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An underwater volcano 300 miles off the coast of Oregon has awakened from its slumber and apears to spew out lava. There is no immediate danger, but geologists are excited to be able to study it in real time.
Neuroscientists at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden have created an out-of-body illusion in participants placed inside a brain scanner to see what happens in the brain during this time.
About a month ago, we were telling you about a new battery for houses Tesla was working on, that might revolutionize home energy and bring forth massive change in renewable energy - now, the official announcement is out. Homeowners will be able to get the Powerwall battery, in 7 or 10 kilowatt modules, which will cost $3000 and $3500 respectively.
Swapping out a single daily sweet drink for water or unsweetened tea or coffee can lower the risk of diabetes by up to 25%, a new research suggests.
Geologists have found a praying-mantis-like cockroach that lived at the side by side with the dinosaurs, 100 million years ago, during the mid Cretaceous. The insect was preserved in amber. Peter Vršanský from the Geological Institute in Bratislava, Slovakia, and Günter Bechly from the State Museum of Natural History in Stuttgart found the insect at a mine in […]
Many beetles have defense mechanisms which involves foul chemicals squirting from their abdomens, but bombardier beetles have taken it to the next level. Researchers from MIT, the University of Arizona, and Brookhaven National Laboratory wanted to see how it works, so they studied the bombardier beetle and figured it out. The research is published in Science.
For most smokers, the message that cigarettes are fatally bad for their health often doesn't come across. But if that message came written in ink made from pitch black lungs? It's a morbid concept, one that was actually followed through by BBDO Proximity Thailand, an agency which commissioned the charcoal ink, part of an anti-smoking effort for the Thai Health Promotion Foundation.
Using the MUSE instrument aboard ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT), astronomers have made a three dimensional view of the famous Pillars of Creation - a photograph taken by Hubble 20 years ago showing elephant trunks of interstellar gas and dust in the Eagle Nebula, some 7,000 light years from Earth. The 3D image shows never before seen details of the dust columns, greatly expanding scientists' knowledge of how these formed, but also what's in stored for them in the future.
Microsoft demonstrated just how far they’ve come with their augmented reality HoloLens project – and it’s far. Virtual browsers on your wall, virtual dogs, the weather in your cup, holograms following you to the kitchen… all that and many more were showcased by Microsoft at the Build Conference. I’ll be honest with you, I didn’t […]
Since 1990, Keith Londsdale went through no less than 45 different surgical procedures to remove basal cell carcinoma tumors, one of the most common skin cancers. The man survived the ordeal, but was left deformed as doctors had to remove his nose, upper jawbone and cheekbones. Basically, the 74-year-old-man now has a huge hole in his face.
In the modern world, we tend to eat more salt than we should, and that can have several negative impacts on our body, including higher blood pressure – or so we thought. But a new study on teenage girls found that salt has no negative effect on blood pressure; bananas do. “It may be that […]
Amid crashing oil prices and a divestment movement from fossil fuels, one of the most important banks in the world, HSBC, advised its clients to exercise caution when considering investing in fossil fuel assets. This was communicated through a private report, called ‘Stranded assets: what next?’, picked up by Newsweek. Inside, analysts warn that fossil fuel companies might become economically non-viable in the future, considering tightening emission regulations throughout the world. Considering HSBC's portfolio, we can only take this as a sign that the fossil fuel industry is growing increasingly vulnerable, while renewables are shifting gears and growing at a fast pace driven by technological advances.
A disease called black band coral disease is affecting nearly half of the reef sites researchers have surveyed in waters off Kauai and threatens to destroy Hawaii's reefs, according to the state Department of Land and Natural Resources.
The New Horizons spacecraft snapped a picture of Pluto - the best we have so far. NASA released the information and pictures yesterday, along with the theory that Pluto may have a polar cap.
The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) has reiterated its stance against modifying human embryos, after a paper published last week by Chinese researchers reported how they modified the DNA of human embryos to eradicate certain inheritable diseases from the lineage. Modifying human embryos was banned in 1996 for US government bodies, but in some states private entities are allowed to carry out such research.
Three babies aged six to eighteen months suffering from an incurable breathing condition were saved by doctors who printed a 3-D implant. The implant is made out of a special biodegradable plastic that dissolves in three years (just enough incidentally for kids to be out of harms way permanently). It's also designed to grow and expand as the babies age, hence it's called a 4-D printed implant since time is considered an additional dimension, in this case.
Water may have been plentiful in some parts of the universe as early as one billion years after the Big Bang, a new model suggests. That's a lot earlier than scientists had previously presumed, seeing how at the very beginning the only elements were hydrogen and helium. Seeing how water is comprised of one oxygen atom (16 times heavier than hydrogen) and two hydrogen atoms, then we should have seen water much later, or so the thinking goes.
