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There are still many things we have yet to discover about plants, a new study has highlighted. The research team showed that trees don’t just move water up and down like we previously thought - they can store it and move it horizontally if they need it. In a way, they save water for a not-so-rainy day.
When the University of Amsterdam decided to close down several language studies, students reacted; but they didn't protest or used violence, they simply occupied one of the University's buildings, demanding a more democratic approach to education and more student participation.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Obama administration and California lawmakers have announced a doubling of the size of the Cordell Bank and Gulf of the Farallones national marine sanctuaries off Northern California. “NOAA is expanding the boundaries of Cordell Bank National Marine Sanctuary (CBNMS) and Gulf of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary (GFNMS) to […]
The Pacific island nation of Vanuatu has lost years of development progress following the devastating effects of Cyclone Pam. Widely regarded as the worst natural disaster in the history of Vanuatu, the cyclone's damage has not yet been thoroughly estimated.
The Moon's geologic past was much more interesting and active than previously thought, results from the Chinese lunar rover indicate. The Yutu moon rover found evidence of at least nine distinct rock layers deep beneath its wheels, something which seems to indicate a more complex setting.
It's awesome when engineers can take inspiration from nature and design something truly spectacular - now, a Berkeley team has managed to create a material that can shift colors as easy as a chameleon's skin when pulled or twisted. The material could be used for camouflage or for the next generation of display technologies.
For centuries, arsenic was the go-to poison in the high circles of Europe, either to knock out political foes or to simply eliminate people on the dastardly way to a high position; it was odourless, tasteless, and until 1830 - when chemist James Marsh developed a test - impossible to detect. Thankfully, we're dealing with much less intentional arsenic poisoning today, but unfortunately, we're dealing with much more accidental poisoning. Recently, scientists discovered a population that developed natural immunity to arsenic, high in the Andes.
Deep inside the Earth, in the gigantic Hang Son Doong cave in Vietnam, there lies a completely unique and mostly unknown ecosystem. Using a GoPro-carrying drone, Beijing-based traveler Ryan Deboodt provides a unique insight into this cave, showing a pristine, forgotten world. The cave was only discovered in 1991, but even then, scientists had to wait until 2009 […]
Watch the video all to the end – it starts off a bit slow, but it gets pretty rad towards the end. I’m not sure what I was expecting to happen… but it clearly wasn’t this: So what’s happening here? Well, it’s plain to see that a bunch of dark particles precipitate at the bottom […]
If you've ever visited the McMurdo Dry Valleys in Antarctica, then you've likely had a surprise. The cold, frigid white background cut by snowless valleys is marked by the Onyx river, the continent's longest and largest river, which ends with a five-storey-tall waterfall that spills bright blood-red water over an enormous glacier.
Extraterrestrial life in our solar system just got a lot more likely: NASA has found convincing evidence that Ganymede and Enceladus, moons of Jupiter and Saturn respectively, might both harbor salty oceans beneath their frozen surface. Scientists estimate that the oceans are over 50 miles thick (80 km), which greatly increases the chances of alien life.
It is generally accepted that our galaxy has a diameter of nearly 100,000 light-years. However, findings of a new research, published in the Astrophysical Journal, suggest that the Milky Way may actually be 50% larger than previously thought. The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy containing our solar system. From Earth, the Milky Way appears as a […]
Recent archaeological and anthropological research showed that Neanderthals weren't the mindless brutes we once thought they were - they were smart, organized, they had their own speech and interbred with early humans. Now, a new study has found evidence that 130,000 years ago, Neanderthals also designed elaborate jewelry, a degree of sophistication never seen before for that time.
As more and more researchers are starting to highlight the potential benefits of Psychedelic substances, one recent Norwegian campaign is aiming high: they’ve started a crowdfunding campaign to make psychedelics and MDMA legal for research and global medical use. In the past years, we’ve written about several studies documenting the positive effects that psychedelics may have, […]
An eruption from an underwater volcano in the Pacific 'Ring of Fire' caused a 1-km wide island to form.
It may be the dawn of a new age for particle physics - scientists and engineers are working together to restart the Large Hadron Collider. Upon reactivation, the LHC will be capable of energies never before achieved, potentially unveiling novel particles, confirming the Standard Model and revealing some of the Universe's biggest mysteries.
