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In what can only be called a medical oddity, doctors in Columbia found that a man's lung tumor wasn't actually caused by human cancer cells, but those of a parasite. Apparently, due to the patient's weakened immune system, cells from the parasite leached into the rest of the body and eventually developed into cancer. This is the very first reported case of a patient sick with cancer sourced from outside the body. It's literally alien cancer.
From Dec. 14, NASA is opening applications for its new astronaut crew. The minimal requirements aren't that strict, but as you might imagine to make the cut you'll have to prove you're better than a stellar class of applicants.
Before the official talks at the UN climate change summit start next month in Paris, each nation was invited to submit a pledge in which it details how it plans to reduce its carbon emissions. The plan is for the world's leaders to reach a sensible agreement such that the climate might avert warming by more than 2 degrees Celsius by 2100 past pre-industrial levels. The climate is already 0.9 degrees Celsius warmer. More than 155 countries have responded to the call, amounting to 128 Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs). Each country outlined the progress it wants to make differently, depending on how many resources they can dispose of and, of course, how serious they take the issue
Tyrannosaurus was one of the fiercest land predators ever, despite claims that the dinosaur was mostly a scavenger. While this is true to a degree, T-Rex was most definitely a hunter at heart even though the predator might have munched on a carcass or two from time to time. Apparently, the dinosaur even ate its own kind, a new study suggests.
The pineapple is the second most grown fruit crop behind bananas, with 85 countries producing about 25 million metric tons each year. It's sweet, exotic, tasty. Most people love it. But there's more to the pineapple than meets the eye. It's one of the most drought resistant crops out there, and scientists have now finally identified the genes that make the pineapple so resilient. By genetically engineering similar crops that share a genetic history with the pineapple it's possible to lend its drought resistance, and thus help curb the stress these face at the hand of global warming.
It's no secret that people nowadays spend most of their time indoors. In high-income countries, as many as 66% of jobs are in the service sector. If you fall in this category, you most likely work in an office environment, which might seem benign enough and boring, of course. However, not all office buildings are built the same. The various materials and furnishings can not only affect your performance at work, but also our health. A new study published in the journal Environmental Health Reports quantified the effects of air quality and found employees working in environments with minimum pollutants in the air performed up to twice as better on cognitive tests.
The famous inventor and tech pundit shares a few words on why he thinks humans will soon live forever.
Our solar system likely had a fifth gas giant in its initial configuration, but the planet was ejected by Jupiter a new study suggests.
Changes in surface height as measured by satellite altimeters suggest the Antarctic peninsula is experiencing a net gain of ice cover. The analysis suggests Antarctic ice sheet showed a net gain of 112 billion tons of ice a year from 1992 to 2001. However, this net gain slowed to 82 billion tons of ice per year between 2003 and 2008. Some parts the peninsula experienced substantial ice cover gain (East Antarctica), while other parts showed evidence of ice discharge (West Antarctica).
For the second time this year, however, the desert bloomed as thousands of dormant species of flowers and plants awoke after El Niño brought a rainy boom to the region.
Russia is locking up six women together to simulate a trip to the moon and back. But no one is taking this too seriously, it seems.
After using relaxation-response technique, such as yoga, meditation and even prayer, participants involved in a study coordinated by the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) solicited health care services 43% less frequently. The researchers involved in the study say simply learning how to relax to fend off anxiety and depression -second only to cancer and heart diseases in terms of health care costs - might significantly reduce the strain on the health care system. As such, more wide spread use of relaxation-response techniques could free up immense resources that can be diverted for chronic diseases.
When humans and nature work together, you can build some extraordinary designs. At MIT, living things are integrated using today's most advanced gear - like biological 3D printers - to help solve human needs. In this particular case, a suit that self-regulates in response to humidity (the trigger is sweat) so you can work, dance or explore more comfortably.
Of all the major conservative parties in the democratic world, the Republican Party stands alone in its denial of the legitimacy of climate science.
eam at Lawrence Livermore, helped by researchers from all around the world, announced the discovery of five new isotopes, adding to the already extensive list of 3,000 isotopes of 114 confirmed chemical elements. The exotic atomic variations discovered are one isotope each of heavy elements berkelium, neptunium and uranium and two isotopes of the element americium.
