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What if you could power regularly used consumer electronics, like for say a laptop, just by using them? It’s an incredible prospect, one which Australian scientists from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) hope to turn into reality in the near future. Harnessing the power of piezoelectric technology, researchers successfully embedded a piezoelectric thin […]
Gas prices have sky rocketed during the past five years, and so far it seems to know only one trend – upwards. As such, fuel efficiency, besides keeping environmental pollution to a minimum, has become a sort of priority for today’s automobile manufacturers. Captioned above is a hypermiling concept car, developed by Cambridge Design Partnership, […]
It’s a bird! It’s a plane! No, it’s super sand! *tadam Researchers from Rice University have managed to develop a new kind of filtering sand, dubbed “super sand”, which has five times the filtering properties of regular sand. The advancement could provide an indispensable, cost-effective solution for the current water crisis in developing countries where […]
Dubbed EDWARD, this most inspiring electric two-wheeler has managed to forge a simple Star Wars geek fantasy into reality. The name stands for Electric Diwheel With Active Rotation Damping, and was developed by students at Adelaide University in southern Australia. Very simply built, the vehicle runs on sealed lead acid batteries, which allows it to […]
Ghastly nails on a blackboard or deafening sires don’t come any close to a infant’s whining as far as annoying sounds are concerned, according to a recent study from SUNY New Paltz. In a fairly simple approach, researchers asked study participants to solve various math problems while a background noise was playing. Six sounds were […]
Akkadian, or Assyro-Babylonian, is the oldest attested written language – the code for the cuneiform writing system. Texts written in Akkadian date back as early as 2800 BC, and although it hasn’t been spoken for well over two thousand years, the language can be considered invaluable to the unraveling of the first human civilizations from […]
Brain surgeons must have the best sense of humor in the whole scientific community. Seems like a team of German neurosurgeons took the liberty to analyze the hundreds of head injuries roman legionnaires had to suffer at the hands of the ruthless gaul Asterix. They’re results have been remarkable – this my friend is pure […]
According to a recently published study, computer processor chips made out of nano-scale magnets could yield an efficiency close to the limit imposed by physics. A 100% efficiency is impossible in practice, since any mechanical or electrical process requires more energy than it theoretically needs because of dissipation, be it heat (most of the time) […]
An Australian engineer boosts that he has successfully managed to build a working hover bike, one, he claims, that you could ride to 173 mph at 10,000 feet and feel like any other motorcycle. So far, however, Chris Malloy’s prototype hoverbike hasn’t done any of the aforementioned claims, aside from hovering a bit over ground, […]
When Google Earth was first released I was simply struck with amazement by the myriad of features the software was bundled with. I never imagined I could have my very own state of the art satellite imaging from the comfort of my armchair and notebook. This may be common enough now (meanwhile Google maps popularized […]
Although they’ve been around for a while, 3D printers still manage to impress me with the quality and precission of the outputted models. Recently, another step in the popularization of this technology has been made by addressing its size once with the development of the world’s smallest 3D printer to date. The smallest 3D printer […]
After a long period of research and debates 114 and 116 are now the heaviest elements in the periodic table, after being recently added by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) and the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP). How heavy? Well at 289 and 292 atomic mass, respectively, they’re […]
A much anticipated and highly expected drug could come from Pfizer Inc, the biggest drug company in the world; the drug appears to double survival over standard approved drugs, but only against lung tumours with a certain mutation. The drug, called crizotinib, would be the first targeted treatment for the roughly 50,000 people who get […]
For most, a jetpack can be considered more of a SciFi concept than a viable, realistic flying contraction. However, recent advances from a New Zealand aeronautical company might have paved the way for jetpacks to finally become commercially mainstream. Exiting, right? Just recently this month, the aforementioned company, Martin Aircraft Co., has successfully tested one […]
Cats are surprisingly independent pets, which I’m sure most of you who own one already know, and as I’m steadily leaning about this myself in the past few weeks since I adopted a little feline devil. Do you really know, however, how independent your cat is? Well, although house cats can be fairly lazy and […]
After she suffered a stroke, a 36-year-old professor started to feel sounds. In the beginning she didn’t know what was happening when a radio announcer’s voice made her tingle, or when during a flight she became physically uncomfortable. Neuroscientist at the City College of New York and the Graduate Center of the City University of […]
