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The current leading theory that explains the mass extinction of the dinosaurs – once the dominant group of animals on Earth for millions of years – states that an asteroid impact some 65 million years ago brought their demise, wiping them out along with 70% of all life on the planet. A new study, however, […]
Some 200 million years ago half of all life on Earth went extinct, thus providing a window of opportunity for the dinosaurs to evolve in now unoccupied niches and dominate the planet for the next 135 million years. Curiously enough, after the dinosaurs were at their own term wiped out by a calamity – presumably at the […]
If you have really young kids, under three of four years old, you might have noticed just how tricky they can be in their actions – one thing they say, another thing they do. A recent study from University of Michigan puts these discrepancies into a psychological discussion. The researchers’ findings surprisingly show that children […]
Trekkies have a reason to rejoice one again after Japanese researchers have successfully devised the first working phaser – a laser that shoots sound particles instead of light. It will take a while though until you’ll be able to zap your neighbors around with a sound canon, as the scientists still need to work around […]
Using the incredible Planck cosmology probe astronomers at the European Space Agency have assembled a map of the “oldest light” in the sky – the cosmic microwave background (CMB) that was thrown into space in all directions just a few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang and which is still picked up here on Earth today. […]
Miniaturization is a fad that’s increasingly popular in the field of medicine for obvious reasons, and scientists at EPFL have recently made a remarkable contribution – a tiny monitoring and diagnosis device implantable under the skin just a few cubic millimeters in volume that can instantly analyze key substances in the blood stream and transmit information to a […]
Millions of years ago, an ancient tectonic plate called the Farallon oceanic plate used to sit between the Pacific and North American plates. In time, the plate “disappeared” beneath the North American one, however geologists at Brown University have now found physical surface remnants of the plate under sections of central California and Mexico. The Farallon surface […]
There are millions of asteroids in our solar system. Be them the size of France or a small bus, these space rocks can be found through out the solar system, and have recently become the subject of entrepreneurial discussions, since even a single medium-sized asteroid is thought to carry trillions of dollars worth of rare […]
German scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig have completed the first high-quality draft Neanderthal genome sequence, marking another leap forward in understanding our fellow hominids and how our species interacted, if there was such thing, with other hominid species. Moreover, the whole Neanderthal genome has been made freely available to the […]
Physicists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, once home to the longest particle accelerator for nearly fifty years, have used the world’s most powerful X-ray laser to distinguish at an atomic level the mechanisms of reaction of a catalyst in action. This unprecedented view will help scientists develop cleaner and […]
Up until the mind XIXth century most homes and buildings were made out of wood, a readily available and cheap material. However, like we all know wood is easily flammable and caused a myriad of issues, especially in urban environments. How many times were whole cities at risk of being whipped out by flames? Rome? […]
This month the PAN-STARSS comet can be seen at its brightest, a truly rare event that can be witnessed in all its splendor in the skies around the world with simple magnifying tools such as binoculars. Some have reported they could see the comet with the naked eye, but if you plan on catching sight […]
An extremely worrisome climate model predicts, based on current global warming projections, that storm surges – the most damaging and dangerous part of a hurricane – are set to increase in frequency and magnitude by as much as ten times by the turn of the century due to climate change. The scientists involved in the […]
The Curiosity rover is in a bit of trouble and is currently facing it’s longest period of inactivity since its touchdown on Mars. At the beginning of March, the rover experience fatal memory errors in one of its two side computers, presumably due to radiation exposure, which forced scientists on Earth to put the rover into […]
A virus that most of us carry, yet which is remarkably obscure both to the immune system and the general public in terms of awareness, is responsible for a number of health hazards in the human body. In time, it tires the immune system which is forced to seek and fight it for a life […]
Paleontologists were stoked by the discovery of hundreds of fossilized dinosaur eggs, belonging to various species, in a region of Spain. The dinosaur fossil eggs were said to be about as big as a basketball, while others were smaller. Since eggs belonging to various species were found in the same are, the findings add further […]
A recent study that asked human participants with minimal experience with dogs to judge the latter’s facial expression showed that we have an inherent ability to empathize with canines. Humans and dogs have been evolving side-by-side for the past 100,000 years and the study suggests that we are capable of judging a dog’s emotions similarly if […]
