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It’s a rather well-attested fact that men are significantly better than women at spatial navigation, something that holds across a wide variety of species, not just humans. General belief holds that evolution triggered this response since our ancestors needed to return home after traveling vast distances in search of food, while the females stayed home. […]
Researchers at Northwestern University claim they have uncovered the mechanisms that lead to difficulty in reading. Apparently, there is a direct correlation between one’s ability to encode speech sound in the brain and ease of reading. The scientists also devised an experiment and saw that children with reading impairment significantly improved after being fitted with […]
3D printing is like a piece of future in the present – the number and extent of applications are just staggering. Recently, researchers from Cornell University have reated an artificial ear using 3-D printing and injectable molds that works pretty much just like the real thing. In a study published in PLOS One, Cornell bioengineers […]
There are millions of species on Earth, and naturally understanding the mechanics of evolution is of great importance for understanding further on what sparks life. What sparks consciousness, well that’s a whole different ball-game. Currently, scientists are concentrating on how diversification occurs in order to better their knowledge of how so many species surfaced along […]
Computer scientists at University of Illinois at Chicago have created what can only be described as a real-life Star Trek holodeck. Now, it’s not nearly as impressive as its SciFi counterpart, after all futurist Tim Huckaby predicted it will take some ten years before a full blown version might be created, still virtual reality is […]
A new study led by an international team of biolgoists has shown just some brain chemicals allow seals to sleep with only half of the brain. “Seals do something biologically amazing — they sleep with half their brain at a time. The left side of their brain can sleep while the right side stays awake. […]
As Niels Bohr once pointed out, to fully understand how a living organism works, you’d have to take it apart in the smallest of parts; since this is not something you can actually do, organisms, which represent systems of very high complexity, are impossible to track and understand in all their details. The few and […]
Your smartphone amateur photos could be instantly converted into professional-looking pictures at the touch of a button, thanks to a chip developed by MIT researchers. The chip, built by a team at MIT’s Microsystems Technology Laboratory can perform a number of tasks, including creating a more realistic environment or enhanced lighting in a shot without […]
For most Parkinson’s patients, tremors associated with this devastating disease make living a normal life extremely difficult, if not impossible. Cooking, eating, even tying one’s shoelaces, basically anything that implies limb manipulation is very difficult to achieve by one’s self. A novel type of therapy developed by physicians at Oxford University, however, brings a glimmer […]
A team of international researchers from US and China have employed a novel method to link enzymes together and then encapsulate them in a polymer shell. This enables the enzymes to work sequentially in chemical reactions, just like in nature. To illustrate their enzyme batch, a group of mice were intoxicated with alcohol and then injected […]
Researchers at University of Utah have recently demonstrated that it is indeed feasible to construct a topological insulator from organic compounds. Topological insulators are deemed very important by scientists because of their unique property of conducting electrons on their edges, while at the same time acting as an insulator on the inside. These capabilities make it […]
Astronomers at NASA‘s Chandra X-ray Observatory were delighted to come across one of the rarest events in the Universe, after they came across an atypical kind of supernova. To top it over, the supernova’s remnants may have given birth to the Milky Way’s youngest black hole estimated thus far. After a massive star, say ten times […]
Chances have it, if you’re working in the field of manufacturing, medicine, research or even sales, that some of your co-workers are robots. Which is no wonder, since robots today are a lot cheaper and efficient than most humans when simple or repetitive tasks are required, or on the contrary when high precision and delicate […]
Using 21st century nanotechnology, researchers have discovered a new mineral in samples from a meteorite discovered in Antarctica in 1969. The meteorite is 4.5 billion years old and originates from an asteroid orbiting between Mars and Jupiter. The new mineral has alluded scientists for some time since its discovery by a Japanese expedition team to Antarctica […]
MIT engineers have created genetic circuits in bacterial cells that not only perform logic functions, but also remember the results, encode them in the cell’s DNA and pass it on for generations to come. Biotechnology The circuits, which are described in Nature Biotechnology could have a swarm of appplications, most notably long-term environmental sensors, efficient […]
Researchers at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, have developed a three-legged silicon robot that uses chemical reactions to help it leap up to 30 times its own height. Combustion is typically used in hard systems like internal combustion engines where the heat generated by the chemical reaction can be withstood, but this latest demo proves that […]