See: Previous Week’s Featured Researchers This is where we take a look back at the past week, discussing not only the most interesting recent studies, but also the men and women behind them. Lost City Belonging to Mysterious Culture Discovered in the Honduran Rain Forest Article Featured Researchers: Christopher Fisher; Mark Plotkin Affiliation: Colorado State University; Old […]
A few days ago, we wrote an article about our featured researchers – outstanding men and women in their field, who recently published highly interesting studies. Today, we’re talking to Michael Mann, Distinguished Professor of Meteorology at Penn State University, with joint appointments in the Department of Geosciences and the Earth and Environmental Systems Institute (EESI). […]
Scientists in Australia have developed a groundbreaking bionic heart that works without having a pulse. The device, which was successfully tested on a sheep, is set to start clinical trials within three years.
The cockroach - one of the nature's great survivors, hated by building residents throughout the entire world, just got more interesting. According to a new study published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, cockroaches have individual and even group personalities; in other words, cockroaches do have a character.
At the core of a newly found dwarf galaxy, astronomers discovered a mysterious source of gamma rays that may signal the presence of the mysterious dark matter. If this is confirmed, then it would be the first time we see dark matter through anything else than its gravitational pull.
A few days ago, we wrote an article about our featured researchers – outstanding men and women in their field, who recently published highly interesting studies. Today, we’re talking to Dirk Lachenmeier, a certified food chemist, toxicologist, head of the official alcohol control laboratory and co-head of the nuclear magnetic resonance laboratory at Chemical and Veterinary […]
Exoplanet GJ581d is the first potentially habitable world astronomers have discovered, but some astronomers believed that the planet wasn't actually there - it was all an observational flaw mixed with some noise in the signal. However, British researchers recently released a study which confirms that the planet does exist and further underline the matter of habitability. This is one of the planets outside our solar system most likely to harbor life.
A study conducted on 2000 year old tooth enamel found that ancient farmers traveled to the grassy plains southern Africa to develop herding away from the dangerous tsetse fly.
Neil deGrasse Tyson, the internet's favorite astrophysicist doesn't have high hopes for Mars One - the private enterprise that plans to send people on a one way trip to Mars. Mars One, plans to create a Martian outpost with a crew to land in 2024, sending people 2 by 2; they recently announced the 100 finalists to be the first Martian astronauts.
The Catalina Fox simply can't catch a break - it went from endangered, to doing so well that local residents want to kill it again.
In 2002, Jason Padgett was brutally attacked outside a karaoke bar, getting a brain concussion and a severe case of PTSD. But this may have actually been the best thing that happened to him - the brain injury turned him into a mathematical genius, and made him see the world differently, through a geometrical lens.
This eagle at Codorus State Park in Pennsylvania has had it up to his neck with snow – both parents, mother and father, have taken parenting to the next level, sharing egg duty despite the growing snow. The Bald Eagle, recently taken off the endangered list, is a sea eagle. It’s an opportunistic species that subsists […]
Whether we see them in math or in real life biology (or architecture, or art), fractals are just awesome. In case you don’t know, a fractal is a repeating pattern that displays at every scale. Basically, a fractal is a similar, never-ending pattern. No matteer how you zoom in or out, you end up with a […]
Archaeologists working in Oregon have uncovered a stone tool which seems to be way older than any previously documented site of human occupation in North America. When archaeologists date things, they use a relative law borrowed from geology, called the superposition law. The superposition law states that sedimentary layers are deposited in a time sequence, […]
Dental health is still a generally neglected issue throughout the world - most people just delay their dental problem or simply ignore them until they become unbearable. Although it's pretty simple to have a correct dental hygiene, most people simply don't care enough about this, and as a result, almost 2 and a half billion people suffer from untreated tooth decay.
Scientists in Finland have been keeping themselves busy testing two different beers... for science, of course. These are not just your average beers though - they're almost two centuries old, recovered by divers exploring a 1840s shipwreck in the Baltic Sea back in 2010.
Scientists have found tantalizing evidence regarding Mars' wet past - according to new research, the Red Planet may have once had a huge ocean, containing 5 million cubic miles of water with a depth of over a mile.
