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When the administration gives you budget cut lemons, make a different scientific lemonade – that’s pretty much what NASA is trying to do in light of these decisions. Less money, more problems Citing lack of funds, the Obama administration is cutting healthy chunks of the NASA budget, placing a big question mark on many important […]
Of all the skills that athletes and sportsmen possess, the most underappreciated ability is a sportsman’s mental acuity. While sports and games of all types require a great amount of physical ability, what separates a good player from a great player is how they analyze the game on the field. Let’s take a deeper look […]
When Voyager 2 made its flyby near the planet of Uranus, astronomers got their first direct glimpse of what an aurora might look on the cold planet. However, such lights have never been observed from Earth – that is, until last year, when a team of scientists used careful planning and the Hubble Telescope to […]
I don’t know if you’re thinking it, but I definitely am: lizardmen! I’m scared of lizardmen just like the next guy, but all my life I’ve lived with the idea that they are just figments of the imagination which sometimes occur in Star Trek episodes or RPG games – but according to Ronald Breslow, Ph.D., […]
An 8.6-magnitude earthquake and powerful aftershocks struck the coast of Indonesia today, resurrecting fears of a big tsunami like the one responsible for one of the biggest modern disasters ever. However, this earthquake, which struck at 2:38 p.m. local time (4:38 a.m. ET), about 270 miles (435 kilometers) off the coast of the Indonesian island […]
If you’re not a dedicated Christian or loved reading about mythology, then you probably don’t even know what the shroud of Turin is, so let me just clear that right away. From a religious point of view It is a linen cloth bearing the image of a man who appears to have suffered physical trauma […]
Our solar system is special for two reasons: the first one, obviously – is us. Our solar system is the only one we know of so far that hosts life. The second one is the number of planets – no other solar system that we’ve seen until now had as many planets as ours, but […]
She was a sacrifice, so you can look at it this way: the Inca chose her to go and live with the gods. But you can look at it this way too: the Inca brutally killed a 15 year old girl, for no other reason than religion. Furthermore, grim evidence showed that the Inca fattened […]
It just saddens me to find out about things like this: in Colombia, a ten year old girl has given birth to another baby girl, making her one of the youngest mothers to ever live. According to Univision’s Primer Impacto, the girl, which was not named for obvious reasons, arrived in hospital in a great […]
The atmosphere is getting more and more packed with tension between the two Koreas, as satellite images revealed North Korea is digging a huge underground tunnel, in what appears to be preparation for a new nuclear test. Nuclear tests raise global concern North Korea performed two previous tests, both of which were significantly smaller than […]
It’s been pretty quiet lately at the LHC, despite the fact that things seemed to be getting pretty hot, as the elusive Higgs boson appeared to be cornered. However, CERN cracked up the volume, announcing they achieved a record collision energy of 8 TeV. LHC recap The Large Hadron Collider is the world’s largest and […]
After James Cameron, the director of movies such as Titanic and Avatar, became the first man to perform a solo voyage to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, the deepest point on Earth, another Hollywood director is set for an astonishing feat; but Steven Spielberg won’t be hitting rock bottom – instead, he will be […]
Autism is truly one of the medical conditions we have extremely much to learn about – the only way it can be diagnosed is through behavior, and not by cause or mechanism. It would appear that lately, the number of autism cases have grown dramatically, but then again, maybe we’ve just gotten better at detecting […]
Solar tornadoes several times bigger than the Earth are generated in the solar atmosphere, researchers claim, after such a tornado was discovered using the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly telescope on board the Solar Dynamic Observatory (SDO) satellite. “This is perhaps the first time that such a huge solar tornado is filmed by an imager. Previously much […]
I love chocolate, and to be frank, I don’t really care if it goes directly to my hips or not, but millions of women and men all across the world believe differently. For them this study is godsend. A research letter published by the Archives of Internal Medicine showed that healthy people which exercise regularly […]
A simple, non-expensive drug can shrink or cure many types of human cancer, including breast, ovary, colon, bladder, brain, liver, and prostate tumors. It worked on human tumors that were transplanted in mice, and the team was given a green light to move on to human trials. Taking advantage of the tumor’s weakness Basically, the […]
The scalloped hammerhead shark which we’ve probably all seen has a twin – and this discovery led to the conclusion that members of the species might be much, much rarer than previously thought. Scientists have shown that the hammerhead, which was already and endangered species has a ‘fishy’ twin – a newfound species that looks […]
