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Svante Paabo, the researcher whose work provided the basis for the Jurassic Park movies seems to have struck gold once again; this time it’s about a finger bone older than 30.000 years, found in the Altai mountains, that as far as DNA analysis has shown, belongs to no known species of humans. They also found […]
This New Year brought more joy than usual for a Colorado family, as Chris and Pam Jessen were thrilled by the birth of an extremely rare type of cow in their farm: the panda cow. The panda cow is an uncommon cross breed that was worked on for 44 years by Richard Gradwohl, a Covington, […]
In case you’re wondering, what you’re looking at is a silicon chip, only 1 millimeter square that was used by researchers to prove how data can be stored in the magnetic spin of atoms – and how it can then be accessed electronically. Physicists from the University of Utah have managed to store information in […]
A team led by Sandia National Laboratories researcher Jianyu Huang created the smallest battery in the world, with a single nanowire 7000 times thinner than a human hair as an anode. The battery was formed inside a transmission electron microscope (TEM) at the Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies (CINT) to allow researchers to better understand the […]
As I was telling you before, NASA got everybody hyped when they announced a big conference on the topic of finding alien life; of course everybody’s mind started flying to aliens and ET and all that, but more realistic people realized that something like this is extremely unlikely. However, pretty much everybody was shocked when […]
A supernova is a stellar explosion of cosmic proportions, that often can outshine the entire galaxy it is located in, before fading away in a matter of weeks or months. During this short period however, supernovae emit as much energy as the Sun emits during its entire life span – it’s the same kind of […]
A new study suggests that a blunder of cosmic proportions has been made when estimating the total number of stars in the universe; the research points out that a specific kind of galaxy has 10 times more red dwarf stars than previously estimated. This would not only triple the number of stars throughout the universe, […]
A team of physicists from the University of Bonn developed a totally new type of source of light, the so called Bose-Einstein condensate; the results will be published in the upcoming edition of Nature. They managed to achieve this astonishing feat by greatly cooling Rubidium atoms and stashing them into each other, up until the […]
For physicists, antimatter is probably the most valuable substance ever; the slightest bit of it could provide extremely valuable information that can help clear out some of the most stressing issues in modern physics. However, the thing is these little gifts are pretty hard to wrap. However, the ALPHA project at CERN achieved this remarkable […]
You know those days when you go to the beach, and it’s just too hot outside, so you have to use some cream and all ? Well, it’s a little harder if you’re a whale. A recent study conducted that a whole lot of whales displayed blisters caused by sun damage. Laura Martinez-Levasseur, from the […]
That’s right people, all the life on this beautiful planet (yep, that includes you) could descend from alien zombies. Well, this is indeed a slight imagination leap, but what I’m talking about are viruses; dead viruses, to be more exact. Dead viruses who contained information, enough information to pave the way for lifeforms to appear. […]
The next step in prospecting and mining has always been a subject of speculation and theories, ever since the days of Jules Verne. For decades, an idea that flourished more and more was to gather up potato-sized magnanese nodules, rich in nickel, cobalt and manganese, that are very valuable in large quantities. The problem is […]
The Large Hadron Collider at CERN has taken another step towards its goal of finding the so called ‘god particle‘: it recently produced the highest temperatures ever obtained through a science experiment. The day before yesterday, 7 November was a big one at the LHC, as the particle collider started smashing lead ions head-on instead […]
Amber is not very common, but you can’t say it’s really uncommon either. Bugs in amber – that’s rare, but a huge “stash” such as the one that was found in India – that’s really something out of this world. The bug “collection” that was unearthed seems to suggest that the Indian continent was not […]
During the year 241 B.C., the play was set for the big game. The players were the relatively young and ascending Roman Republic and the old declining Carthage empire; the stake was high as well: domination around the Mediterranean sea, in a series of conflicts called the Punic Wars. The remains of an ancient sunken […]
This amazing snailfish is just one of the animals new to science that have been uncovered by Oceanlab scientists; the expedition was studying one of the world’s deepest trenches, an environment thought to be void of fish of any kind, but researchers were surprised to find out that even the bottom of the trench was […]
Scientists working for the UN reported today that they have erradicated the Rinderpest virus, a virus that is deadly for cattle. Rinderpest would be only the second virus erradicated by mankind, after smallpox. It caused massive damage in the Middle East, Africa and Asia, having a survival rate of only 10-20%. The UN’s Food and […]
