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Fewer guns lead to fewer homicides. Will this convince anyone in the U.S., though?
In the 1990s, a famous study found animals in Yellowstone National Park, like elk, bred in fewer numbers and ate less after wolves were re-introduced. That seems like something bound to happen when you introduce an apex predator in a new ecosystem. However, what the study pointed out, in fact, was that most of the elk population suffered not as a result of attack from wolves, but rather simply due to them knowing wolves where now sharing the same park. In other words, fear produced such intense ripples that it altered the entire ecosystem. This was very controversial, and a team of Canadian researchers sought to replicate the findings on an island of fearless raccoons.
One group combined water collecting traits from the awesome Namib desert beetle, cactus and pitcher plant to devise a material that seemingly makes water out of thin air.
DiCaprio took to the stage to present his acceptance speech, and tackled climate change in front of millions of people watching the Academy Awards, calling it 'the most existential crisis our civilisation has ever known.'
There's a tune to oxygen, carbon and any other element from the periodic table.
If you sprinkle water on a hot plate, it will evaporate. Basic physics, really. If the plate is really hot (well above the boiling point of water) something very interesting happens, which the untrained eye might discard as uneventful. The droplets will dance around the plate on a cushion of its own vapor -- this form of levitation is called the Leindenfrost effect. This layer is about 100 nanometers wide, and for the first time a team of researchers has imaged it.
Research shows that those who exercise stand a far better chance of not getting getting cancer. Those who did get cancer, but recovered, can delay or completely avert cancer from showing up again by putting in hours in the gym.
Human psychology works in surprising ways, due to our inherent biases. Stubborn people are always hard to convince, but researchers have identified some of the points that sometimes cause people to change their minds about something.
Clearly, this isn't your regular truck. It's a custom build that allows masons to erect free-standing tunnels very fast. The roller-covered arched rear temporarily supports the Lego-like brick structures, which are then locked in place without the need for an adhesive.
University of Washington researchers want to flip Wi-Fi energy use upside down. They've invented a new protocol and technique that uses 10,000 less energy. The same signal can be used to power devices without the need of an external power source. Cameras, temperature or motion sensors can all be power and connected to the internet at the same time using 'passive Wi-Fi.'
Pushing around Atlas actually has a purpose, besides annoying the robot.
Depending on the alignment of Mars and Earth, as well as the speed of propulsion, a spacecraft could reach the Red Planet as soon as 150 days. So far, NASA spacecraft have made 13 trips to Mars, with seven landings. The most recent -- that of the Curiosity rover -- took 253 days from launch on Earth to touchdown on Mars. There's now reason to believe, however, that this journey could be significantly made faster to the point it only takes 3 days, according to a NASA researcher.
Can you fly through water? It's a silly thought, but that's exactly what this snail butterfly, called Limacina helicina, seems to be doing. Researchers at Georgia Tech report that these sea snails flap their wings in a figure eight pattern very much akin to that used by airborne insects, like flies or bees.
For the first time, natural gas installations were also surpassed by PV arrays despite the shale boom, which says a lot about the momentum solar energy is currently gathering.
A study ten years in the making found that sea levels are rising at the fastest rate in the last 2,800 years. The researchers say that greenhouse gas emissions that build up in the atmosphere and heat the planet, melting glaciers and ice sheets, are to blame for this sharp rise.
Two major oil spills in the course of only one month are threatening Amazonian wildlife and local communities. Peru’s General Directorate of Environmental Health issued a water quality emergency last Wednesday, but critics voice that this is a tad late -- more than three weeks since the first spill spewed more than 2,000 barrels in the regions of Amazonas and Loreto. Shockingly, a third spill has been reported by the local media in Peru, but this has been refuted by the the oil company responsible for the pipelines.
Astronaut Scott Kelly (seen in pic) and his colleagues stationed on the International Space Station now have a new Sidekick. The project is a collaboration between NASA and Microsoft aimed to help with astronaut duties, like repairs, experiments or space walks, using an out of this world augment reality device called the HoloLens.
Sharks have a reputation of solitary predators. They're not the life of the party, sort to say. One new research casts doubt on this assumption, though. The findings suggest that sharks, or at least Sand Tiger sharks, have a complex social structure not all that different in some instances from notoriously social mammals like dolphins, chimps or even humans.
While 3-D scanning the Columbia command module used by the Apollo 11 astronauts to splash down back on Earth, researchers found some amazing artifacts: graffiti markings.
