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MESSENGER is a spacecraft which recently made a flyby near Mercury and it gave scientists a whole new perspective over the planet. Researchers are amazed by the wealth of images and data which show a surprising diversity of geological processes which took and are still taking place and a very different magnetosphere from the one […]
There are already numerous ways of storing gas but this is in fact a new concept, very different from those existing today and it’s not an improvement, but rather a novel method. A team of University of Calgary researchers developed this process of catching gas from the environment and holding it indefinitely in molecular-sized which […]
Charging the cell phones is a drag; and the battery drops out just when you need it most. Having a battery that would last 10 times as long wouldn’t solve every problem of that type but it definetly would be very helpful. Also, an energy-efficient chip would be very helpful in other cases, and this […]
Nature has its own balance which is both sturdy and fragile at the same time; when that balance is broken (by man, what else?) it is very hard and sometimes almost impossible to set things right. That’s why we have to pay attention to the numerous fragile ecosystems because everything is connected. It goes […]
Understanding the mechanisms which take place is something scientists are have been trying to figure out for ages; because of it’s small size, maping it and understanding some things seems almost impossible, but this is a very important step in solving some molecullar puzzles. This would in fact speed up significantly the process of discovering […]
In case you don’t know, a tsunami is a series of waves created when a body of water, such as an ocean, is rapidly displaced. Earthquakes, mass movements above or below water, volcanic eruptions and other underwater explosions, landslides, underwater earthquakes, large meteoroid or asteroid impacts and testing with nuclear weapons at sea all have […]
The Ulysses spacecraft today is making a very interesting and important rare flyby over the sun’s north pole. This spacecraft is different from anyother, being able to sample winds at the sun’s poles, which are difficult to study from Earth. However, this is not the first time it has been over the Sun’s poles; this […]
A volcano in the West Antarctic Ice Sheet erupted 2000 years ago (325BC) and remains active thus giving us the first evidence of an under-ice volcanic eruption. This volcano has a volcanic explosion index of about 3-4. The heat from the volcano melt-water that lubricates the base of the ice sheet and increases the flow […]
Butterflies have fascinated people for as long as we can remember; the beauty of their wings is known to just about everybody and well just about everybody loves them. But behind their naive beauty lies a mistery which has baffled scientists as they couldn’t understand how these colours are created. Marco Giraldo has been examining […]
The tree of life is a metaphor scientists use to describe all life on Earth in an evolutionary context. Charles Darwin talks about envisioning evolution and ecosystems as a “tangled bank” in The Origin of Species; however, the book’s sole illustration is of a branched diagram that is very tree-like. This “design” has been used […]
According to wikpiedia, Autism is a brain development disorder that impairs social interaction and communication, and causes restricted and repetitive behavior, all starting before a child is three years old. It is very heritable, although the genetics of autism are complex and it is generally unclear which genes are responsible. A study showed that previously […]
About 250 million years ago, at the end of the Permian, and event caused a mass extinction which killed over 90 percent of the life on Earth. Ecosystems were destroyed and organisms were left to recover; it was the closest life came to being wiped out ever. The full recovery of those ecosystems took at […]
Snowflakes have fascinated most of us since the beggining of time. They say that there are no two snowflakes alike and that isn’t very far away from the truth. No two snowflakes are truly alike, but they can be very similar to each other, said Janko Gravner, a mathematics professor at UC Davis. Now he […]
Recently a study was conducted by a team led by Dr Edward Hanna at the University of Sheffield which demonstrated that recent warm summers have caused the most extreme Greenland ice melting in 50 years. This is yet another proof of the damage caused by global warming and it also helps scientists place recent satellite […]
Not a Hollywood movie or something like that; not even a pun. The title is in the most literal fashion it could be. But how could this be? Worlds can’t collide, can’t they? Hard to say. Anyway astronomers have announced that a mystery object orbiting a star 170 light-years from Earth might have formed from […]
Whoa there! I mean sometimes just about everybody feels the need to be agressive but…. agression just as good as sex? That sounds a bit weird. But that’s just a way of thinking about things. The study is about the fact that the brain processes agression as a reward offering insights into our propensity to […]
Life as we know has certain ingredients which are necessary for life to evolve and even exist. Such ingredients are the molecules methanimine and hydrogen cyanide — two ingredients that build life-forming amino acids. Researchers found these molecules in a galaxy somewhere 250 million light years away; it’s not as a few more light years […]