Our perception of size and distances is basically a product of how the brain interprets different visual signals, like for example the size of an object on the retina or its movement across the visual field. Now, if you were shrinking to the size of a doll in your sleep, when you woke up, the […]
In an amazing feat of electrical engineering, scientists have managed to set a new landmark in optical communications by transmitting data at the remarkable speed of 26 terabits per second, or about 700 DVDs downloaded in an instant, all using a single transmitting laser. The research was lead by scientists from the Karlsruhe Institute of […]
Graphene is probably the ‘substance of the century’, and it will probably be for us what plastics were in the 1900s. Now, a flower-like defect in the material that can occur during the fabrication process could have a significant effect on graphene’s already impressive mechanical, magnetic, and electrical properties. Amazing graphene Graphene is practically a […]
I a recent study published by the University of British Columbia, Canada, it seems women are more sexually attracted by men who display a more gloomy complexion or awareness of social norms by displaying shame, than men who look happy all the time. The study published online Tuesday in the American Psychological Association journal Emotion […]
For most bacteria, a fresh supply of air is pretty much the best thing that can happen; however, for some, that is quite unbearable. Basically, they can’t stand it. They’d do anything to get rid of it. These little guys can be the key to a process so efficient that in the end will not […]
An extremely old spider has showed its face for the first time in almost 50 million years; buried in a large chunk of amber, this Huntsman spider has descendants which live in the tropics and Southern Europe today. They can grow up to 30 centimeters, but they’re not aggressive and not poisonous for humans, despite […]
Even though Facebook is already filled with underage children, and acording to a facebook depression study, kids are often negatively affected by the social media site, their intention is to spread their wings even further, and catch a whole new segment of the market (as they put it). CNN Money reports that Facebook founder Mark […]
Ironically, while most tidy people in the world are busy dusting off furniture, electronics, ceilings, cats, whatnot, researchers have shown in a recent study that the same dust is actually very good for the air, reducing ozone levels by 2 to 15 percent. All because of dead human skin. Ozone is crucial for preventing potentially […]
A new and extensive study by Hunch.com shows that persons who keep their desktops cluttered are more likely to be liberal, have a higher education, are career orientated and good math, while a person who keeps his desktop tidy and clutter free is more likely to be young suburbanites, somewhat techy and allegedly put their […]
In its most simple form, a memristor can be defined as a two-terminal electronic device whose conductance can be precisely modulated by charge or flux through it. What sets it apart from other electrical components is the property that its resistance can be programmed and subsequently remains stored (memory). Basically, memristors resist the passage of […]
Confirming what teenage boys and mysoginistic men already knew, a 2002 study confirms the fact that semen might have in fact antidepressant qualities for women. This is not news at all, but still, definitely worth spreading the word. Semen carries with it more than just sperm; it’s a whole cocktail of substances, out of which […]
Time is money, time is of the essence, it’s time for time to be given its just attention; clocks are already incredibly precise, but with this new improvement, they will be just incredible ! Researchers from America and Russia announced that they have eliminated a source of error that came from temperature variation and they […]
Touch is revolutionizing everything these days – first, it was the touch screen, then it was the touchpad, and it seems tomorrow – it will be the touch keyboard. The thing with aesthetic keyboards is, everyone likes it some other way; some want a bigger distance between buttons, some have smaller fingers, some need certain […]
If you think giving a robot a sword and teaching him how to use is a bad idea, you may be just about half wrong. A young robotics PhD student at Georgia Tech has programmed a robot how to sword fight, in terms of only defending itself against attacks in order to simulate the sudden […]
Discovered deep in the farthest reaches of our solar system, Haumea is a tiny dwarf planet which has been fascinating scientists for years now since its discovery in 2004, not only because of its peculiar rugby-ball shaped form, but also because of its surface structure. According to the European Southern Observatory, 75 per cent of […]
Of course, it is always better to prevent than to treat, but if prevention is no longer an option, than it is much better to start drug therapy as soon as possible after being detected HIV positive; this could help both the patient and it is also far less likely to pass on the virus […]
Accurate dating of a Neanderthal fossil found in a Russian cave, showed that it was 10,000 years older than previous research had suggested. The find could provide proof for the dismissal of the theory which states that Neanderthals and modern humans interacted for thousands of years. The study leads scientists to believe that coexistence between […]
