homehome Home chatchat Notifications


Algae and bacteria will provide oxygen for astronauts living on Mars

NASA has partnered with a private company to design and build an oxygen production facility for a Martian outpost or colony. The make the oxygen, bacteria and algae would use the nitrogen-rich Martian soil to make the precious oxygen, essential for the astronauts' survival. It can be used to make air, water and fuel.

If the world built nuclear power plants at the rate Sweden had, there would be no need for fossil in 25 years

With all its cons and pros, at this time, nuclear power remains our best shot at decarbonizing the planet and ridding the world of its dependence of fossil fuel. During the 60s and 70s, many of the world's governments, including France, the US or the USSR embarked on ambitious projects to electrify their nations using nuclear power. Accidents like those at Three Mile Island (1979), Chernobyl (1986) or Fukushima (2011) served to halt this rapid pace of deployment and even shift policy back to massive fossil fuel deployment. Anti-nuclear power public sentiment did little to help, of course. Considering that the combined power of solar, wind and hydropower can't yet rid us of pesky oil and gas, wouldn't it be better if we embraced nuclear nevertheless, with all its shortcoming (many of which have been addressed by modern technology)? Two researchers wondered if the world was to hypothetically shift in high nuclear gear, how long would it take to completely shelve fossil. Their analysis showed if we built nuclear power plants at the rate Sweden had between 1960-1990, this target would be reached within 25 years.

Rats rescue their friends from drowning out of empathy (and kindness)

We use the word "humane" to describe kind behavior and sympathy towards others, but the term might falsely lend some to believe that this is an exclusive human quality. Far from it. Rats too are kind, sympathetic and as "humane" as any human. For instance, when their peers are in danger of drowning, rats will come to their aid to save them. Even when a tasty treat, like chocolate, is offered instead the rat will most often than not choose to help his dying friend. To hell with chocolate!

Early human societies were egalitarian - male dominance emerges only with agriculture and more resources

Sexual equality might be the mark of a civilized society, but it's definitely not a new thing. In fact, there's much we can learn from our so-called primitive forefathers and foremothers, who likely lived in closely bonded communities where sexes shared equal influence and contributions, according to a study published by a team at University College London. The researchers investigated modern hunter-gatherer communities, one in Congo and the other in the Philippines, then constructed a computer model. Their model showed when only one sex had influence over how the group migrated for food or who lived with whom, the close community crumbled and did not reflect what was actually happening in reality. The researchers believe sexual segregation and male dominance in most cultures appeared following the advent of agriculture, as more resources became available.

Meet the first fully warm-blooded fish: the opah

Though it's a deep ocean fish, the slender opah is actually fully warm blooded - the first of its kind discovered so far. This remarkable insight was made by accident after researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration dissected the fish and noticed its blue and red blood vessels were located inside the gills, rather than in the fish's swimming muscles. Tuna or sharks, which both have the same vessels but not arranged in the same way, cool their blood once it reaches the gills for oxygen reloading. The opah's vessels are interwoven inside the gill like a net, which means the the veins that carry warm blood away from the hot muscles are interwoven with the arteries that carry cold blood in from the gills. This makes all the difference. Running so close to each other, the warm blood from the heart heats the cold blood from the gills. This way the Opah is 5 degrees Celsius warmer than its surroundings waters!

Making computers 'tick' like the human brain: a breakthrough moment

Researchers at UC Santa Barbara made a simple neural circuit comprised of 100 artificial synapses, which they used to classify three letters by their images, despite font changes and noise introduced into the image. The researchers claim the rudimentary, yet effective circuit processes the text much in the same way as the human brain does. In other words, like you're currently interpreting the text in this article. Even if you change the font, printscreen this article and splash it with an airbrush in MS Paint, you'll still be able to read at least portions of it, because the human brain is so great at scaling patterns and abstracting symbols. This kind of research will hopefully usher in a new age of more refined, energy efficient computing.

A lung cancer vaccine made in Cuba will begin clinical trials in the US

Cuba, famous for its rum and cigars, might be one of the unlikeliest places people think of when cutting-edge biotech research is concerned. Despite economic sanctions and embargoes set forth by the US and partners, the country's medical research institutes boasts some impressive results, particularly in immunization. One prime example is a lung cancer vaccine developed at Cuba’s Center for Molecular Immunology which increases life expectancy by up to six months. Now, the Roswell Park Cancer has signed an agreement with the Cuban medical center to finally bring the vaccine to the US for clinical trials.

