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Scientists have successfully identified an immune protein which has the possibility to stop or even revert development of type 1 diabetes in its early stages – that is, before insulin producing cells have been destroyed. Why is this not inaccurate/sensationalistic? This is a new thing we’re going to do with most of these articles; why? […]
Researchers in Sweden have shown that children whose moms and dads placed their childrens pacifiers in their own mouths, thus sharing some of their own bacteria with them, had a lower risk of allergies, asthma and eczema. Arguably, the sample size of the study is too small, and more research is needed in order to […]
Paleontologists working at Ohio University have unearthed evidence of two new species of ancient primates, named Rukwapithecus fleaglei and Nsungwepithecus gunnellifa, which offer solid evidence of a split between Old World monkeys and apes. Geological and paleontological analysis have shown that the fossils are approximately 25 million years old, which puts them in the late […]
Usually, species are named after defining trait, or sometimes, more rarely, after somebody famous in the field, but every once in a while, they get some rather cooky names – like is the case with Kooteninchela deppi. Cambrian and scrissors Pronounced Koo-ten-ee-che-la depp-eye, the 505-million-year-old fossil is a distant relative of lobsters and scorpions, and […]
For the first time, scientists have observed in a patient the evolution of an immune molecule that recognizes different HIV types and adapt accordingly. A neutralizing antibody, or NAb is an antibody which defends a cell from an antigen or infectious body by inhibiting or neutralizing any effect it has biologically. They’re your body’s elite […]
For decades, the accepted theory was that the mountain chains running from Alaska to Mexico were created from fragments of land scraped off a huge tectonic plate moving eastwards, called the Farallon, that converged with North America and sunk below it over the past 200 million years or so. But alas, geologists and geophysicists aren’t […]
The humble dragonfly is the most efficient predator in the world.
Unborn lizards can erupt from their eggs days before they should if they recept vibrations that hint at a predator coming. The premature hatchlings literally begin their life by running as fast as they can. Talk about having an escape plan! The fact that lizards can have such spectacular survival reflexes even before they are […]
A magnetic solar ‘heartbeat’ beats deep down in the Sun’s interior, generating energy that leads to solar flares and sunspots. Solar flares and sunspots A solar flare is a large energy release in the form of a sudden brightening of the surface or the solar limb. The flare ejects clouds of electrons, ions, and atoms […]
A paleoclimate study has shown that a huge mass of warm water stretched out from Indonesia over to Africa and South America four million years ago had a huge impact on tropical changes, suggesting that current climate models are a too conservative. The Pliocene era started 5.332 million years ago and lasted until 2.588 million […]
It’s been discussed since the 70s – can hydrogen fuel be the much anticipated solution that ends our full dependence on fossil fuels? A team of researchers from Virginia Tech believes the answer is ‘yes’. They found a way to extract large quantities of hydrogen from any plant, bringing low-cost, environmentally friendly hydrogen-based fuel one […]
In case you don’t know, global bee populations have been dropping dramatically in latest years – and this is not an exaggeration. In 2012 alone, a phenomenon called colony collapse disorder (CCD) wiped out about half of honeybee hives. What happens in CCD is that bees just leave the hive, never to return again. This […]
Just 9% of the millions of tonnes of fish caught by China’s giant fishing fleet in international waters (most notably in Africa) is reported to the UN. Overfishing is one of the most serious issues mankind is facing – people don’t really understand that aquatic resources are not neverending, and this is probably the kind […]
Paracetamol or acetaminophen (going by trade names such as Tylenol, Panadol, Efferalgan, and many more) is one of the most common and effective drugs out there. You’ve almost certainly took it at some point in your life, your parents have, your friends have, I don’t think I know more than a few people who never […]
Florida country radio morning-show hosts Val St. John and Scott Fish are currently serving indefinite suspensions and possibly criminal charges for what can only be described as a successful April Fools. They told their listeners that “dihydrogen monoxide” was coming out of the taps throughout the Fort Myers area – as I’m sure you all […]
New research by The Open University and Lancaster University showed that another type of volcanic eruption in Iceland could cause significant disruption throughout the Old Continent. Published in Geology, the study found magma that is twice as ‘fizzy’ as previously believed, which increases the likelihood of disruptive ash clouds from future eruptions. Magma can […]
Life on Mars The sedimentary processes on Mars have generally been governed by wind, not water – but is this the case where the Curiosity rover is searching for life at the moment. If this is the case (and Curiosity will either confirm or infirm this when it reaches Mount Sharp next year), then odds […]
