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For the first time, natural gas installations were also surpassed by PV arrays despite the shale boom, which says a lot about the momentum solar energy is currently gathering.
MIT researchers have created a powerful new tool for energy monitoring: a citywide urban building energy model of unprecedented scale and detail.
Before life exploded in the Cambrian 542 million years ago, Earth's inhabitants were generally single-celled simple organisms.
As NASA’s New Horizons shuttle zoomed past Pluto, it snapped awesome photos not only of the “ex-planet”, but also of its moons. Now researchers are analyzing those pictures and reporting surprising finds – such as an ancient ocean on Charon, Pluto’s moon. Too big for its skin? The side of Pluto’s largest moon viewed by […]
It's obvious that automation will replace a lot of jobs in the coming decades, especially the low paying ones. A new report made at the White House assessed the likelihood of robots taking over jobs and broke it down by hourly wage.
A study ten years in the making found that sea levels are rising at the fastest rate in the last 2,800 years. The researchers say that greenhouse gas emissions that build up in the atmosphere and heat the planet, melting glaciers and ice sheets, are to blame for this sharp rise.
The voracious reputation of sharks might soon change as marine biologists uncover that most coral reef sharks eat pray smaller than a cheeseburger.
A laboratory study on rats found that the animals that breathed Beijing's notoriously polluted air gained weight and showed sighs of cardio-respiratory and metabolic dysfunctions after three to eight weeks of exposure.
Over one century ago, in 1879, a botanist called William Beal buried 20 glass bottles in a secret place in the campus of the Michigan State University.
According to a 2009 report, around "60 percent of Americans live in areas where air pollution has reached unhealthy levels that can make people sick"
Two major oil spills in the course of only one month are threatening Amazonian wildlife and local communities. Peru’s General Directorate of Environmental Health issued a water quality emergency last Wednesday, but critics voice that this is a tad late -- more than three weeks since the first spill spewed more than 2,000 barrels in the regions of Amazonas and Loreto. Shockingly, a third spill has been reported by the local media in Peru, but this has been refuted by the the oil company responsible for the pipelines.
Astronaut Scott Kelly (seen in pic) and his colleagues stationed on the International Space Station now have a new Sidekick. The project is a collaboration between NASA and Microsoft aimed to help with astronaut duties, like repairs, experiments or space walks, using an out of this world augment reality device called the HoloLens.
Sharks have a reputation of solitary predators. They're not the life of the party, sort to say. One new research casts doubt on this assumption, though. The findings suggest that sharks, or at least Sand Tiger sharks, have a complex social structure not all that different in some instances from notoriously social mammals like dolphins, chimps or even humans.
A new study confirms the the effectiveness of a HPV vaccine introduced almost a decade ago in the US; the virus' prevalence in teenage girls is down by almost two thirds. Even for women in their early 20s, the group with the lowest vaccination rates, infections have been reduced by more than a third.
British archaeologists have uncovered five Roman roads built over 2,000 years ago using a technology called LIDAR - a mix between LASER and RADAR.
In late 2015, Volkswagen (VW) admitted to cheating on US tests to make its diesel cars seem more green than they actually were.
In what has to be one of the strangest declassifications, three Apollo astronauts on 1969’s Apollo 10 mission heard strange “music” while passing over the far side of the moon, where communication with Earth is cut off. The three astronauts onboard the mission — John Young, Eugence Cernan, and Thomas Stafford — were practicing the separation and […]
When archaeology meets forensics - a team of British researchers has found three thousand year old fingerprints on the lid of an Egyptian coffin.
They may not look like much, but coffee pods are a big problem.
A new report revealed the unhealthy sleeping habits of Americans: 65% the country's population sleeps 7 hours or more, and even less get the recommended 8 hours.
While there is a full scientific consensus that homeopathy is a pseudoscience many people still believe in it.
In the new technique, nanotechnology is used to determine whether a specific target nucleic acid sequence exists within a mixture, and to quantify it if it does through a simple electronic signature.
University of Toronto researchers have developed a molecular delivery system to administer chemotherapy drugs with as little collateral damage as possible.
The Sun is easily the most recognizable and important star that humanity has ever known. And yet, those who want to study it come face to face with a tiny weensy problem -- it tends to burn your retinas if you look at it.
Beer, liquor and wine lovers - rejoice!
Getting a solid 7-8 hours of sleep at night is vital for a healthy life. A new study confirms that, reporting that missing out on sleep or oversleeping severely increases the chance of a stroke. Researchers conducted an analysis of the health of 288,888 adults (77 percent white; nearly half 45 or older) who participated in […]
Here's one more benefit of exercise (as if we needed more): it can help you fight cancer.
