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Our solar system likely had a fifth gas giant in its initial configuration, but the planet was ejected by Jupiter a new study suggests.
A new model of a spectrometer was unveiled by Australian national nuclear research and development organisation. But this one is made of LEGOs.
The Finnish Social Insurance Institution, Kela, is currently drawing plans for a nation-wide implementation of basic income.
Changes in surface height as measured by satellite altimeters suggest the Antarctic peninsula is experiencing a net gain of ice cover. The analysis suggests Antarctic ice sheet showed a net gain of 112 billion tons of ice a year from 1992 to 2001. However, this net gain slowed to 82 billion tons of ice per year between 2003 and 2008. Some parts the peninsula experienced substantial ice cover gain (East Antarctica), while other parts showed evidence of ice discharge (West Antarctica).
Cod fisheries around the US, and especially in the Gulf of Maine have reached catastrophic levels - only 3% of sustainable levels.
Researchers at MIT have developed a device that can track human silhouettes behind walls using Wi-Fi.
The concepts of biodiversity and evolution are generally thought of as something that occurs in thousands, maybe millions of years - but every once in a while, scientists catch a species red handed: evolving, becoming a new species.
Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, scientists from the universities of Michigan and Pennsylvania scanned the brains of 50 smokers while they viewed anti-smoking ads. They recorded their neural activity spikes as they watched the sample of 40 images one at a time, looking for increase activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, the area that handles decision making processes.
Ahh, the phallus. In most sexually-reproductive species, half of the individuals lack one, while the other half is constantly trying to share theirs as much as possible with the first group, with varying degrees of success -- bragging, fighting or impressing their way to the continuation of the species. Marvelous!
For the second time this year, however, the desert bloomed as thousands of dormant species of flowers and plants awoke after El Niño brought a rainy boom to the region.
Russia is locking up six women together to simulate a trip to the moon and back. But no one is taking this too seriously, it seems.
After using relaxation-response technique, such as yoga, meditation and even prayer, participants involved in a study coordinated by the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) solicited health care services 43% less frequently. The researchers involved in the study say simply learning how to relax to fend off anxiety and depression -second only to cancer and heart diseases in terms of health care costs - might significantly reduce the strain on the health care system. As such, more wide spread use of relaxation-response techniques could free up immense resources that can be diverted for chronic diseases.
It seems bees may suffer from the same drowsy morning moods and weary fatigued afternoons as their human cousins. And it may be similarly cured with a jolt of joe.
When humans and nature work together, you can build some extraordinary designs. At MIT, living things are integrated using today's most advanced gear - like biological 3D printers - to help solve human needs. In this particular case, a suit that self-regulates in response to humidity (the trigger is sweat) so you can work, dance or explore more comfortably.
Of all the major conservative parties in the democratic world, the Republican Party stands alone in its denial of the legitimacy of climate science.
Sprocket the cat has been fitted with an improvised 3D printed leg brace which has a good chance of saving his leg from amputation. Sprocket, who is just younger than 1 year old, has had his share of misfortunes. He was lucky to survive being hit by a car, but his leg was shattered. He managed […]
Mary Kenneth Keller of the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary was a pioneer in computer science. In 1965, she, along with Irving Tang at Washington University, was the first in the United States to earn a doctorate in that field; and yes, she was not only a woman, but also a nun.
For the first time, astronomers have detected primordial oxygen gassing out from a comet
50 years ago, on October 28, 1965, an unlikely British geophysicist made a map that set the record straight on how the world’s tectonic plates fit together.
French scientist working on the Hall thrusters -- an advanced type of engine that harnesses a stream of plasma to generate forward momentum -- have recently figured out a way to optimize them, allowing them to run on (wait for it) a staggering 100 million times less fuel than conventional chemical rockets. The research has been published in Applied Physics Letters.
eam at Lawrence Livermore, helped by researchers from all around the world, announced the discovery of five new isotopes, adding to the already extensive list of 3,000 isotopes of 114 confirmed chemical elements. The exotic atomic variations discovered are one isotope each of heavy elements berkelium, neptunium and uranium and two isotopes of the element americium.
Science and medicine advances have stretched the life span further than ever. That's good news, but the quality of life is also important. People live longer now than ever, but they also live longer in sickness and suffering of both body and mind. Concerning the latter, a clear, sharp mind can be a rare thing once you pass a venerable age, but a team at the Paracelsus Medical University in Austria may be on to something. Working with mice, the researchers gave some of the elderly rodents a common drug called Montelukast that's used to treat asthma in children. To everyone surprise, the old rats started growing new brain cells and performed almost as well as the young in cognitive tests. If only the drug worked on people, too - we might find out soon.
Manure has been used as a plant and crop fertilizer since the dawn of agriculture, but since poop is naturally occurring it's been essential to the ecosystem far before humans evolved on this planet. But as the planet's megafauna has steadily dwindled, so has the megapoop significantly impacting the nutrient-recycling system. According to Joe Roman, a biologist at the University of Vermont, in some cases nutrient transport via pooping today is only 5% of what it used to be during the Ice Age.
This Wednesday at the Tokyo Motor Show, Honda Motors will unveil its brand new hydrogen car: the FCV (not its real name likely). According to Forbes, the car can run 435 miles on a tank full of hydrogen, which is more than 100 miles than any of Tesla EV. Moreover, a full fill only takes 3 minutes which means you can be back on the road in no time - provided you can find a hydrogen filling station. The biggest innovation, however, is Honda's new fuel cell system which is 10 times cheaper than the one on the FCX Clarity and takes as much space a typical V-6 engine.
With a simple brain scan, researchers can now see if you've been naughty or nice - on average.