GE engineers 3D print mini jet engine, then power it to 33,000 RPMs

Printing your own mechanical parts or toys is really easy, not to mention fun, using a 3-D printer. But things get a bit trickier when you want to print the kind of parts that go into a car or airplane. Metal is a lot more complex to work with inside a 3D printer than polymers like ABS - the kind of film roles that get melted layer by layer to form a part of your liking once it cools down. Engineers at General Electric just demonstrated, however, that in practice it's not that complicated to print parts out of metal alloys as it sounds. The team used additive technology to build a fully functional jet engine, then test powered it to 33,000 RPMs. The company is already using 3-D printed fuel nozzles in its next-generation aircraft engines, slated to role out in 2016.

How should space mining be regulated? Tough question, maybe for our future overlords to decide

At the Canadian Institute of Mining's annual convention, NASA scientists said exploration and prospecting of celestial bodies like the moon or asteroids is decades away, but even so this shouldn't stop regulations from being well established in advance. At the event, concerns were raised that ownership and management of resources in outer space are still far from being resolved.

Bird's beak reversed engineered into Dinosaur-like snout

Most evolutionary biologists seem to agree, based on fossil record, that the birds of today are direct descendants of dinosaurs, and that the first bird ancestors evolved some 150 million years ago. Though valuable, fossil records alone are not enough to recreate the DNA migration and tweaking that occurred to give rise to the avian family. What if you went from your original product (the bird) and genetically traced your steps backwards millions of years into the past? This is where a novel research might come in made by a collective from Harvard, Yale and several other universities. The scientists used the knowledge their garnered in eight years of research about how bird beaks form in the embryo stage to shut down key protein sequencing to basically breed birds with primitive, dinosaur-like snouts.

This computer is worth 9$ and it's not as bad as you might think. No, seriously

Next Thing Co, a fledgling company started by three budding hardware enthusiasts, just released a KickStarter campaign in which they promise to release a computer worth nine USD. The computer, called CHIP, can do everything 90% of all people usually use computers for: office apps, surf the web and play games. The team hoped to raise $50,000 to supplement their own budget and start rolling orders at an assembly line in China. Right now, $1,040,006 were donated as I'm writing this and the numbers are swelling with 24 days still to go. Are we finally seeing the fruits of liberalizing computing and economics of scale?

Carl Sagans' solar sail will be put to the test next week: our shot at interplanetary travel

In 1976, Carl Sagan went on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson along with a strange contraption, that looked like a tinfoil square. In all likelihood it was probably tin foil, since it was only a model for what Sagan termed as a solar sail - a simple, but effective spacecraft that harnesses the solar winds to generate power, much like a sail uses the wind to move a ship here on Earth. On May 20th, a tiny satellite the size of a loaf of bread will be blasted into Earth's orbit from an Atlas V rocket that will test Sagan's design.

Autonomous underwater gliders plan missions and coordinate by themselves

Climate models and environmental monitoring missions are ever more reliant on autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) to scour the ocean depths and bring back valuable data like temperature, salinity, carbon levels and so on. Researchers at MIT have now upgraded the way AUVs perform their missions by adding an extra dimension to their autonomy. They demonstrate how a pack of AUVs, directed by a "captain" drone, is able to navigate obstacles and retrieve data with minimal intervention. This dramatically enhances performance and might revolutionize the way scientists study the oceans.

World's first solar road works better than expected

Only six months ago, a 230-foot strip of road was covered in solar panels in the Netherlands. Since then, some 3,000 kilowatt-hours of energy were produced or enough to power one Dutch home for a whole year. These news came as a surprise even to the developers of SolaRoad, as the project has been dubbed.

A trip to Mars might incur permanent brain damage from cosmic rays

Researchers at University of California Irvine exposed mice to radiation similar to the cosmic rays that permeate space and found the animals experienced declines in cognition and changes in the structure and integrity of brain nerve cells and the synapses where nerve impulses are sent and received. The mice became easily confused and lost their tendency to explore new environments. Similar cognitive impairments are likely to be felt by astronauts traveling to Mars, according to the researchers. Even with shielding, the effects of cosmic rays exposure are sure to be noticed, considering the journey to Mars lasts six to eight months. This without counting the time spent on the red planet and the journey back home.

