gear Push settings
Among your memory’s biggest challenges is remembering what actually happened, versus what you imagined – that’s especially hard with some people I know. That ability, according to a new study, is linked to the presence of a small fold; even more interesting, some people have and some people don’t have this fold – a finding […]
I was recently telling you about graphene, the wonder material that promises to bring significant technological advancements – and the promise is almost delivered. A team of researchers from Manchester have developed a sandwich-like architecture that is one step closer to replacing silicone. Graphene is, in (extremely) light terms, a one atom thick planar sheet […]
Our brain is a wonderful thing – the pinnacle of evolution on our planet – and there is still so much we don’t understand about it! For example, a team of researchers recently concluded that for some people, the brain tends to maintain a positive outlook on life, even through hard times and problems, and […]
A whole lot of people have been closely following the developments at the Large Hadron Collider, but now, all that may become a whole lot easier, thanks to an Android based application which allows users to see the latest colliding protons, among others, at the world’s largest particle accelerator, located at the French/Swiss border. LHSee, […]
A study into muscle development conducted on several fish has given valuable insight regarding the genetic leap that moved the scene from the aquatic parts onto the land. It was this particular leap that gave birth to tetrapods, animals that walk on four legs and are our very distant ancestors. Peter Currie, of the Australian […]
Bug bite leads to photography award No matter who you are or what you do, you’ve been bitten by a bug at some point in your life – and they really are a nuisance. But for Igor Siwanowicz, a bug bite turned out to be all but annoying, as it helped him win the 2011 […]
Europe aims for the stars: known as the Solar Orbiter will fly towards the Sun and get closer to it than any other man made object has; also, ESA will launch two other missions with the purpose of studying dark matter and dark energy. Closer to the Sun The mission was adopted today, and it […]
Steve Jobs, co-founder of apple and the visionary mind behind the company’s products has passed away, at the age of 56, after a long fight with cancer. As word of his death spread, people remembered him as the innovator he was, and as the man who made technology seem so close and personal; the man […]
The Nobel Prize has been awarded to a single scientist, which is less common than you might think, for the discovery of the structure of quasicrystals. When this new structure was first proposed, to say that it stirred controversy would be putting it light; at first, the idea was so outside of the general consensus, […]
The brain learns basically by shifting between different strengths of its synapses, as a response to different stimuli – that much is clear. However, recently, a team of UCLA scientists have shattered the common belief about the mechanism of learning, showing that the brain learns rhythmically, and that there is an optimal ‘rhythm’, or frequency, […]
Well hopefully the days when children dream about being astronauts haven’t withered, and there are still people out there who dream of going into outer space and see our planet from orbit. If this is the case, then you now have a chance of joining the elite group that the space agency chooses as its […]
A grad student from the prestigious college has created an actual flying carpet, that moves thanks to “ripple power waves” that come from an electrical current which are driven forward from air packets. At the moment, the device moves at only 1 cm per second, but it is only the first prototype, and can be […]
Humanity seems determined to continue on a suicidal path and destroy much of the planet that surrounds us; so far we’ve been lucky, but if we continue in this line, we have a good chance of breaking the very fragile equilibrium our world has. In almost every forest, carbon is constantly being absorbed as trees […]
A new radio telescope array built in the world’s highest and driest desert in the world has just photographed two colliding galaxies for its first public test shots. The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, a joint project between Canada, Chile, the European Union, Japan, Taiwan and the United States was officially opened for business after a […]
It’s already the third year in which the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, London is hosting the Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition, and the winner has been chosen out of some 800 entries. Categories were ‘Earth and Space’, ‘Our Solar System’, ‘Deep Space’ and ‘Young Astronomy Photographer of the Year’, and there was also an […]
Women who use birth control pills or other contraceptives experience memory changes, according to a study conducted by UC Irvine researchers. They tend to remember emotional events more vividly, at the cost of losing their attention for details. “What’s most exciting about this study is that it shows the use of hormonal contraception alters memory,” […]
Kepler 19c, an invisible world, was discovered solely through the gravitational influence it has on its companion world, Kepler 19b. Nothing else is known about it, other that it exists. When you’re five minutes late, a lot of bad things can happen. You can miss an appointment, lose reservations, or just annoy people; but when […]