Science and medicine advances have stretched the life span further than ever. That's good news, but the quality of life is also important. People live longer now than ever, but they also live longer in sickness and suffering of both body and mind. Concerning the latter, a clear, sharp mind can be a rare thing once you pass a venerable age, but a team at the Paracelsus Medical University in Austria may be on to something. Working with mice, the researchers gave some of the elderly rodents a common drug called Montelukast that's used to treat asthma in children. To everyone surprise, the old rats started growing new brain cells and performed almost as well as the young in cognitive tests. If only the drug worked on people, too - we might find out soon.
Manure has been used as a plant and crop fertilizer since the dawn of agriculture, but since poop is naturally occurring it's been essential to the ecosystem far before humans evolved on this planet. But as the planet's megafauna has steadily dwindled, so has the megapoop significantly impacting the nutrient-recycling system. According to Joe Roman, a biologist at the University of Vermont, in some cases nutrient transport via pooping today is only 5% of what it used to be during the Ice Age.
This Wednesday at the Tokyo Motor Show, Honda Motors will unveil its brand new hydrogen car: the FCV (not its real name likely). According to Forbes, the car can run 435 miles on a tank full of hydrogen, which is more than 100 miles than any of Tesla EV. Moreover, a full fill only takes 3 minutes which means you can be back on the road in no time - provided you can find a hydrogen filling station. The biggest innovation, however, is Honda's new fuel cell system which is 10 times cheaper than the one on the FCX Clarity and takes as much space a typical V-6 engine.
A team of scientists from Switzerland, Russia, Denmark, Belgium and Canada has for the first time demonstrated that it is possible to track the movement of an electron inside a molecule in real time. Moreover, the scientists claim the electron movements can be manipulated allowing unprecedented control over chemical reactions and biological processes.
Money. It makes the brain go nuts!
In a room filled with oil & gas executives, a veteran lobbyist called Richard Berman held a crash course on how companies can use scare tactics and manipulation to make environmental groups look like radical morons. This includes digging up dirt on opponents (celebrities are the focus), exploiting basic emotions like fear and anger, skewing information and other dirty tactics, because in the end “you can either win ugly or lose pretty,” Berman said. Of course, these things would have never been admitted in public, but unbeknownst to Berman the whole meeting was taped by one of the executives who found the whole affair appalling, then made public by the New York Times.
If you still think wind and solar energy can't possibly work because they're too expensive, you're trapped in time. As the technology improves and manufacturing of scale comes into full force we're seeing prices per unit of energy dwindling. Elsewhere, regulations like price on carbon is making fossil fuel energy more expensive. According to the Bloomberg New Energy finance, on-shore wind energy has once again dropped in price and is competitive with conventional coal or gas fired energy. In some parts of the world, like Germany or UK, on-shore wind is up to 30% cheaper than fossil fuel energy. Apparently, we're running out of reasons not to ditch fossil fuels in favor of renewable energy.
Nobody wants to know how a hot dog is made, because you always know there's some crazy stuff inside. If you're one of those persons, stop reading now. Alright, time for a reality check. According to the "The Hot Dog Report" released by Clear Food, a company on a mission to demystify the black box that's the US food industry, many consumer brands add more ingredients in their sausages than you'd wished for, i.e. labeled. The company sequenced the genetic material from 345 samples of hot dogs across 75 brands and found around 15% were problematic. This means a deceiving label, whether exaggerating the protein content or finding pork in your chicken sausage. About 67% of the veggie samples had hygiene issues. Perhaps most disturbing is that 1 in 10 so-called veggie hot dogs had meat in them, and 2% of all samples had human DNA inside.
Martin Shkreli, chief executive officer of Turing Pharmaceuticals, became over night one of the most despised figures in the pharmaceutical industry when just as suddenly he raised the price of the only treatment of a rare parasitic infection by 5,000 percent. The drug, Daraprim, was initially developed in 1953 and used to cost $1 a pill only a couple years ago. I have no idea what Shkreli thought would happen after he'd raise the price 500-fold in one go, but he got some serious backlash. "I think that it makes sense to lower the price in response to the anger that was felt by people," he said while under the spotlight, but this promise made a month ago is still unfulfilled shattering whatever credibility Shkreli had left.
