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Engineers at the 846th Test Squadron simply shattered the Maglev record with a sled powered by a very powerful rocket. The sled raced through a magnetic levitation track at an incredible 633 mph, or 120 mph faster than the previous record which they set only two days before.
About 21 million years ago, North and South America were separated by an ancient sea called the Miocene Central American Seaway, and the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans formed a single tropical ocean. This separation isolated species, except those who could fly or swim over long distances. Oddly enough, South American monkeys managed to cross this seaway and migrated all the way to North America by swimming. No one's really sure how exactly they did this, but the discovery is definitely baffling.
Is size all there is to it? As far as the brain is concerned, a recent study that assessed corvid intelligence suggests the answer seems no. The researchers found crows, ravens and other corvids score the same on an important cognitive test as the big-brained chimps.
Studies show that childhood trauma like abuse, neglect, physical accidents and other hallmarks put people at greater risk of dying prematurely once in adulthood. A rough childhood is associated with heart disease, diabetes, and addiction later in life, even though the stressful events have subsided. Generally, what doesn't kill you makes your life shorter. This is true for baboons as well, according to researchers at Duke University, University of Notre Dame and Princeton University.
Each city has its own distinct germ cloud comprised of a unique microbial population and distribution, according to scientists at Northern Arizona University.
Nothing seems to work when you're sick. When I'm down with the flu, for instance, my muscles ache, my eyes are bloodshot and I don't feel like doing anything. It's pretty bad, and if you ever wondered who you have to thank, a team of scientists has singled out a prime suspect: a signaling protein called interferon-β.
The closest we've come to natural muscles is a novel elastomer developed at Stanford University, Palo Alto that can stretch 45 times its length and return to its original size. It's also self-healing.
Researchers from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have found a way to reliably produce batteries that are very cheap, but can store a lot of energy.
. In a breakthrough research, a team at Binghamton University showed that it's possible to identify a person with 100 percent accuracy based on their response to a visual stimulus like the word "conundrum" or a picture showing a slice of pizza. We each devour pizza uniquely in our minds, it seems, and that's enough to tell who you are or aren't.
There's confidence that reproducing in space is indeed possible, based on previous research. The most recent experiment made by Chinese scientists, for instance, proved that mammalian embryos can develop in microgravity.
"I will make a GREAT, GREAT wall and make Mexico pay for it," Donald Trump famously said. This is a medieval statement in both approach and mindset, but the rhetoric has worked enormously well for Trump. Why are we acting so surprised, though? Trump is only the most recent politician from a myriad who have turned to demonizing immigrants to advance their own political agenda -- all in the disfavor of the American taxpayer.
Ernest Hemingway is famous for being one of the most appreciated American fiction writers. However, his personal life is no less interesting.
Security analysts rely on all sorts of automated software that spots suspicious activity. Even so, an analyst has to churn through even thousands of false positives on a daily basis, which makes it easy to miss a cyber attack. Coming to their rescue is MIT which reports an artificial intelligence 'tutored' by the best human experts can identify 85 percent of incoming attacks. Most importantly, it's not confined to a certain set of attack patterns and learns to adapt with each new attack.
A new circuit was demonstrated at the 2016 IEEE International Solid- State Circuits Conference this past February that can, among other things, double Wi-Fi speed, while halving the size of the chip. The researchers at Columbia Engineering invented a new tech called "full-duplex radio integrated circuits" which uses only one antenna to simultaneously transmit and receive at the same wireless radio frequency.
Beam is basically a huge inflatable structure which is easy to carry and provides ample living space for astronauts once it expands. Props to SpaceX for yet another successful Dragon mission, but also to Bigelow Aerospace -- a company which might become a household name in the coming decade if their plan works: build the first space hotel!
One week from now, on April 22, officials representing 130 countries are expected at a high-level signing ceremony in New York. If enough countries sign, the landmark Paris agreement on climate change reached in December in Paris could enter into force two years earlier than expected. This enthusiasm and seemingly genuine spirit of cooperation can only be saluted. But we need action, not words. This is an urgent matter that can't suffer any delay.
Heat engines, whether they're as big as a five-story building or as small as an atom, operate using the same thermodynamic processes. This was proven by Johannes Roßnagel at the University of Mainz in Germany who made a single calcium-40 atom behave like a Stirling engine. Nothing short of amazing!
We tested Microsoft's CaptionBot and had some laughs.
The prettiest carbon allotropes of them all, diamonds have fascinated royalty, collectors and window shoppers since ancient times. Some gem-grade diamonds, no bigger than a thumb, sell for tens of million. Most, however, aren't worth much. But even the most prized diamonds aren't perfect, and it is these imperfections that might settle and age long debate among chemists and geologists: what's the source of gem-grade diamonds? A recent analysis suggests both gem diamonds and the largely impure fibrous diamonds stem from the same source.
Westerners are horror-struck by the prospect of an Ebola or Zika pandemic in their very own neighbourhood. Media panic aside, that's extremely unlikely thanks to modern medical science. Our close cousins, the Neanderthals, weren't so lucky tens of thousands of years ago when they first met us, humans. British researchers analyzed ancient bone DNA and sequenced pathogens and found some infectious diseases are far older than we thought. They argue that it's very likely that humans passed many diseases to Neandertals, the two species having interbred, like tapeworm, tuberculosis, stomach ulcers and types of herpes.
