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At the beginning of the year, we reported how NASA, despite being faced with drastic budget cut-backs, had an audacious plan of building a human-tended waypoint on the far side of the moon. Suspended in space, hundreds of thousands of miles away from Earth, astronauts would care to this outpost by conducting experiments in deep space, […]
When you think of air pollution, inevitably your mind wanders to huge, fume spilling power stations, old motor trucks and other nasty things in these lines. Surprisingly enough, researchers at University of California, Riverside, found that charbroiled burgers, chicken, and steaks are behind much of Southern California’s air pollution, topping even diesel engines. These findings were made after […]
Spy drones have been used by the US government on a various occasion in Pakistan to gather intelligence from the tribal area bordering Afghanistan, known for its close ties with terrorist organisations. Most recently, however, drones have been used to capture some mind blowing photos of sights otherwise completely inaccessible. The latest venture follows renowned […]
In an exceptional feat of medical and technical ingenuity, scientists have been able to restore partial hearing to deaf gerbils by implanting modified human embryonic stem cells in their ears. The success rate is pleasing, and offers solid ground on which human trials with a similar treatment might commence. There are many causes which might […]
This might sound hilarious, but the Department of Homeland Security takes no humor when US waters are concerned. Collaborating with Boston Engineering Corporation’s Advanced Systems Group, the DHS science division have created a tuna inspired robot designed for versatile maneuvrability in harsh conditions, like tumultuous waters and crammed ship tanks. Called the BIOSwimmer, the tuna robot can swim inside the interior […]
From time to time, the sun projects billion-ton clouds of charged particles from its scorching surface, surrounded by a solar atmosphere scientists dub corona, into space. Sometimes, these blasts hit the Earth’s magnetic field with a high potential for wrecking havoc to satellites and communications, and in extreme cases massive electrical power surges. It’s become a […]
Two studies conducted by scientists at NASA based on data gathered by the Dawn spacecraft, which orbited around the Vesta asteroid, showed that the giant space rock holds tantalizing signs of water on its surface – albeit in very small amounts, in the form of hydrated minerals. These conclusions were drawn after scientists found that volatile, or easily […]
A feline genetic study has revealed that a particular gene variation in a cat’s chromosome is responsible for the stripped fur so many cat lovers adore. According to the researchers, the same gene gives cheetahs, the house cat’s larger and wilder cousin, stripes instead of the regular spots. The research was lead by Stephen O’Brien of […]
In Philip K. Dick’s novels, a common denominator is the complete autonomy of the surrounding technology. The human characters often interact with their toaster which knows what kind of grill cheese they prefer and even makes small talk, to the extent of exasperation from the human counterpart. A more palpable side to reality is the […]
Boy, oh boy. Here’s a run for your dollar – DARPA’s latest ultimate threat detection system seems like it’s stripped from a bad war movie, but crazy as it may sound, it works and very well, according to officials. The system, called Cognitive Technology Threat Warning System (CT2WS), consists of an extremely high resolution camera of […]
Neuroscientists at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle have created an atlas of the human brain, which highlights the activity of genes across the entire organ. The brain map was created after many hard years of labor, and might help scientists from across the world identify factors that underlie neurological and psychiatric conditions. The human brain is […]
Researchers have found what’s believed to be the oldest dental feeling in history, dating from the stone age. The find was made after the jaw-bone of a middle-aged man dating back from 6,500 years ago had a tooth filled with beeswax, pushing back early human dentistry. The jaw-bone was discovered some 100 years ago in […]
In 1996, hundreds of US Air Force specialists, scientists and affiliates established an extensive study called Air Force 2025, in which the emerging technologies that will shape the battlefield in the next 25 years were outlined. The study went pretty well, since it was continued with Blue Horizons in 2007, in the same lines, which […]
By doping graphite, researchers in Germany have reported that they found tantalizing hints of superconductivity at room-temperatures and far above, like water boiling point (100°C.). Superconductivity is a property which describes zero resistance electrical conductivity, however this property has only been observed at temperatures lower than -100°C. Graphite has been found to exhibit superconductivity in […]
This four pound geological marvel, captioned above, is what’s commonly reffered to as a lunar meteorite. And like all things of rarity, it’s been recently listed for auction – the biggest chunk of moon rock yet. Experts believe it should sell around the $380,000 mark. Lunar meteorites are a special class of moon rocks. During […]
As once can see above, Curiosity recently caught glimpse of a partial solar eclipse from the surface of Mars and wired back some eye candy for us Earthlings to rejoice. You might find the fact that there’s only a small black dot partially covering the sun a bit disappointing. Instead, maybe we should look at […]