One of the most intense Cold War fronts, and probably the only one to actually provide mankind a monumental legacy, was the so called space race. Each of the behemoth nations battled each other for space supremacy for decades raising hopes for millions of people as to someday the stars may belong to man and […]
In a slapp across Beijing’s face, the Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to imprisoned Chinese scholar Liu Xiaobo, for “his long and nonviolent struggle for fundamental human rights in China”. The decision of the Nobel jury goes totally against the Chinese government, who claims Liu Xiaobo is nothing more than a criminal. The Nobel […]
I’m really not sure what to think about genetically modified food; in theory, it seems like one of the best ideas ever, but if we don’t fully understand the ramifications of the modifications, it can have really harmful effects. But still, the study I’m going to tell you about is not that. It’s about the […]
It’s always nice when new species are discovered, and this time it was an expedition from Papua New Guinea that made the discovery. A frog no bigger than a peanut, a brilliant green katydid with bright pink eyes and a white tipped tail mouse are the stars of the over 200 newly discovered species. The […]
The future is here, baby ! Robot archers, that’s what it’s all about ! This little humanoid robot, nicknamed iCub may be using just arrows with suction cups, but hey – you have to start somewhere ! Italian researchers developed an algorithm that can teach the robot how to shoot arrows. So, after being taught […]
Fossil hunters have recently unearthed the fossil remains of a species that can easily claim the title of the horniest dinosaur ever to be found. Kosmoceratops lived some 76 million years ago, in the warm and wet swamps of (what is today) Utah; but what’s really fascinating about him is the fact that he has […]
Well this is definitely not your average fossil hunt, by any standards. The excavating team was doing it’s thing, just as in any other day, when they heard a weird scraping sound. Gino Calvano, a paleontologist at the San Diego Natural History Museum was nearby, heard the sound, and headed straight towards the point of […]
As the dramatic decline of the tigers becomes more and more abrupt, it seems more and more possible that pretty soon, we will be living in a world without tigers. Numerous plans and various approaches have been taken, but the results have been pretty scarce so far, and the fate of these wonderful felines seems […]
Commercial space flight is starting to promise to become a very lucrative market since an ever growing interested is harnessed by the big corporations of the world. Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic in cooperation with Scaled Composites (Mojave, CA), announced their sincere intentions of entering the commercial space travel market, after recently the giant Boeing also […]
Robotics is developing faster and faster, partially thanks to the technological growth of Japan, which has quite some awesome plans for the not so distant future. This time however, it’s a team of researchers from University of California, Berkeley, led by Ali Javey that is in the spotlight. You see, it’s not the strength that […]
About 125 million years ago, these hunchback dinosaurs roamed today’s central Spain, measuring approximately 6 meters and feasting off of smaller animals of all sorts. However, what’s really surprising about the dinosaurs is its “hump”, a body structure never before seen in dinosaurs. A recently exposed skeletal structure revealed some unique features that has researchers […]
Now, that’s not Sauron’s eye. Pictured above is the most highly detailed photo of a sunspot ever taken at present date, captured and recently released by the Big Bear Solar Observatory, CA. The whole event was captured by Big Bear’s New Solar Telescope (NST), which has a resolution covering about 50 miles on the Sun’s […]
Although the oldest sexual toy may have dated from the stone age, a newly published discovery of two fossils bearing the mark of tool used to scrub off the meat dating back 3.39 million years could be enough to make anthropologists revise their current text books. What makes this study potentially monumental is the fact […]
It was more than 300 million years ago that reptiles made tracks on earth. The exact moment when this happened is unknown, however; oh, and by exact moment, I’m talking about pinning it down to a couple million years (you gotta love geologists for their sense of time). So, a discovery of fossilized footprints was […]
It’s often remarkable the ways in which seemingly disparate characteristics of personality mingle. Whether this interaction is remarkable due to the vast complexity and multifaceted nature of the human persona or instead because our understanding of such matters is so paltry, our library of the “psychical” patterns that give rise first to cognition and then […]
Last week at the latest TEDGlobal conference in Oxford, astronomer Dimitar Sassilov, professor of astronomy at Harvard University and a distinguished member of the Kepler space telescope science team, unveiled some incredible results gathered by our eyes and ears in the galaxy. Kepler’s most recent reported downloaded conferred some incredible statistics, among which most importantly the discovery of: […]
This is possibly one of the earliest sex toys in human history.