The Moon has fascinated researchers and poets alike since ancient times, but while the latter all agree on its beauty, scientists are still debating how the satellite was formed; recently, a new isotopic analysis seems to shed some new light on the matter, making things even more interesting than they were before. Most believe that […]
The small yet pleasant city of Bugarach in southwest France is flooded with tourists, but the thing is most of them are preoccupied by UFOs instead of the local countryside. The town located near the Pic of Bugarach mountain which has no more than 200 inhabitants is getting more and more spotlight from doomsday visitors […]
Images from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft have enabled scientists for the first time to create a correlation between spraying of jets of water vapor from fissures on Saturn’s moon Enceladus with Saturn’s gravity and the way it creates stress on the fissure. “This new work gives scientists insight into the mechanics of these picturesque jets at […]
All 80.000 items from Albert Einstein’s archives, including a huge number of manuscripts, personal correspondence with several lovers and a touching letter to his ailing mother are going to be published online. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which currently owns the Einstein collection is currently uploading high-res pictures of his scientific works, letters on social […]
Gas giants might just be the most whimsical planets of all: they don’t just settle at any old point on the orbit – instead, they only choose certain regions and stay clear of others – at least according to a new supercomputer simulation. A new study recently revealed that the orbital deserts and pile-ups caused […]
Ancient human settlements have changed the landscape around where they live in such a way that today, 8000 years later, archaeologists can tell if an area was inhabited – using little more than images taken from a satellite. Deep in the Middle East, beyond the impressive mounds of Earth which marked the bigger, known cities […]
It’s equinox time again, and this March 2012 equinox will take place at precisely 5:14 a.m. GMT, or Universal Time. That’s the time of Greenwich, England, which basically gives the standard time for the entire world. But the thing is, our clocks say different times, depending on where we are. If you’re in the United […]
A major study conducted by the Harvard School of Public Health, which involved 110.000 people, concluded that eating as little as two pieces of pork per day or one hot dog can raise the mortality rates of mortality by 20%, while showing that substituting red meat with other sources of protein, such as fish, chicken […]
The amazing properties of graphene are being put to use more and more, as Evan Reed and Mitchell Ong from the Stanford School of Engineering have described a new way of engineering piezoelectrics into graphene. The study was published in the ACS Nano Journal. When you apply a mechanical stress to certain materials, such as […]
In a landmark liftoff, the first privately owned spaceship which can carry passengers will head for a test flight beyond the atmosphere this year – and over 500 people have reserved seats already. More and more companies are starting to look at space tourism as a reliable source of income, and another company has just […]
It’s been quite a week for space exploration and some truly remarkable pictures were taken, here’s the best ones. The solar flare in 3D Earth was struck by a major solar flare, the biggest one in years, and this fantastic 3D image shows sunspots and “wonderful active regions in exquisite detail,” according to NASA’s Solar […]
It saddens me to see NASA having to come out again and explain why the whole ‘Mayan end of the calendar apocalypse’ thing; the US space agency came out with on Saturday in an attempt to debunk these claims and downplay concerns that the world will end in 2012. Mr Don Yeomans from NASA explains […]
It’s really not too late to catch the spectacular show offered by Venus and Jupiter; on Monday and Tuesday evening, the two planets will appear in the sky at a distance of only three degrees – a distance which has been narrowing since early March, and is now reaching its minimum values. The two planets […]
A Romanian scientist working at the University of Ohio captured the first-ever images of atoms moving within a molecule by applying a novel technique which basically turns the electrons of a molecule into flashbulbs; while this is currently only a new way to visualize molecules, researchers believe that one day it will be the key […]
Symbiosis is an absolutely fantastic adaptation in itself, but this case of deep sea symbiosis takes it to a whole new level: basically, a hermit crab uses an anemone as shell; scientists discovered this in a rare place, where to different extreme environments meet. Researchers discovered a junction of two strange environments off the coast […]
The largest solar flare since 2006 occurred Tuesday, when a massive amount of plasma was ejected at a speed of over 4 million miles per hour, causing some significant problems on Earth, forcing planes to reroute, knocking out power grids and blacking out a number of radios. “Super Tuesday? You bet!” joked Joseph Kunches, a […]
NASA admitted to something pretty scary: they were hacked 13 times last year alone, and several times hackers had “full, functional control” of the space agency’s information. According to Inspector General Paul K. Martin, the most powerful attack came from an IP in China, which broke into the network of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, one […]
