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If you did intermediate math in school, then you’ll most likely remember how to split numbers into prime factors; basically, any number can be written out by multiplying prime factors. Now, a group of researchers from UC Santa Barbara has designed and fabricated a quantum processor capable of factoring a composite number. Don’t get overexcited […]
Huge leaps in research within the field of genetics have enabled fetal DNA sequencing from maternal blood. This has made it possible to determine whether the unborn baby is suffering from any autoimmune conditions or chromosomal abnormalities such as Down’s syndrome, Turner’s syndrome or Neural tube defects such as Spina Bifida. Up until the recent […]
Was there an interaction between Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis – better known as Neanderthals? It is a long-standing question that has had scientists baffled for years. Only months ago scientists reported that there was a definitive genetic connection between modern humans and Neanderthals of the past. However, there are now studies showing that perhaps […]
After UAVs inspired by hawks, robotic stability control spun from leaping lizards, wall climbing derived from geckos or the swimming artificial jellyfish made from rat cells, in yet another remarkable feat of robotics which draws inspiration from nature scientists at Harvard University have created a robot which mixes the blending capabilities of a squid with the locomotion […]
In an archeological dig in the Danish bog Alken Enge wetlands lies the remains of an army long dead. There scientists recently uncovered hundreds of skeletons, some presenting clear evidence of a violent death, along with a slew of shields, armors, spears or axes. Researchers are still trying to determine the soldiers’ identities, places of origin, […]
Not one, but two independent high-energy particle physics laboratories in New York (Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider – RHIC) and Geneva ( Large Hadron Collider – LHC) have managed to create quark-gluon plasma after smashing particles into another at very high speeds. The resulting plasma, which only lasted for a fraction of a moment, is the hottest […]
Spintronics, or spin transport electronics, is a sort of emerging technology that scientists have been studying for a while in an attempt to leverage the encoding posibilities in an electron’s spin, in addition to its electrical charge. Recently, researchers at IBM Zurich have made a huge leap forward in turning spintronics into a viable technology […]
During the Neolithic period, man made the big jump from hunter-gatherer to farmer and agriculturalist, eventually moving on to larger and larger settlements, with a variety of animals and plants. The transition also brought significant changes in terms of economy, architecture, and apparently, woodworking. Dr. Ran Barkai of Tel Aviv University‘s Department of Archaeology and […]
Dr. Jay Bradner, a physician and chemical biologist at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, makes beating cancer sound easy – darn easy! Through the wonderful information that epigenetics science has delivered in the past decade, he believes cancer can be defeated simply by re-writing its genetic information such that it forgets that it’s a cancer, and […]
Researchers have found evidence that the crater in case was formed when the ground was slammed by a massive meteorite, millions of years ago. Prince Albert crater Measuring about 25 kilometers across, Prince Albert crater was named after the peninsula in which it was discovered. Researchers never were really sure when it was formed, the […]
Would you eat shark fin soup? Please, tell me that the answer is ‘NO!’. Nearly a third of all shark species are endangered, due to wreckless killing – mostly for soup. Proceed at will, but the article contains some gruesome pictures. The champions’s tragedy Sharks are on top of the food chain – they have […]
Our family tree may be much more complex than we know – it may have sprouted some long lost branches which go back some 2 million years. A messy family tree A team led by Meave Leakey, daughter-in-law of distinguished scientist Louis Leakey found facial and jaw bones from three specimens that led them to […]
Hope you’re all not too bored by the influx of Curiosity we’ve been feeding these past few days. We believe this to be one of the most significant scientific events of the year, topped maybe just by the discovery of the Higgs boson, and as such the rover’s landing on martian soil deserves at least […]
Your eyes don’t just tell someone you’re lying. They now can tell others your sexual orientation. A new study by Ritch Savin-Williams, a researcher who works at Cornell University as a developmental psychologist, shows that your eyes could give away your sexual orientation through pupil dilation. Pupil dilation is a tell-tale sign of sexual orientation […]
It seems we keep finding out more and more interesting facts about dolphins, the fantastic creatures highlighting a not-so-pleasant but rather human behavior: much like sassy highschool girls, dolphins hang out in cliques. Discriminating dolphins Dolphins have figured out how to use sea sponges as hunting tools – which is an absolutely remarkable feat in […]
Someone whose been driving for 20 years, let’s say, in the United States and somehow ends up driving a car in the UK will be in a lot of trouble. Going from right side driving to left side driving, or vice versa, will bewilder just about anyone, and if you’ve gone through such an experience […]
