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Huge leaps in research within the field of genetics have enabled fetal DNA sequencing from maternal blood. This has made it possible to determine whether the unborn baby is suffering from any autoimmune conditions or chromosomal abnormalities such as Down’s syndrome, Turner’s syndrome or Neural tube defects such as Spina Bifida. Up until the recent […]
Just think about it: a minimally invasive brain stimulator that significantly reduces seizure duration for epilepsy patients. Such a device exists, but sadly, only works in rats so far. The device was tested on nine rats with a ‘petit mal’ form of epilepsy, and it reduced the length of seizures by approximately 60 percent. Most […]
During the Neolithic period, man made the big jump from hunter-gatherer to farmer and agriculturalist, eventually moving on to larger and larger settlements, with a variety of animals and plants. The transition also brought significant changes in terms of economy, architecture, and apparently, woodworking. Dr. Ran Barkai of Tel Aviv University‘s Department of Archaeology and […]
NASA’s Curiosity rover is really getting down to business, sending spectacular pictures back to Earth – including a colour panoramic image of the Gale Crater landing site. During a press conference, NASA officials announced the pictures are not only spectacular themselves, but also crucial to understanding the Martian landscape. “The Navcam and Mastcam images have […]
Groundwater use is unsustainable in many of the world’s major agricultural zones; as a matter of fact, about a quarter of the world’s population lives in regions where groundwater is being used up faster than it can be replenished, concluded researchers. The planet thirsts Our entire civilization depends on our water supply, and aside from […]
Researchers have found evidence that the crater in case was formed when the ground was slammed by a massive meteorite, millions of years ago. Prince Albert crater Measuring about 25 kilometers across, Prince Albert crater was named after the peninsula in which it was discovered. Researchers never were really sure when it was formed, the […]
Would you eat shark fin soup? Please, tell me that the answer is ‘NO!’. Nearly a third of all shark species are endangered, due to wreckless killing – mostly for soup. Proceed at will, but the article contains some gruesome pictures. The champions’s tragedy Sharks are on top of the food chain – they have […]
Our family tree may be much more complex than we know – it may have sprouted some long lost branches which go back some 2 million years. A messy family tree A team led by Meave Leakey, daughter-in-law of distinguished scientist Louis Leakey found facial and jaw bones from three specimens that led them to […]
The video captures the thrilling final few minutes of the Curiosity rover’s white-knuckle ride as it descended towards the surface of Mars, where it will hopefully provide valuable information about the Red Planet’s history. You shouldn’t expect a fantastic hi-res video, because the rover’s Mars Descent Imager (MARDI) only has a low-resolution camera. During the […]
Amazing photo: the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter took one of the best space pictures of the decade – Curiosity descending to Mars, using its parachutes. As you can see, the rover is safely descending inside its backshell, suspended from its huge parachute; the picture was taken just as the rover was deccelerating […]
Curiosity has landed. The Mars Science Laboratory is set to go, and today, we’ll be writing tons of posts about it: videos, pics, facts, etc – given that it is, without a doubt the most important accomplishment of the year in space exploration. Unlike Spirit and Opportunity, Curiosity doesn’t use solar panels as an energy […]
Stars suffer, too, you know. Astronomers have recently discovered a distinctive X-ray signal coming from a star on the verge of being engulfed by a black hole in a distant galaxy. “This tell-tale signal, called a quasi-periodic oscillation or QPO, is a characteristic feature of the accretion disks that often surround the most compact objects […]
The Mars landing isn’t an easy feat, even if you’re NASA; the car-sized Curiosity roverch is on its way to fulfilling the two year $2.5 billion project it embarked on: finding out whether Mars has, or had at any time in its existence, life forms. The rover has been traveling 8 months and a half, […]
Tokelau is a small island near Samoa, not far from New Zealand; at a first glance, it wouldn’t seem significantly different from other beautiful atolls in that part of the world, but Tokelau has something very special: they are on track to become the first territory entirely powered by solar energy. The Diesel dependent country […]
Leg ulcers are nasty problems – and hard ones to get rid of. Now, according to a team of Canadian and American doctors, spraying leg ulcers with a mixture of skin cell mixture may speed up healing, even for nasty cases. Typically, such ulcers develop when high blood pressure in the veins from the legs […]
With the Mars rover Curiosity due to land this weekend, it can be a real drag following NASA’s everyday lingo, which sometimes seems to resemble Martian more than English. Processes have nicknames, parts have nicknames or acronyms, and if you want to know if MSL will nail the EDL for example, you have to learn […]
I have to admit this one caught me off-guard: Mount Sharp, the destination for the new Mars Rover is at the center of a minor naming confusion: its official name isn’t actually Mount Sharp. As of today only three days remain until the much expected land, and I was just reading some details about Curiosity […]