I have to say, this is one of the most attractive initiatives I’ve come across in quite a while. Basically, you live in the museum and breathe science for 30 days, and if you do that, you win 10.000$ and a lot of other prizes. That’s pretty much awesome if you ask me. You can […]
The major fault in Sierra Nevada is believed to have been “quiet” for more than 3 million years has shown signs of becoming active and it is believed that it can trigger quakes that can reach magnitudes of up to 7. This comes as a rather unpleasant surprise to geologists, as well as the people […]
Peter Higgs is not the rockstar type of scientist; the particle physicist rarely gives interviews, despite the fact that he is the one who proposed the existence of a fundamental particle that gives all matter its mass. Almost as mysterious as the particle itself, he simply calls it the “boson named after me”. Higgs visited […]
The Wave, Arizona The Wave is an astonishing sandstone formation that fascinates photographers and attracts numerous hikers every year. It formed in the early Jurassic (190 million years ago) when dinosaurs ruled the Earth and compacted through the years, calcifying in vertical and horizontal layers. The lovely curves we see today are a result of erosion […]
Wildlife researchers from Sri Lanka have reported photographing one of the world’s most reclusive animals, the Horton Plains slender loris, an animal thought to be extinct for more than 60 years (1939 to 2002). Slender loris populations are native to the rainforests of Sri Lanka and southern India have been in decline for decades, but […]
As if the domesticated dog’s position as, “man’s (or woman’s) best friend” was not entrenched in the human zeitgeist enough, research from Brian Hare out Harvard’s Anthropology department indicates that not only are dogs far more adept than Chimpanzees- our closest genetic, extant relative- at interpreting human social cues, but that domesticated dogs are superior […]
A recent study conducted by a Montana State University doctoral student and one of the world’s top paleontologists shed some new light on more than 100 years of thought regarding the dinosaurs known as Triceratops and Torsaurus. The general belief since the late 1800s was that they were two separate dinosaurs: Triceratops had three horns […]
Two years ago, Dr. Alexander Khoruts took on a patient suffering from an awful infection of Clostridium difficile; she was suffering from diarrhea. Now we’ve all probably had our bad moments, but this is not your average case. It was so bad that she was practically stuck in a wheelchair wearing diapers. She was also […]
The above photo was captured by the Hubble Space Telescope around mid last year, proving excellent practice for Hubble’s newly installed Wide Field Camera 3. Captioned is the by now famous NGC 3603 nebula, located in the Carina spiral arm – it’s by far one of the most spectacular star forming regions in the Milky […]
Storm elves and sprites are electric luminous fleeting phenomena that sometimes naturally occur in the upper atmosphere. A team of Spanish researchers managed to make a high speed recording of the phenomena and publish it in the Journal of Geophysical Research. Practically, sprites are electrical discharges shaped like a carrot or a column that form […]
As any fourth grader will tell you, photosynthesis is (in layman terms), the process through which plants (and bacteria, algae, etc) get the sugars and other organic compounds they need using energy from sunlight. However, during last week’s synthetic biology conference in Boston, a biologist from Harvard took things to a whole new level, presenting […]
Yes ladies and gents, researchers have produced the whole genome sequence of the 3 billion “letters” (nucleotides) in the Neanderthalian genome, and the results are interesting to say the least. For starters, up to 2 percent of present day human DNA outside of Africa originated in Neanderthals; this result suggests that the Neanderthals, Homo neanderthalensis […]
Using DNA preserved for 25.000 – 43.000 years in bones from Siberian mammoths, a team of international scientists recreated mammoth hemoglobin and studied it, revealing interesting facts about the fascinating animals. “It has been remarkable to bring a complex protein from an extinct species, such as the mammoth, back to life,” says Professor Alan Cooper, […]
Two studies put Einstein’s theory, the General Theory of Relativity to a test unlike any other before. The two teams used extensive observations from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory to analyze galaxy clusters, the biggest objects in the Universe that are bound together by gravity (at least, that we know of). The first team produced results […]
The discovery of 9 new planets raises some serious questions on the matter of how planets are formed. Two astronomers from the University of California, Santa Barbara reported the discovery, and of them, two are spinning in the opposite direction the planets in our solar system are spinning. This, along with other recent studies of […]
There are so many things we have yet to understand about the animal kingdom it makes you wonder how much we know about it after all. Therefore, ZME Science will present to you one animal each month; one animal that really makes yo go “what ?!”. There’s no connection to the month itself, no order […]
