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Strollers along the San Diego shoreline experienced their own kind of Northern Lights these past few days, only the western coast equivalent is less about skyline astral projections, and more about a grand neon blue light show luminating from within the ocean’s waves. And less cold. The event is actually a bioluminescence phenomenon and is […]
Mixing in a typical fMRI brain scanner with advanced computer modeling simulations, scientists at the University of California have managed to achieve the the unthinkable – render the visual expressions triggered inside the brain and play them like a movie. This is the forefront technology which will one day allow us to tap inside the mind […]
I’d like to divert from a potential discussion which might build around the trillions of dollars spent on defense by the US government or the more or less futile efforts enterprised in the middle east, and stick to the point at hand – spy drones! Yes, scary, paranoia inducing flying unmanned vehicles whose sole purpose is that […]
If harnessed at a much greater potential than it is now, sunlight might not only become the primary source of energy on the planet, but the cheapest too. In one hour the sun sprays our planet with enough energy to power all the electrical needs of the word for an entire YEAR. Now that’s something […]
Sociologists from Cornell University have scrambled through half a billion twits from the web to map out the way moods rise and fall for the populace in tandem, over time and across the world. The volume of data handled is what makes this study unique, as it allows for the proverbial ‘picking of the brain’ […]
People used to think Chimpanzee tool-use was impressive, but it in the past decades it has been documented that dolphins, whales or birds posses the necessary intelligence to use tools and the environment surrouding them in their benefit. A recent video posted by a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, […]
Last week, ground shattering news hit the scientific community worldwide when CERN announced that their experiments showed that neutrinos fired from the CERN laboratory in Geneva, reached their destination of Gran Sasso, Italy, 60 billionths of a second faster than they would have if they had been traveling exactly at the speed of light. CERN […]
The Slinky is one of the most popular toys in the world, being used by children in the playroom and NASA scientists trying to demonstrate physical principles, alike. Surprisingly or not, slinky springs are filled with even more secrets of physics besides simple energy and momentum releases. For example, in these two incredibly entertaining videos […]
Remarkably enough, scientists from Tel Aviv University in Israel, have manged to implant an artificial cerebellum in a rat’s brain, which successfully restored lost brain function. This research could provide the foundations for implementing cyborg-like functions in the human brain sometime in the distant future. Such an advancement, could possibly one day offer the prospect […]
In a classic David vs Goliath scenario, scientists have observed how the Epomis beetle larvae simply devour frogs, several times larger than the larvae. Thus the pray has become the predator, and vice versa, as the initial predatory frog finds itself sucked out of his lifeline by the larvae until nothing by a sac of […]
The Chinese space program is set to made a giant leap later this week, when its first orbiting docking station, the Tiangong-1, is set to be launched. Tiangong could pave the way for a future Chinese space station and for exploration further afield, most likely the moon, a long sought after destination by the Chinese. […]
Generally, yawning is considered a sign of fatigue or boredom, and it has been shown to be contagious in humans. A new study led by Andrew Gallup, a postdoctoral research associate in Princeton University’s Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, shows how yawning varies in frequency according to the season and heat exposure. Basically, after […]
What’s maybe the most shocking announcement for the scientific community this whole millennium came earlier today from Geneva, when scientists at CERN dropped the bomb shell according to which they’ve managed to break the speed of light barrier. If their three years study of measurements with re-checks upon re-checks proves to be valid, than the […]
In 2008 a deadly earthquake hit the Sichuan province of China killing tens of thousands and living millions homeless – it was the most devastating natural disaster in China’s recent history. From the among the rubles of the quake, however, emerged a survivor-pig which made him an instant national hero at the time. Now, Chinese […]
Scientists from the University of Washington have been struggling for the past decade to decipher the complex structure of an enzyme that exhibits behavior similar to that of an enzyme key in the development of AIDS from an HIV infection, and which might hold a critical role in building a cure for the disease. Gamers […]
A bridge or tunnel of some sorts which physically connects Asia with North America through the Bering Strait has been considered for many years now, but apparently each proposed project for such a titanic engineering feat has up to now remained in the fantasy stage. Recently, the Russian government put its seal of approval for […]
All you clinically diagnosed anxious readers might want to boot your therapist and settle for a cheaper, more comfortable alternative in the form a computer software which offers therapy through a series of highly effective tests, apparently just as effective as “the couch”. Called Cognitive bias modification (CBM), the therapy developed by researchers at Brown […]
