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The race for oil drilling is tougher than ever, and the effects are quite often extremely damaging for the environment (I’m sure pretty much everybody knows about the BP oil spill already). However, the UN has come up with an initiative, the first of its kind, that promises to protect at least a handful of […]
It was more than 300 million years ago that reptiles made tracks on earth. The exact moment when this happened is unknown, however; oh, and by exact moment, I’m talking about pinning it down to a couple million years (you gotta love geologists for their sense of time). So, a discovery of fossilized footprints was […]
When the ultra-strong glass was invented more than 40 years ago, it was labeled as interesting, but a manufacturing use for it was hard to find. This glass is about three times harder than regular glass, while it’s also thinner (about as thin as a dime). The so called Gorilla glass will probably be worth […]
Boy, you just can’t have enough octopus, that’s for sure – they’re really amazing creatures, that often surprise us. Now, a venomous octopus living in the frozen waters of Antarctica is definitely awesome, but how is this useful? Well, according to Bryan Fry, of the University of Melbourne, it is. He and his team have […]
Finally, it seems researchers have taken a new strong step towards developing an HIV vaccine, which could send HIV on the road to hell, so to speak. Researchers at the National Institute of Health (NIH) announced their discovery of three new HIV antibodies; this in itself is not big news, because HIV antibodies get discovered […]
If you thought solar panels or cars are sweet, you’re two steps behind. The Japanese space agency (of which we keep hearing more and more) put solar panels in space. Even better, so-called Ikaros solar sail is pushed forward by solar light – literally. Basically, photons exert pressure when they fall on the super reflective […]
Ethiopian authorities announced that thanks to large-scale reforestation campaigns the forest cover of their country has tripled since 2000. The African country has suffered from severe droughts in the past, and their solution to this problem turned out to be just great. “Ethiopia was able to increase its forest coverage to nine percent now from […]
This is possibly one of the earliest sex toys in human history.
I have to say, this is one of the most attractive initiatives I’ve come across in quite a while. Basically, you live in the museum and breathe science for 30 days, and if you do that, you win 10.000$ and a lot of other prizes. That’s pretty much awesome if you ask me. You can […]
The major fault in Sierra Nevada is believed to have been “quiet” for more than 3 million years has shown signs of becoming active and it is believed that it can trigger quakes that can reach magnitudes of up to 7. This comes as a rather unpleasant surprise to geologists, as well as the people […]
Peter Higgs is not the rockstar type of scientist; the particle physicist rarely gives interviews, despite the fact that he is the one who proposed the existence of a fundamental particle that gives all matter its mass. Almost as mysterious as the particle itself, he simply calls it the “boson named after me”. Higgs visited […]
The Wave, Arizona The Wave is an astonishing sandstone formation that fascinates photographers and attracts numerous hikers every year. It formed in the early Jurassic (190 million years ago) when dinosaurs ruled the Earth and compacted through the years, calcifying in vertical and horizontal layers. The lovely curves we see today are a result of erosion […]
Wildlife researchers from Sri Lanka have reported photographing one of the world’s most reclusive animals, the Horton Plains slender loris, an animal thought to be extinct for more than 60 years (1939 to 2002). Slender loris populations are native to the rainforests of Sri Lanka and southern India have been in decline for decades, but […]
A recent study conducted by a Montana State University doctoral student and one of the world’s top paleontologists shed some new light on more than 100 years of thought regarding the dinosaurs known as Triceratops and Torsaurus. The general belief since the late 1800s was that they were two separate dinosaurs: Triceratops had three horns […]
Two years ago, Dr. Alexander Khoruts took on a patient suffering from an awful infection of Clostridium difficile; she was suffering from diarrhea. Now we’ve all probably had our bad moments, but this is not your average case. It was so bad that she was practically stuck in a wheelchair wearing diapers. She was also […]
Storm elves and sprites are electric luminous fleeting phenomena that sometimes naturally occur in the upper atmosphere. A team of Spanish researchers managed to make a high speed recording of the phenomena and publish it in the Journal of Geophysical Research. Practically, sprites are electrical discharges shaped like a carrot or a column that form […]
First of all, I have no idea how this rumour started, but a number of people signaled this already; the rumour sounded something like this: I was talking to my son last week (he works on Mauna Kea), and he mentioned some new observations (that will no doubt get published eventually) of “Beetlejuice”; it’s no […]