After an A.I. beat the human champion at Go, a game almost infinitely more complex than chess, some might feel like tossing the towel and let our robot overlords take their rightful place. Not so fast! We're still good for something. Pressed to find a solution for a complicated quantum physics problem that neither the researchers themselves nor an algorithm could properly solve, Danish physicists turned to the gaming community. They devised a game which mimicked the task at hand while also keeping it fun, and found some gamers came up with novel "outside the box" solutions which the algorithm couldn't even touch. Points for humanity!
What if you could read a book three times faster? That definitely sounds appealing, which si why speed-reading training and, most recently, apps are very popular. Research suggests, however, that for the most part speed-reading hurts comprehension. The best thing you can do to read faster, and still understand something, is to improve your language and vocabulary, scientists say.
A Silicon Valley billionaire who made a fortunate investing in Facebook wants to beat cancer once and for all.
On the desk of Seokheun "Sean" Choi sits a 3x3 array that at first glance looks like a lemon squeezer. It is, in fact, a solar panel but not like any you've seen or heard about before. Instead of using semiconductors like silicon crystals to convert sunlight into electricity, the array employs a complex system that nurtures cyanobacteria -- beings whose metabolism create free electrons which can be harnessed.
Designer/molecular biologist Eleanor Lutz is back with yet another awesome science feature: virus trading cards.
It took a while, but scientists have finally imaged the brains of people on LSD -- a psychedelic used recreationally by millions, but whose therapeutic potential is only recently beginning to be recognized. Judging from the scans, it seems like Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) "completes the brain". Essentially, the brain functions less like a compartmentalized entity and more like a whole, very much akin to how the brain of an infant works.
Fresh from the GE Global Research lab is this tiny monster: a turbine small enough you can hold in your hands, but powerful enough to provide energy to a whole town. It's secret lies in a couple of design features, but also the power agent. Instead of steam, the "minirotor" as it's been nicknamed is driven by supercritical carbon dioxide.
Most of the life we see around us -- plants, animals, humans and other so-called eukaryotes -- actually comprise a tiny minority of the planet's biodiversity. The rulers of this planet are actually bacteria and Archaea. A new research which includes genome sequencing data from over 1,000 new organisms has produced a refined tree of life that better matches reality. In this expanded tree of life two-thirds of all diversity on Earth is bacterial, while nearly a third is Archaea.
In Europe and the United States, an increasing number of employers have adopted a smoke-free policy and may not hire people who smoke. This is because of the negative perception of smoking. Stanford researchers wanted to quantify just how large the economic burden of tobacco use is on the labour market. Their analysis suggests that nonsmokers are twice as likely to get hired than smokers. Tobacco users also earn $5 less per hour on average than nonsmokers.
One new research on rats suggests that the magic brew could be very potent against anxiety if ingested over a prolonged time.
For archiving purposes, at least, DNA -- the blueprint or genetic recipe that codes all life -- might be worth considering. One team, for instance, coded digital images into synthetic DNA using a novel method, then decoded and read this data.
The great physicist who invented Calculus in his 20s and gave the world the universal law of gravity transcribed countless pages from a famous alchemy manuscript which describes how to manufacture a key element for the Philosopher's Stone.
The best public speakers have mastered these key factors.
Though minute, these are far from insignificant as their pray have learned the hard way. In fact, it's their small body that allowed them to become the fastest snapping spiders in the world!
People of European descent carry as much as 4 percent Neanderthal DNA, but the Y chromosome passed down from father to sons is entirely missing in the modern population. Scientists now think they know why.
Those who take too much offence of improper grammar and typos in an informal situations were found have "less agreeable" personalities.
. A team at Purdue University in West Lafayette finally cracked the code, revealing a virus very much akin to the dengue and West Nile viruses.
Drastically reducing body size and, maybe most importantly, lifespan may have been the most important course of action evolution undertook to preserve some species, paleontologists argue.
The Sunny State is going through its worst drought in the last couple thousand years. Unfortunately, these events will happen more frequently in the future.
Finally, a team of researchers have bridged the gap and found an accurate mathematical equation that can determine the "spectral radiative heat transfer rate between two closely spaced bodies, generalizing the concept of a blackbody to the case of near-field energy transfer."
Five baboons were each hooked up with a pig heart alongside their own hearts. Essentially, these baboons lived with two hearts and the pig one still functioned two years on average after the grafting, marking a marvelous breakthrough in xenografting.
The exact path Hannibal took in this epic voyage across the Alps has been a matter of debate among scholars, but now scientists think they've finally found it by following some unlikely bread crumbs: ancient horse dung still teeming with preserved bacteria left by Hannibal's cavalry.
Here's a great way to spend science dollars: see if humans literally find robots sexy. They do sort of, or so conclude Stanford researchers who asked volunteers to touch an anthropomorphic robot in various body parts.
Depression can be exhausting. Here's why.
Photosynthesis is maybe the most important chemical process on Earth, turning sunlight and CO2 into the oxygen we breath and the food we eat. This process can be reversed, however.
Enercon's E-126 turbine towers 125 meters high and can generate a staggering 7.58 MW of electricity.
The ritual of sacrifice is ubiquitous in all religions, be it self-offered or undertaken by a higher religious figures. Scholars are still investigating the object of sacrifice, and its role in shaping culture and society. One study makes an interesting hypothesis based on historical records: human sacrifice has repeatedly worked in favor of the ruling elite to consolidate their position in stratified societies. In egalitarian societies, human sacrifice was less wide spread and also less impactful.
Fake 3-D printed eggs packed with sensors help scientist learn how vultures incubate their eggs. This way, they might be one day able to incubate their own eggs, without having to rely on vultures.
A gas giant called KELT-4Ab revolves in a stable 3-day orbit around its parent star, flanked by another two.
If confirmed, the findings could rewrite history.