Morocco is poised to become a solar superpower, as they revealed plans for the largest concentrated solar power plant, powered by the Saharan sun.
A team of scientists from Switzerland, Russia, Denmark, Belgium and Canada has for the first time demonstrated that it is possible to track the movement of an electron inside a molecule in real time. Moreover, the scientists claim the electron movements can be manipulated allowing unprecedented control over chemical reactions and biological processes.
When the Scottish government introduced a 5 pence tax for plastic bags, they were expecting a significant reduction, but even they weren't expecting such a big success.
The next time you throw away an aluminium can, picture the can half full of gasoline. That's how much energy goes into making it, and how much energy will have to be spent to produce a new one rather than recycle.
It could only happen in Norway: a hiker traveling a historic route found a 1,200 year old Viking sword in excellent shape.
There's no getting rid of our microscopic friends - where there are people there are bacteria, even in outer space.
Money. It makes the brain go nuts!
NASA is preparing for a historical approach to Enceladus, plunging its Cassini spacecraft deep through the icy spray coming from the ocean on Enceladus.
A sinkhole popped up in St. Albans, England, and engineers fear this is not an isolated event.
Just in time for Halloween, scientists have developed the blackest material - a material so dark that it absorbs almost all the light that hits its surface.
If you’ve ever wanted to plan a hiking trip on the Moon, now you have the perfect opportunity: a gorgeous pair of new lunar maps – the Image Mosaic and Topographic Maps of the Moon – is now available online for everyone to see and download. To me, it’s mind blowing that we have so high quality maps […]
Armed with almost 1 million diary entries, an Oxford-based laboratory is trying to figure out why modern life seems so hectic.
Paleontologists have unearthed two spectacular cave lion cubs, preserved by the permafrost in the Sakha Republic, also known as Yakutia. The last glacial period, popularly known as the Ice Age, was the most recent glacial period within the Quaternary glaciation occurring from 100,000 to 12,000 years ago. At the end of this ice age, several species couldn’t […]
In a room filled with oil & gas executives, a veteran lobbyist called Richard Berman held a crash course on how companies can use scare tactics and manipulation to make environmental groups look like radical morons. This includes digging up dirt on opponents (celebrities are the focus), exploiting basic emotions like fear and anger, skewing information and other dirty tactics, because in the end “you can either win ugly or lose pretty,” Berman said. Of course, these things would have never been admitted in public, but unbeknownst to Berman the whole meeting was taped by one of the executives who found the whole affair appalling, then made public by the New York Times.
If you still think wind and solar energy can't possibly work because they're too expensive, you're trapped in time. As the technology improves and manufacturing of scale comes into full force we're seeing prices per unit of energy dwindling. Elsewhere, regulations like price on carbon is making fossil fuel energy more expensive. According to the Bloomberg New Energy finance, on-shore wind energy has once again dropped in price and is competitive with conventional coal or gas fired energy. In some parts of the world, like Germany or UK, on-shore wind is up to 30% cheaper than fossil fuel energy. Apparently, we're running out of reasons not to ditch fossil fuels in favor of renewable energy.
In what could become a monumental decision, the World Health Organization has decided to roll out pilot tests for a malaria vaccine.
An eagerly awaited report from the World Health Organization (WHO) states that processed meats such as bacon and sausages cause cancer, and red meat likely does so too.
A team of students in Canada invented a cheap, portable cooling device that doesn't need any electricity.
True to its name, comet Lovejoy is having a stellar party, releasing large amounts of ethanol, the same type of alcohol found in terrestrial alcoholic beverages.
Nobody wants to know how a hot dog is made, because you always know there's some crazy stuff inside. If you're one of those persons, stop reading now. Alright, time for a reality check. According to the "The Hot Dog Report" released by Clear Food, a company on a mission to demystify the black box that's the US food industry, many consumer brands add more ingredients in their sausages than you'd wished for, i.e. labeled. The company sequenced the genetic material from 345 samples of hot dogs across 75 brands and found around 15% were problematic. This means a deceiving label, whether exaggerating the protein content or finding pork in your chicken sausage. About 67% of the veggie samples had hygiene issues. Perhaps most disturbing is that 1 in 10 so-called veggie hot dogs had meat in them, and 2% of all samples had human DNA inside.
A 7.5 earthquake has struck near the Hindu Kush region of Afghanistan, close to the border with Pakistan and Tajikistan.
A preliminary study from Switzerland, published this month in the Annals of Neurology, proved the effectiveness of a new method of non-invasive brain surgery: using a newly-developed operating device that relies on ultrasound, in conjunction with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), allowed neurosurgeons to precisely remove small pieces of brain tissue in nine patients suffering from chronic pain without removing skin or skull bone. Researchers now plan to test it on patients with other disorders, such as Parkinson's. Neal Kassell, neurosurgeon at the University of Virginia, not directly involved in the study.
Martin Shkreli, chief executive officer of Turing Pharmaceuticals, became over night one of the most despised figures in the pharmaceutical industry when just as suddenly he raised the price of the only treatment of a rare parasitic infection by 5,000 percent. The drug, Daraprim, was initially developed in 1953 and used to cost $1 a pill only a couple years ago. I have no idea what Shkreli thought would happen after he'd raise the price 500-fold in one go, but he got some serious backlash. "I think that it makes sense to lower the price in response to the anger that was felt by people," he said while under the spotlight, but this promise made a month ago is still unfulfilled shattering whatever credibility Shkreli had left.
Cristiano Menezes of the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation has discovered farming behaviors in bees, adding them to the list of social insects that practice agriculture.
A new, extremely worrying study found that a third of meta-analyses related to antidepressant studies are written by pharma industry employees.
