Just one billion years following the Big Bang, water may had been as abundant as it is today
Water may have been plentiful in some parts of the universe as early as one billion years after the Big...
Newly discovered dinosaur had bat-like wings… but could it fly?
Each year, hundreds of millions people fly by plane to meet family, do business or travel for leisure. Quite a...
Automated process finds three super-Earths in our neighborhood – a new way to hunt for alien planets
Using three state of the art ground-based telescopes, a team of astronomers has identified three super-Earth exoplanets that are seven...
There’s a reset trigger for your biological clock – bye, bye jet lag, insomnia and exhaustion
While humans have invented a convention called time keeping to make society work, our bodies themselves also have a sort...
Lowest science spending since WWII threatens US economy and security, MIT says
A report issued by a committee at MIT concludes that the decline in science funding will have drastic consequences for...
Courtship in the animal kingdom: the amazing blue-eyed satin bowerbird
Endemic to Australia and New Zealand, the satin bowerbird is considered one of the most intelligent birds found in nature....
Why you have floating things in your eyes
If you ever stared into the blue sky or even a blank computer screen, you might have noticed there are...
NASA can only make three more Plutonium batteries to power spacecraft in space
According to the Department of Energy, the plutonium-238 stockpile is enough to make only three more nuclear batteries. These are...
Book review: ‘Climate Shock: The Economic Consequences of a Hotter Planet’
A sobering wake-up call: tax carbon!
Could you balance a pencil on a one-atom thick tip?
It's Saturday, so time for some fun physics. This non-trivial question is often asked in international physics contests and requires...
The seemingly chaotic, but elegant movement of the octopus: how it pulls it off
Despite lacking a rigid skeleton, octopuses have a remarkable coordinated locomotion. Using high-speed cameras, a group at the Hebrew University...
Blowing vapor: cigarette use plummets among youth in schools, but e-cigs take their place
Electronic cigarettes have soared in use among high school and middle school kids, tripling relative in 2014, while cigarettes have...
Why do we have chins?
Chins are weird and make little evolutionary sense.
Pluto – now in color, courtesy of New Horizon
These two dim dots are none other than Pluto, the dwarf plant, and Charon, its largest moon. Though it might...
SpaceX misses rocket landing by a hair’s breath – Dragon successfully launched, though
Today, SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket blasted off Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at 4:10 p.m. EDT (2010 GMT) carrying...
Dutch citizens sue the government over human rights for lack of action against climate change
Some 900 Dutch citizens have banded together and filled a lawsuit against the Dutch government over human rights, citing the...
First dark matter map spots the invisible substance that might help form galaxies
This is the first map in a series of maps that will be stitched together to form a grand picture...
A ‘warm blob’ in the Pacific is linked to California’s drought and East Coast snow storms
Strange weather in the East Coast and California's worst drought in history have been linked to a peculiar warm mass...
Fear of punishment and conformity might explain how traditions are created and mantained
The threat of punishment and humans' seemingly innate tendency to copy other behaviors form the basis of a psychological model...
Smartphones used as sensors for earthquake early warnings
There's so much you can do with a smartphone today - much more than just browsing the web or social...
Why the Dutch are the tallest on the planet: sexual selection
European males are on average 11 centimeters taller now than they were in the 1870s, which is quite a lot...
The neurological condition that makes Hodor keep Hodoring
"Hodor. Hodor, hodor; hodor hodor... hodor" said Hodor.
Kid doesn’t like going to school? Your ‘bad’ genes might have a say in all this
Some kids seem to enjoy school activities more than others, but while efforts seem to be concentrated on improving teaching,...
The sun goes through quasi-seasonal changes, a find that could help protect power grids back on Earth
Just like our own planet, the sun goes through seasonal changes in its activity, waxing and waning over the course...
Shorter people are more likely to get heart disease – every inch counts
The same genes that are responsible for height have been linked to heart disease as well, according to British researchers...
