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A few days ago, I wrote about the damage that a well intended, but wrongly conducted mangrove restoration could cause; the article itself was focusing on the Philippines. It is time to underline (again) the importance that they have on ecosystems which rely on them way more than you would probably guess.Just a few days […]
Actually, it’s not about the brightest star of all, but the brightest star in our galaxy. It seems there’s a new contender for the title of Milky Way brightest star; it’s near its dusty center, and infrared observations performed by NASA have revealed how bright it is by piercing the dust that surrounds it. The […]
Archaeopteryx has been the subject of many controversies, but it is now widely considered as the world’s oldest bird; however, reptiles were flying for 50 million years when it appeared, even before the world was roamed by dinosaurs. Now, paleontologists have unveiled an extraordinary prehistoric ‘flying’ reptile which lived 235 million years ago.It’s called kuehneosaurs […]
If you have a bug you want to identify and know everything about, there’s one place which will solve all your problems; the experts at the Natural History Museum in London are proud to say that they can identify species from around the globe, from birds and mammals to insects and snakes. Still, if you […]
Scientists have believed for years that the moon doesn’t have water, only to find that its interior proved them wrong, challenging our current understanding on how the satellite was formed The current most accepted theory is that it formed in a violent collision between Earth and another planet-sized object.But if this had been the case, […]
Michio Kaku, a highly regarded physicist and one of the world’s leading authorities on string theory (essentially an attempt to discover a “theory of everything” combining all of the known physical forces) has virtually redefined what is impossible and what is not. He has studied and tried to predict the future of science and physics […]
It’s not a bird, it’s not a planet, it’s not Jupiter… it’s super earth. Actually, there’s 3 of them. What are they? Well they’re three planets that astrophysicists have found orbiting the same star. They were located with the HARPS instrument on the European Southern Observatory’s 3.6-meter telescope at La Silla, Chile.These Super Earths are […]
We all know (or really should know) the benefic impact a healthy lifestyle has on your body and mind. But according to a study led by U.S. researchers, exercising and having a balanced diet can not just keep you fit, but it can also lead to some swift and dramatic changes at the genetic level.In […]
Ever wake up in the morning and just couldn’t get out of bed? Did you ever have something to do and just didn’t have what it takes to do it? Well, all you lazy people, rejoice! In may not be your fault after all. A simple test could show whether difficulty in defeating your laziness […]
When I read what Ray Kurzweil said about the future, I was just awed! I mean, coming from somebody else, it would seem ludacris (even from him, I find it really hard to believe), but c’mon, the man is one of the best futurists we have, so he HAS to know what he’s talking about. […]
For the first time, scientists have found fossilized burrows of tetrapods (four legged vertebrates) in Antarctica dating from the Early Triassic epoch, about 245 million years ago. They’ve been conducted research there since early 2006, and it’s the first time they’ve actually found something of this calibre. The fossils are created in a relatively simple […]
Geography Easter Island (Rapa Nui in the native Easter Island language) is situated in the southeastern Pacific Ocean – it’s an overseas territory of Chile. It’s the most isolated inhabited area, and it’s famous for the monumental statues, called moai (pronounced MOE-eye) which have fascinated and baffled people for many, many years; and still, no […]
If you think girls like sport cars, bling, and fancy clubs… you’re so last year! Well that’s not really what I think, but it’s what a study conducted by GM as part of this year’s Challenge X competition showed. I’m not really sure how relevant this is, but the results baffled me to be honest […]
Seven was considered a magic number by the ancient Greeks. So when it came to naming the most impressive constructions mankind had achieved at the time, it was a must that they settle on just seven. The historian Herodotus and the architect Callimachus of Cyrene made these lists, but their writing remained only as references. […]
For almost a century, scientists have been trying to figure out what’s good and what’s bad about Einstein’s vision of the universe. Blending the traditional view of physics with the bizarre almost impossible to understand world of quantum physics is no easy task – for anybody. It’s due to our current understanding of these phenomena […]
Think about the hottest thing that comes to your mind; probably, 90% of people would answer the Sun. But what if you found out that some scientists in Oxfordshire have heated matter to 10 million Celsius, hotter than the surface of the Sun, marking a major landmark in research, you’d probably change your mind. […]
A study conducted by researchers at the Columbia Center for Children’s Environmental Health (CCCEH) at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health showed that cat ownership probably has a very good effect on young children of ages up to 5 years. The study was published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology. […]
