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Starting yesterday, the whole world has been abuzz about the giant river discovered 4 kilometers beneath the Amazon, ranging from 200 to 400 km in width. The river, named Rio Hamza, was located analyzing temperatures from 241 abandoned deep wells that were drilled in the Amazon region by the petrochemical company Petrobras in the 1970s […]
The mating between Neanderthals and modern homo sapiens has been a highly controversial matter between scientists in the anthropology scene for decades now. That was until last year, however, when anthropologists convened that the two related species did indeed mate, but the genes passed down from Neanderthals were inactive. Recently, there’s been another reason for […]
For men everywhere beer lovers everywhere, yeast is probably the best microorganism there is, because it is used in one of the most popular drinks: beer. But its identity has puzzled researchers for decades now, as they were unable to pinpoint its exact origins. However, they now believed they have solved this puzzle and traced […]
The oldest, up to now, fossil has been found recently by a team of Australian and UK geologists, who claim that they’ve managed to discover micro-organism remnants as old as 3.5 billion years. These tiny living cells were actually sulfur feeding bacteria, which didn’t need any kind of oxygen to survive. The fossils were found […]
It’s generally known that people of above-average physical looks are at a greater social advantage than people of average or sub-average appearance. Beautiful people are known to be more successful, happier and more financially fulfilled. Regarding the last part, there’s always been a controversy regarding the economics behind this kind of superficial advantage. Renowned economist […]
A recent study has shown that the plague spread so quickly that the carriers couldn’t have been rats, as is commonly believed. The black plague, or black death as it is sometimes referred to was a disease outburst so horrible that it killed some 30-60% of the population of Europe. Even to this day, few […]
The United States and Gabon are the only countries left in the world that are still using chimps for medical research. While research made on our closest relatives is considered invaluable by scientists studying deadly diseases such as HIV, animal rights activists are pressuring the authorities to ban the use of chimps in research labs, […]
Diamonds are for a nano-second – in the glitter of a candle light, that is. In a stroke of brilliance, Professor Wuzong Zhou, Professor of Chemistry at the University of St Andrews, has found millions of diamond nano-particles in the flickering light of a simple candle. Since its invention in China thousands of years ago, […]
Despite an evident contrast, geologists claim that the region of modern day El Paso, Texas was once attached to the now icy continent of Antarctica, in an effort to piece together the giant pieces of a puzzle that formed a pre-Pangaea supercontinent. “Most people are familiar with Pangaea,” said study co-author Staci Loewy, a geochemist […]
Well, I guess Han Solo should be more careful where he parks his spaceship from now, since Swedish treasure hunters just recently found an unidentified object beneath the Baltic seas which portrays an uncanny resemblance to Star Wars’ most iconic of spaceships. The whole find occured while the Ocean Explorer team, led by researcher Peter […]
Biologists from Edinburgh University might have stumbled across a significant discovery, after strapping a tarantula to a magnetic resonance imaging scanner, which showed how its heart contracted in a unique double beat. The find might apply to a species of spiders. If your curious to see the strange double heart beat for yourself, scientists have […]
A team of researchers from Yale University have shown at a cellular basis why we tend to be more forgetful as we age, and claim that the condition may be reversed. There’s no secret to the fact that an elderly person has a much weaker memory than the one he did at 20 years of […]
I’ve always amazed how some non-primate species manage to sometimes use the environment to their advantage, in a tool-like use manner. The African Crested Rat, however, takes this to a whole new other level. It’s the only known mammal in the world, besides humans, that uses poison for defensive purposes. He does this by chewing […]
More like props from a James Bond movie than something that might have come from a scientific lab, a new device developed by neuroscientists combines a pair of special glasses, a webcam and a smartphone might allow the blind to see again by converting visual signals into auditory ones, which get transmitted through a headset. […]
The latin phrase “mens sana in corpore sano” has been put to the test by researchers who wanted to study what kind of repercussions an unhealthy lifestyle has on the mind. What they found was a dramatic increase in brain damage and dementia cases among subjects who have experienced high blood pressure, diabetes, smoking and obesity […]
In a recent groundbreaking research study, scientists from Seoul National University in South Korea have successfully created a dog that can glow in the dark, using genetic engineering techniques. This achievement holds the potential for finding cures for human diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. The dog in question, a genetically modified female beagle named […]
