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The art of science is most evident when one manages to accurately assert truths about a given fact with little information provided. A great scientists knows how to properly churn information, turn it over a million sides and correlate it with other related facts to form a clear picture. It’s incredible for instance how astronomers […]
Hypnosis has been considered for the past 250 years by the scientific community as being nothing more than a cute trick, with little consideration put in for in-depth research into this highly controversial state. Some psychologists believe that a hypnotized person is unconscious, resembling a sleep walker, while modern research suggests that the case is […]
The sonic hedgehog gene got its name after researchers did some testing on fruit flies embryos, and found that the specimens which were modified to lack the gene developed spine-like projections. The gene itself is crucial to body development; to put it in layman terms, the sonic hedgehog gene makes sure that all your limbs […]
Floods are a major hazard to crops worldwide. This year alone, billions of dollars worth of crops came to waste after catastrophic floods raided Pakistan, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Australia, Thailand, the UK and America, and famines have hit millions of people worldwide as a result of ruined agriculture. What if you could, however, engineer crops that could […]
The northern hemisphere is accustomed enough to the dazzling Aurora Borealis phenomena, an event which occurs when charged particles collide with atoms from the extreme latitude atmosphere. However, yesterday almost the whole North American continent was bewildered by an incredible spectacle of lights, as Aurora Borealis apparitions were reported as far south as Kansas, Arkansas […]
In the new mobile information age where smartphones have become an ever common part of our lives, there seems to be a dominant trend which tends to incorporate interactive touch screen capabilities to more and more consumer electronics. It’s pretty clear that our electronics are getting smarter day by day – I, for one, am […]
A team of Swedish scientists paired with a USC researcher to crack the Copiale Cipher, thus revealing secret rituals and beliefs of a secret German society that had a fascination for ophtalmology. Thousands of old and obscure symbols filled over 100 pages of text which was found in Berlin towards the end of the Cold […]
A new massive research from SMU’s Geothermal Laboratory, funded by a grant from Google.org has documented significant geothermal resources across the US (especially in the West), a resource that has the potential, with today’s technology, to produce over three million megawatts of green power – that’s 10 times more than coal plants currently produce. Sophisticated […]
This Friday morning NASA will upgrade its climate and weather observatory capabilities, when it’s set to launch a new, high-end satellite via a United Launch Alliance Delta 2 rocket, which promises to significantally improve weather forecast and offer a significant leap forward to authorities in the face of calamities. The project, lengthy dubbed the National Polar-Orbiting […]
The little carnivorous animal has suffered one of the steepest population declines ever to be documented. In just 15 years, it went from being a common animal to the brink of extinction; and the cause is an unusual one: an infectious tumor. “Devil facial tumor disease has been a devastating, ongoing problem,” said Menna Jones […]
Scientists who observed an underwater eruption in 2009 concluded they observed a tear in the planetary crust that mimicks the birth of a subduction zone. Subduction takes place at convergent tectonic plate boundaries; basically, one plate slides below the other – an extremely complicated and complex process that drives along a series of other processes, […]
Deep in the Mariana Trench, about seven miles below the surface, researchers found huge single celled amoebas, making them not only completely surprisng and amazing, but also the creatures living at the biggest depth found so far. The team from Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego studied and catalogued these xenophyophores, single-celled animals […]
Another powerful seismic event has taken place, this time in Turkey; the 7.2 earthquake in case struck eastern Turkey on Sunday, killing at least 60 people and turning most buildings into big chunks of concrete and metal. However, Turkish scientists grimly predict that the victim count could easily go above 1000, as housing conditions are […]
They didn’t actually use other mastodons as killer pets, instead it’s been found that early hunters used mastodon bones for making deadly sharp spear heads. One interesting consequence to this is that Mastodon game season seems to have opened 800 years earlier than previously thought, offering a possible explanation for the blitzkrieg mass extinction of […]
Water is everywhere on Earth – that’s easy to see for anybody. But why and how it got here, that’s a dilemma that until now, hasn’t been fully answered. A new comet study has shown how a ring of cold water vapor can encircle a young planet, while another related one explains a hailstorm of […]
Satellite deployments make up most of the space launches in any given year, however it’s also a highly risky operation. Every satellite launch costs around $10,000 per pound, and basically it’s fairly common for the total cost of a satellite to jump in the tens of millions of dollars range. Currently, in the geosynchronous orbit there […]