Approximately 3.8tn cubic metres of water is used by humans annually with 70% being consumed by the global agriculture sector, according to a report issued by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IME). Strikingly, up to 50% of all food is thrown away before it gets the chance to reach consumers, often out of frivolous reasons. In terms of water that's 550bn cubic metres that go to waste each year. At the same time, approximately 795 million people in the world are chronically malnourished and 1 in 10 lack access to clean water. While policy makers should take more notice and take measures to curb waste, there's much you can do yourself to cut on waste. Eglė Plytnikaitė, an illustrator from Vilnius, Lithuania made some insightful drawings showing how much water goes into some of the most popular foodstuff.
"Please enter a strong password", is now an ubiquitous greeting whenever we try to register online. Security experts advise we use long passwords at least 12 characters in length, which should include numbers, symbols, capital letters, and lower-case letters. Most websites nowadays force you to enter a password under some or all of these conditions. Moreover, the password shouldn't contain dictionary words and combinations of dictionary words. Common substitution like "h0use" instead of "house" are also not recommended - these naive attempts will fool no automated hacking algorithm. So, what we end up at the end is a very strong password, like the website kindly asked (or forced) us to do. At the same time, it's damn difficult if not impossible to remember. People end up endlessly hitting "recover password" or, far worse, write down their passwords in email or other notes on their computer which can easily be recovered by any novice hacker.
Couple of weeks ago, Volkswagen admitted it had cheated US tests to make its diesel cars seem more green than they actually were. Later, ZME Science reported companies like Renault, Nissan, Hyundai, Citroen, Fiat or Volvo were also cheating. Then, independent lab tests showed some Samsung TVs were rigged to use less energy during official testing conditions than they do during real-world use. Now, famous British inventor James Dyson is accusing German companies Bosch and Siemens of doing the same thing, gaming energy ratings for their vacuum cleaners.
The Concorde was created by Britain's British Aircraft Corporation and France's Aérospatiale in the early 1960s. But it wasn't until 1976 and billions of dollars later that the supersonic plane took its maiden voyage. Because it was very expensive to maintain, only long distance flights made sense and boy did the Concorde deliver - New York to London in just three hours! Today, 12 years after the aircraft was retired, it takes 7 hours. Rightfully so, the Concorde episode is one of the few in human history where society has had to downgrade. Yes, today's sub-sonic aircraft are more advanced than the Concorde, but still arduously sluggish. Now, a group of Concorde enthusiasts - its fan club if you will - plans to buy up two old units of this vintage wonder. One will be turned into a museum in London, and the other will be refurbished, upgraded and put to good use flying the wealthy faster than the speed of sound.
After five years of painstakingly stitching together pictures of the Milky Way, astronomers from Ruhr University Bochum have finally completed their masterpiece: the largest ever space photo. It has a whooping 46 billion megapixel and 194 GB in file size. It's so large, in fact, that the astronomers had to cut it in 268 sections for it be manageable.
We humans arguably came to dominate the world thanks to our dexterous hands, which allow gripping tools and manipulating objects. An eccentric professor at University of Utah agrees, but with a twist. According to David Carrier there's a secondary evolutionary driver that led our hands to reach their current shape and dexterity: fist punching. To illustrate his hypothesis, Carrier turned to a macabre experiment in which cadaver hands clenched in various positions, from open hand to a good old sucker punch fist, were bashed against a dumbbell. Carrier showed that a fist could handle the strike with double the force supported by an open hand before bones started to break.
Marijuana use has doubled among American adults from 2001 to 2013. About 10% of the population or 22 million are believed to be recreational users, a steep rise driven by both cultural shifts and more permissive laws. About 1 in 3 users abuse the drug (continued use despite knowing it may be damaging health or causing depression or anxiety), though it's worth mentioning that this ratio was the same before the exponential rise in marijuana users.