All life as we know it is primarily based on two elements: carbon and oxygen. Scientists at North Carolina State University investigating the conditions required for the formation of these life essential ingredients found that the Universe lives little room for error. Carbon and oxygen are formed as combustion byproducts after helium burns inside a […]
In a great leap forward towards reviving extinct animal species, scientists at University of New South Wales, Australia have grown embryos that contain the genetic markup of a rather peculiar, yet unfortunately extinct frog species native to Australia. The frog died off in the 1980s due to parasites, loss of habitat, invasive weeds and fungus, and […]
Though we’ve accomplish our knowledge a great deal in the past decades of bird evolution there are still many loose ends and debate is far from being settled. A general consensus among paleontologists is that birds today are actually a sort of modern dinosaurs, now recent fossils findings from China suggest early birds some 150 million years ago were four-winged […]
The science of physics has entered a new era once with the discovery of the much sought-after Higgs boson in July 2012. The elementary particle thought to be responsible for granting matter its mass has been theorized for decades, but only with the deployment of the multi-billion Large Hadron Collider in Geneva could such a […]
The Chinese government is well on track in its plans of implement a modern and more secure internet infrastructure. The web is getting really, really old and creaky, and naturally attempts to modernize its infrastructure and protocols have been made. The west is lagging far behind in its efforts, while China is close to setting […]
This is only the second time ever that astronomers have managed to identify a triple quasar system – a highly elusive and very difficult to observe phenomenon. The international team of researchers identified and described the triple quasar system named QQQ J1519+0627 in a paper published in the Oxford University Press journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical […]
This might be the weirdest news piece you’ll read all day. Apparently, the Ukrainian navy is only one of two navies in the world, the other being the US navy, which has navy killer dolphins at their disposal. These warrior sea-mammals are trained to place and hunt down mines and attack enemy frogmen divers with knives […]
I just finished watching NASA‘s latest and definitely most important Curiosity briefing to date. There the Curiosity team announced findings nothing short of spectacular: a slew of chemical elements, minerals and other chemicals have been found in the rover’s first drilled rock sample on Mars, hinting that, at least in the vicinity of the sample […]
The space agency just recently tweeted that it will hold a public briefing centered around the rover Curiosity to inform the public on what’s going on with the mission. The conference will be streamed live today at 1 PM ET, or in less than an hour from the time of writing. You can also watch […]
Hotter than ever, basically.
SpaceX, a company that has made tremendous leaps forward in the past year alone, has recently completed yet another successful test of its reusable Grasshopper spacecraft. This isn’t the Grasshopper’s first test run, but this time around it bested it previous record after it hoped to an altitude nearly 24 stories high, hovered for 34 […]
A rather well rooted idea in evolutionary biology says that evolution itself is non-reversible. Simply put, once an organism has specialized certain traits, it can not return to its ancestral traits – this is commonly referred to as Dollo’s law. In a way, you could say that by looking at Dollo’s law, evolution isn’t ever […]
It’s remarkable how adaptable the human brain is especially in these extremely busy, crowded and most of all noise times. Focus is key, of course, and recently researchers have shown for instance how the brain hones in at one speaker at a time when subjected to multiple external stimuli, like other people jabbering around at […]
A group of international researchers assessed 17 state-of-the-art climate model simulations and based on these have found that temperature seasonality shifts and green plants could move further north by as much as a whooping 20 degrees latitude by the turn of the century. So far, in the past 30 years alone, southern vegetation has moved […]
Just recently European scientists have released the first part of the Rapyuta program – a global world wide web for robots. Now, don’t get this wrong. This isn’t a place where robots can chat, surf websites or browse facebook. On Rapyuta, robots will have access to open data like a massive database, as well as additional […]
We have a rather sound image in our heads of Antarctica: cold, barren and damn well inhospitable. Million of years ago before a big freeze turned the continent into a huge popsicle, Antarctica was flat, covered in vegetation and riddled with flowing rivers and life. University of Arizona researchers have sampled key sediments from the Lambert Graben […]
An international team of researchers set out on the daunting task of surveying the Central African elephant population. Their results offer a new harsh cold shower as to the critical situation wildlife our planet is currently in. Their findings suggest the African elephant population in the area has plummeted by a staggering 62% and their […]