A sunrise literally painted in life by glowing bacteria on an agar plate

This "drawing" might look like it was made by a kid in grade school, but make no mistake it symbolizes one of the biggest achievements in 21st century biology. This San Diego beach scene was actually drawn in an eight color palette of bacterial colonies expressing fluorescent proteins derived from GFP and the red-fluorescent coral protein dsRed. Effectively, this is a picture literally drawn with life.

Spiders weave graphene-infused silk: the strongest of both worlds

Graphene - the one atom thick sheet of carbon arranged in a hexagon lattice - is the strongest material known to man, and spider silk is one of the strongest found in nature, second only to limpet teeth. Heck, why not combine the two? Sounds silly, but it surprisingly worked when Nicola Pugno of the University of Trento, Italy sprayed spiders with both graphene particles and carbon nanotubes. The spiders weaved silk infused with the materials, and in some cases the silk was 3.5 times stronger than its natural counterpart. The resulting fiber is tougher than "synthetic polymeric high performance fibers (e.g. Kevlar49) and even the current toughest knotted fibers,” according to the paper published in Materials Science, which obviously entails a lot of real-life applications, industrial or otherwise.

The tooth-lined 'penis worm' now gets a dentist's handbook

One of the perks of being a writer for ZME Science is that I frequently get to feature some really amazing, yet bizarre creatures. Take for instance Ottoia prolifica (priapulid) or the penis-worm as it's also known, for obvious reasons. This phallic creature actually had a throat full of teeth which it used to munch its meaty prey, and the weirdness doesn't stop here. It could its mouth inside-out and use those teeth for traction so it could easily move about. Talk about double standards. Now, a team has systematically studied these ancient Cambrian fossils (520 million years old) to compile a dentistry handbook to distinguish between other penis worm species. This proved to be wise, since in their compiling work the researchers at University of Cambridge have already reported what they believe to be new Ottoia species.

There may not be such a thing as autism epidemic - the explanation might lie in the diagnosis

Over the last couple of years, cases of children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) increased by 30%, according to a reported issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Today, the CDC estimates that one in 150 8-year-olds in the U.S. has an autism spectrum disorder, or ASD. There's a whole debate surrounding this topic - where does this slew of new cases come from? Are we dealing with an epidemic-like event? It used to be vaccines that took the hit, but this was long debunked. There's another, maybe more plausible explanation: it's all a statistical mishap as far as diagnosis goes. In effect, if this is true, ASDs prevalence is stable, it's in the way we count the cases that the problem might lie.

Free choice and monkeys: researchers record the moment a mind is changed

Free will is considered the domain of philosophers, but this long lasting question might actually be put to rest by neuroscience. In a most intriguing research, a team at Stanford analyzed the key brain motor patterns in monkeys as they made specific decisions, and eventually recorded the moment-by-moment patterns that lead to change of mind. Apart from its philosophical implications, which really might never be settled, the findings prove extremely useful for brain-computer interfaces and the likes. Controlling robotic arms with your thoughts, or just about anything really, is no longer a provision of science fiction. Still, this basic neuroscience discovery could be used to improve brain-computer algorithms and thus refine control of thought controlled prostheses such that a robotic arm or leg might be moved only when the user is certain of its decisions, thereby avoiding premature or inopportune moments.

This is what thunder looks like (kind of)

What does lightning sound like? Thunder. Well, what does thunder look like then? It's no trick question. Like all acoustic waves, thunder can also be visualized and Maher Dayeh from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio was the first to turn a thunderclap into an image. His findings were shown at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union.

Scientists make muscles out of gold plated onions

When it comes to artificial muscles, researchers at from National Taiwan University really know their onions. The team applied an uncanny design in which they layered gold atop the treated skin of onions. Once an electrical current was discharged, the "onion muscle" contracted and bent, just like the real thing. There's a whole slew of possible applications for artificial muscles, from so-called "soft robotics" (flesh-like droids), to of course helping injured humans.

Oldest avian ancestor of modern day birds found in Chinese siltstone slabs

A group of paleontologists have unearthed fossils preserved in pristine condition belonging to a new ancient avian species that lived some 130 million years ago. Dating suggests it's the oldest ancestor to modern day birds found thus far, beating the previous record holder by about six million years. The findings also suggest that different bird groups were already well established and spread through the world even in the early Cretaceous.