Scientists from the world’s largest democracy, and 2nd most populated country in the world, India, announced a most ambitious mission set for next year: they want to send a probe to the red planet to study its climate and geology. India and China are now preparing for two major space missions that could put the […]
It seems we keep finding out more and more interesting facts about dolphins, the fantastic creatures highlighting a not-so-pleasant but rather human behavior: much like sassy highschool girls, dolphins hang out in cliques. Discriminating dolphins Dolphins have figured out how to use sea sponges as hunting tools – which is an absolutely remarkable feat in […]
A novel avian influenza virus has developed the ability to infect aquatic mammals and is responsible for an outbreak of fatal pneumonia that recently struck harbor seals in New England. The announcement was made by researchers from the Center for Infection & Immunity (CII) at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, the National Oceanic […]
Just grin and bear it – we’ve all heard it at one point or another in our lives, and we’ve probably hated hearing it. But could there be some real scientific fact behind this piece of advice? Can smiling actually help you feel better? Smile psychology In a study forthcoming in Psychological Science, a journal […]
Heartened by a glimpse of what may have been the Higgs boson, researchers at the CERN physics lab continue to smash particles in a quest to understand how the Universe works at a submolecular level, why do particles have mass, and many other such cosmic riddles. But rather than the end of the line, the […]
A camera attached to a South American seabird allowed scientists to directly observe its dive-and-feed techniques for the first time. The video below explains this exact process, and it’s absolutely stunning! Researchers from the Wildlife Conservation Society mounted a small camera on the back of an imperial cormorant in Punta León, a coastal protected area […]
As we count the days to the expected Curiosty land, let’s take a while to understand just what it will do, at least from a chemical point of view. Curiosity, the new Mars rover, is practically a laboratory on wheels, equipped with instruments to analyze soil samples from the red planet to test for microbial […]
A recent study of gargantuan proportions estimated that the technical potential of photovoltaic cells and concentrated solar power (CSP) in the United States, at today’s level of research and with today’s possibilities, is enough to generate about 400,000 TWh of energy annually, significantly more than any other renewable energy source. The study The National Energy […]
For people of the Northern Hemisphere (North America, Europe, Asia and a healthy chunk of Africa), late July and August is usually meteor viewing season; usually, the most spectacular displays take place during mid August – the Perseids, of course. This year, 2012, will be a fairly good but not spectacular one for meteor showers, […]
A colossal sculpture, both in physical and artistic terms, was unearthed by archaeologists at the Tayinat Archaeological Project (TAP) excavation site in southeastern Turkey. Aside from this new treasure, they also found a large semi-circular column base, ornately decorated on one side. The pieces are part of a monumental gate complex from the upper citadel […]
Researchers have discovered what they believe to be a grandfather of snakes, which descended from terrestrial rather than marine ancestors. “It’s the missing-link snake between snakes and lizards,” says Nicholas Longrich, a postdoctoral fellow in the geology and geophysics department at Yale University and the lead author of a paper published in the journal Nature. […]
Great news for people over 35, die hard rock fans, and not only: according to a researchers in Spain, pop music is louder than your average songs, and sounds pretty much all the same. Louder and scarcer Scientists used a huge archive known as the Million Song Dataset, which basically breaks down audio and lyrical […]
A while ago, we started this animal award, giving the first one to the mimic octopus, and the second one to the amazing Siberian salamander, which can survive after being frozen in temperatures as low as -45 degrees Celsius. Each month, we’ll highlight an animal so special and unique it just makes you go ‘Wow!’. […]
Hand stencils, red dots and animal figures currently represent the oldest examples yet found so far in cave art in Europe; using a new, improved technique, researchers have dated the walls at 11 Spanish locations, including the World Heritage sites of Altamira, El Castillo and Tito Bustillo, and found that one motif, a faint red […]
A huge asteroid will make a ‘cosmic brush’ on Earth, closing in on our planet at a distance of only a few million kilometers. The massive asteroid, named 2012 LZ1, will buzz Earth Thursday, and amateur astronomers without any equipment can watch the flyby on the Slooh Space Camera’s website. It will be a close […]
I recently told you a few days ago China was planning its first ever space docking, and one of the astronauts will definitely be a woman – first they nailed it down to two, but now, Chinese officials have made their decision: Liu Yang will be their first female astronaut ever! Liu will be one of […]
