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Computing using unconventional methods found in nature has become an important branch of computer science, which might aid scientists construct more robust and reliable devices. For instance, the ability of biological systems to assemble and grow on their own enables much higher interconnection densities or swarm intelligence algorithms, like ant colonies that find optimal paths to food sources. […]
Dmitri Krioukov, a physicist at University of California in San Diego, was recently fined by a police officer for allegedly driving through a stop sign. Confident that he did nothing of the sorts, Krioukov sought justice like most of us would, in court that is, however during the hearing he presented a somewhat atypical piece of […]
Sometime at the beginning of the year I mentioned in post that once stepping into the age of Terahertz electromagnetic waves (T-rays), which can penetrate any molecule and and then interpret it for identification, we will come to know a slew of new, grand applications, from surveillance , to medical, but possibly the most interesting […]
Part of a study which sought to see how deeply rooted is our psychological projection inherited from our ancestors when faced with a physical situation, scientists concluded that holding a knife or gun causes one to be perceived as bigger. Anthropologists consider this behavior as evidence, coupled with other studies, that backs up the idea according to which humans, […]
Quantum technology is the future, no doubt. The impact of computing devices based on quantum effects finally entering service would be vast and of immense positive consequence to the scientific world, and hence mankind, comparable with the invent of the microchip. While this future might still seem far fetched, judging from the number of successful […]
It seems 3-D printing is growing into a phenomenon, and rightfully so. We’ve seen jaw bones perfectly reconstructed and used as medical implants, and even nanoscale objects masterfully made by 3-D printers, and if you’ve yet to witness the potential, wait until you hear about the latest project spun off MIT. Scientists there have initiated […]
If you’re not a dedicated Christian or loved reading about mythology, then you probably don’t even know what the shroud of Turin is, so let me just clear that right away. From a religious point of view It is a linen cloth bearing the image of a man who appears to have suffered physical trauma […]
A remarkable paleontological discovery surfaced from China recently, after scientists reported they’ve found fossils belonging to the Yutyrannus huali,a very close relative of the Tyrannosaurs Rex, which prove that its entire enormous bus-sized body was covered in feathers. This officially makes it the biggest animal covered in feathers ever found, and also forces paleontologists to rethink […]
Encompassing years worth of work, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-III) has now precisely measured the distance between over a quarter of a million galaxies. As part of the project, called the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey, or BOSS, scientists built a massive map of all the studied galaxies so far, some more than six billion years ago […]
While on the macro-scale conventional scales make us of gravity to measure mass, on the microscale there are a myriad of factors that interfere with measurements. Scientists at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona have successfully created a scale made out of a single carbon nanotube which can accurately measure the smallest unit of mass, a yoctogram (one […]
The Sandman would have certainly approve of the latest experimental tech to come off MIT. Researchers from the university have demonstrated how tiny computer pellets, just a few millimeters in size, were automatically bound together to form a simple 2-D shape. The same algorithm might be used in a future refined version which could allow this kind […]
Backed by an international consortium, ten years from now the world’s largest and most sensitive radio telescope in the world will be built – the Square Kilometer Array (SKA). The project will consist in thousands of antennas displaced across thousands of miles, with a collecting area equivalent to one square kilometer (hence the name), that […]
The most complex object on Earth is the human brain. However, even though it’s intertwined by billions of nerve fibers almost in a chaotic fashion, scientists who have used sophisticated mathematical analysis of advanced imaging data found that the neural pathways that carry electrical signals through the brain are arranged in a very simple manner, resembling […]
Scientists at Newcastle University are currently developing a tiny bio-inspired robot, just one centimeter in length, which in less than five years might be used to diagnose and pinpoint diseases from inside the human body. The researchers, backed-up by the American National Science Foundation and the UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, are hoping to […]
Boston Dynamics is at the forefront of robotic research and development at the moment, fact very easily attested just by checking out a few of their amazing robots developed during the past year alone, like the cheetah-bot which broke the robot land speed record, the gecko-like bot which can climb walls effortlessly or the terrifyingly […]
Billions of years ago, the Earth was unrecognizable from the life supporting paradise it is today. Fossilized raindrops from some 2.7 billion years ago, conserved in time as rain dropped onto volcanic ash during an eruption, which eventually solidified into rock known as tuff, has revealed some very interesting facts about Earth’s ancient atmosphere. The discovery […]