For almost 100 years it carried the blame of sinking the world’s most famous ship, but now, the ill-famed iceberg may be cleared, after some researchers claim they’ve found the true culprit – the Moon. Now don’t get the wrong idea, it was the collision with the ice mass that ultimately brought the demise of […]
Cassini has sent some new remarkable pictures which brilliantly illustrate the difference in size between Saturn and Titan, its largest moon. Saturn dwarfs its moon easily, even though Titan, at 3,200 miles across, is bigger than Earth’s moon, which has a diameter of only 2159 miles. If you look really closely above Saturn’s rings, there […]
Strange, huge explosions apparently fueled by solar energy are detonating just above the surface of Venus, a surprising new study concludes. Explosive Venus This is not the first time this unusual phenomenon, called ‘hot flow anomaly’ (of HFA) was observed; such events have been previously spotted above Earth, and possibly Saturn and Mars – but […]
Paleontologists claim to have tracked the origins of humans and other vertebrates to a worm that swam in today’s Canada. The team concluded that the extinct Pikaia gracilens is the most primitive known member of the chordate family. The chordate family includes fish, amphibians, birds, reptiles and mammals – pretty much all of what we […]
Diversity is one of the most shocking aspects when it comes to life on Earth, and knowing how many species walk this planet alongside us is perhaps one of the most important questions in science. However, despite major advancements being made in the field, an answer to that question is still miles away, as efforts […]
Since the start of the year, I’ve received quite a few questions regarding absolute temperatures – highest and lowest, so I decided to start a brief discussion around the two values, in which I will give the basic facts about them, so feel free to step in and add more info or questions. Absolute zero […]
Xinwei Wang, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Iowa State studies thermal conductivity – and he had a funny feeling about spiders; so he ordered eight spiders — Nephila clavipes, golden silk orbweavers — and put them to work eating crickets and spinning webs in the cages he set up. Wang has been looking for organic […]
Ground robots are currently typically deployed by the US military in various explosive-ordinance-disposal missions. However, robots are currently unable to fulfill their potential across a greater range of missions mostly due to issues regarding mobility and manipulation. However, DARPA is trying hard to face those obstacles, and when they team up with Boston Dynamics, you […]
It’s been less than a month since we published the last thing about the Cassini probe, and the amazing spacecraft has done it again; this time it detected a thin, oxygen atmosphere, on a moon of Saturn – Dione. The study was published in the Geophysical Research Letters At 1122 km in diameter, Dione is […]
The oldest and thickest Arctic ice seems to be vanishing much faster than the younger, thinner ice at the edges of the Arctic ocean. The bright, white snow mass from the center is the perennial ice sea, which has survived for at least one year, while the larger, light blue area shows the full extent […]
I recently stumbled upon this absolutely dazzling chemistry experiment, and I just had to share it. What you will see is a pretty rare reaction in chemistry – an oscillation reaction. Three clear solutions are combined, and the color gradually changes to amber. Suddenly, the whole thing goes dark blue! Then it stays blue, reverts […]
Women in red dresses have twisted the minds of men for centuries, but a new study shows not only that we find women in red more attractive, but that we also think of them as being more… ahem… available. Basically, men rate women in red dresses as more interested in sex, hinting that men associate […]
During the past months we’ve been reporting several breakthroughs in the field of quantum computing, and now IBM seems ready to truly pave the way for quantum computers. Researchers announced they are now able to develop a superconducting qubit made from microfabricated silicon that maintains coherence long enough for practical computation. Whoa! That probably sounds […]
You probably remember the massive 9.1 earthquake that struck Japan last year and the subsequent problems that followed – most notably the huge tsunamis that struck the Fukushima nuclear plant, bringing it close to a meltdown. Now, according to the first scientific assessment made on the spot, the tsunami was indeed as formidable as the […]
According to a recent study published by researchers from the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC), our galaxy may be ‘infested’ with nomad planets, which wander aimlessly instead of orbiting a star. Furthermore, the study concluded there may actually be 100,000 times more “nomad planets” in the Milky Way than stars. If this […]
Implantable medical devices, capable of delivering drugs or performing micro-surgery from inside the body, have been the subject of scientific research for decades now. A number of exciting prototypes have been developed in the past few years, as miniaturization allowed it, however reliability flaws rendered them unpractical. A new tiny device developed by Stanford electrical engineers, was presented […]