Is sleepwalking genetic? Study suggests it runs in the family

Canadian researchers found that kids born out of parents with a history of sleepwalking are more likely to experience somnambulism. They found 60% of kids whose both parents reported sleepwalking also took slumbering walks in the middle of the night, or seven times more likely than kids whose parents had no history of sleepwalking. Children with only one sleepwalking parent were three time more likely to sleep walk.

Book review: 'Great Principles of Computing'

Computer science and the major principles behind it.

Of beards, feces and clickbait

Some news outlets were quick to label beards as toilets. I disagree.

What the first cup of coffee in space means for space travel in the future

Yesterday, Samantha Cristoforetti sipped the first coffee brewed in space using the newly delivered micro-gravity espresso machine. How befitting that the first espresso in space was made by an Italian. Living in space thus got a lot pleasant, but there's a lot more to this than just making life more enjoyable for the astronauts aboard the International Space Station. Along with the espresso machine, six carefully crafted coffee mugs were also supplied. Previously, to consume liquids astronauts had to suck them out of a plastic bag. The new 3-D printed, transparent jugs behave more like a coffee mug in normal Earth gravity. Exploiting capillary flow, the mugs have a sharp inner corner that allows the liquid to be pushed along the inside of the cup and towards the astronaut's lips.

Tiny hairs on bats' wings act like airflow sensors - is this why they're such great flyers?

Apart from echolocation, bats have another ace up their sleeve that makes them formidable flying animals: tiny hairs that sense airflow and transmit this information to key areas of the brain. Here the info is decoded and used to steer the bats' flight for pinpoint accuracy. In combination with echolocation, this makes bats awesome hunters even in pitch black darkness.

Creative agency makes ink from smokers' lungs; increases interest in quitting by 500%

For most smokers, the message that cigarettes are fatally bad for their health often doesn't come across. But if that message came written in ink made from pitch black lungs? It's a morbid concept, one that was actually followed through by BBDO Proximity Thailand, an agency which commissioned the charcoal ink, part of an anti-smoking effort for the Thai Health Promotion Foundation.

3D map of the Pillars of Creation shows the same shaping forces will also destroy them

Using the MUSE instrument aboard ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT), astronomers have made a three dimensional view of the famous Pillars of Creation - a photograph taken by Hubble 20 years ago showing elephant trunks of interstellar gas and dust in the Eagle Nebula, some 7,000 light years from Earth. The 3D image shows never before seen details of the dust columns, greatly expanding scientists' knowledge of how these formed, but also what's in stored for them in the future.

After cancer ate out his face, this 74-year-old now uses a 3-D printed mask. Photos speak for themselves

Since 1990, Keith Londsdale went through no less than 45 different surgical procedures to remove basal cell carcinoma tumors, one of the most common skin cancers. The man survived the ordeal, but was left deformed as doctors had to remove his nose, upper jawbone and cheekbones. Basically, the 74-year-old-man now has a huge hole in his face.

HSBC advises caution when investing in fossil fuels, according to private note to clients

Amid crashing oil prices and a divestment movement from fossil fuels, one of the most important banks in the world, HSBC, advised its clients to exercise caution when considering investing in fossil fuel assets. This was communicated through a private report, called ‘Stranded assets: what next?’, picked up by Newsweek. Inside, analysts warn that fossil fuel companies might become economically non-viable in the future, considering tightening emission regulations throughout the world. Considering HSBC's portfolio, we can only take this as a sign that the fossil fuel industry is growing increasingly vulnerable, while renewables are shifting gears and growing at a fast pace driven by technological advances.

Genetically modifying human embryos: 'a line that should not be crossed,' NIH says

The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) has reiterated its stance against modifying human embryos, after a paper published last week by Chinese researchers reported how they modified the DNA of human embryos to eradicate certain inheritable diseases from the lineage. Modifying human embryos was banned in 1996 for US government bodies, but in some states private entities are allowed to carry out such research.

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 Bang, a new model suggests. That's a lot earlier than scientists had previously presumed, seeing how at the very beginning the only elements were hydrogen and helium. Seeing how water is comprised of one oxygen atom (16 times heavier than hydrogen) and two hydrogen atoms, then we should have seen water much later, or so the thinking goes.

