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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 […]
There’s few things I can think of that sound scarier that a genetically modified version of herpes simplex virus type 1, but apparently that’s exactly what researchers used to shrink tumors of the deadly skin cancer melanoma in a clinical trial, according to Amgen, which is developing the experimental cancer treatment. The virus is actually […]
Almost always I happen to discuss global warming, something that often comes up. Still, the Earth was hotter in its history, like say right after the Cretaceous, so what’s the problem? In this article, we’re gonna clarify the aspects that differentiate those geologic periods from nowadays. Some sixty million years ago, there was virtually no […]
This is not really news, but it’s so awesome I just had to share it. Astronomers in England have discovered a “singing” black hole in a distant cluster of galaxies. But wait a minute, you’re gonna say; just hold on a second there. How can sound escape a black hole, and what does it propagate […]
Scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego have found a layer of liquefied molten rock in Earth’s mantle that may be acting as a lubricant for the sliding motions of the planet’s tectonic plates. This discovery has very far reaching implications, which can solve some of the long standing geological puzzles, as […]
I always find it funny when something says “zero fat”, but has tons of sugar in it. Sugar is addictive, it’s teeming in your cereal, it’s in your soda, it’s almost everywhere – and we need to get off of it; not to say we shouldn’t eat any sugar, but we really need to lower […]
Researchers find out new species all the time, but really, when do they ever find a creature that looks like it was spawned by the fiery volcano of Mordor? Coal-black with orange-tinted toes, the new crocodile newt was identified as a different species when biologists spotted a series of differences to nearly related species. “I […]
The fearsome monster that inspired Greek and Norse mythology was once driven almost to extinction, facing a genetic bottleneck event that marked their evolution as a species. The finding comes from an analysis of tissue samples from 43 giant squid (Architeuthis spp.) from around the world. The analysis were mostly concluded on specimens which were […]
If you still don’t know what graphene is, you’d better learn pretty soon – because it’s the stuff of the future. Graphene is a substance composed of pure carbon, with atoms arranged in a regular hexagonal pattern similar to graphite, but in a one-atom thick sheet. Ok, so what’s so special about it? Well, due […]
To boldly go where no man has gone before: a spacecraft launched from Earth, Voyager I has pushed into the great unknown, leaving behind our solar system. For years, astronomers have been discussing about when Voyager will finally leave the solar system – and it’s actually pretty hard to draw a line and say that […]
Recently, a big drop in swallow road-kill numbers was observed, without humans changing anything on their part. So biologists set out to see what swallows have been doing differently that allows them to be so much better at avoiding cars. They discovered that roadside nesting cliff swallows have evolved shorter, more manoeuvrable wings that gives […]
Researchers have managed to take skin cells from monkeys, reverse engineer them into stem cells, and then transplant into the monkeys’ brain where they successfully became brain cells. This technique holds massive promise for treating mental degenerative diseases. The generation of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) opens up the possibility for personalized cell therapy. Using […]
I really liked New York’s mayor Bloomberg campaign of limiting sugary drink consumption, but that didn’t really work out as good as we were hoping. Another, better idea that has a lot of potential however is conveying the food’s calories into walking. So a regular burger would give you some 250 calories, which you can […]
I had the chance to witness, on several occasions, how bears change their behaviors when people feed them (which they really shouldn’t!). Bears, who usually just avoid people, or if they feel threatened display some sort of aggressive behavior, just started to beg for food, much like a dog around Thanksgiving dinner. This dramatically altered […]
Way back before clocks were a thing, people had another natural way of waking up: the rooster’s crow. Now, a new study shows that they are so exact, that they don’t even need the light of a new day to know when it’s dawn – they just rely on their internal clocks. Nagoya University […]
According to a research published by researchers from Chinese Academy of Sciences and Washington University in St. Louis, interbreeding was pretty common with our ancestors. They based their case on an approximately 100,000-year-old skull from Xujiayao in the Nihewan Basin of northern China, which has a rare congenital disorder caused by interbreeding. Enlarged parietal foramen […]
For the first time in history, researchers have found microbes living deep inside Earth’s oceanic crust – the black basalts that make some 60% of our planet’s surface – potentially the largest habitat on our planet. Engineering and microbes Microbiologist Mark Lever is on board the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program’s research vessel JOIDES Resolution to […]
A NOAA paper published 4 years ago showed, almost beyond the shadow of a doubt, that climate change is irreversible for approximately for approximately 1000 years. Despite this and several other papers that had pretty much the same conclusions, people still believe that climate change is reversible in the near future; it’s not. We’ve reached […]
A new theory based on a simple but viable geologic model claims that over 80 percent of all commercial gold deposits were formed in a flash. Gold seams are formed when mineral-rich waters flow through networks of cracks in rocks some 5-30 km deep. But the exact mechanism through which the gold is deposited is […]