Africa proves yet again that it’s the cradle of the hominid family, and in consequence the human species. Scientists have found foot fossils in Ethiopia that don’t match those of any kind of hominid discovered thus far, dating from 3.4 million years ago, making the specimen contemporary with Lucy, an Australopithecus afarensis specimen, of vast […]
One of the most outstanding dreams astronomers and other scientists hope to accomplish is to someday encounter proof that extraterestrial life exists. Intelligent life might be extremely far off, however microbiological life should without a doubt be present elsewhere other than our planet or solar system. For life to blossom, however, the right conditions have […]
Scientists at MIT and Harvard University teamed up to figure out what would be the simplest 3-D structure capable of collapsing and morphing due to instability. Their inspiration came after the scientists came across a popular toy, spherical in shape and fitted with movable parts and hinges, which allows it to easily dimple in size […]
Cloaking has turned into a subject of great interest for scientists in the past decade, most likely because of its military potential. We’ve seen some exciting prototypes developed, from optical invisibility cloaks to temporal cloaks, and now French scientists at the University of Aix-Marseille have added a new member to the cloaking family, one that renders […]
Hailed as yet another big step towards devising working quantum computers, scientists at Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB) have successfully managed to generate quantum qubits inside a semiconductor for the first time, instead of vacuum. A qubit is the quantum analog of a bit. While a bit must be read either as a 0 or 1, the qubit can […]
In the year 2011 alone, the US faced 14 extreme weather events, while Japan registered record rainfalls and the Yangtze river basin in China suffered a record drought. The year 2010 saw Russia in the midst of its hottest summer in centuries, while Pakistan and Australia received record-breaking amounts of rain, highly atypical for the region. […]
When the brain deems an experience meaningful enough, it will transfer that information from short-term storage, where typically information like where you put your car keys or the phone number of a person you just met gets stored temporarily, to your long-term memory, offering the possibility to be accessed at a later time. Neurologists claim […]
Researchers at MIT have developed a new revolutionary technique, in which they re-purposed the trillion frames/second camera we told you about a while ago, and used it to capture 3-D images of a wooden figurine and of foam cutouts outside of the camera’s line of sight. Essentially, the camera could see around corners, by transmitting […]
After a three year effort, researchers at Virginia Tech have successfully managed to create a silicone robot that functions underwater by mimicking the motion of a jellyfish. The robot can propel itself thanks to the heat-producing reactions catalyzed by its surface, and since it uses hydrogen and oxygen found in the water as fuel, the Robojelly can theoretically […]
The now retired Concorde turbojets were the fastest civilian airliners in the world, capable of carrying passengers from Paris to New York in just 3.5 hours, traveling at supersonic speeds. However, lack of market appeal, combined with high maintenance costs, lead to its regrettable retirement from service with no civilian airliner to replace it, not even to […]
Supernovae are one of the most energetic and brightest events in the cosmos, often so powerful they outshine whole galaxies. They’re considered to play a major role in our understanding of the Universe, which is why scientists have invested so much time and effort into studying them. A recent study of X-ray and ultraviolet observations from […]
Since it was first discovered more than four hundred years ago by Galileo Galilei, Jupiter’s innermost moon Io has played an important part in the development of astronomy. Still with secrets to be revealed, a team of US scientists have recently formulated the first complete global geologic map of Jupiter’s satellite. The moon of Io is […]
One of the biggest anthropological mysteries scientists have been trying to unravel is the long put question of how did humans develop bipedal movement. There have been many theories formulated hypothesizing why our ancestors eventually switched from four limbs walking to two – some appealing, some a bit too far the edge. A recent study […]
Researchers at Yale University have successfully mange to utilize a novel MRI technique to 3-D image the insides of hard and soft solids, like bone and tissue, opening the way for a new array of applications, like previously difficult to image dense objects. Typically, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) can produce a 3-D image of an object […]
There are a number of factors that lead to obesity, the most obvious of which is of course eating too much, without burning the excess fat by exercising. Fact is, there are some people in the world who no matter how much they’d eat, they never seem to be satisfied, constantly consumed by a sense […]
We’ve reported in the past about the frightening, ever growing cases of honeybee population dye-offs of the past few years, and while no immediate or long term plan has been effective thus far, it seems at least that scientists are identifying the causes. It’s been known for some time that some classes of pesticides are […]
If you think today’s urban air, thickened with noxious smog, is terrible, just imagine how the Earth was filled in a shroud of hydrocarbons some 2.5 billion years ago. Back then, a haze dominated by methane engulfed the atmosphere such that light could barely reach the ground, similarly to what can be seen today on […]
