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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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Despite of the all the efforts (which by the way, are not as numerous as you may think) which have been done, pollution and global warming are still “hot” topics, with no great solution in sight. Some studies claim that things are not as bad as we believe, others claim that it’s worse. Still, one […]
The idea of a comprehensive encyclopedia has been launched a long time ago, and the internet was the perfect way to make it possible and to promote it and make it popular. The internet has done its job too well, because the computers which hosted the encyclopedia were overwhelmed and couldn’t keep it alive when […]
I’ve always found it strange that beavers are considered by some pests; besides being amazing animals with some amazing habits, they also have been proven to have a positive effect during the droughts which occure quite often these days. They can help mitigate the effects of drought, and because of that, their removal from wetlands […]
Think of the territory which was once cald the wild west; what’s the first image that pops up in your head? For most, it will probably be a dusty scenery, with some bush rolling about, an image of solitude. If you thought about that, then you were pretty close to the truth. During the last […]
Probably all of us have, at a certain point, went on a trek in the mountains, or at least went up a hill of some sort. The shortest way to walk on flat terrain is still a straight line, but it has been proven that if you are going up a hill, zig zagging is […]
The return of three Antarctic marine science research vessels marks the crowning of one of Australia’s most ambitious International Polar Year projects, a census of life in the Antarctic seas. The ships (Aurora Australis and collaborating vessels L’Astrolabe from France and Umitaka Maru from Japan) came back from the Southern Ocean, their decks overflowing with […]
This has been talked about for ever, and as much as we admit it or not, a big mass of people is in fact quite easy to manipulate, because of our… flock mentality. Results from a study at the University of Leeds show that it takes a minority of just five per cent to influence […]
A new study has shown that not even a square meter of the world’s oceans has been left untouched by human activities. Oceansystems face probably the largest of threats from humans including overfishing, pollution, and rising ocean temperatures and ocean acidification caused by global warming. The study has been led by an international team of […]
When Swedish researchers published this theory of theirs, nobody took it seriously. Without paying much attention to the scientific community, they pursued and tried to prove what they were claiming. It seems now they have managed to present evidence which supports their way of viewing Earth’s internal core. The findings may be of significance for […]
Birds evolved from lizards, (nearly) all scientists agree about that, but strangely enough there is still a debate around when the first bird showed up in the Mesozoic scene. While paleontologists who have studied fossils think that birds evolved from dinosaurs about 60 million to 65 million years ago, right when the dinosaurs went extinct, […]
They say the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference. You can simultaneously love and hate somebody (and something, for that matter) at the same time, but you can’t love them and feel nothing for them at the same time. So if we were to continue in that manner, hating somebody doesn’t neccesarily mean […]
Nature has its own balance which is both sturdy and fragile at the same time; when that balance is broken (by man, what else?) it is very hard and sometimes almost impossible to set things right. That’s why we have to pay attention to the numerous fragile ecosystems because everything is connected. It goes […]
In case you don’t know, a tsunami is a series of waves created when a body of water, such as an ocean, is rapidly displaced. Earthquakes, mass movements above or below water, volcanic eruptions and other underwater explosions, landslides, underwater earthquakes, large meteoroid or asteroid impacts and testing with nuclear weapons at sea all have […]
Butterflies have fascinated people for as long as we can remember; the beauty of their wings is known to just about everybody and well just about everybody loves them. But behind their naive beauty lies a mistery which has baffled scientists as they couldn’t understand how these colours are created. Marco Giraldo has been examining […]
The tree of life is a metaphor scientists use to describe all life on Earth in an evolutionary context. Charles Darwin talks about envisioning evolution and ecosystems as a “tangled bank” in The Origin of Species; however, the book’s sole illustration is of a branched diagram that is very tree-like. This “design” has been used […]
About 250 million years ago, at the end of the Permian, and event caused a mass extinction which killed over 90 percent of the life on Earth. Ecosystems were destroyed and organisms were left to recover; it was the closest life came to being wiped out ever. The full recovery of those ecosystems took at […]
Recently a study was conducted by a team led by Dr Edward Hanna at the University of Sheffield which demonstrated that recent warm summers have caused the most extreme Greenland ice melting in 50 years. This is yet another proof of the damage caused by global warming and it also helps scientists place recent satellite […]
Whoa there! I mean sometimes just about everybody feels the need to be agressive but…. agression just as good as sex? That sounds a bit weird. But that’s just a way of thinking about things. The study is about the fact that the brain processes agression as a reward offering insights into our propensity to […]