It’s still unclear how sleep deprivation affects us, as there are still so many things scientists have failed to understand about sleep itself. But now, neuroscientists at the Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School in Singapore have shown for the first time what happens to the visual perceptions of healthy but sleep-deprived people who struggle […]
British scientists have received the green light to research devastating diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s using human-animal embryos, after the House of Commons rejected a ban yesterday. Already a wave of contradictions and the scientific world is divided into two camps. An amendment to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill was rejected […]
Just like when you lie certain things happen in your brain, the same thing happens when you think something about somebody. But what happens in our brain when we judge people or at least when we make an idea about someone? Those (and many other) questions have been tackled by MIT neuroscientist Rebecca Saxe. Her […]
Let’s start with the beginning, shall we ? A black hole is a region of space in which the gravitational field is so powerful that nothing, not even light, can escape its pull after having fallen past its event horizon. That means that electromagnetic radiation (e.g. visible light) is unable to break away from the […]
Photo by ±‡ U a € ï ¥ a H ‡± Life has ups and downs, reminding more or less of an emotional rollercoaster; but some memories stay in your memory way longer than the others. Emotional memories of traumatic life events (physical or mental), especially cases of accidents or serious illnesses are stored […]
I’ve always been fascinated by intelligence as a human trait. Smarter and more intelligent people seem to have this sort of aura that surrounds them, but how much of this ability is native and how much can be developed? Ever since the experiments conducted on fruit flies showed that the flies that were taught […]
Or at least this is what a study conducted by scientists from Mcgill suggests. They made the largest study of breastfeeding and the results they found were that it increases both IQ and academic performance. In the article in which the study was published, Dr. Michael Kramer reports the results from following the same […]
Photo by jago In a study conducted by researchers at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University that claimed a different perspective, it was published that it takes between 3,000 gallons and 6,000 gallons of water to power a 60-watt incandescent bulb for about 12 hours per day in a year. As it turns out, size […]
Two years ago, the Finnish Meteorological Institute made public the fact that they had created an electric solar wind sail. Now, scientists believe that this kind of propulsion could benefit space travel significantly, throughout the Solar System. Doctor Pekka Janhunen who invented the sail, believes it could revolutionise travelling in space, as using solar winds […]
University of Maryland researchers have managed to shed some light in an important matter which puzzled medical scientists and not only for ages: how iron carried in human blood is absorbed and transported into the body. Among the benefits of this discovery I’ll just name a better understanding of iron deficiency, the world’s number one […]
I’m not fond of alarmist theories or “bad things are happening, fast” attitude, but… bad things are just going to happen soon in California. The likelihood of a major quake of magnitude 7.5 or greater in the next 30 years is 46%-and such a quake is most likely to occur in the southern […]
What makes us different is not who we are, not what we think, but the decisions we make. That defines us, it’s what makes us different from others. But aside what you’d want to think, it turns out decision-making may be a process handled to a large extent by unconscious mental activity. A team of […]
Green fuels are a really hot topic, with every single day bringing a new (claimed) discovery or breakthrough, but many of them are just minor improvements. Still, every once in a while you hear about something that sounds really promising (like green gasoline). Now it seems that chemists are describing development of a “revolutionary” process […]
Researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison have made a significant breakthrough in the development of biofuels (“green gasoline”), a liquid identical to standard gasoline yet created from sustainable biomass sources, such as poplar trees and switch grass. Poplar plants have been in the scientific spotlight before, as they are considered to disarm toxic pollutants 100 […]
Recently, it seems there’s a gene for everything, from generosity to ruthlesness. That still doesn’t mean that you can blame everything on your genes, but it may go to show the fact that even some of the world’s most cruelest dictators may owe their behaviour partly to their genes, at least according to a study […]
It’s said that even though computer have so much processing power, it some ways, it can never even get close to interpreting information like the human brain does. But is that really so? Beauty lies in the eye of the beholder, right? Right ?! The thing is that according to scientists at Tel Aviv University, […]
The hunt is on for finding other planets we can live on; this is probably the next step for us as a species, and may just be crucial, considering how things are developing on Earth. But we haven’t had much luck with that so far. Now, scientists are using a method which is claimed […]