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 feat, considering humans don't have any wings. Like all advanced technology we have at our disposal today, flying is also taken for granted. In the early days, however, just getting a few feet off the ground for a couple of seconds was considered a triumph. Like human pioneering flight, nature also had to experiment a lot before flying creatures could evolve. One newly discovered dinosaur species fits well into this story. Unearthed in 160 million year old sediments in China, this queer dinosaur strangely had bat-like wings. It's uncertain however if it was able to fly or even glide, owing to the degraded state of the fossil records. One thing's for sure, it makes the evolution of flight much more interesting to study.

What an overheated Lithium-ion battery looks like, inside and out

Boom!

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 to eight times as massive as our own planet and orbit their parent star closer than Mercury orbits the sun. What's hot about the findings - apart from the planet's likely scorching surface - is that these were made using a novel automated approach, in which one telescope called the Automated Planet Finder (APF) Telescope at Lick Observatory in California was programmed to scour the night's sky and look for signs of nearby alien planets. These three planets are just the beginning of a new process that hopefully will return hundreds of planets in our neighborhood, all without the need for human supervision.

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 of clock called an internal biologic clock or circadian rhythm. When met by daylight, hormones are released that keep us awake and alert, while darkness releases different hormones that puts us to sleep. Canadian researchers have now found the molecular switch that resets and synchronizes the circadian clock. A drug that tweaks this switch could thus be made that regulates the internal clock, something travelers and night owls might find particularly useful.

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 the country's economy and security, making the US trail behind other countries like China which is spending immense amounts of money on science. In fact, one study estimates China will become the world's leading science and innovation producer by 2020, outpacing the US. The MIT report identifies some 15 fields where inadequate budgets seriously hampers progress, from Alzheimer's research, to nuclear fusion, to disease and agriculture.

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. Mature males are very easy to spot because of their bright blue eyes, while their bodies are uniformly covered in black, although sometimes light diffraction makes the bird's feathers turn almost into a metallic sheen. What sets these birds apart is their remarkable courtship ritual, and the male's seemingly obsessive fixation for blue.

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 some  strange blobs floating through the field of vision.  These might look like black or gray specks, strings or cobwebs that drift about when you move your eyes, but kind of disappear when you try to concentrate your vision directly onto them. So, what are we actually seeing? Time to dispel another childhood superpower. No, these aren't aliens trying to make contact or microbes. Nor are they hallucinations, for make no mistake the spots are completely real and there. These spots in your vision are called by doctors eye floaters and are caused by the  blue field entoptic phenomenon.

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 used to power long-term space missions, like Curiosity rover now studying Mars on site, the Voyager probes which were launched in the 1970s and are now almost out of the solar system or New Horizon which is close to making the first Pluto flyby in history. New Horizon is also the fastest spacecraft ever built, racing at one million miles per day. All these remarkable achievements were made possible thanks to plutonium-238 and the technology developed to harness its heat.

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 a bit of out of the box thinking.

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 of Jerusalem found the octopus achieves this by precisely and independently moving one or more of its eight legs to crawl its body, even when its facing a different direction. Moreover, there is no discernible rhythm or pattern to this undulating leg movement, making the octopus unique in this respect. It's controlled chaos, and only the octopus itself completely knows how it pulls all this off.

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 reached an all time low. The report was issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which found 4.6 million middle and high school students were current users of any tobacco product, which includes e-cigs despite the fact that it doesn't burn or contain any tobacco - just the nicotine.

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 not look like much, this is the first ever colored photograph of the two cosmic bodies ever taken. We have NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft to thank for this, which used its Ralph color imager to make the shot from 71 million miles away.

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 the Dragon capsule to orbit, on slate for its rendezvous with the International Space Station where it's tasked with a resupply mission. Instead of dropping in the ocean like the gazillion other rockets before it, the first stage of Falcon was programmed to make a controlled landing on a "autonomous spaceport drone ship." The rocket did land on the spaceport, which is amazing in itself, but unfortunately it flipped over post landing and was damaged beyond repair. So, just almost!

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 latter's lack of decisive action against climate change. This is the first such case in Europe where a group of citizens holds its government responsible for ineffective climate policy, and also the first to be based on human rights law.