Each year, hundreds of millions people fly by plane to meet family, do business or travel for leisure. Quite a feat, considering humans don't have any wings. Like all advanced technology we have at our disposal today, flying is also taken for granted. In the early days, however, just getting a few feet off the ground for a couple of seconds was considered a triumph. Like human pioneering flight, nature also had to experiment a lot before flying creatures could evolve. One newly discovered dinosaur species fits well into this story. Unearthed in 160 million year old sediments in China, this queer dinosaur strangely had bat-like wings. It's uncertain however if it was able to fly or even glide, owing to the degraded state of the fossil records. One thing's for sure, it makes the evolution of flight much more interesting to study.
Boom!
Childhood bullying seems to be almost ubiquitous to some extent, and yet researchers have time and time again underlined the negative effects it can have. Now, a new study has concluded that kids who were bullied by their peers suffer worse in the long term than those who were maltreated by adults. The research was […]
Each year, we cut down 26 billion trees, for lumber, agriculture, mining and development projects. Every year, we plant about 15 billion trees, so that still leaves us with a huge deficit - something which is not sustainable and has to be addressed as soon as possible to avoid further problems down the road. Now, a former NASA engineer has found that drones could play a key part, and he plans to plant up to 1 billion trees a year using them.
Drug-resistant bacteria are one of the biggest challenges mankind has to face in the near, as well as distant, future. In a recent survey conducted by the World Health Organization it was revealed that only 34 out of 133 questioned countries have even a basic plan to combat the misuse of antibiotics fuelling drug resistance and encouraging the development of superbugs.
IBM claims to be one step closer to developing functional, scalable quantum computers. According to the company, they managed to overcome two key hurdles, demonstrating for the first time a new, square quantum bit circuit design - the only physical architecture that could successfully scale to larger dimensions.
A coast guard patrol reported that Lake Michigan’s shallow waters are so clear that you can actually see the shipwrecks on the bottom of the lake, until sediments stir up the water and algae blooms develop. Lake Michigan is one of the five Great Lakes of North America, and the only one that’s completely on […]
Using three state of the art ground-based telescopes, a team of astronomers has identified three super-Earth exoplanets that are seven to eight times as massive as our own planet and orbit their parent star closer than Mercury orbits the sun. What's hot about the findings - apart from the planet's likely scorching surface - is that these were made using a novel automated approach, in which one telescope called the Automated Planet Finder (APF) Telescope at Lick Observatory in California was programmed to scour the night's sky and look for signs of nearby alien planets. These three planets are just the beginning of a new process that hopefully will return hundreds of planets in our neighborhood, all without the need for human supervision.
You hear about potential cancer treatments all the time, and despite significant and remarkable improvements, we're still miles away from an actual cure for cancer; so what makes this therapy so great? Well... it just seems to work - on humans, suffering from cancer, not in a lab. For one woman, it seems to have completely dissolved a big tumor in just three weeks, and overall, 53% of patients experienced at least 80% tumor shrinkage.
While humans have invented a convention called time keeping to make society work, our bodies themselves also have a sort of clock called an internal biologic clock or circadian rhythm. When met by daylight, hormones are released that keep us awake and alert, while darkness releases different hormones that puts us to sleep. Canadian researchers have now found the molecular switch that resets and synchronizes the circadian clock. A drug that tweaks this switch could thus be made that regulates the internal clock, something travelers and night owls might find particularly useful.
All those hours of leveling up your character have finally paid off - a new study conducted by Australian and Chinese researchers suggests that playing computer games not only increases the amount of grey matter in your brain, but also promotes better connectivity between different areas of the brain.
A report issued by a committee at MIT concludes that the decline in science funding will have drastic consequences for the country's economy and security, making the US trail behind other countries like China which is spending immense amounts of money on science. In fact, one study estimates China will become the world's leading science and innovation producer by 2020, outpacing the US. The MIT report identifies some 15 fields where inadequate budgets seriously hampers progress, from Alzheimer's research, to nuclear fusion, to disease and agriculture.
An innovative study suggests that something as small as labeling healthy foods with a small smiley face can make kids more interested in buying and consuming healthy food.
Researchers from Cambridge have, for the first time, captured a 3D video of a living algal embryo turning itself inside out: from a sphere into a mushroom and into a sphere again. The results could help us better understand the process of gastrulation in animal embryos -- which biologist Lewis Wolpert called "the most important event in your life."
Endemic to Australia and New Zealand, the satin bowerbird is considered one of the most intelligent birds found in nature. Mature males are very easy to spot because of their bright blue eyes, while their bodies are uniformly covered in black, although sometimes light diffraction makes the bird's feathers turn almost into a metallic sheen. What sets these birds apart is their remarkable courtship ritual, and the male's seemingly obsessive fixation for blue.
Just after NASA researchers made the bold claim that they will find alien life in less than 20 years, the space agency has officially launched a project to look for it. The Nexus for Exoplanet System Science, or “NExSS” will be a project integrating several fields of science, aiming to better understand exoplanets with the potential to host life, as well as planet-life interactions.