Crop circles have always been an important weapon in any conspiracy theorist’s arsenal, certain to be mentioned alongside UFOs, green aliens or reptilians. Since 1970, tens of thousands of crop circles have been reported around the world, most amateur hoaxes, while some are so intricately built that they even baffle scientists. In this month’s edition […]
Researchers from Cleveland have managed to create an artificial lung that reaches an efficiency comparable to that of the real organ, by using air, instead of pure oxygen, as an essential element. There is still a long way to go, and human transplant is years away, but the results so far are extremely encouraging, and […]
In a paper published in the journal Nature, Chinese paleontologists have detailed their impressions on the finding of a chicken-sized feathered dinosaur which might lead to a total reconsideration of the origin of birds on Earth. In 1861, just two years after Darwin published his infamous Origin of Species, scientists unearthed the fossils of Archaeopteryx, […]
A team of Hong Kong scientists have proven that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light in vacuum, at the same time crushing a dream concluding that time travel is simply impossible. Time travel has been a central theme for science fiction for many years, moving minds and imagination to all sort of […]
In what is a slap in the face of science, scientists at the University of Illinois have demonstrated that in fact, sugar doesn’t melt, it decomposes. “This discovery is important to food scientists and candy lovers because it will give them yummier caramel flavors and more tantalizing textures. It even gives the pharmaceutical industry a […]
CERN researchers have announced this Friday that they may had caught a glimpse of the fabled Higgs Boson particle, also known as the “God Particle”. Scientists have the news during the 2011 Europhysics Conference on High-Energy Physics (HEP 2011), which opened Thursday in Grenoble, France. This came after two collision detector teams (Atlas and CMS), […]
Around 200 million years ago, the Earth was still one big continent – the great Pangaea. Around that time came, what’s commonly referred to as, the End-Triassic mass extinction period in which half of all marine life on the planet went extinct. For years, scientists believed that this came as a result of a mass […]
According to a new study released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), tiny solid and liquid particles in the atmosphere, resulting from human and natural pollution, have kept the Earth from warming at the estimated level. The reduction of global warming effects by stratospheric aerosols has been significant for the past dozen years, […]
Scientists at Fermilab’s Tevatron particle collider on Wednesday voiced excitement about the observation of a new particle. The new particle, called Xi-sub-b, was first theorized by the Standard Model which predicted that the neutral particle should exist. Now, through a process which involved high-speed collisions in the Fermilab Tevatron particle accelerator in Batavi, a three-story […]
News of a low-cost semiconductor-based gene sequencing machine has been reported this Wednesday in the journal Nature, by a team led by Jonathan Rothberg. The astonishing advancement might lead to a age of personal human genome sequence, where people will be able to decipher their own DNA for as low as $1000. The human genome was […]
Researchers from the CalTech University have managed to create the first artificial neural network from DNA, a circuit built out of interactinig molecules that can recall memories based on an incomplete pattern, in pretty much the same way a brain works. “Although brainlike behaviors within artificial biochemical systems have been hypothesized for decades,” says Lulu […]
Pretty much everyone has experienced some sort of memory triggering, but there hasn’t been any satisfactory explanation for this common phenomenon. But now, researchers from University of Pennsylvania have provided the first neurobiological proof that memories which are formed in the same context can become linked, the foundation of the theory of episodic memory. This […]
Mike Schropp can be considered a geek-tinkerer, a person whose passion for hacking, tweaking and generally setting things apart animate him day by day. His most recent project comes as a pinnacle to his self-proclaimed label, combining his passion for building computers and lego (you’d be surprised how well they come together) to build a […]
Recently, researchers from the Texas A&M University have returned from a trip which had the purpose of estimating the extend of this year’s “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico. They have currently measured it to about 3,300 square miles, which is roughly the size of “Rhose Island and Delaware combined”. However, researchers estimate it […]
It seems that recently, science is finally beginning to corner the HIV virus. Last week, two studies had the same conclusions, showing how a daily antiviral pill protects sexually active men and women from becoming infected with HIV, the virus that leads to AIDS. Now, researchers show that the life expectancy of already infected African […]
A recent discovery made by Argentinian paleontologist uncovered wasp cocoons hidden inside the 70 million year old fossilized egg of a titanosaur sauropod, suggesting that these ancient wasps used to dwell, consume and breed inside of them. The find was made after researchers carefully analyzed one of the five titanosaur eggs uncovered back in 1989 […]
There has been a long standing debate regarding the Neanderthal people, and what kind of legacy we carry from them. Recently, a study conducted by an international team of researchers led by Damian Labuda of the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Montreal and the CHU Sainte-Justine Research Center showed that a part of […]