As years pass, computers start beating us in more and more fields: math is out of the question, chess, and even jeopardy; but in crossword puzzles, man still beats computer – and easily. In a contest held in New York this weekend, a program designed to work crossword puzzles, came in 141st among 600 human […]
Last September the whole scientific community was set ablaze by a the controversial claim set forth by CERN scientists, part of the OPERA experiment, in which they announced that they had measured neutrinos traveling at a velocity faster than the speed of light – 60 nanoseconds faster to be more exact. The implications of this […]
General Motors has always invested in technology which goes beyond the automotive applications for which the company is primarily known, a philosophy which I find most praise worthy, and teaming up with NASA is sure to always output performance. The latest to result from their partnership is the K-glove, a robotic glove designed to aid […]
The plot of the Hollywood blockbuster flick Armageddon is fairly simple – a giant asteroid is hurling towards Earth, threatening to obliterate all life on the planet as we know it. A team of brave oil-drillers is sent on the space rock to diffuse the threat by detonating a nuclear warhead placed inside the asteroid itself. Apparently, a group […]
An incredible find was publicized just earlier – fossils remains from stone age people were unearthed from two caves in China. Upon further inspection it was found that the bone features, particularly skulls, were unlike any other human or early ancestor remains ever found, suggesting that the researchers may have actually found a new species […]
The Cambrian era marked a profound change on life on Earth, sparking the rapid development of complex organisms and a diversification of the ecosystem, thus the term “Cambrian explosion“. Prior to this period, animals were simple and small, as well as soft bodied, with no hard parts to display. A team of paleontologists at University […]
The human brain is wired to see all kinds of patterns in various shapes. The most common one is that of the human face, most often encountered in our day to day lives, be it in the coffee, a fire hidrant or a cut off potato (I saw Jesus!). The moon makes no exception either. […]
Paleontologists have recently named two new horned dinosaur species, closely related to the famous Triceratops, which were dug up from a site in Alberta, Canada some time ago. Dubbed Unescopceratops koppelhusae and Gryphoceratops morrisoni, the dinosaurs are extremely tiny, as far as plant eating dinosaurs dating back from the late Cretaceous go, and belong to the Leptoceratopsidae family of […]
A remarkable research whose findings recently published in the journal Cell, concludes that intense physical exercise leads to chemical alteration of the DNA, turning certain genes on and off. In fact, individuals which lead a relatively sedentary lifestyle changed the DNA in their muscle fibers almost immediately, after a strenuous 35 minute work-out. It’s important […]
A team of researchers at Vienna University of Technology constructed various nanoscale models of incredible precision (St. Stephen’s Cathedral, London’s Tower Bridge or a F1 race car), using a technique called two-photon lithography. The device which the researchers used for their high precision 3D printing is an order of magnitude faster than others such similar, and opens a […]
In what might seem an oddball experiment in the first instance, later revealing some very interesting scientific facts, a Kyoto University researcher asked 60 women participating in a study to look at a 9-photo grid (eight were of flowers, and another captioned a snake) and identify as quickly as possible the snake photo. Women who were […]
Atomic clocks are the current most accurate time and frequency standards, capable of operating with an uncertity of only a second in millions of years. A new research currently in the work by scientist from the University of New South Wales seeks to track time with an unprecedented accuracy of a mere 20th a second in […]
A group of researchers at MIT have successfully managed to create a light emitting diode (LED) that has an electrical efficiency greater than 100%. This might sound preposterous, and against everything you learned in physics, however the system is still governed by fundamental laws of thermodynamics. This extraordinary power conversion efficiency was obtained by a […]
In what’s arguable the most important physics discovery ever to come out of China, and a perfect example of “by the book” international collaborative effort, researchers report they’ve successfully identified the last piece of missing information needed to describe the mysterious neutrino oscillation. For a long time, scientists have been trying to discover how neutrinos […]
Researchers have completed the great apes family’s genetic library after they sequenced the genes of a western lowland gorilla, joining the already-sequenced genomes of humans, chimpanzees and orangutans. Scientists found that gorillas, which share 98% of their genes with humans, are a lot more related to humans than previously thought, as well as surprising genetic differences which […]
Since they were first introduced more than 70 years ago, electron microscopes have aided researchers from a diverse array of fields of science reach some of the world’s greatest scientific breakthroughs – most often they’ve been considered indispensable. They’ve well reached their limits, however, and University of Sheffield researchers sought to find an alternate route for sub-atomic imaging. […]
Velociraptors have been repeatedly described by paleonthologists as voracious predators, however a recent study of a 75 million year old specimen revealed that the dinosaur wasn’t picky at all, and didn’t miss the chance to pass a free meal. The conclusion came after a pterosaur or “Pterodactyl” bone was found in its gut, suggesting that its […]