New Aluminum-ion battery fully charges in under a minute – 100 times faster than your laptop
Renewable energy and electric vehicles not only need high density storage mediums to become successful, but ones that can be...
Presenting the first brain-gene interface: thought-controlled protein production
You've heard all about controlling robotic arms or prosthesis with thoughts, but what about genes? In a deceptively simple experiment,...
The ultimate bandaid: synthetic spider silk
There aren't blood vessels you're seeing, but itsy bitsy strands of artificial spider silk. For some years, researchers have been...
Map compiled by NASA shows how lightning strikes the Earth
By the time you've finished reading this sentence, thousands of lightning bolts had already discharged enormous amounts of energy onto...
Blind rats ‘sense’ their location after a geomagnetic compass was strapped to their brains
Blind rats learned to navigate mazes just as well as those that could see, after scientists strapped a simple geomagnetic...
City ants LOVE junk food
If you ever dropped food on the pavement, don't feel too bad. It'll get scrapped bit by bit by the...
Frustrated magnets really do exhibit Hall’s effect, but only near absolute zero temperature
Settling a long debate, Princeton University researchers found that a class of materials called frustrated magnets - called so because...
Book review: ‘Higher Education in the Digital Age’
Higher education is facing a crisis, and professor Bowen offers some solutions.
What overpopulation looks like, in PHOTOS
Sprawling Mexico City rolls across the landscape, displacing every scrap of natural habitat . Photograph: Pablo Lopez Luz Some might...
Homes cleaned with bleach linked to higher rate of infection in children
Homes cleaned at least once a week with bleach might provide an environment that puts children at a higher risk...
Biotech used to build plant tolerance to water shortage – one way to beat California’s worst drought in history
Exploiting plants' natural response to stress caused by drought, researchers have engineered crops that build tolerance and can withstand longer...
DNA blood test can detect Down Syndrome more accurately than standard tests
A new test analyzes the free DNA inside the blood of pregnant women to detect Down Syndrome in fetuses with...
Over 100 child paralysis cases linked to new Enterovirus strain
Most of the 100 children hospitalized with acute flaccid myelitis haven't recovered from paralysis and weak limbs. CC BY-NC 2.0
As Arctic ice goes, so do the polar bears. Study finds land food is inadequate to keep them fed
After carefully calculating the net nutritional gain polar bears have from land-based food like caribou, berries or bird eggs, researchers...
Awesome tiny birds cross the Atlantic in one go without stopping
More than half a century in question, scientists now confirm that the tiny blackpoll warbler flies nonstop over the North...
Ignoring the dress code can actually enhance status, but only if other people think you’re elite
There's a fine line between being seen as a non-conformist (higher status) and sloppy dresser (lower status). But what sets...
Book review: ‘On Sacrifice’
I'd recommend this book to anyone interested in understanding the biblical sacrifice, but also the psychoanalytical reasoning behind sacrifice. Quite...
The Colugo (flying lemur): the cutest mammalian glider
The flying lemur is the most accomplished mammalian glider.
Sandwiching water between graphene makes square ice crystals at room temperature
In a most unexpected find, the same University of Manchester team that isolated graphene for the first time in 2003...
First 3D mini lungs grow in the lab help end animal testing
Stem cells were coaxed to grow into 3D dimensional mini lungs, or organoids, for the first time. These survived for...
How a new generation of climate change resistant beans could save millions
Some 30 new bean varieties have been cross-bred by researchers in order to make these more resistant to rising temperatures....
50 years ago today, an astronaut smuggled the first sandwich to space
When you gotta eat... well you gotta eat, even in space. On March 23, 1965 astronaut John Young launched to...
Boeing develops force field reminiscent of Star Trek
Boeing, a major aircraft and military manufacturer, just secured a patent that describes a Star Trek-like force shield, meant to...
Humidity-powered seed drills itself in the ground
The Stork’s Bill (Erodium circutarium) is a incredible plant which evolved its own seed drilling mechanism. The vitamin K rich seeds have little...