A healthy life style, plenty of exercise and good genes might be your best bet, if you’re looking for a long life, but an eight decade study in the making found one common denominator – the answer to longevity is consciousness. In 1921, in a quest to understand what really sets apart people who happen […]
A remarkable MIT research has found that by coating carbon nano-tubes with bee venom they can create incredibly faithful sensor detectors for explosives, such as TNT, as well as at least two different types of pesticides. The find came after MIT chemists, lead by Michael Strano, coated one-atom-thick tubes of carbon with protein fragments found […]
Twitter prides itself in connecting the world and sharing everybody’s thoughts from every corner of the world, especially when it comes to news. But is this really true, or is this just a branding and marketing stunt ? According to a study conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, Twitter accounts […]
Lately, I’m feeling quite skeptical about the studies I read regarding coffee consumption, especially since it’s known that sometimes a major industry (like oil, or tobacco, or coffee) tends to… influence certain researchers to publish favorable results. I just recently wrote about how 9 out of the top 10 climate change deniers are influenced by […]
Poor dandelions – they never even get a chance. If they shop up on your front lawn, you’re probably gonna go and buy some weed killer and wipe them out. If they show up at a picnic, they never even get creditted as flowers. Even animals don’t like them. But a Ford is taking them […]
According to a recently published study, teens who regularly drink alcohol tend to spend more time on a computer surfing the internet on social networking sites, than other teens who don’t drink alcohol. As a conclusion that both somewhat bashes ‘nowadays teens’ and the Internet, the study concludes that a link between teenage drinking and […]
Autism is still yet poorly understood, and researchers are just starting to figure out the mechanisms behind this strange condition which seems to affect more and more children (and not only) with each passing year. A 6 year autism study The ambitious six year effort attempted to gauge the rate of autism in a South […]
New amazing yet gruelsome details have emerged, regarding how a fungus can control an unfortunate ant. Basically, the fungus infects the ant’s brain, and then tells it what to do, in a somewhat similar fashion to what a Goa’uld would do. Zombies in Thailand Venturing deep in the Thai forest, researchers have found a species […]
Shark Men: Biggest and Baddest, is a new TV show set to premier on National Geographic Channel tomorrow night, which chronicles the work of a team of scientists and professional fishermen who go after great whites in an effort to figure out where the mysterious giants breed and give birth. During one of their stints […]
Researchers from the University of Texas and Yale infected a computer with schizophrenia in order to find out more about how the human brain behaves and understands things. Human behaviour from a computer Computers can show some signs of virtual schizophrenia too, if they can’t ‘forget’ fast enough. So researchers used a virtual computer model, […]
In what can be considered somewhat paradoxal, according to a recent study from the University College London, scientists have found larger than average volumes of grey matter in certain brain regions of people easily distracted. Meaning, people who are easily distracted may have “too much brain”. This conclusion came after scientists compared the brain activity […]
Until recently it was considered that only humans have the ability of being aware of the fact that they exist as an individual, but studies show that chimps as well as dolphins share this ability. A recent research revolving around chimps strengthens the idea and shows that our close relatives are indeed self-aware and can […]
According to a recently published study reported by Swedish scientists, people who are obese and middle aged are up to four times more likely do develop dementia than people of normal weight. Published in the journal Neurology, the research was conducted 8,534 Swedish twins over the age of 65, of which data showed that 350 […]
The sad shut down of SETI due to lack of funding brings a major halt to the search for aliens, unplugging the voice and ears which have been doing the search until now. But perhaps we should start thinking outside the box, and start looking for aliens in even the most unexpected places, at least […]
The team operating the Antihydrogen Laser Physics Apparatus (ALPHA) at the CERN laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland reported storing antimatter for approximately 1000 seconds, which might not seem like much of a big deal, but it is about 10.000 times longer than the previous record ! A cloud of antihydrogen This study will hopefully reveal more […]
The Ebola virus has been the subject of numerous panic inducing books and movies, portraying it as a devastating killer, and in all seriousness its quite deadly. Research on the virus and its numerous variation has made across the past decades, but so far little to no advances in prevention have been made and currently […]
In what can be considered a breakthrough in the battle against worldwide depression, scientists from Germany’s Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry have found a link between a particular gene and depression which might provide solid treatment in the future. The discovery was made after reserachers analyzed the results of a study conducted upon 15,000 people […]
