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A 7.9 magnitude earthquake has struck deep beneath the ocean floor near Alaska’s Aleutian islands, triggering a small tsunami. Initially, a tsunami warning was issued for the area, but it was then downgraded to an advisory. Still, 200 residents of the town of Adak were evacuated to higher ground. The good news is that no injuries was […]
Using fMRI machines to peer into the brains of artists is not really a new idea, we’ve even done it to animals as well, so I was quite surprised to see that no one used them to analyze writers as they go through their creative process. But this is exactly what German researchers did now – […]
An invasive ant has been sweeping through southeastern United States; it has a jaw like a bear trap, which close faster than almost anything in nature. Naturally, it packs quite a sting, and if that wasn’t enough, it can propel itself through the air like a rocket. “They look like little hammerhead sharks walking around,” […]
Germany has reached a new renewable energy milestone recently after the country announced that on a given day an impressive 50.6% of its energy demand was covered by solar energy alone. Breaching this important psychological barrier means a lot of for renewable energy efforts in Germany, and worldwide as well serving as an example. According to […]
Since its advent some 100 years ago, crystallography has become one of the most important processes in chemical research and development. It involves bombarding a material with X-rays to produce a diffraction pattern as they reflect off the sample. The pattern can be used then to directly determine the atomic structure of the crystal. Using […]
In the past years, several types of invisibility cloaks have been developed, hiding objects not only from light, but also from sound and even heat. But this is the first time an invisibility cloak for touch has been developed. Recently, we’ve written quite a lot about invisibility cloaks – how they work, how they can be […]
Taking food away from C. elegans in larval stages suspends their development; while they still wiggle around and look for food, they are in a state of arrested development. However, when food becomes plentiful again, they start to develop normally – but live twice as long. This remarkably simple way of achieving longevity is not entirely surprising. It […]
Astronomers have discovered a previously unspotted geological feature on Saturn’s moon, Titan. Pictures taken by the Cassini probe revealed a transient geological feature – a “magic island”. Now you see it, now you don’t The bright, mysterious object was seen in Ligeia Mare, the second-largest sea on Saturn’s moon Titan. But Cassini took pictures of […]
A month ago, on May 25, a large mudslide rushed down a Colorado mountain near the town of Collbran covering an area three miles long and one-half to three-quarters of a mile wide. It claimed the lives of three ranchers, caused a small earthquake and covered an area three miles long and one-half to three-quarters of a mile […]
Paul Barton, a 50 year old pianist fulfilled his dream, as he sat behind his piano just a few metres away from the gentle giants. He transported his piano up a mountain in Thailand – so he could play Beethoven for old, injured, and blind elephants. A lifelong dream “It was a 50th birthday present to myself, my […]
Chinese doctors have grafted a man’s hand onto his food in order to preserve it until they could transplant it back to its rightful place. If a body part becomes severed from the body, there is only a limited period of time before it can be reattached – usually just 2-3 hours. Adding some ice […]
We were telling you a while ago about NASA growing vegetables in space, on the International Space Station. So far, the project has been successful, and everything has worked out fine – so it’s harvest time! In this picture we see American astronaut, Steve Swanson, harvesting lettuce grown on board the ISS. “Expedition 40 commander, harvests […]
Do you still think that fish don’t feel pain? That we shouldn’t really care how we catch or treat them? If so, then you’re terribly wrong. In a new article published in Springer’s journal Animal Cognition, Associate Professor Culum Brown from Macquarie University concludes that not only do fish feel pain and are conscious of it, but […]
We’ve written about food addiction several times previously – it’s correlated with impulsive personality, it shares some similarities with drug addiction, and some people become addicted to junk food just by staring at it. But food addiction remained a very controversial aspect, with some scientists claiming that it simply doesn’t exist. Now, a study conducted […]
Recent swarms of tiny earthquakes inside Hawaii’s Mauna Loa signal that the volcano may be coming back to life. But don’t cancel your vacation plans just yet. Mauna Loa is one of five volcanoes that form the Island of Hawaii in the U.S. It is the largest subaerial volcano in both mass and volume, and […]
How do you act when you’re at a job interview? Do you just go and be yourself, showing your true qualities and defects, or is it all a role in which you say what the interviewer wants to hear? According to a new research, sadly, the latter may be the way to go more often […]
The new NASA-funded study showed that if the icy surface of Pluto’s giant moon Charon is cracked, analyzing the fractures could show if the interior was warm and perhaps warm enough to have maintained a subterranean ocean of liquid water. Pluto is the most distant planetoid (no longer a planet, sorry) in the solar system. […]