Some antibiotics (including common ones) may cause serious brain disruption and other serious problems according to a new study. The study found a connection between the drugs and delirium (a disruption in brain functions that may be accompanied by hallucinations and agitation). Antibiotics are not the first drugs suspected of causing this but the fact that […]
Nearly half the world's population, close to some 5 billion people, will develop myopia by 2050 according to a study recently published in the journal Ophthalmology. The paper also estimates that one-fifth of these people will have a significantly increased risk of becoming permanently blind from the condition if recent trends continue.
While 3-D scanning the Columbia command module used by the Apollo 11 astronauts to splash down back on Earth, researchers found some amazing artifacts: graffiti markings.
The saddening story of global warming continues in 2016 like it did in 2015. According to NASA, this January was the warmest January on record, in more than 150 years.
This suggests that humans and Neanderthals interbred about 50,000 years earlier than previously thought. The implications are staggering considering humans left Africa to settle Europe and Asia about 65,000 years ago. How was this possible? Researchers suggest that this gene flow comes from modern humans who left Africa even earlier -- maybe the very first wave.
The Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment Collaboration has started the first batch of tests using a small-scale 35 tons prototype of the final device, dubbed the DUNE Buggy. The team is busy gathering readings from the prototype to tweak and optimize the design of the final device.
A four-minute cantata was found among the the mountains of archives in the Czech Museum of Music in November 2015. The score was likely written in 1785 by the maestro Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, along with Antonio Salieri, popularly considered a rival, and an unknown composer called Cornetti. The find was made after Timo Jouko Herrmann, a German composer, was browsing […]
Such a program might prove effective at training simple robots to be less awkward around humans and, most importantly, make sure they don't hurt anyone or break social norms.
The evidence is pilling up that fish grown in hatcheries are very different from those in the wild. A new study found that after only one generation, hatchery salmon have significant genetic changes. A fish hatchery is a “place for artificial breeding, hatching and rearing through the early life stages of animals, finfish and shellfish in […]
This Friday, the tiny island nation of Fiji put up a big flag on the map by becoming the first country in the world to ratify the UN climate deal put together last December at the Paris COP21.
Following ISIS's attack and destruction of the oldest Christian monastery in Iraq, Italy and the United Nations have joined forces to protect cultural heritage sites in conflict zones.
When you think about it from a biological point of view....Menopause doesn't make that much sense, does it?
Mantis shrimp are probably best known for the dazzling colors that adorn their shells. The second thing they're best known for is their tendency to violently murder anything they come into contact with.
It’s extremely unusual for journals to publish papers from non-scientists, but three gamers will have their thoughts covered by one of the biggest and most respected publishers: the Journal of Molecular Biology. EteRNA is a browser-based “game with a purpose”, developed by scientists at Carnegie Mellon University and Stanford University, that engages users to solve puzzles related […]
The smaller humans who lived on the Flores Island in Indonesia until 12,000 years ago were not Homo sapiens but a different species, a new study confirms.
In what has the potential to be a paradigm shift, doctors report extraordinary progress in treating patients with a severe, terminally form of leukaemia.
This quartz disk could revolutionize storage.
According to a new study, we have to increase our phosphorus-based fertilizer production 4 times if we want to satisfy global food needs by 2050.
Between 2,500 and 4,000 so-called 'extremists' have been killed by drone strikes and kill squads in Pakistan since 2004. Maybe as early as 2007, the NSA has targeted terrorists based on metadata supplied by machine learning program named Skynet. I have no idea who would find naming Skynet a machine designed to list people for assassination a bright idea, but that's besides the point. The real point is that the inner workings of this software, as revealed in part by Edward Snowden from his leaks, suggest that the program might be targeting innocent people.
Today, sea levels rise at a rate double that recorded in the 20th century. That's a lot, but not nearly as much as climate scientists expected. Researchers at NASA claim they now know why: thirsty continents absorb a great deal of the extra water coming from melting glaciers. They warn, however, that the system will become saturated at one point and the water will be returned to the oceans, as part of the global water cycle.
The Easter Island is one of the biggest mysteries in human history. How people got there and where they came from, how they built the huge moai statues and why, and what brought their demise are still unsolved questions. But at leas for the latter, we may be getting a bit closer to the truth. The previously […]
A Nebraskan entrepreneur brought his own take on greenhouses, creating one that's powered by green, geothermal energy.
In what seems to be the largest study of its kind, researchers in the US have found that women’s code has a higher average rate of approval than men’s code. However, when their gender is made public, the approval rate drops significantly for women, showing a high gender bias. To examine the prevalence of gender […]