You never know what’s hidden in food these days… but you also never know what’s hidden under supermarkets. Organized rows of over 200 skeletons have been found in a communal grave under a Monoprix supermarket in central Paris. The site is thought to be a hospital cemetery dating back to the 1100s. When building constructors encounter […]
It’s not every day that species get such awesome names – but then again, it’s not every day that such awesome spiders are discovered. Two gorgeous new species of spider have been discovered in Australia (where else?), and the researchers who made the discovery decided to give them these memorable names. The species are a part […]
A private company in Hong Kong known as the Hong Kong Nicaragua Canal Development Investment Company (HKND) has been given the green light to start the $50 billion work on a canal that will connect the Pacific and the Atlantic Ocean through Nicaragua. The project, which will be significantly longer than the Panama canal could bring huge economic benefits, saving a lot of time and resources, but it also raises major environmental concerns.
Using both modern and historic measurements, researchers now have a more extensive view of how the Arctic sea ice has changed in the past few decades, finding that the ice is melting much faster than previously expected. The ice in the central Arctic Ocean thinned 65 percent between 1975 and 2012, from 11.7 feet (3.59 meters) to 4.1 feet (1.25 m).
How the tables have turned! While documenting the experiments conducted on campus, Benjamin Savard, a digital media producer at Middlebury College, wanted to take some underwater pictures of an octopus. But the octopus had other plans. It grabbed the camera and turned it on Savard, who posted the photos and GIF of the entire sequence on Reddit. “I […]
An expedition in the Honduras has emerged from the jungle with a spectacular announcement: they have discovered the remains of a lost city belonging to an unknown, mysterious culture. The team was investigating a lead regarding the site of a storied “White City,” also referred to in legend as the “City of the Monkey God.” La […]
Anthony Gibbons, a designer which specializes on sustainable materials and biomimicry developed some rad looking tree houses which seem to be taken straight from the elves’ forest home of Lothlorien in Lord of the Rings! The Roost (as its called) rises up above the forest floor with sleeping quarters, viewing platforms, and spiral stairs, fully […]
One of the world's most iconic and well known monuments - the Eiffel Tower - just got even better: the French authorities have installed two vertical axis wind turbines to power, at least partially, the tower's electrical requirements.
Sick, got the flu? Well, maybe what you think is the flu really isn't the flu... a new study has found that while children catch a flu once every two years on average, the rate goes down significantly in adults - the average adult only gets it once every 5 years.
When she was pregnant, former Chinese news anchor Chai Jing got some tragic news - her unborn daughter was diagnosed with a tumour. She immediately quit her job, and soon started working on a documentary focusing on China's pollution problem (especially smog). Now, her self-financed documentary, for which she paid $200,000 took the country by storm, with 75 million hits on the day it was released on Chinese video streaming sites and over 250 million views now.
A new study suggests that two very common emulsifiers - chemicals that stabilize foods and stop products like mayo from separating - could increase the risk of obesity and irritable bowel syndrome.
Scientists undertook the gargantuan task of analyzing the compound chemicals found in the venom of 206 spiders, and they discovered what may lead to a new generation of painkillers, improving the lives of over 1 billion people.
If you'd happen to see these two British twins, you'd likely believe they're good friends - or cousins at most. But Lucy and Maria are actually twins - despite the obvious differences.
Many people today are consuming more salt than they actually need - while this may make foods more tasty, it also increases the risk of heart disease and stroke. But a new study found that dietary salt could actually have a dietary advantage, defending the body against invading microbes.
In the developed world, obesity is one of the biggest health concerns, so weight loss is one of the hottest topics today. But while dietary supplements and gastric by-pass surgeries are becoming more and more popular, we are also starting to discover issues associated with these procedures. Recently, a study published in Cell showed that the new generation of weight loss drugs may actually favor cancer development.
OK, it’s been a while since we did this feature, but it’s back now – and it’s here to stay. This is where we take a look back at the past week, discussing the most interesting studies and the researchers behind them. Bees have false memories too Article Featured Researcher: Lars Chittka Affiliation: Chittka Lab, Queen Mary […]
Most of the time, the so-called civilized world would just rather turn a blind eye towards what is happening in Africa; right now, I'd like to shed some light on what it's like to be an albino in Africa, and more specific, Tanzania.