Usually, the military taps into what science does and uses its technologies – but for once, it was the other way around. Using unmannes planes typically designed for city warfare, scientists were able to keep track of toxic volcanic fumes. The Dragon Eye remote-controlled plane weighs in at just under 6 pounds (2.7 kilograms), with […]
A decade ago, American physics professor John Cramer released an audio file which made history: the sound of the theorized Big Bang that formed the universe. Now, armed with new data and more observations, Cramer has released a remix – an improved version of the universe’s first one hit wonder. “In general, there are no sounds […]
In ancient times, Pluto’s Gate (Ploutonion in Greek, Plutonium in Latin) was a place most people would go to any length to avoid; it held a considerable importance in their mythology, celebrate as the gate to the underworld – Pluto being the Roman name for Hades. “This space is full of a vapor so misty […]
I was always puzzled by the tentacle-like spiral arms some galaxies (including our own) develop; it just seems so counter intuitive and senseless, that most researchers agreed they are only transient features, which come and go in galactic history. But astronomers working at University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics claim that these […]
While relatively small quantities of water appear to be colorless, water's tint becomes bluer and bluer as its thickness increases.
Especially after the Fukushima events, nuclear energy has been painted black by most of the media, with everybody suddenly realizing just how dangerous and not really desirable it is. But a recent report conducted by NASA showed that as a matter of fact, nuclear energy leads to substantially fewer pollution-related deaths and greenhouse gas emissions […]
Few destinations in our solar systems are as likely to hold life as Europa, a moon of Jupiter. Even though on the surface it’s a barren, frozen wasteland, there is every reason for it to host life beneath its surface. So it’s quite easy to understand why we’re so excited to see that on page […]
If you know your physics (or optics, to be more specific), you’ve probably heard a lot about Fermat’s principle (or the principle of least time). Basically, what it states is that the path taken between two points by a ray of light is the path that can be traversed in the least time. A ray […]
A recent study led by WCS-India scientist Vidya Athreaya finds that certain areas in India, in which human settlements have greatly expanded, and which, as a result, are basically devoid of wilderness are teeming with another type of backyard wildlife: leopards. Camera traps set up at night in a densely populated region of India virtually […]
It’s hard to find two populated areas as far apart as Brazil and Polynesia; however, a recent genetic study showed that indigenous people that lived in southeastern Brazil in the late 1800s shared some genetic sequences with Polynesians. This could suggest that Pacific islanders traded with South America thousands of years ago (or traveled across […]
There’s a lot of fuss about climate modeling is definitely a hot one, with the validity of certain models (and models in general) often being brought to question. So how could you test if the today’s models are correct, except for waiting? That’s still a debatable question, but if we were to look at past […]
Overgrowth of invasive algae can have huge detrimental effects both on the environment and on human activities. This is quite clearly observed in lake Erie, where a study published by the National Academy of Sciences documents some serious problems. Farmers and the environment According to Anna Michalak, the study’s co-author and a researcher at the […]
The misinformation going on in some fields of science is just staggering. For example, I woke up today to see my email, Facebook and even phone filled with messages about this new discovery that can use the CO2 in the atmosphere and transform it into biofuel. My first take on that was “Cool, a plant”. […]
A team of researchers working at Harvard has measured the magnetic moment of the antiproton with unprecedented precision. “That is a spectacular jump in precision for any fundamental quality of the antiproton measurements. That’s a leap that we don’t often see in physics, at least not in a single step,” said Prof Gerald Gabrielse of […]
It may be a little off to talk about invisibility when we’re not even in the visible spectrum, but ‘invisibility cloak‘ sounds just to awesome not to use it. Using a new kind of cloak that uses a very thin multilayer dielectric coating made of natural material (as opposed to metamaterials which are often used), […]
It’s important to understand that our planet’s climate consists of so much interconnected elements, that what happens someplace affects virtually the entire Earth. Thing is, few people realize the huge impact the warming in the Arctic has on global climate. At a news conference held on Tuesday, several researchers said that the melting ice may […]
Archaeology – check. Beer – check. Cool chemistry – check. Shipwreck – check. What more could you ask for, seriously? Produced at least as far back as 7000 years ago, in 5000 BC, beer has been with us for a long time, and we’re thankful for that. It’s done a lot for us (for better […]
Inaccuracy in the genetic makeup can lead to deficiencies that alter how color should be perceived in optimal conditions.