Paleontologists in South Africa have reported finding an extraordinary number of fossils of a species that predated humans, belonging to the prehuman species Australopithecus Sediba that lived almost 2 million years ago. The species had human-like hands and ape-like feet; it was found in a rearkable collection of fossils which includes the most complete early […]
Your earrings, your wedding ring, the platinum in your computer of phone – all of them might be alien artefacts. So send them over for future study. According to a team led by Matthias Willbold of the University of Bristol, U.K., gold, platinum, and other precious metals were brought to Earth by a massive meteor […]
After hurricane Irene, the wildfires ravaging through texas are also visible for astronauts on the International Space Station, as these new pictures sent by them reveal. It was especially sad for NASA astronaut Mike Fossum, because Bastrop State Park, one of the damaged areas, is a favorite spot of his. He specifically asked to be […]
In recent years, fishing is going out of control, and deep water fishing especially has to stop, because it depleted fish stocks that take longer to recover than other species. This is exactly the conclusion of a paper published by an international team of marine biologists, published in Marine Policy. The article describes how fishing […]
A three year survey that comprised of research flights from the Arctic to the Antarctic comes to an end, successfully depicting greenhouse gases unlike ever before. Greenhouse gases are gases that absorb and emit radiation within the thermal infrared range; they have a huge impact on our planet’s temperature, and any increase in the amount […]
Being smart is the most valuable thing a man can have for himself; seriously – this is not a metaphor. Studies have shown that babies spend as much as 90% of their energy building their brains, and even as an adult, 25% of your energy goes directly to the brain. A great number of studies […]
Researchers have reached what can only be described as a crucial milestone that opens the way for a new class of materials with amazing electronic properties. Superconductivity is a relatively recently discovered feat, in which conducting materials oppose exactly zero resistance when electric current passes through them, below a certain temperature. Like ferromagnetism and atomic […]
Ever since uranium has been mined and atomic bombs have been tested, some areas have had to deal with the contamination of sediments and groundwaters by toxic soluble uranium. Now, this problem could be solved with filaments growing from a specific bacteria. Some clean-up methods already use the bacteria to solidify Uranium in sediments, but […]
For the first time, king crabs have been found on the edge of Antarctica, probably as a result of global warming, which has made this environment suitable for them, researchers claim. They suggest the crabs were washed in during an upsurge of warmer water, and that this can be extremely damaging to the local ecosystem […]
Gladiators had it rough – to say the least. Their cells barely were big enough to allow them to turn around in for the time allotted them until death; usually four or five battles in the arena. In what has been described as an archaeological sensation, a model of a Roman gladiator school was found […]
A group of scientists and engineers from the United Kingdom are working on an ambitious program to revive their only satellite – still in orbit after 40 years. When the Prospero spacecraft was launched atop a Black Arrow rocket on 28 October 1971, it was pretty much the end of an era; the end of […]
Think of an electric motor; what comes to mind? The results probably vary, but no one would even dare think about something 1 nanometer wide – and that’s exactly how big the world’s smallest electric motor is. It would take 60.000 of them to reach the width of a human hair, but its importance is […]
Oceana is the ocean conservation organization, and they’ve been doing a series of infographics which I found absolutely fantastic! So I’d like to share them with you, in the hope that you will too, as well as learn something. Infographic: Where Does Our Seafood Come From? Link Eighty-four percent of seafood eaten in the U.S. […]
If you look at this picture, you will probably see what can only be described as an unremarkable, even faint star. But this ancient star, in the constellation of Leo (The Lion), called SDSS J102915+172927 has astrophysicists scratching their heads, searching for new answers. A team of European astronomers using ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) […]
Using 14 years of images put together, astronomers have managed to animate the fantastic chaos that takes place inside the supersonic jets of newborn stars. Using pictures taken from 1994 to 2008 and a little image animation, NASA astronomers managed to put together these videos of supersonic jets being ejected out of stars. “We’r trying […]
Hurricane Irene is believed to be the 10th billion dollar disaster of 2011, which makes it a new record holder, taking down 2008, which only had 9 such disasters; and hey, we still have 4 months to go! Hopefully, by now, people will start to understand the cost of man’s impact on the plaet ever […]