While America seems to have delayed it’s Moon base ambitions, Japan seems to have no such plans; according to their own statements, they have absolutely no intention of letting perfectly good lunar lands go to waste. An ambitious plan of (just?) $2.2 billion investments is in the works at JAXA (Japan’s space agency), with the […]
Mycobacterium vaccae is a type of bacteria that naturally leaves in soil and has been in the attention of researchers for a while now, due to the fact that it decreases anxiety. Recent studies sugest that in fact, it also stimulates neuron growth and thus intelligence and the ability to learn. Dorothy Matthews and Susan […]
A new study has shown that most people who think they have food alergies (over 80% in fact) actually don’t suffer from such problems. This has taunted some doctors for years and years, and AOL Health looked into this misdiagnosis. The study concluded that it is in fact a number of factors that lead to […]
To be quite honest, I was never really fond of the man, but ever since he quit his executive positions at Microsoft, I’m starting to like him more and more. The reason is not that he’s giving money away, but the causes he’s giving the money for. I’m not really sure how practical this idea […]
Everest is known as many things; first of all it’s the highest point in Asia, and in the world. It’s perhaps the peak over 8000 meters that most people try to climb (due to obvious reasons); but it also kills. Despite not being the most dangerous peak on the face of the earth, it has […]
As any fourth grader will tell you, photosynthesis is (in layman terms), the process through which plants (and bacteria, algae, etc) get the sugars and other organic compounds they need using energy from sunlight. However, during last week’s synthetic biology conference in Boston, a biologist from Harvard took things to a whole new level, presenting […]
c If you want your kids to be healthier, thinier and smarter, then you probably should keep them away from TVs while they’re toddlers. A recent (and quite shocking) joint study conducted by Université de Montréal, the Sainte-Justine University Hospital Research Center and the University of Michigan revealed that television exposure at ages of 2 […]
Yes ladies and gents, researchers have produced the whole genome sequence of the 3 billion “letters” (nucleotides) in the Neanderthalian genome, and the results are interesting to say the least. For starters, up to 2 percent of present day human DNA outside of Africa originated in Neanderthals; this result suggests that the Neanderthals, Homo neanderthalensis […]
The first touchable scientific results of the Herschel infrared space observatory are spectacular indeed; not only is it showing previously hidden details of star formation, but it also shows thousands of distant galaxies “building” stars with incredible energy and covering the Milky Way in wonderfully coloured star clouds. Not only are the images spectacular by […]
The biggest beaver dam is (get ready folks), twice as long as the Hoover dam, measuring 2,790 ft (over 800 meters; in fact, it’s so big that you can even see it from space. Though it may seem pointless for the tiny critters to build, they actually build the dams for a good purpose: the […]
Using DNA preserved for 25.000 – 43.000 years in bones from Siberian mammoths, a team of international scientists recreated mammoth hemoglobin and studied it, revealing interesting facts about the fascinating animals. “It has been remarkable to bring a complex protein from an extinct species, such as the mammoth, back to life,” says Professor Alan Cooper, […]
Barack Obama came out and said that it should be possible for NASA to send astronauts to Mars and bring them back safely by the mid 2030s. The US president said this while explaining the details of his plans with the US space agency at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Mister Obama has set […]
I had some serious thought on whether to write this or not. It’s not a paid post or anything, and quite frankly, I’ve never owned anything from Puma. But I was absolutely thrilled to find out about their initiative to replace the shoe boxes with reusable bags. It’s exactly this kind of small thing, but […]
Two studies put Einstein’s theory, the General Theory of Relativity to a test unlike any other before. The two teams used extensive observations from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory to analyze galaxy clusters, the biggest objects in the Universe that are bound together by gravity (at least, that we know of). The first team produced results […]
The discovery of 9 new planets raises some serious questions on the matter of how planets are formed. Two astronomers from the University of California, Santa Barbara reported the discovery, and of them, two are spinning in the opposite direction the planets in our solar system are spinning. This, along with other recent studies of […]
There are so many things we have yet to understand about the animal kingdom it makes you wonder how much we know about it after all. Therefore, ZME Science will present to you one animal each month; one animal that really makes yo go “what ?!”. There’s no connection to the month itself, no order […]