For decades, there’s been significant discussions on how professional fighting affects the brain, but not much scientific progress has been made on the matter. Now, a new (not yet peer reviewed) MRI study has shown that important regions and connections of the brain have decreased in volume in both amateur and professional fighters with the […]
It’s Chevron’s third oil spill in three years in Utah alone; a June 2010 spill involved more than 30,000 gallons of crude oil near Red Butte Gardens in Salt Lake City, while a December 2010 leak near the same site involved about 21,000 gallons. This time, the spill was originally thought to be 27,000 gallons, […]
As the writers on Nature depict it, it evokes the dystopian worlds of science fiction writer Philip K. Dick – if you’ve read his works or seen Minority Report, you’ll understand it. Neuroscientists have developed a brain scan that shows how likely are convicted felons to commit crimes again. Brain scanning felons Kent Kiehl, a […]
Aerogels are fantastic materials – typically, they are synthetic porous ultralight material derived from a gel, in which the liquid component of the gel has been replaced with a gas. They are ultra-light, and have numerous practical applications – most notable as insulators, but also in the pharmaceutical and cosmetic industry, in biology and chemistry […]
When it comes to social media, we post all sorts of stuff: what we eat, what we drink, who we hang out with, how we hate the weather, and oh so much more. There’s one area where apparently, we’re much more careful about: our health. A new study from BYU finds that while most of […]
You’ve probably heard it a few times: the climate is indeed warming up, but it’s all good, because the rate at which it is warming up is slowing down. But a new study published in Geophysical Research Letters analyzing ocean warming (which represents 90% of global warming) claims otherwise. Accelerating global warming Contrary to the […]
While taking a walk with her parents on U.K.’s Isle of Wight (map) in 2008, Daisy Morris, who was then no more than 5 years old, came across blackened “bones sticking out of the sand”. Her family took the bones to paleontologist Martin Simpson at the University of Southampton, who, with the help of colleagues, […]
Great tits are widespread species throughout Europe, the Middle East, Central and Northern Asia, and parts of North Africa in any sort of woodland. They tipically don’t migrate, except for very harsh winters. According to a new paper published in BioMed Central’s open access journal Frontiers in Zoology, the female’s appearance can be correlated with […]
ESA’s XMM-Newton space telescope has found a star and a black hole that orbit each other at the whopping rate of once every 2.4 hours. Basically, the star orbits the black hole at 2,000,000 km/hr. The black hole here is 3-4 times heavier than the Sun, while the red dwarf has a mass just 20% […]
So far… it’s re-extinction Almost 10 years ago, on July 30, 2003, a team of Spanish and French scientists reversed time. They brought an animal back from extinction, if only just to see it go extinct again. The animal they revived was a kind of wild goat known as a bucardo, or Pyrenean ibex. For […]
Each year, towards the end of March, we mark Earth Hour – a worldwide event organized by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) that encourages households and institutions to turn off their non-essential lights for one hour to raise awareness about the need to take action on climate change. Sorry to the Australians and […]
Rapidly expanding road networks are causing massive direct and indirect damage to forests but proper infrastructure planning and implementation could actually turn them into a net positive for the environment, argue researchers writing in the journal Science. William Laurance and Andrew Balmford have studied the severe negative environmental issues caused by expanding road networks in […]
In one of the first articles I’ve ever written on ZME Science, all the way back in 2007 (has it really been 6 years? Wow!), I was telling you about an interesting plan of cooling global temperatures by fertilizing the world’s oceans with iron. This would in cause turn a phytoplankton explosion, which would suck […]
There is still unbelievably much we have yet to discover from the Amazon. Now, researchers have uncovered two new species of woodlizards from Peru. Woodlizards are little known species of reptiles, with only 10 species being described so far, all of which are found in Central or South America (9 in Peru). These new found […]
Physics and heavy metal may not have much in common, but Matt Bierbaum and Jesse Silverberg have found a connection. Both of them are graduate students at Cornell University – and both of them love heavy metal and headbanging. It all started when Silverberg, who really loves rocking out, took his girlfriend to a metal […]