The rate of global warming varies from year to year, and climate change deniers try to take advantage of this and argue that global warming is actually slowing down. That may or may not be true, but Earth is still on course for extremely dangerous levels of warming, and, as yet another study has concluded, this is also causing extreme weather.
A seven year old has discovered the fossil of a turkey-sized dinosaur that roamed South America over 140 million years ago. The tiny dinosaur was related to T-Rex, but had few similarities to it; aside for its size, the dinosaur was a vegetarian, munching on plants instead of terrorizing other creatures.
Good news for space exploration: Japan’s space agency JAXA revealed plans to land a rover on the Moon by 2018, joining a very small club of nations that directly explored our planet’s satellite. “This is an initial step and a lot of procedures are still ahead before the plan is formally approved,” a JAXA spokesperson told […]
We all need to consider our future without pollinators, or if there even will be a future without them.
We all see garbage in our daily routine, be it on the way to work, school, or just on the streets. But most people just choose to ignore it; after all, what difference could one man possibly do? Well, Tommy Kleyn didn’t think like that when he was walking pass a polluted river to work. He […]
Beneath one of the most famous touristic attractions in the world, the Yellowstone National Park, there lies one of the largest and most complex volcanic systems in the world. Yellowstone is a supervolcano of perplexing size, but as Utah seismologists found... it may actually be even bigger than previously thought.
We've all had days when we've felt invisible metaphorically, but Swedish researchers have taken it to the next level - they've made a man actually feel like he's invisible.
While searching for the remains of an ancient human ancestor, archaeologists came across a lot more than their bargained for: the oldest stone tools ever found so far. The archaic stones they found were clearly deliberately manipulated by hominid hands, and not the result of some natural formation. According to paleomagnetic dating techniques, the artifacts are about 3.3 million years old, or 700,000 years older than previous artifacts.
According to the Department of Energy, the plutonium-238 stockpile is enough to make only three more nuclear batteries. These are used to power long-term space missions, like Curiosity rover now studying Mars on site, the Voyager probes which were launched in the 1970s and are now almost out of the solar system or New Horizon which is close to making the first Pluto flyby in history. New Horizon is also the fastest spacecraft ever built, racing at one million miles per day. All these remarkable achievements were made possible thanks to plutonium-238 and the technology developed to harness its heat.
It's Saturday, so time for some fun physics. This non-trivial question is often asked in international physics contests and requires a bit of out of the box thinking.
Despite lacking a rigid skeleton, octopuses have a remarkable coordinated locomotion. Using high-speed cameras, a group at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem found the octopus achieves this by precisely and independently moving one or more of its eight legs to crawl its body, even when its facing a different direction. Moreover, there is no discernible rhythm or pattern to this undulating leg movement, making the octopus unique in this respect. It's controlled chaos, and only the octopus itself completely knows how it pulls all this off.
Electronic cigarettes have soared in use among high school and middle school kids, tripling relative in 2014, while cigarettes have reached an all time low. The report was issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which found 4.6 million middle and high school students were current users of any tobacco product, which includes e-cigs despite the fact that it doesn't burn or contain any tobacco - just the nicotine.
Upon acquiring virtual technology company Oculus, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg predicted that virtual reality technology would one day permeate areas of life further than just the world of gaming, and we would ‘someday [use virtual reality] to enjoy a courtside seat at a basketball game, study in a classroom, consult with a doctor face-to-face or shop in a virtual store’. It’s true - the creation of immersive, virtual environments does indeed have masses of potential for industries which beforehand, were seemingly incongruous with such technology. Social psychology, the study of human experience and behaviour, is one of them.
These two dim dots are none other than Pluto, the dwarf plant, and Charon, its largest moon. Though it might not look like much, this is the first ever colored photograph of the two cosmic bodies ever taken. We have NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft to thank for this, which used its Ralph color imager to make the shot from 71 million miles away.
In most cultures, men are typically regarded as handy and it’s usually up to them to do the handy work – it’s quite a stereotype actually, but I think it’s among the few that really stick; but a new study reveals that women may actually be much more well suited for that job. Female chips […]
Today, SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket blasted off Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at 4:10 p.m. EDT (2010 GMT) carrying the Dragon capsule to orbit, on slate for its rendezvous with the International Space Station where it's tasked with a resupply mission. Instead of dropping in the ocean like the gazillion other rockets before it, the first stage of Falcon was programmed to make a controlled landing on a "autonomous spaceport drone ship." The rocket did land on the spaceport, which is amazing in itself, but unfortunately it flipped over post landing and was damaged beyond repair. So, just almost!
Some 900 Dutch citizens have banded together and filled a lawsuit against the Dutch government over human rights, citing the latter's lack of decisive action against climate change. This is the first such case in Europe where a group of citizens holds its government responsible for ineffective climate policy, and also the first to be based on human rights law.