Rethink Robotics has been in the attention of the industry for a few years now since it was first founded by Rodney Brooks, possibly the most celebrated roboticist in the world, as the company promised from the get-go that they’re aiming to completely revolutionize the manufacturing industry. Bold claims, but giving the reputation of the […]
The Dark Energy Camera (DECam) is the most powerful sky survey instrument yet built, a collaborative international effort which took more than eight hard years worth of planning and design. Recently, the camera, installed on top of a mountain in Chile at the Victor Blanco Telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, was tested for the first time and […]
No person is the same, thanks to genetic variation. While skin color, hair, or body proportions are elements that might be exactly the same for two persons, you can be sure that one’s face is unique – even in identical twins, if you look extremely closely. While life style, body weight, diet, accidents and so […]
We’ve seen a lot of concepts cross the realm of SciFi into reality, however transferring fabrics of imagination to practical applications which respect the laws of physics can be troublesome, if not sometimes impossible. If in a book or TV show, like Star Trek for instance, things like teleportation, time travel or faster than light speeds are […]
A group of archeologists have identified the oldest known Roman military fortress in Germany, located near the small town of Hermeskei. The site has been hypothesized as once being a roman military encampment since it was first discovered in the 19th century, however only after recently surfaced evidence, coupled with modern analysis tools, could it be confirmed. […]
Astronomers, financially backed by NASA, have for the first time ever discovered tantilizing evidence that planets can form and exist around sun-like stars, densly packed together in star clusters. The finding is of significant importance, as scientists claim that it shows that planet can indeed exist in extremely harsh environments, like star clusters. The two […]
In the past couple of months, all Mars-related attention has been almost unanimously shifted towars the Curiosity rover. Not to discredit any of its achievements thus far, which are just appetizers for marvelous fings to come off Curiosity, but the Opportunity rover has been trailing the Martian surface for the past eight years now, long […]
While it may lack most of Bruce Wayne’s gadgets, the very first artificial bat cave in the world is sure to provide resonable accomodations for non-superhero dwellers. The cave was introduced after a group of environmentalists raised money, in an effort to help save thousands of bats from a disease which has claimed the lives […]
Atomic level imaging has come a long way in the past decade, and after scientists first managed to image molecular structure and even electron clouds, now a group of researchers at IBM Research Center Zurich have visually depicted how chemical bonds differentiate in individual molecules using a technique called non-contact atomic force microscopy (AFM). In the image below […]
This bright little fellow is known as the lesula to the local people of a remote part of the Democratic Republic of Congo, and as of recently has been recognized as a new, distinct species of monkey. Lucky for the lesula, the discovery came in the nick of time for preservation efforts to be rolled, […]
If you thought the computer devised out of soldier crab swarms was cool, wait till you hear what scientists at Aalto University managed to make. In a recently published study, the researchers built a hydrophopic set-up through which they channeled water droplets, and in the process encoded information, practically building a computer. The researchers used the term […]
The findings of a new research at UCLA, suggest that cramming all night before a big test, something that we’ve all went through at least once in a point of our lives with personal mixed results, is generally counter-productive as the sleep deprivation acts its toll on cognitive performance. Whether we’re talking about high school or university, […]
Anthropologists have discovered an ancient skull in a cave in the Annamite Mountains in northern Laos, which according to subsequent dating is the oldest evidence of modern human presence found in Southeast Asia. This would clock on modern human migration through the region by as much as 20,000 years, and adds weight to the theory which states that […]
The sun has been extensively studied by astronomers for the last 50 years. While previous research suggested that the the sun is slightly sun bulged a bit around the middle , making it very slightly flying-saucer shaped, new measurements however taken by a satellite suggest that its shape is the closest to that of a perfect […]
After UAVs inspired by hawks, robotic stability control spun from leaping lizards, wall climbing derived from geckos or the swimming artificial jellyfish made from rat cells, in yet another remarkable feat of robotics which draws inspiration from nature scientists at Harvard University have created a robot which mixes the blending capabilities of a squid with the locomotion […]
In an archeological dig in the Danish bog Alken Enge wetlands lies the remains of an army long dead. There scientists recently uncovered hundreds of skeletons, some presenting clear evidence of a violent death, along with a slew of shields, armors, spears or axes. Researchers are still trying to determine the soldiers’ identities, places of origin, […]
According to recent findings as a result of observations from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), it seems like the moon’s pale atmosphere contains helium, a fact in question for some forty years since the first hints were discovered on the lunar surface during the Apollo missions. The moon is often considered not to have an […]