The ethical and moral aspects of using stem cells have been discussed a lot and it seems there is no good answer; genetic practically has no limit and since the discovery of DNA things have evolved very quickly. But the thing is that the moral aspects concerning it could be left unsolved and yet everybody […]
Antimatter is a fascinating story; basically nobody knows for sure what it could do and scientists have been trying to understand it for years. The artificial production of atoms of antimatter (specifically antihydrogen) first became a reality in the early 1990s. For example an atom of antihydrogen is composed of a negatively-charged antiproton being orbited […]
Most children are able to imagine their future selves as astronauts, politicians or even superheroes and make up imaginary friends and things such as those; but as people grow up they find it difficult to recollect past events, let alone generate new ones. A new Harvard University study reveals that the ability of older adults […]
For a lot of time man kind or at least a big part of it has been absolutely fascinated with the diamond and its fantastic glimmer. The reasons which account for its stunning beauty could be uncovered by a mathematical analysis of its microscopic crystal structure. It turns out that this structure has some very […]
Researchers are searching everyday for options which could bring an ending to the energy issue or at least delay it for an undefinite time and bacteria researching has developed a lot so it would only seem sensible to bring those two together. The point would be well to obtain a bacteria which generates electricity. Researchers […]
A drug company is a commercial business whose focus is to research, develop, market and/or distribute drugs, most commonly in the context of healthcare; from wikipedia. But according to a study by two York University researchers estimates the U.S. pharmaceutical industry spends almost twice as much on promotion as it does on research and development, […]
There is (or at least there should be) a lot of attention focused around endangered wildlife and protecting a number of species from the damage which we as humans bring to them more or less directly. The animals most definetly deserve it. But most people don’t think of plants as being endangered, but the thing is […]
Most people have a problem in looking at a problem from a different point of view than their own. Curiously enough the our species has the same problem; scientists have found more than 240 planets in the past two decades, none likely to support Earth-like life. But just recently did the whole astronomic community as […]
Titan is a constant point of interest and scientists find out more fascinating things about this moon of Saturn almost every week. By analyzing images from NASA’s Cassini Radar instrument, a Brigham Young University professor helped discover and analyze mountains on Saturn’s largest moon, additional evidence that it has some of the most earthlike processes of […]
The carbon dioxide problem has been give much less attention than alternative fuel or biomass-derived energy production yet it is very important as chemical production creates billions of tons of carbon dioxide each year. But fear not – an analysis has concluded that use of existing biotechnology in the production of so-called bulk chemicals could […]
We live in a world which we think we know everything about but that is obviously not true; people believed the same thing about a hundred years ago and well we have discovered some things since then. Such would be the case with an expedition which explored one of the largest remaining blocks of tropical […]
Since there are still a big number of things we fail to understand about our brain it is somewhat understandable that such misbeliefs appear. They turn into myths and thanks to the oh so well documented media everybody ends up believing that they are true; and such a belief is hard to shatter even when […]
We have just began to understand our genome yet there are still numerous things we fail to understand; there is a very big number of genes of which we know very little about. Just how much of what we do and think is influenced by our genes remains a mystery, but genetics research is going […]
The quest for understanding planets and stars seems to be more intense than ever. Things we could not have imagined not years but months ago are proven valid today. The problem of really big planets has especially fascinated scientists for hundreds of years for numerous reasons. A gas giant is basically a large planet that is not […]
There is no need to recap the petroleum problem as just about everybody knows it and you are faced with it everyday. But scientists are trying to find other fuel alternatives and they seem to find more interesting things everyday. The latest is using concentrated solar energy to reverse combustion. This means that we could […]
So how could we achieve this is hard to say. But according to Sir Nicholas Stern trading and targets should be at the heart of a global agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. He made this statement during the Royal Economic Society’s annual public lecture at The University of Manchester ahead of the world summit […]