The controversy between the climate and energy researchers has been fuelled by the recent studies which suggest the fact that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has seriously underestimated the challenge and costs of stabilizing greenhouse-gas emissions in the 21st century. Climate policy expert Roger Pielke Jr, climatologist Tom Wigley, and economist […]
After the “crash site” in Peru, meteorites keep the headlines again! This time, scientists from the University of Oxford and the University of Aberdeen found the biggest meteorite to ever crash in the British islands. The scientists believe that a large meteorite hit northwest Scotland about 1.2 billion years ago near the Scottish town of […]
According to a new research, published in PLoS, as the total number of different species in a certain group grows, the chance of the rate of new species apprearing decreases greatly. The research team believes these findings suggest that new species appear less and less as the number of species in a region approaches the […]
The date of March 19, 2008 will be remembered as a very important day in astronomy and science; it’s the day mankind had its first chance of witnessing the birth of a black hole. It all started when the “Pi of the Sky” telescope detected the brightest ever optical outburst from a distant place, about […]
There’s always been a lot of effort put into understanding what (if something) makes humans superior to other man-like mammals. The science world seems to be split into two camps, which can’t agree with each other. Now, researchers at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, Emory University, have identified a language feature unique to the […]
Professor David Lambert and his team from the Allan Wilson Centre for Molecular Ecology and Evolution performeda study of New Zealand’s “living dinosaur” the tuatara. They recovered DNA sequences from the bones of ancient tuatara which are up to 8000 years old. The conclusions they drew were amazing: despite all the ods, the tuatara has […]
A recent study has shown that certain types of air pollution can actually help by creating extra doses of atmospheric cleaner. Of course, we’re talking about just a small fraction of the total pollution which triggers the right chemical process. The lab study pointed out that nitrogen oxides (which result mostly from agricultural pollution) can […]
Scientists from the University of Bath have revealed what may very well be the first law of evolution, which has a huge importance. The study was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and it shows the fact that evolution drives animals to become increasingly more complex. They analyzed fossils from the crustacean […]
Recently, more and more people are beginning to claim that the melting of glaciers caused by global warming is all fuss for nothing. Well, that couldn’t be further from the truth! According to the official figures published by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) the world’s glaciers are continuing to melt, at a higher rate than […]
Nature has its own way of protecting itself, and we should have already learned this (the hard way), because so many catastrophes have happened as a result of man’s destructive work. Look at the damage caused by the recent tsunamis; they would have been almost neglectable if we hadn’t destroyed the plankton, which has a […]
An amateur Dutch archaeologist named Jan Meulmeester made a startling find which pleases scientists: an amazing collection of 28 flint hand-axes, dated by archaeologists to be around 100,000 years-old. He found them in an area about 13km off Great Yarmouth. Jan Meulmeester diggs regularly for mammoth bones and fossils in marine sand and gravel delivered […]
[digg-me] [reddit-me]After it was proved that Homo floresiensis (”Man of Flores”, nicknamed Hobbit) is a different species than humans, the tiny skeletons found in the caves of the Pacific islands of Palau let to the theory that similar remains found in Indonesia are a very unique species. The Palau skeletons which are from 900 and […]
Researchers from the University of Maryland started researching some characteristics of bacteriae from Chesapeake Bay that could lead to a process of converting large quantities of all kinds of plant products (including leftovers and trash) into ethanol and other biofuels. This sounds pretty dreamy but it’s quite possible as the technology is not at all […]
Astronomers from the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario have spotted (with the aid of cameras, of course) a meteor falling to Earth; this is quite a rare occasion and scientists from many fields are eagerly awaiting the recovery of the meteorite and the start of the studies. They spotted a giant fireball Wednesday […]
As you know (or at least should know), butterflies and moths are known for their metamorphosis from catterpillars to their adult form. This radical change involves not just a change of look, but it also includes changes in lifestyle, diet, sensorial impulses and many many other differences. So it would seem very probable that the […]
For a whole lot of time Mars has fascinated scientists, which during the time made some crazy theories, of whch some included martians living there, or a lost civilization that used to live there, and that kind of stuff. Now, they are sure that nothing else except microorganisms live there, but who knows what tomorrow […]