Most children are able to imagine their future selves as astronauts, politicians or even superheroes and make up imaginary friends and things such as those; but as people grow up they find it difficult to recollect past events, let alone generate new ones. A new Harvard University study reveals that the ability of older adults […]
For a lot of time man kind or at least a big part of it has been absolutely fascinated with the diamond and its fantastic glimmer. The reasons which account for its stunning beauty could be uncovered by a mathematical analysis of its microscopic crystal structure. It turns out that this structure has some very […]
A drug company is a commercial business whose focus is to research, develop, market and/or distribute drugs, most commonly in the context of healthcare; from wikipedia. But according to a study by two York University researchers estimates the U.S. pharmaceutical industry spends almost twice as much on promotion as it does on research and development, […]
There is (or at least there should be) a lot of attention focused around endangered wildlife and protecting a number of species from the damage which we as humans bring to them more or less directly. The animals most definetly deserve it. But most people don’t think of plants as being endangered, but the thing is […]
We live in a world which we think we know everything about but that is obviously not true; people believed the same thing about a hundred years ago and well we have discovered some things since then. Such would be the case with an expedition which explored one of the largest remaining blocks of tropical […]
Since there are still a big number of things we fail to understand about our brain it is somewhat understandable that such misbeliefs appear. They turn into myths and thanks to the oh so well documented media everybody ends up believing that they are true; and such a belief is hard to shatter even when […]
The quest for understanding planets and stars seems to be more intense than ever. Things we could not have imagined not years but months ago are proven valid today. The problem of really big planets has especially fascinated scientists for hundreds of years for numerous reasons. A gas giant is basically a large planet that is not […]
So how could we achieve this is hard to say. But according to Sir Nicholas Stern trading and targets should be at the heart of a global agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. He made this statement during the Royal Economic Society’s annual public lecture at The University of Manchester ahead of the world summit […]
The growing economic strength of the European Union is something most europeans are proud of but what most are not aware of is that this growth has doubled the ecological pressure on the planet in the past 30 years, according to a WWF report WWF stands for World Wildlife Fund and conducted this research which […]
So Charles Darwin called it the “abominable mystery” of early plant evolution. But the University of Florida and University of Texas at Austin scientists have shed light on what was and is a very intriguing thing. The scientists are reporting that the two largest groups of flowering plants are more closely related to each other […]
There’s a common misconception that the foods that are good for you are just spinach and broccoli, or something else which just taste really bad; numerous people would want to eat healthy foods but they find that these foods are just not tasty. For them there is a new generation of superfoods that promise to […]
Nature has a way of defending itself and even things which we fail to understand play their part. For example, the reef helps protect the shore from devastating waves and tsunamis – and the recent tragic events were in a way just a reflection of what we are doing to the planet. Massive man made […]
Mankind found numerous ways to harm our planet and damage just about every ecosystem; what we fail to understand is that this backfires at us. A report made by James Corbett of University of Delaware and James Winebrake from Rochester Institute of Technology claims that marine shipping causes approximately 60,000 premature cardiopulmonary and lung […]
Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), or Hyperkinetic Disorder affects about 5% of the world’s population. It is hard to cure it and in it is currently considered to be a persistent and chronic condition and medicine does not have any cure. This is because we fail to understand it as numerous studies have shown contrary results. […]
Yellowstone is being visited by over 2 million tourists every year and it spans an area of 3,472 square miles (8,987 km²) which makes it North America’s largest volcanic field. The main interest was around the Old Faithful Geyser and the Yellowstone Lake which is the largest high-altitude lake in North America and is centered […]
But it has to be the good quantity. Eating fruits and vegetables and drinking red wine could just be what gives the edge against cancer or what play a beneficial role for those with diseased hearts and circulatory systems. The cure could be at the grocery.The research conducted was published in the November 2007 issue […]
The need to find out energy sources and the development of genetic and microbiology make it likely to find out bacteria or microbes which could be very useful. In this case the bacteria should be able to eat sugar or sludge and it must be team player or electrochemically active. Surviving without oxygen would be […]
This dog is famous in the world because it is very big but very gentle – also, thanks to a certain Beethoven movie. The ancestors of the St. Bernard are the herding dogs of Swiss farmers like the Greater Swiss Mountain Dog, as well as hunting dogs and watchdogs. Their history has also been […]