Bitcoin's blockchain database is shared by all nodes participating in a system - that's more computing power than Google has. This makes the Bitcoin ledger impossible to forge or destroy, since there are millions of other copies distributed across the whole web. Now, this remarkable financial innovation could be used to thwart corruption.
"No amount of alcohol should be considered safe to drink during any trimester of pregnancy," wrote the the American Academy of Pediatrics in a report which identified ingesting alcohol during pregnancy as the leading cause of preventable birth defects.
Carbon nanotubes are a class of advanced materials that researchers think will transform electronics someday, but while great effort is expended trying to figure out the best way to make them, it appears that our lungs are already littered with them. American and French researchers collected both biological samples from randomly selected asthma patients and swabs from nearby buildings and busy intersections. Eventually they found carbon nanotubes, leading them to believe that the material is expelled throughout the city. The source? Vehicles, it seems, which act like carbon nanotube factories on wheels. Similar findings were detected in samples from Houston, in spider webs in India and in ice cores, suggesting carbon nanotubes are everywhere where automobiles are on the loose.
The current procedure for Ebola survivors is wait 42 consecutive days for the tests to come back negative, then the patients can be discharged from quarantine. More and more evidence is surfacing, however, showing that the virus can still linger on through various nooks and crannies in the human body, undetected from standard testing. For instance, one man was treated for Ebola, but the virus was still present in his eyes. It wasn't dormant either, since the inflammation caused his normally blue eyes to turn into green. Other evidence suggests Ebola can linger in the testes and be transmitted through sexual contact, but also in the uterus and joints. Only the case where Ebola was present in semen led to a transmission of the disease, so survivors aren't necessary contagious. These serious findings do suggest more quarantine measures are required, though.
In 2006, the US court found the tobacco industry guilty of a decades-long racketeering enterprise in which it conspired to deceive the public about the dangers of smoking. The tobacco companies were ordered to buy newspaper ads detailing smoking's health effects and to stop using such descriptions as "low tar," "light," ultra light," "mild" or "natural" that might imply that they are less dangerous than other cigarettes. They were also ordered to pay $10 billion in fines. Speaking for ThinkProgress, Sharon Y. Eubanks - the leader of the Justice Department team that prosecuted the landmark lawsuit against big tobacco - says the Department of Justice should investigate Exxon and possibly other fossil fuel industry players (Koch *cough) for a similar claim, only much worse. The conspiracy isn't only against smokers' health, it's against all life on Earth.
Defecating outside comes at a great toll to the numerous, and often crowded Indian people. Lack of basic hygiene means hundreds of millions are exposed to bacterial pathogens and children are at the mercy of diarrhea. Economically speaking, this translated to $53.8 billion or 6.4 percent from India’s gross domestic product in 2006, says the World Bank.
It probably took a bit of convincing for man to turn wolves into dogs through domestication. At least this is not settled for debate: dogs branched from Eurasian grey wolves some 15,000 years ago. What's less clear is where did this first happen. After embarking on a huge study which led them to analyze the genetic markup of hundreds of dog breeds, Adam Boyko at Cornell University thinks he's finally got an answer: dogs were first domesticated in Central Asia, or in modern day Nepal and Mongolia.
Used to make almost everything from skyscraper girders, automobiles, and appliances to thumb tacks and paper clips, steel is one of the world's most vital materials. While there's been a great amount of research invested into steel, most of it has concentrated on making various grades of steel, with little focus on the surface itself. Understanding that there's a great interest and need for steel surfaces that can stay clean and don't corrode under harsh biological conditions, a group of material scientists at Harvard have come up with a squeaky clean coating that does just that.
You've probably heard some of the headlines: eBay hacked; Apple hacked etc. It's infuriating when your private records, which you shared with a company you trust, get breached. But it's often easy to lose sight of the fact that nowadays it's not only companies that get hacked - it's normal, nine to five, credit card holding individuals that get hacked too. Cybercriminals use all sorts of methods to spoof millions of twitter or facebook accounts and extract private information they can later use to steal your identity, extort you or hack other accounts. As such, we should all be a lot more responsible. Here's a brief infographic made by the Digital Guardian which shows how oversharing on social media can be harmful and some practical tips on how to protect your data.
