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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 […]
Astronomers at Nottingham Trent University have presented evidence that a 4000-year-old stone monolith, located at Gardom’s Edge less than an hour’s drive from Manchester, was used by Neolithic locals at the time as an astronomical marker. The monolith is 7.2-foot tall (2.2-meter), triangular in shape, angles up toward geographic south, and features packing stones arranged around […]
Cloaking has turned into a subject of great interest for scientists in the past decade, most likely because of its military potential. We’ve seen some exciting prototypes developed, from optical invisibility cloaks to temporal cloaks, and now French scientists at the University of Aix-Marseille have added a new member to the cloaking family, one that renders […]
Hailed as yet another big step towards devising working quantum computers, scientists at Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB) have successfully managed to generate quantum qubits inside a semiconductor for the first time, instead of vacuum. A qubit is the quantum analog of a bit. While a bit must be read either as a 0 or 1, the qubit can […]
The Moon has fascinated researchers and poets alike since ancient times, but while the latter all agree on its beauty, scientists are still debating how the satellite was formed; recently, a new isotopic analysis seems to shed some new light on the matter, making things even more interesting than they were before. Most believe that […]
The small yet pleasant city of Bugarach in southwest France is flooded with tourists, but the thing is most of them are preoccupied by UFOs instead of the local countryside. The town located near the Pic of Bugarach mountain which has no more than 200 inhabitants is getting more and more spotlight from doomsday visitors […]
When the brain deems an experience meaningful enough, it will transfer that information from short-term storage, where typically information like where you put your car keys or the phone number of a person you just met gets stored temporarily, to your long-term memory, offering the possibility to be accessed at a later time. Neurologists claim […]
Researchers at MIT have developed a new revolutionary technique, in which they re-purposed the trillion frames/second camera we told you about a while ago, and used it to capture 3-D images of a wooden figurine and of foam cutouts outside of the camera’s line of sight. Essentially, the camera could see around corners, by transmitting […]
After a three year effort, researchers at Virginia Tech have successfully managed to create a silicone robot that functions underwater by mimicking the motion of a jellyfish. The robot can propel itself thanks to the heat-producing reactions catalyzed by its surface, and since it uses hydrogen and oxygen found in the water as fuel, the Robojelly can theoretically […]
The now retired Concorde turbojets were the fastest civilian airliners in the world, capable of carrying passengers from Paris to New York in just 3.5 hours, traveling at supersonic speeds. However, lack of market appeal, combined with high maintenance costs, lead to its regrettable retirement from service with no civilian airliner to replace it, not even to […]
Since it was first discovered more than four hundred years ago by Galileo Galilei, Jupiter’s innermost moon Io has played an important part in the development of astronomy. Still with secrets to be revealed, a team of US scientists have recently formulated the first complete global geologic map of Jupiter’s satellite. The moon of Io is […]
One of the biggest anthropological mysteries scientists have been trying to unravel is the long put question of how did humans develop bipedal movement. There have been many theories formulated hypothesizing why our ancestors eventually switched from four limbs walking to two – some appealing, some a bit too far the edge. A recent study […]
Researchers at Yale University have successfully mange to utilize a novel MRI technique to 3-D image the insides of hard and soft solids, like bone and tissue, opening the way for a new array of applications, like previously difficult to image dense objects. Typically, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) can produce a 3-D image of an object […]
All 80.000 items from Albert Einstein’s archives, including a huge number of manuscripts, personal correspondence with several lovers and a touching letter to his ailing mother are going to be published online. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which currently owns the Einstein collection is currently uploading high-res pictures of his scientific works, letters on social […]
Ancient human settlements have changed the landscape around where they live in such a way that today, 8000 years later, archaeologists can tell if an area was inhabited – using little more than images taken from a satellite. Deep in the Middle East, beyond the impressive mounds of Earth which marked the bigger, known cities […]
We’ve reported in the past about the frightening, ever growing cases of honeybee population dye-offs of the past few years, and while no immediate or long term plan has been effective thus far, it seems at least that scientists are identifying the causes. It’s been known for some time that some classes of pesticides are […]
If you think today’s urban air, thickened with noxious smog, is terrible, just imagine how the Earth was filled in a shroud of hydrocarbons some 2.5 billion years ago. Back then, a haze dominated by methane engulfed the atmosphere such that light could barely reach the ground, similarly to what can be seen today on […]
The amazing properties of graphene are being put to use more and more, as Evan Reed and Mitchell Ong from the Stanford School of Engineering have described a new way of engineering piezoelectrics into graphene. The study was published in the ACS Nano Journal. When you apply a mechanical stress to certain materials, such as […]
Last September the whole scientific community was set ablaze by a the controversial claim set forth by CERN scientists, part of the OPERA experiment, in which they announced that they had measured neutrinos traveling at a velocity faster than the speed of light – 60 nanoseconds faster to be more exact. The implications of this […]
General Motors has always invested in technology which goes beyond the automotive applications for which the company is primarily known, a philosophy which I find most praise worthy, and teaming up with NASA is sure to always output performance. The latest to result from their partnership is the K-glove, a robotic glove designed to aid […]
An incredible find was publicized just earlier – fossils remains from stone age people were unearthed from two caves in China. Upon further inspection it was found that the bone features, particularly skulls, were unlike any other human or early ancestor remains ever found, suggesting that the researchers may have actually found a new species […]
In a landmark liftoff, the first privately owned spaceship which can carry passengers will head for a test flight beyond the atmosphere this year – and over 500 people have reserved seats already. More and more companies are starting to look at space tourism as a reliable source of income, and another company has just […]
The Cambrian era marked a profound change on life on Earth, sparking the rapid development of complex organisms and a diversification of the ecosystem, thus the term “Cambrian explosion“. Prior to this period, animals were simple and small, as well as soft bodied, with no hard parts to display. A team of paleontologists at University […]
The human brain is wired to see all kinds of patterns in various shapes. The most common one is that of the human face, most often encountered in our day to day lives, be it in the coffee, a fire hidrant or a cut off potato (I saw Jesus!). The moon makes no exception either. […]
Paleontologists have recently named two new horned dinosaur species, closely related to the famous Triceratops, which were dug up from a site in Alberta, Canada some time ago. Dubbed Unescopceratops koppelhusae and Gryphoceratops morrisoni, the dinosaurs are extremely tiny, as far as plant eating dinosaurs dating back from the late Cretaceous go, and belong to the Leptoceratopsidae family of […]
A team of researchers at Vienna University of Technology constructed various nanoscale models of incredible precision (St. Stephen’s Cathedral, London’s Tower Bridge or a F1 race car), using a technique called two-photon lithography. The device which the researchers used for their high precision 3D printing is an order of magnitude faster than others such similar, and opens a […]