At the nano scale, even the slightest of motions can be harnessed and transformed into useful work. Material science researchers at the University of Wisconsin, for instance, have developed a very thin plastic belt capable of vibrating from low velocity fluid flow, such as one’s breath. Made out of polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF), the microbelt not only […]
Scientists at London’s Imperial College have successfully managed to create biological logic gates, indispensible for the production of electronical devices, simply our of bacteria and DNA. Though the research detailed in a recently published study in the journal Nature Communications was anything but simple, it provides an incredible advancement in the field of biotechnology. “Logic […]
Another one from the realm of James Cameron’s movies – a robot that can build other robots. While the technology is still not exactly Skynet material, University of Pennsylvania’s Modlab foambot is an extremely interesting working concept capable of deploying itself with modular robot components, and practically assemble a new bot on the spot depending on the […]
While the Earth is steadily being depleted of its natural resources, it might become imperative to look to the sky for alternatives. Studies so far alone has shown that the moon has twenty times more titanium and platinum than anywhere on Earth, along with helium 3, a rare isotope of helium, which is nonexistent on our planet, […]
Archaeologists have uncovered fully intact Viking boat burial site in the United Kingdom, in the west Highlands. Artefacts buried along the viking suggest he was a high ranking warrior, revered and respected. According to Dr. Hannah Cobb, the “artefacts and preservation make this one of the most important Norse graves ever excavated in Britain”. The […]
What you just saw in the video above is a perfect demonstration of the quantum levitation effect, through a fairly simple set-up made by Tel Aviv University scientists, comprised of a track and a semiconductor. The quantum levitation is actually a perfect demonstration of the Meissner effect, which describes the expulsion of a magnetic field […]
A common SciFi theme we often see in movies is that of extravagant covert ops equipment, like a device which can see through a building and see whatever the enemy is doing inside, eventually convenianetly imagined like ambulant skeletons running around with machine guns. Researchers from MIT have managed to bring such a device to […]
If you ask me, the Greeks are by far the most remarkable ancient people, laying the base for science, philosophy and even art as we know it today. They also loved to trade, in order to achieve the means for the life they desired. However, we are only learning how and what they used to […]
Scientists at Northwestern University have developed a new nanomaterial of exciting properties, which will allow for the computer of the future to rewrite and rewire its circuitry, and in the process become an entirely different device. Thus, a single device could rewire itself to become resistor, a rectifier, a diode or a transistor simply based on signals. […]
If you think that T-Rex had laughable front limbs, you’re in for a treat: even he would be amused by upon such puny arms. However, the shortcomings Carnotaurus had more than made up for its very muscular and powerful tail, which made it one of the fastest hunters to ever walk the face of the […]
A dramatic overnight increase in seismic activity near the Katla volcano in southern Iceland has brought fears of a dramatic eruption, one that would make last year’s massive air-traffic disruption seem like a walk in the park. “It is definitely showing signs of restlessness,” commented Pall Einarsson, a professor of geophysics at the University of […]
Ever since the physics experiment which recorded neutrinos traveling slightly faster than light have set the scientific world ablaze, and since then, over 80 possible explanations have emerged. While some claim that these results pave the way for a totally different set of laws of physics, many offer less revolutionary solutions to the problem. The […]
Overlooking the Indian Ocean, lies the beautiful Blombos Cave in South Africa. It was here that archeologists uncovered red and yellow dyes, as well as shell containers that could have been used as paint pots – all around 100,000 years old! This extraordinary find proves humans were thinking in a modern way hundreds of thousands of […]
We’ve become so accustomed to the imagery of huge stacks of solar panel arrays stretching across the scorching desert, that the idea of implementing solar panels in some of the coldest spots on Earth might be quickly judged as feeble. In reality, Japanese scientists claim in a recently published study that the most energy efficient […]
Just 6 years after the first cloned canine by scientists from South Korea, ironically a country which has dog on the menu, the practice has evolved tremendously and has already provided important results. Some animal specimens are immensily separable from the rest of its kind, whether their smarter, stronger or more productive, so why not […]
No, not the sports car, neither the predatory feline, but Oak Ridge National Labs Jaguar – a supercomputer of immense computing capabilities set to top the ranks of the fastest computers in the world, for the second time, after a GPU (graphical processing unit) upgrade. Capable of simulating physical systems with heretofore unfeasible speed and accuracy -from […]
A map of the moon composed of superimposed observations in visible and ultraviolet wavelengths has revealed an amazing treasure – hordes of titanium ore, up to 10 times richer than on Earth. This could be the necessary motivation governments have been waiting for to initiate a mining colony project in the future. The discovery was made […]