The former popular landscape was an expanse of warped shapes, out of which some were as tall as a Manhattan skyscraper, and it was discovered by an ice-penetration radar loaded aboard NASA survey flights. According to the scientists who made the discovery, this could deepen the level of understanding concerning the way in which the […]
There’s been a lot of discussion regarding the warm or cold blooded nature of dinosaurs. The traditional belief was that they were cold blooded, like today’s lizards, but an increasing amount of evidence indicated that they could regulate their body temperature, like today’s mammals. Now, a new metabolic study showed that the answer is somewhere […]
Today, Elon Must, the founder and owner of Tesla Motors announced that they were releasing all the patents they own, for free, for everyone to use. The release of over 200 patents was announced in style, through a blog entry called “All our patents are belong to you“. ” Yesterday, there was a wall of Tesla […]
A class of drugs currently used to treat leukemia has been found to have some severe side effects – positive ones, that is. The drug was found to drastically boosting immune responses against many different cancers, reports a new study. The drug class is referred to as p110´ inhibitors. Recently, it has been used with […]
Whenever you’re eating a fish or some other marine creature, think just for a moment that it may actually be worth more as a CO2 storing machine than a food. First of all, let’s just make this clear: we’re unsustainably eating fish. If we continue current trends, we’ll soon be facing a massive fish crisis, […]
When you think about ‘gamers’, pretty unpleasant stereotypes usually pop to mind. You’ll likely think about young kids without many friends, spending countless hours of the day and night in front of their computer, or perhaps 30 year old men still living in their parents basement or something. However, a new study has shown that […]
Infants exposed to more “real” conditions tend to be healthier than those overly protected. A new study has shown that newborns exposed to rodent and pet dander, roach allergens and a wide variety of household bacteria in the first year of life appear less likely to suffer from allergies, wheezing and asthma. If the child […]
A new research has shown that rats exhibit behaviors consistent with regret, a feeling once thought to be unique to humans. To measure the cognitive measure of regret, scientists developed a task that asked rats how long they were willing to wait for certain foods. Basically, they made them decide if they want to wait […]
What’s the most common mineral on Earth? Is it quartz, limestone? Maybe olivine? Well, if you take into consideration the entire planet, the most common mineral would be something known as silicate-perovskite – but now, that mineral finally has a name. On June 2, bridgmanite was approved as the formal name for silicate-perovskite – possibly of the Earth’s […]
The 65 year-old iconic Turing Test was passed for the very first time by a supercomputer program named Eugene Goostman. Eugene managed to convince 33% of the human judges that it too was human. The Turing Test The Turing test is a test of a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, […]
Electric vehicles started to rise in popularity, but we’re clearly not ready to make such a huge change at once, especially concerning the steady supply of energy that would have to come along with introducing them into massive production and consumption. Scientist Neville Mars has come with a great EV charging station which takes the form […]
A spacecraft from Earth is about to do something no other spacecraft has done before: take off, orbit a comet, and send a lander to it. The European Space Agency (ESA), NASA’s European counterpart has developed the Rosetta probe to hurl towards Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The mission is simple in principle, but the work behind it is […]
We’ve probably all experimented it: you don’t have anything useful or even fun to do, but you don’t want to go to bed just yet – so you just browse your computer or tablet for a few minutes… or hours. Now, researchers from the University of Utrech have come up with a scientific explanation for […]
When we think of CO2 emissions, we generally tend to think of air pollution and global warming; we tend to ignore the fact that a huge part of all the CO2 emissions is absorbed by the oceans, and the oceans are becoming more and more acidic. The process is just getting started, and it’s gonna […]
Every baby has a mother and a father, right? As in one of each. Well, that may change soon, according to a new UK report. In February, the FDA announced it was considering 3-parent embryos; while this would be an excellent way to stop some deadly diseases, it also raises many ethical questions, and the reaction (as […]
Astronomers operating the Hubble telescope have captured the most comprehensive (and most colorful) picture ever assembled of the evolving Universe. This was part of a study called the Ultraviolet Coverage of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (UVUDF) project. Prior to this study, there was a significant lack of data for astronomers. They knew a lot about the […]