By creating this microbiome catalog, researchers hope to figure out the complex interactions between the countless microbes in our bodies and our immune system. As many already know, germs are not always bad for you – in fact, they are sometimes necessary for a healthy body. But regardless how careless or careful you are with […]
Dr. Perry Kendall, one of B.C.’s leading health officials says taking pure ecstasy, without any other substances, is totally safe for adults – when consumed responsibly. MDMA and street ecstasy MDMA, the pure substance originally synonymous with ecstasy was thought to be responsible for a series of deaths, but according to Dr. Kendall, the life-threatening […]
As it turns out, no one single factor was powerful enough to wipe out the woolly mammoth – instead, a sum of factors acted towards their demise, much like many animals are threatened today. Woolly mammoths roamed the globe for 250.000 years, wandering from North America to Europe to Asia, until they were driven extinct […]
I was just telling you how China is preparing for its first manned space docking – a truly remarkable feat, especially considering how only 9 years have passed since their first space flight. However, it is still not clear which woman will board the Shenzhou-9 manned spacecraft docking mission, but it will be either Captain […]
Hidden for more than 100 years for being too ‘graphic’, a set of images depicting ‘hooligan behaviors, including sexual coercion’, sodomy and necrophilia by Adelie penguins observed during captain Scott’s 1910 expedition were revealed, analyzed and interpreted. George Levick, a surgeon and the medical officer on Scott’s famous 1910-1913 expedition to the South Pole, called […]
Remember about the auctioned Tyrannosaurus Bataar, taken out of Mongolia? Even though a court from Texas declared the auction illegal, the sale proceeded in New York, and unofficial, national court order has not been issued yet. However, that may change following the analysis of an international paleontologists team. “We have pulled a lot of them […]
NASA announced a truly unexpected phenomena, observed under the shrinking Arctic ice: a massive algae bloom under the ice. Not long ago, the life of this crucial plant seemed to suffer greatly, a worrying phenomena, as algae produces much of the world’s oxygen. The same year that NASA researchers launched the Icescape expedition to the […]
After the successful docking of the first private space shuttle, China announced it is preparing its next step in the ambitious space flight project: the country’s first manned space docking. The Shenzhou 9 spacecraft will dock with the Tiangong 1 orbital module “sometime in mid-June,” according to official statements. However, the government didn’t announce how […]
Remember the late Mesozoic? Dinosaurs ruled the planet, there was no ice at the poles, plants were huge, and so were insects; and if we don’t see any giant insects on the planet – we have the early birds to thank. In the oxygen-rich atmosphere that prevailed at the moment, giant insects thrived in the […]
Yesterday marked the 40th Global Environment day, and this year’s theme was ‘Green economy’ – a sector in which, by far, Europe leads the way. When it comes to green energy and reducing the impact industry has on the environment, Denmark and Scotland stand out, by far – just think about Samso, the world’s ‘greenest […]
Bulgarian archaeologists have unearthed centuries-old skeletons treated for vampirism: pinned through their chests with iron rods, a practice thought to keep vampires away. Vampires and mythology If you thought vampires are only creatures of legend, only to be found in myths, folklore and Hollywood movies, then you might disagree with medieval Bulgarians (and not only). […]
I recently came across this delicious post, written when NASA celebrated 50 years of age, in 2008; it has some great insights, and I honestly recommend reading it. But a few ideas really stood out to me. Because of NASA, Armstrong said: “Our knowledge of the universe around us has increased a thousand fold and […]
The Governor of the Honolulu county signed the law passed by the local council, banning plastic bags altogether – thus making Hawaii the first state ever to do so. There are four counties in Hawaii – and all of them set a great example together; the thing is, this was not done by state legislature, […]
The big money out there is invested in climate change denial, as major oil companies fight to eliminate climate protection laws or intentionally fund studies which deny climate change; and it’s been a tough few weeks for them. More and more independent studies are highlighting the amount of damage human-caused global warming is caused, and […]
While a definite cure for cancer is still miles away, researchers and doctors are using more and more tactics to successfully corner the disease, and as a result, more and more cancer drugs are being developed and produced. As we have a better understanding of the molecular makeup of the disease, novel techniques and treatments […]
Typically, in the tundras, tree growth is hindered by very low temperatures, and usually, in the tundra, vegetation comprises of dwarf shrubs, sedges and grasses, lichens, etc. However, according to a recent study, plants and shrubs which colonized the Arctic tundra are starting to turn into small trees, a process which will accelerate global warming […]
Effective quantum computers are still far away, but researchers are already showing more and more advantages these devices would bring to the table. A trio of theorists have shown one more talent of a quantum computer: it would be powerful enough to study the inner workings of the universe in ways that are far beyond […]