Our understanding and appreciation of Mars has greatly shifted in the past decade alone. If previously scientists used to thought the planet had been dead and bared geologically-wise for billions of years, recent evidence shows that Mars has been marked by a series of geological events. Using radar technology, scientists have now found water-carved channels buried […]
Every once in a while, some people who have had a limb, organ or some other body part amputated or removed still experience it, feel its pain and experience the sensation that it’s still attached to the body and is moving appropriately with other body parts. This sensation is typically referred to as phantom limb. Now, […]
We typically tend to associate camels with dry, barren, scorching hot deserts, but the truth is the animals first originated in North America’s Arctic region. A recent discovery of an ancient giant camel in Canada’s High Arctic region adds further weight to this claim, and shows just how adaptable the animal was in its migration […]
Babies need to wait until they’re at least two months old for vaccines to work, which leaves a lot of newborn babies in the world at risk of infections like rotavirus or pneumococcus. Researchers at Boston Children’s Hospital have developed small-molecule compounds that target a particular receptor to generate an immune response. The vaccine is […]
Eccentric millionaire Dennis Tito – better known for being the first tourist astronaut in space – announced late last month that he has set-up a manned mission to Mars called Inspiration Mars set to put the first man and woman into Martian orbit by 2018. As audacious as the plan might seem, Tito claims that […]
After a great deal of excitement following a glitch in the Dragon Capsule’s thrusters, the SpaceX vessel docked with the International Space Station as commander Kevin Ford wielded the lab’s robot arm and secured the spacecraft for berthing. A day late, the Dragon made a near-perfect rendezvous with the ISS 253 miles above northern Ukraine, much to the […]
We’ve showed you some incredible brain-computer interface scientific advances in the past few weeks alone, be it the merged rat brain organic computer or flexible electronic “tattoo” that might enable functioning telepathy, and the field is only growing. We couldn’t be more happy, you can imagine, since the potential medical uses alone for this kind […]
A team of researchers at Princeton University have devised an experimental set-up that closely mimics the flow of bacteria through working medical devices. Their findings show that bacteria clog medical devices extremely fast – much faster than previously thought – and warrant new strategies and designs in order to counter machine failure. The researchers used […]
A group of French researchers have published a paper in which they reveal how King Richard I, also known as Richard the Lionheart, had its heart mummified after he succumbed from gangrene in 1199. Apparently the great monarch’s heart was preserved in mercury, mint and frankincense, among other sweet-smelling plants. As it was customary at the time, Richard’s […]
In an incredible feat of neuroscience and communications, researchers at Duke University School of Medicine formed a link between pairs of rats by electronically linking their brains. As such, the rats could exchange motor and tactile information between each other. In one particular case, the experiment showed that a pair of linked rats – one rat […]
Just a few hours ago, SpaceX launched its third flight to the International Space Station tasked with carrying precious cargo as part of its current contract with NASA. Shortly after the 10:10 AM EST launch of the Falcon 9 from Cape Canaveral, however, the Dragon Capsule experienced a glitch shortly after parting with its rocket. The […]
Astronomers have made the first accurate measurement of a supermassive black hole’s spin, providing new insights that might help scientists probe the mysteries the surround them. Supermassive black holes have an incredibly huge gravitational pull that doesn’t let anything in its surroundings escape its hungry maw, be it dust, rock or even light. Some are […]
Researchers at Tufts University School of Medicine came across a particular strain of bacteriophage – a virus that infects and replicates within bacteria – that had stolen the functional immune system of the cholera bacteria. The virus used the bacteria’s immune system against it to replicate and eventually kill the bacteria. The findings hint to the prospect of developing new […]
While brighter expectations of the future might help most of us battle the harsh realities of life, a recent study conducted by German researchers has found that pessimists, who tend to have lower expectations about the future, live on average longer and are less inclined to develop disease or disabilities than optimists. Data collected between 1993 to 2003 by the […]
Most animals have eyes in the vicinity of their brains, typically inside the head, since these are very sensible organs that require a very sophisticated neural link. Recently, biologists at Tufts University have shown that they could implant working eyes in other locations as well, after they granted blind tadpoles vision after they implanted eyes in […]
In 1899 the famous Russian paleontologist Alexander Petrovich Karpinsky published a paper in which he described a peculiar fossil resembling what can only be called today as a “buzz saw”, but whose barer escaped scientists. Many speculations have been made since then, but most recently, using advanced SCAN scans, scientists at Idaho State University have asserted that […]