Scientists from North Carolina State University have successfully managed to engineer a new kind of soft, malleable memory device that can function like a memristor, while at the same time retaining the physical properties of your plain old, delicious Jell-O. Due to its consistancy, the device might find itself ideally suited for wet environments, where […]
Adenoviruses are nonenveloped (without an outer lipid bilayer) icosahedral viruses, characterized by a particular large size compared to other types of viruses. For years, scientists have thought that each adenovirus strain could infect only one species of animal, however, a recently published report shows how the same strain that infected and decimated a titi monkey […]
The world bee population is at its greatest trial in years, as thousands of bee populations die off each year. Scientists are trying to salvage what’s left or even possibly enforce the current bees left by breeding a new pest resistant, cold impervious superbees. Beekeepers around the world have reported on their lowest honey crops […]
In the first ever-survey of its kind, geologists have managed to discover a chain of massive underwater volcanoes, some as tall as 2 miles, underneath the Antarctic waters near the South Sandwich Islands in the remote Atlantic Ocean. The South Sandwich Islands have always been known for their evident volcanic activity, ever since their discovery […]
Dubbed MBE, after the intricate molecular beam epitaxy process, this device developed by scientists at Sharp Laboratories in Oxford, England, can actually grow electrical components at a dazzling precision atom by atom. This is where razor sharp technology is at, as far as manufacturing goes, and this monstrous-looking device is capable of transferring atoms from […]
A recently published remarkable study describes how scientists from Japan have successfully manage to grow teeth inside a lab using mice stem cells. Takashi Tsuji from Tokyo University of Science and his team managed to achieve this after extracting stem cells from the molars of mice. They then transported these cells to the lab where […]
There were a lot of crazy exhibits on display at this year’s Robotech 2011, and one of the most impressive stands was that of Professor Hideyuki Sawada from Kagawa University in Japan who showed off an bizarre looking artificial mouth designed to look and function as close as possible to the real thing. With this […]
Paleontologists have unearthed in Montana the fossilized bone of a the last known dinosaur so far, dating back from 65.5 million years ago. The finding carries a big weight in supporting the currently leading asteroid impact dinosaur extinction theory. What paleontologists found was actually the horn of a thought to be triceratops in a sediment […]
New York to Paris – 8 hours. Who in their right minds would’ve thought 100 years ago that you could span more than 3600 miles in this kind of time span? Aviation has changed the way we view time and distances forever, and consequently the world is a much smaller place now. Humans aren’t the […]
Anyone scarcely into Iron Man will tell you they wouldn’t want anything more for Christmas than a bone melting ray gun weapon bursting out of your palm. Well, that a fission core artificial heart, but that’s stretching it a bit too far with Santa. Patrick Priebe, a German lab technician, and firstly an Iron Man […]
Seriously, what the heck?
At 300,000 kilometers/second, the speed of light is constant in vacuum, such as space, when it encounters a different medium, however, such as glass or water, its speed is reduced. Another phenomena that can occur in addition is that light can be dragged when it travels through a moving substance, and scientists at University of […]
Seiji Uchida is 49 years old and for the past 28 years he’s been left paralyzed from the waist down and to one of his arms after a dreadful car accident. He’s never lost hope of walking on his own two feet ever since, though, and now thanks to the marvels of Japanese robotics, his […]
There isn’t any news for anyone, I hope, that the Earth is on the heater right now, and as time passes and gas emissions in the atmosphere rise, you should be thinking about ordering that air conditioning faster. Yes, glaciers are melting, and like I mentioned before scientists have projected an increase in sea levels […]
In a recently patented research, UCLA geneticists have shown and demonstrated how they’ve accurately been able to predict a person’s age just by analyzing a saliva sample. The research could possibly find highly welcomed applications in crime scene investigation, as a forensics tool for pinpointing a suspect’s age. “Our approach supplies one answer to the […]
With today’s technology, prosthetics are not at all uncommon, and what’s even more important, they have become more and more performant, allowing certain actions which would have been impossible a century ago. But even more than a century ago, in the 19th century, people were incredibly creative and resourceful. This prosthetic victorian arm, made out […]
The development of a brain-like computer would have numerous and varied benefits, and this achievement is one step closer, according to research published by researchers from the University of Exeter. Unique handling of information The brain is an unique processor from many points of view, displaying many extraordinary abilities, including simultaneous information processing and storage […]