A virtual trek, that is. NASA has just released a stunning video comprised of 309 photos the agency’s Opportunity Rover took during it’s three year journey from the crater Victoria to the crater Endeavor. Although the spanned distance is only 13 miles, the whole trip lasted a whooping three years. Granted, a relatively animated view […]
Humans, as well as most mammals, have only two sets of teeth to make with during their entire lifetime. However, a new research published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which studied the dental structure of mole rats has shown that the species is an exception to this rule. In fact, […]
A few days ago I reported how researchers found a myriad of new virus strains inside raw sewage. On a related, more intriguing, note French scientists have recently discovered the largest virus ever discovered so far in the ocean waters off the coast of Chile. Scientists estimate it’s between 10 and 20 times the size […]
A day or two ago, a whole lot of science websites (including ourselves, let’s be fair), wrote about the big Triassic ‘kraken’; basically, everyone was talking about a super intelligent predatory squid which fed on ichtyosaurs. Funny enough, but when I asked the paleontologists working at my University, they all smiled ironically. Why, you may […]
In the darkest caves of southwest China, one can experience fragments of the long set Ice Age and travel back in time 30,000 years. No, there isn’t any time machine or stargate of some sort (scientists say time travel is impossible, I beg to differ), instead what you’ll find in one of the darkest corners […]
The most popular video sharing website in the world, YouTube, has teamed up with NASA and several other key figures from the scientific community to launch YouTube Space Lab, a global effort challenging students between the ages of 14 and 18 to design an experiment that can be conducted in space. I know there are […]
Hundreds of millions of years ago the Earth surface and oceans were inhabited by fierce predators of huge proportions by today’s standards. In those times, more than ever maybe, the saying that there’s always a bigger fish was cruelly true. For instance, a recent study of the fossils remains of an ichthyosaur, a giant school bus-sized […]
Most of us tend to believe the Earth is a safe heaven, with little regard to outerwordly consequences. The truth is our planet, although without a doubt a true gem within our galaxy, is susceptible to a slew of events triggered from within or well beyond our solar system. A lot of them are very […]
A whole lot of people have been closely following the developments at the Large Hadron Collider, but now, all that may become a whole lot easier, thanks to an Android based application which allows users to see the latest colliding protons, among others, at the world’s largest particle accelerator, located at the French/Swiss border. LHSee, […]
A study into muscle development conducted on several fish has given valuable insight regarding the genetic leap that moved the scene from the aquatic parts onto the land. It was this particular leap that gave birth to tetrapods, animals that walk on four legs and are our very distant ancestors. Peter Currie, of the Australian […]
Uranus, the seventh planet from the sun, is a definite oddball of the solar system. It has its axis titled by a whopping 98 degrees, which makes it orbit on its side. The general accepted theory is that a big impact with an object several times the size that of the Earth nodged its axis […]
You’ve seen James Bond’s vanishing Aston Martin or Frodo’s Elven cloak, and probably always wished for your own means of becoming totally invisible. The are a lot of perks to such a technology (who here remembers Invisible Man movies?), and scientists from University of Dallas in Texas have managed to devise an invisibility cloak inspired by […]
Shark populations have declined at a rapid pace during the past few decades, with a significant number of species being threaten by extinction. Considering the shark is a fairly sensitive species because of its difficult breeding cycle, makes it even more vulnerable. Thus, researchers looking to develop effective breeding programs have to take it up […]
The Nobel Prize has been awarded to a single scientist, which is less common than you might think, for the discovery of the structure of quasicrystals. When this new structure was first proposed, to say that it stirred controversy would be putting it light; at first, the idea was so outside of the general consensus, […]
Physicists from Rice University have made an important break through in the field of quantum computing, after creating a tiny “electron superhighway”, critical for the development of the first working quantum computer. The quantum computer is thought to revolutionize the computing scene of the future, and is believed by many to hold the same impact […]
As the winter ski season is rapidly approaching, snow sports enthusiasts all over the world are already planing their trips, on a quest to find the most intense slop. Skiers need not to look farther, as Cassini scientists have announced that the probe has transmitted data which suggests Enceladus, Saturn’s icy moon, is coated by […]
A grad student from the prestigious college has created an actual flying carpet, that moves thanks to “ripple power waves” that come from an electrical current which are driven forward from air packets. At the moment, the device moves at only 1 cm per second, but it is only the first prototype, and can be […]