A team of neuroscientists from Stanford University have managed to create a remarkably tiny device capable of monitoring brain activity in a rodent or other small animals. The device can be manufactured extremely cost-effective and might prove to be an invaluable tool for researchers of the new decade. Mice have always been the lab subjects […]
A team or Scottish scientists are pushing material science on the extreme side by conducting research which, they hope, will enable them to create life out of inorganic molecules. All life on Earth is based on organic biology – carbon compounds. The researchers from Glasgow University, however, have shown in a recently published paper a […]
Biomechanics has come a long way during the past few decades, on trend with the exponential growth of CPUs and electronics, in general. Articulated limbs or artificial optic units are just a few of today’s options that individuals with various impairments and disabilities can use to make their lives closer to normal. Limitations exist of […]
Virgin Galactic, Virgin’s commercial space flight branch, just recently announced that the first phase in the construction of the world’s first spaceport available to civilian consumers has been completed, making the ambitious project 90% complete. ‘Spaceport America’, as it’s been dubbed, is being built on an 18,000-acre site in the desolate sand plains of New […]
Paleontologists in South Africa have reported finding an extraordinary number of fossils of a species that predated humans, belonging to the prehuman species Australopithecus Sediba that lived almost 2 million years ago. The species had human-like hands and ape-like feet; it was found in a rearkable collection of fossils which includes the most complete early […]
Your earrings, your wedding ring, the platinum in your computer of phone – all of them might be alien artefacts. So send them over for future study. According to a team led by Matthias Willbold of the University of Bristol, U.K., gold, platinum, and other precious metals were brought to Earth by a massive meteor […]
A team of researchers have shown in a recently released paper published in the journal Royal Society Biology Letters that dolphins actually communicate with each other through a process much in the way humans use. What has been mistaken for a long time as plain whisteling has now been proven to be a much more […]
Being smart is the most valuable thing a man can have for himself; seriously – this is not a metaphor. Studies have shown that babies spend as much as 90% of their energy building their brains, and even as an adult, 25% of your energy goes directly to the brain. A great number of studies […]
Researchers have reached what can only be described as a crucial milestone that opens the way for a new class of materials with amazing electronic properties. Superconductivity is a relatively recently discovered feat, in which conducting materials oppose exactly zero resistance when electric current passes through them, below a certain temperature. Like ferromagnetism and atomic […]
Ever since uranium has been mined and atomic bombs have been tested, some areas have had to deal with the contamination of sediments and groundwaters by toxic soluble uranium. Now, this problem could be solved with filaments growing from a specific bacteria. Some clean-up methods already use the bacteria to solidify Uranium in sediments, but […]
For the first time, king crabs have been found on the edge of Antarctica, probably as a result of global warming, which has made this environment suitable for them, researchers claim. They suggest the crabs were washed in during an upsurge of warmer water, and that this can be extremely damaging to the local ecosystem […]
Gladiators had it rough – to say the least. Their cells barely were big enough to allow them to turn around in for the time allotted them until death; usually four or five battles in the arena. In what has been described as an archaeological sensation, a model of a Roman gladiator school was found […]
Think of an electric motor; what comes to mind? The results probably vary, but no one would even dare think about something 1 nanometer wide – and that’s exactly how big the world’s smallest electric motor is. It would take 60.000 of them to reach the width of a human hair, but its importance is […]
Currently, only about 30% percent of the total scientific workforce is comprised of female scientists. Thousands of years of cultural discrepancies might be to blame for this, like stereotyping, however in societies where math gender gaps disappears, the gender gap remains in higher education. In Sweden or Norway, the math gender gap has been bridged, […]
Researchers from Princeton University recently published a study in which they show how they’ve been able to use functional magnetic resonance imaging and a computer program that condensed 3,500 Wikipedia articles to associate words to particular brain activity patterns. Basically, they were able to read thoughts. To reach this remarkable correlation, researchers first did some […]
Humans might have started using sophisticated tools some 1.76 million years ago, much earlier than previously believed. This has been suggested by the discovery of hand axes from that period which belong to the complex Archeulean culture. This could also change what we believe about the period when humans started leaving Africa. Anthropologists consider the […]