This suggests that humans and Neanderthals interbred about 50,000 years earlier than previously thought. The implications are staggering considering humans left Africa to settle Europe and Asia about 65,000 years ago. How was this possible? Researchers suggest that this gene flow comes from modern humans who left Africa even earlier -- maybe the very first wave.
A four-minute cantata was found among the the mountains of archives in the Czech Museum of Music in November 2015. The score was likely written in 1785 by the maestro Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, along with Antonio Salieri, popularly considered a rival, and an unknown composer called Cornetti. The find was made after Timo Jouko Herrmann, a German composer, was browsing […]
Such a program might prove effective at training simple robots to be less awkward around humans and, most importantly, make sure they don't hurt anyone or break social norms.
Part of NASA JPL's Exoplanet Travel Bureau series, these 14 posters show such locales as Mars, Jupiter's moon Europa, Saturn's vapor-spewing moon Enceladus, and the dwarf planet Ceres. They're all available for free in massive resolution (PDF and TIFF format), so you can download, print and hang in your living room. Enjoy!
This quartz disk could revolutionize storage.
Between 2,500 and 4,000 so-called 'extremists' have been killed by drone strikes and kill squads in Pakistan since 2004. Maybe as early as 2007, the NSA has targeted terrorists based on metadata supplied by machine learning program named Skynet. I have no idea who would find naming Skynet a machine designed to list people for assassination a bright idea, but that's besides the point. The real point is that the inner workings of this software, as revealed in part by Edward Snowden from his leaks, suggest that the program might be targeting innocent people.
Today, sea levels rise at a rate double that recorded in the 20th century. That's a lot, but not nearly as much as climate scientists expected. Researchers at NASA claim they now know why: thirsty continents absorb a great deal of the extra water coming from melting glaciers. They warn, however, that the system will become saturated at one point and the water will be returned to the oceans, as part of the global water cycle.
A rare kind of aphasia, abbreviated PPA, leaves people at a loss for words. Patients blabber and stutter, seemingly unable to communicate. Often times families think their diseased relatives and loved ones have Alzheimer's. Because primary progressive aphasia is so rare and unknown, even doctors often misdiagnose the disease. Upon closer inspection though, the PPA patient clearly is able to understand questions and reason . It's just they simply can't verbally use words. At a recent meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, PPA has been put in the center of discussion to raise awareness but also share some of the most promising therapies.
Our perception does not always reflect reality, as evidenced by numerous studies. The information sent by the eyes to the brain is processed and contains many short-cuts and assumptions which makes things more optimized, but also leads to biases. One study, for instance, found that people who are overweight will judge an object as being farther than it really is. This suggests that physical characteristics -- people who thought they were overweight, but weren't in fact, did not share this bias -- plays a major role in defining perception.
To find its way home to the nest, a wasp will leave its own visual 'breadcrumps'. The wasp will ever so often fly backwards to see its environment as if it were traveling to the nest, and use this information later to make its way safely back.
There are over 5,000 mineral species identified by scientists thus far, but fewer than 100 make up the entire planet's crust. The rest are so rare, short lived and notoriously difficult to replicate that you'd barely know they're here. Not understating the importance of such minerals -- which could offer clues on how the planet formed, but also lead to new industrial applications -- researchers from the United States cataloged the 2,500 rarest minerals on the planet.
Though technically a metal, the electrons inside graphene behave like a liquid traveling very fast in waves.
Today, some people are freezing their bodies or heads at death in hopes of future cures for what ails them. Alas, these people are likely gone forever because the damage to the brain is far too critical. With this in mind, despite an enthusiastic decade in the '80s for cryonics, the field has been rarely touched by serious scientists. A group of researchers may spark interest again after they report freezing rabbit and pig brains, then returning them from preservation apparently in mint condition as if they were never iced. This lends hope that just maybe it would be possible to do the same for human brains just before the person dies, and thaw it in proper working condition when the tech is there to revive them.
One landmark study suggests that the tundras are shifting their role as a result of climate change turning into carbon sources, with a net positive release of carbon into the atmosphere.
British researchers at the University College London set the record for the fastest data transfer rate: a mind-boggling 1.225 Tbps/second. That's 50,000 faster than the average UK broadband (24 MBs/s) or just fast enough to download the entire Game of Thrones series in HD in just one freaking second.
This polymer can change shape and release tremendous amounts of stored elastic energy relative to its weight simply by being exposed to a temperature change. This in itself isn't exactly new, but the team led by Chemical Engineering Professor Mitch Anthamatten at the University of Rochester innovated by making the polymer react to room temperature -- a first.