In some ways Venus could be consider to be the twin sister of our planet but in other ways it is pretty much opposite. High temperatures and crushing air pressure make it resemble a place christians would rather not visit (or name) than a planet. But now scientists have received images which confirm the fact […]
Titan is in the spotlight again. The Cassini probe has provided once more valuable data that scientists are analysing; the data seems to confirm the fact that there are heavy negative ions in the upper regions of Titan’s atmosphere. These could be the organic building blocks for molecules and this discovery is unexpected because of […]
The growing economic strength of the European Union is something most europeans are proud of but what most are not aware of is that this growth has doubled the ecological pressure on the planet in the past 30 years, according to a WWF report WWF stands for World Wildlife Fund and conducted this research which […]
So Charles Darwin called it the “abominable mystery” of early plant evolution. But the University of Florida and University of Texas at Austin scientists have shed light on what was and is a very intriguing thing. The scientists are reporting that the two largest groups of flowering plants are more closely related to each other […]
Scientists from the University of Delaware and the University of California at Riverside have thawed ice estimated to be at least a million years old from above Lake Vostok (update – first samples taken from lake Vostok). This lake is hidden more than two miles beneath the frozen surface of Antarctica and has been This […]
We have another piece of evidence which goes to show that we fail to understand numerous things about our universe. Astronomers have discovered white dwarf stars with pure carbon atmospheres. It is something that probably nobody would have believed. The exact way these stars evolved is still pretty much a mystery for astrophysicists. They believe […]
There’s a common misconception that the foods that are good for you are just spinach and broccoli, or something else which just taste really bad; numerous people would want to eat healthy foods but they find that these foods are just not tasty. For them there is a new generation of superfoods that promise to […]
Nature has a way of defending itself and even things which we fail to understand play their part. For example, the reef helps protect the shore from devastating waves and tsunamis – and the recent tragic events were in a way just a reflection of what we are doing to the planet. Massive man made […]
It may not rank among the top 10 causes of death, but decompression sickness could be deadly. Using a $400,000 grant from the U.S. Navy to develop the first optical non-invasive tool to test those most likely to suffer from decompression sickness, such as scuba divers a University of Houston professor is developing a laser-based […]
Heather Hallen is a Michigan State University plant biology research associate who has been looking for the poison in the wrong place for years. Alpha-amanitin is the poison of the death cap mushroom, Amanita phalloides. She was searching for a big gene that makes a big enzyme that produces alpha-amanitin. But she found out that […]
Nanotech could be applied in just about everything. With time scientists find out ways to apply it to various fields; building small, efficient electronics could be very useful in further use of nanotechnology. A University of Arkansas physicist and her colleagues have examined the response of the nanostructures polarization to electric fields which is known […]
Mankind found numerous ways to harm our planet and damage just about every ecosystem; what we fail to understand is that this backfires at us. A report made by James Corbett of University of Delaware and James Winebrake from Rochester Institute of Technology claims that marine shipping causes approximately 60,000 premature cardiopulmonary and lung […]
Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), or Hyperkinetic Disorder affects about 5% of the world’s population. It is hard to cure it and in it is currently considered to be a persistent and chronic condition and medicine does not have any cure. This is because we fail to understand it as numerous studies have shown contrary results. […]
Every day you hear about locations where the laws of physics appear not to apply or where anomalies take place every day; a big part of them are just hoaxes or are caused by misinterpretation of data but there are some which we have not been able to explain. According to an austrian physicist the […]
Yellowstone is being visited by over 2 million tourists every year and it spans an area of 3,472 square miles (8,987 km²) which makes it North America’s largest volcanic field. The main interest was around the Old Faithful Geyser and the Yellowstone Lake which is the largest high-altitude lake in North America and is centered […]
The media seems to be repeating the idea that we use just 10% of our brains and taking it as a given. Scientists have tried for years to change this misconception and they have clearly stated that there is no scientific evidence to suggest that we use only 10% of our brains. In fact it […]
As sea levels rise coastal communities could lose up to 50 percent more of their fresh water supplies than previously thought, according to a new study from Ohio State University. This is not just bad news for them; it is a warning for everybody.Studies have shown how altwater will intrude into fresh water aquifers, given […]