A surprising innovation in wind turbine design named a ‘wind lens’ could triple the output of energy generated by wind, thus making it cheaper than nuclear power. The thing is, wind power is proportional to the wind speed cubed; so basically if you could increase the speed two times, the energy output would be increased […]
During the 1940s, the US conducted a series of incredibly unethical and disturbing experiments regarding sexually transmitted diseases in Guatemala, including the decision to re-infect a dying woman with syphilis. Now, additional information about this very dark period has been disclosed by a presidential panel. Already considered one of the darkest episodes in US research, […]
Stephen Hawking may have just won the most outrageous bet in physics history, a few years ago, when he claimed that the LHC, along with every other particle accelerator won’t find the Higgs boson, the elusive ‘God particle‘, simply because it does not exist. When he addressed this bet, Peter Higgs, who proposed and supported […]
As space agencies around the world, predominantly NASA, are considering building outposts outside Earth for the most likely far distant future, various difficulties need to be cared for. One of the most bugging and precarious one is the matter of energy generation. Without energy, you don’t have electricity to power labs, green houses, you can’t […]
Following the recent failed launch of an unmanned vehicle in a three stage Soyuz rocket this past Wednesday, the International Space Station might become temporarily devoid of its crew by November, if NASA, who is in charge of the outpost, doesn’t deem the Russian spacecraft fit anymore to transport astronauts. A Soyuz rocket crashed Wednesday […]
Starting yesterday, the whole world has been abuzz about the giant river discovered 4 kilometers beneath the Amazon, ranging from 200 to 400 km in width. The river, named Rio Hamza, was located analyzing temperatures from 241 abandoned deep wells that were drilled in the Amazon region by the petrochemical company Petrobras in the 1970s […]
The King’s Knot, a geometrical earthwork located in the royal gardens near Sterlin castle has been covered in mystery and speculation for centuries. The formation, as it is today, is believed to be from around the 1620, but it’s center part is believed to be much, much older. So much older that we could be […]
The mating between Neanderthals and modern homo sapiens has been a highly controversial matter between scientists in the anthropology scene for decades now. That was until last year, however, when anthropologists convened that the two related species did indeed mate, but the genes passed down from Neanderthals were inactive. Recently, there’s been another reason for […]
As the saying goes, there are plenty of fish in the sea, but just how many, exactly? We are still far away from giving an accurate number, but according to a team of scientists working for the Census for Marine Life, the number we are looking at is 8.74 million, give or take 1.3 million, […]
The oldest, up to now, fossil has been found recently by a team of Australian and UK geologists, who claim that they’ve managed to discover micro-organism remnants as old as 3.5 billion years. These tiny living cells were actually sulfur feeding bacteria, which didn’t need any kind of oxygen to survive. The fossils were found […]
A small, yet frightening earthquake, registered at 5.9 magnitude, sent shivers down people’s spines all the way from Ottawa, Canada to North Carolina as it hit the North American east coast. The earthquake first caused ground shacking at 1:51 p.m. ET, when it measured 5.9 in magnitude and lasted only 45 seconds, according to the […]
The orange goo that collected on the shores of Alaska and baffled scientists at first was believed to be a mixture of microscopic eggs and/or embryos deposited by some sort of crustacean. However, researchers at NOAA’s Center for Coastal Environmental Health and Biomolecular Research, based in Charleston, South Carolina conducted another examination and concluded that […]
Diamonds are for a nano-second – in the glitter of a candle light, that is. In a stroke of brilliance, Professor Wuzong Zhou, Professor of Chemistry at the University of St Andrews, has found millions of diamond nano-particles in the flickering light of a simple candle. Since its invention in China thousands of years ago, […]
Despite an evident contrast, geologists claim that the region of modern day El Paso, Texas was once attached to the now icy continent of Antarctica, in an effort to piece together the giant pieces of a puzzle that formed a pre-Pangaea supercontinent. “Most people are familiar with Pangaea,” said study co-author Staci Loewy, a geochemist […]
Biologists from Edinburgh University might have stumbled across a significant discovery, after strapping a tarantula to a magnetic resonance imaging scanner, which showed how its heart contracted in a unique double beat. The find might apply to a species of spiders. If your curious to see the strange double heart beat for yourself, scientists have […]
I’ve always amazed how some non-primate species manage to sometimes use the environment to their advantage, in a tool-like use manner. The African Crested Rat, however, takes this to a whole new other level. It’s the only known mammal in the world, besides humans, that uses poison for defensive purposes. He does this by chewing […]
A dog skull recently found in the Altai mountains in Siberia, Russia shows the earliest signs of domestication ever to be found; but if dog was man’s best friend back then, human loyalty is questionable at best – pretty much like things are now. The dog lived shortly before the peak of the last ice […]