The last time humans set foot on the moon was 1972. Feeling confident it had clearly showed its superiority over Russia, the US felt no more reason to prove itself and immediately shut down subsequent missions. Once with funding gone - and its budget has been thinning since - NASA had to settle for less ambitious goals, and it's not like we can blame them. Building on outpost on the moon, versus say the International Space Station, is not only a lot more expensive, but also impractical. Recent findings, however, suggest there's a lot to gain from having an outpost on the moon, of some sorts at least. That's because the interest has shifted from prestige, or at least not only, to the potentially bountiful economic activities. Minerals, helium-3 (fuel) or precious metals can all be mined from the moon, trillions worth. But before you can shuttle minerals back from the moon, you at least need a footing of some sort. Understanding this, the European Space Agency and Roscosmos banded together to send a robotic probe to an unexplored region of the moon. The ultimate goal, they say, is to prepare the ground for humans.
With today's propulsion tech, it takes at least 1.5 years for a manned crew to reach Mars, and at least as much to get back - provided there's a return mission. There's only so much that can fit in a spacecraft, and besides the supplies astronauts need for the long trip, there's precious cargo that's required to sustain the mission on site like construction materials, lab equipment, food and so on. Remember the last time you went camping? Well, this time we're headed to another planet and forgetting about toiler paper is the least of your worries. But when NASA handles logistics, you know things are tight to the last bolt. Sometimes, outside help and fresh minds are more than welcome, which is why the space agency held a very interesting competition called the 3D-Printed Habitat Challenge Design Competition which awards the most innovative, but practical designs of habitats on Mars.
Every year Nikon holds the Small World Photomicrography Competition awarding the very finest photographers that capture the essence of the micro world. For 2015, the winner was Ralph Grimm from Australia with a close-up of a bee eye covered in dandelion pollen grains. This was no lucky shot. Grimm says it took four hours to prepare, including setting focus increments, proper illumination and stacking.
This Friday, the CEOs of the some of the biggest oil & gas companies in the world, including BP, Shell and Total, held a press conference asking for immediate action against climate change and urging world readers to reach an agreement in Paris, this December. The companies account for a fifth of the world's oil and gas production, the leading fossil fuels that are flooding the atmosphere with excess carbon and warming the planet, causing irreversible climate change. As such, if you find the statement dubious - not to mention hilarious - you're not alone.
Previously stored away in government archives, some 170,000 photographs from the time of the Great Depression have been now released to the public by Yale University.
Solar energy could be turned up a notch not by some exotic material or chip, but surprisingly by viruses. A team at MIT published a paper demonstrating how a genetically modified virus was used in a quantum system to transfer energy at double the speed and over a greater distance than even the best solar cells.
By 1918, the Indian born, self-thought mathematical genius Srinivasa Ramanujan was already making headlines all over the world, recognized as one of the most brilliant mathematicians of his time. He was born into a poor Brahman family and with no formal education. Luckily he came across a couple of textbook maths, and since he didn’t […]
Besides chirps and squeaks, you'll also find bear roars, primate calls, and blue whale songs. In total: 150,000 recordings of 9,000 species.
Bill Gates, the wealthiest man in the world in 2014, has for the past decade concentrated his efforts and resources into philanthropic projects aimed to transform the world. He's invested billions in the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation which concentrates on improving health and helping the world's poor access technology and basic services. Some of Gates' funded projects were covered by ZME Science, like the Omniprocessor that turns sludge into electricity and pure, clean water or the solar power toilets. As you can see, energy is key to meeting any humanitarian goal. It also matters how you get this energy. If we continue to burn fossil fuel at this rate, the planet might irreversibly warm by a couple degrees Celsius, with cataclysmic shifts. That's why Gates has pledged $2 billion strictly into energy R&D.
A while ago, aerospace giant applied a patent for a most peculiar propulsion system that uses high power lasers to kick off a fusion reaction, akin to a small thermonuclear explosion. The energy released would be enough power spacecraft, rockets and even jetliners with tremendous thrust.