Immediately after the incident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, as a result of the devastating tsunami which swept the country resulting thousands of casualties and damage amount to $40 billion, Japanese authorities quickly evacuated the local human population such that exposure to radiation could be kept at a minimum. The local wildlife, however, […]
Since it landed, the Mars Science Laboratory mission has offered a series of premieres for space exploration like the first-ever panorama of Gale Crater, the first measurements of high energy radiation on another planet, the first movie of a spacecraft landing on another planet, the first images from a focusable camera on another planet or first images […]
An U.S.conservation group has pushed a petition to the government requesting that California’s great white sharks should be federally protected as an endangered species. The organization has presented a number of studies and claims, backed by other independent organizations, and argues that California’s white sharks are a genetically distinct species. With a mere 340 adults […]
Not one, but two independent high-energy particle physics laboratories in New York (Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider – RHIC) and Geneva ( Large Hadron Collider – LHC) have managed to create quark-gluon plasma after smashing particles into another at very high speeds. The resulting plasma, which only lasted for a fraction of a moment, is the hottest […]
Spintronics, or spin transport electronics, is a sort of emerging technology that scientists have been studying for a while in an attempt to leverage the encoding posibilities in an electron’s spin, in addition to its electrical charge. Recently, researchers at IBM Zurich have made a huge leap forward in turning spintronics into a viable technology […]
Dr. Jay Bradner, a physician and chemical biologist at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, makes beating cancer sound easy – darn easy! Through the wonderful information that epigenetics science has delivered in the past decade, he believes cancer can be defeated simply by re-writing its genetic information such that it forgets that it’s a cancer, and […]
Ok, enough of the low-res, black and white photos from Curiosity. NASA just released the first high-resolution, nearly dust free, photograph taken by the Curiosity rover on Mars. The image was taken by the rovers’ Navigation Cameras (NavCams), which are capable of photographing at 1megapixel, depicting a flat Martian landscape with the looming rim of […]
Previously, we shared the largest and, respectively, most detailed 3-D maps of the Universe released by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Now the survey has released a new, massive update to the map, again, making it the largest 3-D map of the Universe, which pinpoints the locations and distances of over a million galaxies. Were you […]
Strap on your 3-D glasses, folks. Curiosity is back on ZME Science, this time in full 3-D. We just got ahold of two extraordinary three-dimensional photos, taken by the car-sized rover on Mars by combining images from the robot’s navigation cameras, which operate in pairs to provide stereo views of the Martian surface.
Hope you’re all not too bored by the influx of Curiosity we’ve been feeding these past few days. We believe this to be one of the most significant scientific events of the year, topped maybe just by the discovery of the Higgs boson, and as such the rover’s landing on martian soil deserves at least […]
Two recently released studies by teams of international researchers sequenced the genomes of two major strains of the parasitic disease known as malaria. Their findings show that malaria is a lot more resistant than previously thought, but at the same time helps paint a broader picture which will certain aid in developing more effective treatment, […]
Yes, Curiosity has landed! And like we’ve reported earlier, right after the rover landed on the martian surface, it beamed back its first images to Earth to confirm the successful touchdown. The images took 14 minutes to reach scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, where the whole Mars rover operation is being coordinated. […]
At precisely 10:32 p.m. Pacific time (1:32 a.m. EDT/0530 GMT), today, August 6, NASA’s Curiosity Rover touched down on martian soil flawlessly, finally putting an end to tight nerves and angst which enveloped the agency’s staff, and space exploration enthusiasts from around the globe alike. The landing marks a new milestone for NASA and human space […]
Consciousness is considered the prime driver for superior intelligence, and was initially considered the definite barrier which separates man from beast, although other animals, like fellow primates, have been found to exhibit sings of consciousness in the past years. There’s one big question, however, that follows the epiphany of “I am”, and that is “what happens […]
The European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope in Chile is back with yet another stunning gem. This spectacular spiral galaxy has hosted two supernova explosions over the last 30 years, making it particularly interesting. Supernovae are one of the brightest and most energetic events in the Universe. The galaxy’s name is NGC 1187, and is […]
Both Boeing and SpaceX are set to split as much as $1 billion in federal awards destined to spur development of next-generation manned spacecraft. This follows other funding ventures awarded in the past few years to private space companies, in NASA‘s attempt to delimit itself from suborbital ventures, so that it may concentrate on deep […]
Anthropologists believe cacao beans and pods were mainly used in pre-Hispanic cultures as a beverage, a practice which can be traced traced as far as some 3,500 years ago . The resulting beverage would have been reserved for the Mayan elite. Now, a recent archeological find shows traces of 2,500-year-old chocolate on a plate in Mexico’s […]