An engineered virus injected directly in the patient’s blood has shown some remarkable promise in targeting and destroying cancer cells, in what researchers have called a first. Using viruses to attack cancer isn’t really a novel concept, but until now, they had to be injected directly into the tumour, which leads to several other complications. […]
Humans might have started using sophisticated tools some 1.76 million years ago, much earlier than previously believed. This has been suggested by the discovery of hand axes from that period which belong to the complex Archeulean culture. This could also change what we believe about the period when humans started leaving Africa. Anthropologists consider the […]
A surprising innovation in wind turbine design named a ‘wind lens’ could triple the output of energy generated by wind, thus making it cheaper than nuclear power. The thing is, wind power is proportional to the wind speed cubed; so basically if you could increase the speed two times, the energy output would be increased […]
During the 1940s, the US conducted a series of incredibly unethical and disturbing experiments regarding sexually transmitted diseases in Guatemala, including the decision to re-infect a dying woman with syphilis. Now, additional information about this very dark period has been disclosed by a presidential panel. Already considered one of the darkest episodes in US research, […]
Stephen Hawking may have just won the most outrageous bet in physics history, a few years ago, when he claimed that the LHC, along with every other particle accelerator won’t find the Higgs boson, the elusive ‘God particle‘, simply because it does not exist. When he addressed this bet, Peter Higgs, who proposed and supported […]
A few days ago we were telling you about the possibility of the International Space Station being temporarily evacuated, given the recent failures of the Russian Soyuz spacecrafts. NASA International Space Station Program Manager Mike Suffred says evacuation is a certain possibility if the Soyuz rockets don’t fix their problems until then, which is very […]
Hurricane Irene is shredding down the US East Coast, growing to be larger and more dangerous than meterologists have predicted. Even from outer space, it looks absolutely frightening. NASA astronaut Mike Fossum said that Hurricane Irene has had the unmistakable evolution of a major hurricane, and this can be observed from orbit. “We saw a […]
Whether you like him or not, you have to admit that he has been fighting for a noble and important cause for years now. Global warming is one of the greatest challenges we have to handle as a species, and it won’t be easy at all. Even as it is, it’s hard to change things […]
Starting yesterday, the whole world has been abuzz about the giant river discovered 4 kilometers beneath the Amazon, ranging from 200 to 400 km in width. The river, named Rio Hamza, was located analyzing temperatures from 241 abandoned deep wells that were drilled in the Amazon region by the petrochemical company Petrobras in the 1970s […]
The King’s Knot, a geometrical earthwork located in the royal gardens near Sterlin castle has been covered in mystery and speculation for centuries. The formation, as it is today, is believed to be from around the 1620, but it’s center part is believed to be much, much older. So much older that we could be […]
NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) has offered data about the coolest stars ever found until now, stars which are about as warm as you and me. Named Y dwarfs, these stars have lit the interest of astrophysicists for a long time, but it wasn’t until now that they were finally discovered and analyzed. These […]
For the first time in human history we have witnessed a black hole in the act of ‘eating’ a star that just got too close. So far, astronomers have only found the aftermath of such events, and they say that seeing the black hole in the act is shedding a lot of light on ‘relativistic […]
For men everywhere beer lovers everywhere, yeast is probably the best microorganism there is, because it is used in one of the most popular drinks: beer. But its identity has puzzled researchers for decades now, as they were unable to pinpoint its exact origins. However, they now believed they have solved this puzzle and traced […]
As the saying goes, there are plenty of fish in the sea, but just how many, exactly? We are still far away from giving an accurate number, but according to a team of scientists working for the Census for Marine Life, the number we are looking at is 8.74 million, give or take 1.3 million, […]
A recent study has shown that the plague spread so quickly that the carriers couldn’t have been rats, as is commonly believed. The black plague, or black death as it is sometimes referred to was a disease outburst so horrible that it killed some 30-60% of the population of Europe. Even to this day, few […]
Russia’s space program seems do be doing quite well, which is more than we can say about other countries at the moment; they recently announced plans to build a hotel in space. According to the released plans, the hotel will orbit 217 miles above ground, and it will be able to host 7 guests in […]
There’s only a month until the melt season theoretically melts and the refreezing time begins, but until then, the polar ice cap has begun shrinking again, and shows no signs of even slowing down the shrinking. “With about a month left in the sea ice melt season, the amount of further ice loss will depend […]