Obviously there has to be a limit to how much to a tree can grow, but what exactly influences and in term limits the height of a tree? For a long time researchers have noticed that the taller the tree, the shorter its leaves. Recently, a team of scientists found that there has to be […]
Underneath hundreds of meters of Antarctic ice lie a slew of lakes, completely isolated from the outside world, some for thousand of years. For years, scientists have been trying to imagine what life in such a system might look like, if any. Just recently an US Antarctic expedition found a small body of water huddled in […]
There’s a common stereotype that depicts athletes as being grunts that are all brawn and no brain. In reality, the truth couldn’t be farther. Athletes, the good ones at least, seemingly posses an above average intelligence, and a recent study by cognitive scientists at University of Montreal adds further weight to this statement. In the study […]
For the past twenty years there’s been a debate whether the mammal explosion that eventually made the class of animals dominant on Earth happened before or after the end of the dinosaur reign. Scientific papers and various evidence supporting both views have surfaced along the years, but a recent massive study conducted by a collaborative […]
It’s remarkable what astonishing finds archaeologists today still manage to discover. A few years ago, no less than 17 new pyramids were discovered in Egypt. Recently, in neighboring Sudan a most impressive site filled with densely packed pyramids was unearthed, proving once again that there are still many hidden relics left in the world. The find was […]
The Kepler mission has proven to be invaluable to science today thanks to its formidable discoveries of exoplanets in our galaxy. It’s rather remarkable how scientists can tell so much from so little, like the size, mass, orbit and sometimes even composition of a distant planet all by analyzing light. On other hand, it’s frustrating […]
A new carbon dating technique developed by Australian scientists may warrant a new extinction theory for the Neanderthals, which according to the researchers made their last stand some 50,000 years ago or 15,000 years earlier than previously thought. If this is indeed a fact, then our distant extinct relatives may have never interacted with modern […]
The remains of the legendary Richard III have been found beneath a Leicester car park – where else? DNA, carbon dating and the whole shebang showed, beyond reasonable doubt, that the remains belong to the king, explained lead archaeologist Richard Buckley, from the University of Leicester, so the finding I was telling you about a […]
They say that the bully is actually the victim – and studies on adolescent rats seem to support this idea; younger rats subjected to a stressful environment turn out to be aggressive adults, behaviors that may be explained by accompanying epigenetic changes and altered brain activity. Whoa, let’s slow down a little. Much like humans, […]
Vaccines have become synonymous to needles, and for a lot of people they’re the subject of horror stories since childhood. Typically, a vaccine works by injecting an inactive virus into the body, such that when the real virus reaches the host body, the immune system will be quick to act and destroy it before it gets a […]
The advent of antibiotics has spared humanity of a great deal of suffering and has saved countless lives through the years. Infectious diseases do not bore too easily and have always put out a fight, though. The bad news is that they’re winning and as the battle rages on, more and more strains become resistant […]
As of 2008, just about one in 100 people in the US is currently living in jail. This amounts to millions and millions of people currently incarcerated or roughly half of the total number of jailed people in the world. As to what are the social and legal causes that have lead to such an […]
Though Siberia stretches across about 10% of the world’s land surface, it’s only occupied by 0.5% of the world’s population, which isn’t too hard to explain why. Recent temperature measurements read on average -25°C for the month of January, but it’s not unheard of to experience temperatures below -40°C. Extreme weather, temperatures and terrain, however, call […]
If there’s something ever wrong with ping-pong guns is that they fire too slow. So, Mark French, a mechanical engineer at Purdue University in Indiana, along with a couple of his graduate students took it upon themselves to finally design a gun that can fires ping-pong balls at supersonic speeds. Of course, this makes for […]
For a few years now, Google has been developing what it claims to be the next generation in user interface, set to revolutionize the way to interact with the world. The project is called Google Glass and apart from a few incredible demos, these is still very little known about the product, apart from the […]
Oil spills, especially the big ones, can cause irremediable damage to the local ecosystem. Unfortunately once in a while, there’s a catastrophic disaster either from an oil rig or oil tanker leak, but these are the big ones – the ones you hear about on TV, since frankly anyone today with an internet connection can […]
It’s a bird! No, it’s a plane! No, it’s… microbes ?! High up in the atmosphere, 10.000 meters above ground, researchers have found over 100 species of bacteria doing just fine in stormy clouds. Each year, hundreds of millions of tons of dust, water and man-maned pollutans make their way into the atmosphere, often traveling […]
Scientists at Cornell University may have stumbled across the cornucopia gene for crops, after scientific investigations revealed that a certain gene allows some plants to photosynthesize 50% more efficient than most common plants, including crops like wheat or rice. The researchers hope through genetic manipulation that they may transfer this gene to crops, allowing for […]