A new study conducted by Dr Michael Kearney from the University of Melbourne explains that koalas actually hug trees to regulate their body temperature. This cute behaviour isn’t just a stage act, it’s quite important for koalas. In this study published in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters showed that when it gets really hot, the animals […]
Physicist Kip Thorne and astronomer Anna Zytkow proposed a new theoretical class of stars back in 1975, but it was only very recently that such an example of hybrid star was identified in the universe. The Thorne-Zytkow Objects (TZOs) are a combination between red supergiant and neutron stars, superficially looking like normal red supergiants, for […]
An international team of astronomers reported the discovery of two new planets orbiting a very old and nearby star to the Sun named Kapteyn’s star; one of the planets, Kapteyn b, is potentially habitable – it has the right size, and is at the right distance from its start to host liquid water. What makes it even […]
We’ve written quite a lot lately about the potential benefits of marijuana (and there are quite a lot), but we shouldn’t idealize it and ignore the downsides: a recent study has shown that marijuana use is associated with impaired sleep quality. It’s not the first time marijuana has been associated with lack of sleep quality. In […]
A rocky world weighing 17 more than the Earth was discovered, and because it’s not only way much bigger than the previously discovered ‘super-Earths’, but also all solids, the scientists called it ‘mega-Earth’. Until this recent discovery, scientists believed that a world of such dimensions would be physically impossible to form, because of the thickness […]
When I was a kid, I asked, like many others, how do bees know how to make their way back to the hive – and I was told they use the Sun for guidance. But I was lied! A new study has now finally solved my childhoold dilemma: while they do use the Sun as […]
The tropical rainforests of Central and South America aren’t threatened only by deforestation – they are also overrun by lianas, parasitic woody vines that clamber up trees and smother the forest canopy as they reach for sunlight. But the vines may actually help the trees in a way – scientists suspect they may in fact act as […]
Optimists make the most of life? A new study has shown that cynics are much more likely to develop dementia in later stages of life. Cynicism is an attitude of scornful or jaded negativity, especially a general distrust of the integrity or professed motives of others. Researchers from the University of Eastern Finland in Kuopio have conducted a […]
Researchers have erased and then reactivated memories in rats, profoundly impacting the animals’ reaction to past events. This is the first study ever to demonstrate the ability to selectively erase and then reactivate a memory by stimulating nerves in the brain at frequencies that strengthen synapses, the connection between neurons. The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless […]
The risk of possibly the most dangerous type of cancer out there, melanoma, is greatly increased by exposure to sun in early adulthood. According to a new study conducted on Caucasian women, five or more blistering sun burns may increase the risk of melanoma by 80 percent. “Our results suggest that sun exposures in both […]
A brilliant technology reaching its limits Carrying heavier spacecraft to Mars and then safely landing it at supersonic speeds in the Martian atmosphere is no easy feat – and NASA could use any bit of help they can get. NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility is playing an integral role in solving those problems with the Low Density Supersonic […]
Superhydrophobic surfaces are surfaces that not only don’t get wet, but they actually repel water. This is the so-called lotus effect, named after the superhydrophobic leaves of the lotus plant (as usually, nature’s been doing long before we have). We’ve written time and time again about the amazing achievements in the field of superhydrophobics – and […]
Lyme disease is a stealthy disease, which can be very dangerous, especially if misdiagnosed. It was only recognized officially 40 years ago, but now, a new amber research has shown that the bacteria causing it may have been around for over 15 million years – long before any human was walking on Earth. The study […]
A new study reports that almost 30 percent of the world’s population (2.1 billion people) is now obese or overweight. The highest proportion of overweight and obese people – 13% of the global total – live in the United States, a country which accounts for only 5% of the world’s population. Obesity rates have increased virtually […]
OK, we’ve heard of tornadoes plenty in the last years. As if that wasn’t enough, we’ve even seen water tornadoes and fire tornadoes, but mosquito tornadoes? It’s like the tornado version of Captain Planet… with mosquitoes. OK, spoiler alert: this is not actually a tornado – it’s a huge, vertical swarm of insects, so maybe even […]
When people think of teleportation, inevitably a Star Trek reference like “beam me up, Scotty’ comes to mind. You’ve got to admit though, it’s a really cool idea – how many times did you think about instantly traveling to some place distant? I used to wish for teleportation every single day of my life when […]
OK, wasps are nothing to joke around with. They are the scumbags of the animal kingdom – they’re always up to no good. The thing is, they’re really good at being up to no good! After all, they used to grow in dinosaur feces, and they’ve been around for over 100 million years – more […]