While around 97% of active climate change researchers (the most qualified) agree that global warming is real and caused by humans, the same can't be said about the general populace. One study surveyed 1,500 middle school and high school teachers across all 50 states and found only 67 percent agreed that "global warming is caused mostly by human activities," which is strikingly similar to how the average American feels. You'd think school teachers should know better, though.
It's easy to understand why human societies throughout history were vastly religious. So many things left unexplained, the most annoying of all being our own existence. Consciousness -- a gift and curse at the same time --- had to come to terms with all the overwhelming things life and nature threw at people, so religion was invented to create a more manageable framework. It certainly has its ups and downs. Personally, I'm a firm believer that religion has been largely a driving force for good -- at least if we're to judge common people, ancient or contemporary. One study seems to confirm this hypothesis as it found belief in a super deity promotes cooperation among strangers, something anthropologists believe paramount to the development of civilization as we know it.
In one scenario, parts would spiral farther than the moon!
Police departments all over the world use tasers to pacify aggressive criminals. The stun gun ejects two wires at high speed that hook to the body of a person and send a 50,000 volt current, stunning the target. It certainly hurts, and the physical damage might take a while to heal. Researchers investigated, however, the psychological and cognitive effects of getting stunned with a taser. Their findings suggest those who get tasered experience short-term cognitive decline to the point of borderline dementia. This can last for a full hour, during which the victim might be unable to understand questioning by police properly and could interfere with their Miranda Rights, the "right to remain silent".
Vaccines are arguably one of the most impactful medical developments ever. According to the CDC, vaccines given to infants and young children over the past two decades will prevent 322 million illnesses, 21 million hospitalizations and 732,000 deaths over the course of their lifetimes. If that's not impressive, a group of researchers put this into another perspective that almost all people seem to appreciate: money. Their findings suggest that though it costs a lot to research new vaccines, manufacture and implement them, the return of investment is absolutely stunning. Pharmaceutical companies make a nice profit, but the bulk goes to society.
A team of researchers performed the most extensive study of howling made by canid species. This includes wolves, jackals and familiar domesticated dogs. The findings suggest that each species and subspecies has its distinct vocal fingerprint, with a specific pitch, fluctuation and timbre.
It's hard not to love video mapping, especially if you've seen a show up close and personal.
In the wake of calamities like hurricanes or tornadoes, you'll find trees leveled to the ground. But observations suggest that all trees seem to break at the same wind speed, with parameters like the type of tree, height or diameter barely affecting the outcome.
Sighing is a fundamental biological reflex that's a lot more important than most people care to think. We don't just sigh when we're in a position of weariness or relief, but quite regularly for no particular reason -- about 12 times an hour.
CO2 interferes with neuroreceptors in the brain of fish, causing them to behave as if drunk. By 2100, fish in half of the world's water might be intoxicated in this way.
These bizarre creatures are called Xenoturbella, and can be found at the bottom of the ocean. For years scientists have being trying to figure out which proverbial foot these fit in. Now, it seems like their place in the tree of life has been established. Not surprisingly, these are found near the base of the tree of bilaterally symmetrical animals. A fancy way of saying one half matches the other half. That's at least one thing these deep-sea sock creatures have in common with humans.
Once any ice age is over, the increased surface temperature causes the ice caps to melt which lessens the pressure on the mantle and causing increased volcanic activity. A paper published by a team from the University of Cambridge found that erosion also plays a major role and can be just as important as melting ice caps. Since erosion is largely ignored by climate models, it may be that scientists underestimated CO2 levels following ice ages.
It's all about the topography of the terrain, and whether or not it allows for niches to become connected, researchers found when they tried to explain what drives the most biodiversity. The findings could prove extremely important in gauging the future impact of migrating species to higher elevation as a result of climate change.
Discovered in ancient lake deposits in northeastern China and eastern Kazakhstan, this ancient insect looks and exhibits behavior closely mimicking the modern butterfly. The Jurassic age insect entered the fossil record 165 million years ago, while butterflies as we know them first appeared 80 to 90 million years ago. Though these are set apart by many millions of years, researchers found numerous morphological and ecological features in these two, unrelated clades.
One of Saturn's ring, which is very opaque and bright seems to have played an optical illusions all along. It is in fact much lighter than previously though -- as little as a seventh of the mass it appears to have.
