphere. The discovery […]
Africa proves yet again that it’s the cradle of the hominid family, and in consequence the human species. Scientists have found foot fossils in Ethiopia that don’t match those of any kind of hominid discovered thus far, dating from 3.4 million years ago, making the specimen contemporary with Lucy, an Australopithecus afarensis specimen, of vast […]
Scientists at MIT and Harvard University teamed up to figure out what would be the simplest 3-D structure capable of collapsing and morphing due to instability. Their inspiration came after the scientists came across a popular toy, spherical in shape and fitted with movable parts and hinges, which allows it to easily dimple in size […]