Dung beetles just climbed another ladder on the animal coolness scale – they are the only known species to navigate via the Milky Way. The tiny insects can orient themselves to the bright stripe of light generated by our galaxy, and move in a line relative to it, according to experiments conducted in South Africa. […]
I remember years ago, when I got my first computer – it had a storage capacity of 40 MB. A few years after that, I got a 1 GB hard drive, and nowadays, 1 TB is quite the standard – that’s a growth by a factor of about 250.000. However, data storage capacity has slowed […]
A group of researchers at MIT have devised a new method for infiltrating cells with large molecules such as nanoparticles or proteins that is a lot more non-intrusive and doesn’t damage the cell. Imaging target cells or growing more stable stem cells might thus be possible with this method. Every cell has a membrane, which […]
Hydrogen is an extremely appealing energy source, despite the immense hurdles than come with storing it. Still fuel cells based on hydrogen are extremely useful, and a team of researchers at University at Buffalo may have found the fastest and most effective way of obtaining this element. Basically, it’s as easy as adding water. The scientists […]
Researchers looked at data that described people involved in car accidents and, after balancing factors like airbag and seat belt, found that obese people are at a much greater risk of dying during a collision than people of normal weight. The study holds a rather important significance since it might prompt car manufacturers to rethink […]
As computing power grows and becomes ever more accessible, passwords become easier to crack day by day. If you want to make it really easy for hackers and automated crawlers to retrieve your secure information then input passwords like common names, pets, sequences of numbers and symbols or birthdays. Yup, they’ll gobble these right up. […]
Exactly 50 years ago, Cambridge researchers Watson and Crick published a monumental paper that for the first time described the intertwined double helix DNA structure which carries the fundamental genetic code for life. The discovery led to an explosion of advancements in the fields of genetics and health, but also in chemistry or computing. Now, researchers, […]
Researchers at Duke University studied the telomeres – the tip of chromosomes that protect them – in a group of children and found that those who had experienced trauma had their telomeres shorter than those that hadn’t. These chromosome tips, which can be viewed akin to shoelace tips, have been linked by scientists with aging […]
Using combined imagery delivered by the High-Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) and recent color channel data, the European Space Agency has recently discovered the vestiges of an ancient river that used to flow through Mars’ highlands. The river is 1,000 miles long and at some points 4 miles wide and 1,000 feet deep. The images are simply […]
Scientists at Duke University have devised a metamaterial that uses microwaves to image objects or scenes in real time, all through a set-up no larger than a book. Currently, the same imaging is being made with robust, huge machinery – the kind you see in airports used to scan people before they board flights – […]
At his recent keynote 2013 Consumer Electronics Show (CES), Las Vegas, Tim Huckaby dazzled the audience with his predictions for the future in user interface and technology. His presentation was initially structured as a showcase of possible developments in the next five years, but Huckaby didn’t stop there and also talked a bit about how […]
Scientists have developed a new surface, which they call “superomniphobic”, that can repel virtually any liquid, even the most troublesome like blood or highly concentrated acids. Their findings brings us a step closer to manufacturing stain-proof, spill-proof clothing, protective garments and other products. Currently there is a wide range of clothing and garments that are water proof and offer protection […]
In an amazing breakthrough, scientists at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) have for the first time demonstrated an extremely appealing, yet still obscure concept – intelligent molecules. By definition intelligence is the ability to learn and understand or deal with new situation and the latter is exactly what the researchers’ polymer molecules can do, namely react to external stimuli and reversibly […]
Researchers at University of Toronto and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zurich) have recently published a paper that claims exotic plant species do indeed eliminate native plants from the wildlife ecosystem, contrary to previous reports that found the threat unreal. The ecologists argue that reports heralding invasive plants as non threatening are based […]
The whole point of technology is that of aiding mankind, and it has done so since the advent of fire and will continue to do for a long time. In today’s fast pacing world, however, technology is evolving so fast that it has caught the workforce by surprise. Of course, we’re primarily referring to robots, […]
Along the years DARPA has proposed, tested and implemented a slew of preposterous sounding projects like the Minority Report-like interface threat detection system, the firefighting robot or the surrogate soldier program that aims at deploying robots that bind to a soldier’s will just like the movie Avatar. Yes, the agency seems to have a thing for movie […]