“It’s a great day to be a particle physicist,” said CERN director general Rolf Heuer. “A lot of people have waited a long time for this moment.” The LHC had been going on a promising streak for quite a while now; however, the encountered problems (mostly engineering, but also physics) were huge. Imagine firing arrows […]
I don’t know about you but I was thrilled to find out Natural Geographic was launching another baby, dedicated to wildlife; and no, the bulk of the programms won’t consist of old material just put on a different chanel. “We’re going to make it a very distinct channel. We are going to target promotion on […]
James Lovelock is one of the world’s most brilliant minds alive at the moment; he developed numerous technologies for NASA, and currently dedicates most of his efforts to the environment and futurism. He is largely known for the development of the Gaia Hypothetis. Well, according to the man… we’re just too stupid to prevent climate […]
The mimic octopus, Thaumoctopus mimicus is a species of octopus that grows up to 60 cm (2 feet) in length and is naturally colored with brown and white stripes and spots. So what’s so special about it? The mimic octopus can literally mimic the physical appearance and movement of fifteen different species, that we know of […]
Take a really good look at this picture; you may just be looking at the very thing that will defeat cancer. The black dots are nanobots, practically delivering a killing blow to the cancerous cells, and only to those cells. According to Mark Davis, head of the research team that created the nanobot anti-cancer army […]
Two years ago, researchers reported the strange movement of hundreds of galaxy clusters moving in the same direction at about 3.6 million kilometers per hour. Current spatial movement models can’t explain this in any way, so at the time, they launched a strange hypothesis: clusters are being tugged by the gravity of something outside our […]
NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity is already in its 7th year on Mars, and over the years it provided some quite useful information; researchers from NASA have been constantly working on ways to improve and optimize it by constantly uploading new software. Such is the case with the software they applied this winter, which makes […]
According to a research conducted by researchers from the Cornell University the portions and the plates depicted in more than 50 paintings of the Last Supper have gotten bigger as time passed – way bigger. This finding seems to obviously suggest that as time passes, we eat more and more, which should raise some concerns; […]
“This is a normal, temperate exoplanet just like dozens we already know, but this is the first whose properties we can study in depth,” says Claire Moutou, who is part of the international team of 60 astronomers that made the discovery. This discovery is absolutely mesmerizing, and it’s importance just can’t be overestimated. “It is […]
At nearly 200 meters below the ice, there is no light, the temperature is way below 0 degrees, and scientists were expecting to find nothing more than a handful of microbes – and for good reason. So it’s easy to understand why they were so surprised to find not a single (evolved) life form, but […]
Just like any muscle in your body, if not used, the brain starts to degrade as time passes; this has been known for quite a while, but recently, a team from UC Irvine provided the first visual evidence of how learning protects the brain, thus proving that mental stimulation fights against the degrading effects that […]
Parts of the car’s bodywork could double up as it’s batter in a not so far away future; at least that’s what the people involved in the 3.4 million project believe. They are working on a prototype that can store and discharge electrical energy; the material is also light and very hard. Ultimately, this will […]
There are many things we have yet to find out about Saturn, but the Cassini probe has definitely shed some light on the planet, and will surely do the same in the following years. The most recent flyby showed a significant number of geysers just waiting to pop out from under the surface – even […]
A recent study published by Berkeley UC concluded that an hour nap boosts the brain’s learning capacity and restores power, just like an email box. When it’s full, it needs a cleaning session – which is just what the nap does. So of course, what every student had to learn the hard way, when you […]
Caño Cristales is a river located in Northern Columbia, with a length of almost 100 km and a width of under 20 meters. If you look at it, you’d be tempted to think this is some sort of illusion or photographic trick, but you’d be wrong. It’s quite remote, and you can get there only […]
Well we all know the effect a curvaceous woman can have on men, but according to a new research published by researchers from Georgia Gwinnett College, the effect they have is similar to that of alcohol and drugs, at least in some ways. Evolutionary speaking, for women, curvy figures are associated with fertility and an […]
Whether intelligent life exists in our universe is a long debated problem. But for some scientists, there’s something even more interesting than that: is there life in another universe? A definite answer is impossible, especially since it’s not even clear if such a universe exists, though researchers have speculated such an existence for more than […]