Just grin and bear it – we’ve all heard it at one point or another in our lives, and we’ve probably hated hearing it. But could there be some real scientific fact behind this piece of advice? Can smiling actually help you feel better? Smile psychology In a study forthcoming in Psychological Science, a journal […]
Heartened by a glimpse of what may have been the Higgs boson, researchers at the CERN physics lab continue to smash particles in a quest to understand how the Universe works at a submolecular level, why do particles have mass, and many other such cosmic riddles. But rather than the end of the line, the […]
New, more precise carbon dating of artifacts found in South Africa, such as poison-tipped arrows or ostrich eggs, have been found to be 44,000-year-old. The technology and social behavior at play suggest that modern human culture in the area may have emerged some 20,000 years earlier than previously thought and supports the theory that all modern […]
A colossal sculpture, both in physical and artistic terms, was unearthed by archaeologists at the Tayinat Archaeological Project (TAP) excavation site in southeastern Turkey. Aside from this new treasure, they also found a large semi-circular column base, ornately decorated on one side. The pieces are part of a monumental gate complex from the upper citadel […]
Scientists at the University of Texas at Austin, in collaboration with colleagues in Taiwan and China, have developed what’s considered to be the world’s smallest laser; a device so tiny, that it’s invisible to the naked eye. The laser is heralded as a breakthrough in the emerging photonic technology with applications from computing to medicine. […]
It seems scientists have yet to draw the line on where graphene, man’s greatest material ever discovered, ceases to amazes with its new abilities, since apparently new properties and uses for the carbon allotrope are found constantly. Most of the contributions come from University of Manchester, where the material has been recognized for its true history-shaping […]
Planetary scientist Kelsi Singer initially studied satellite photographs of Saturn’s icy moon Iapetus’ surface looking for stress fractures in the moon’s ice, what she found in process however was far more interesting. Huge landslides, stretching across tens of miles across the moon’s surface were observed, not in one, but multiple locations, hinting this is a common phenomenon […]
Alright, the analogy might not be the best. The Large Hadron Collider is a high energy particle accelerator, while the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer is a state of the art particle detector, which traps high-energy charged particles called cosmic rays and analyzes them. You see, the AMS can practically perform the same functions as the LHC, only the high […]
Researchers have discovered what they believe to be a grandfather of snakes, which descended from terrestrial rather than marine ancestors. “It’s the missing-link snake between snakes and lizards,” says Nicholas Longrich, a postdoctoral fellow in the geology and geophysics department at Yale University and the lead author of a paper published in the journal Nature. […]
When you first see this magnificent painting by Ukranian painter Oleg Shuplyak, your brain perceives the portrait of the famous Beatles frontman John Lenon. However, on a closer look, one will immediately notice that the portrait is actually made out of a sum of parts – a table and a troubadour make for the mouth, two men […]
Deep in the dense Guatemalan jungle, archaeologists have come across a veritable jewel of their trade. An 1600-year old Mayan temple, almost in mint condition, going by the of name Temple of the Night Sun, beautifully or frighting decorated, as you prefer, with giant masks of the Maya sun god. The find was made at the El Zotz […]
You just got out of the office, looking to head home to a soothing dinner, only to find that it’s raining cats and dogs outside – and you forgot your umbrella of course. Do you walk or run to your car to stay as dry as possible? It might sound trivial, but this is a […]
A team led by researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and Harvard University have built this remarkable display of modern bioengineering – a completely engineered jellyfish that blends both living and non-living parts, masterfully fitted together. Called the medusoid, this cyborg jellyfish was created using silicone and muscle cells from a rat’s heart, […]
Scientists from U.S., Britain and Denmark have recently reported in a new study that conclusive evidence, in the form of stone tools and human DNA, attests the presence of a second stone age culture in North America, separate from the Clovis culture, the earliest human society discovered and confirmed thus far. The findings were made […]
Graphene is one of the most phenomenal materials discovered in science. It’s so thin, it can be molded into sheets just 1 atom thick, yet despite this, it’s so strong that you can actually pick it up. It has the highest current density (a million times that of copper) at room temperature, the highest intrinsic mobility […]
This week, rumors surrounding the imminent discovery of the Higgs boson actually came through, after CERN scientists officially announced during a press conference that, indeed, they have finally come at the end of their long and arduous search for the elusive God particle. The whole event has been heralded as a historical milestone, as the Higgs boson was one of the unproven, key […]
Researchers have analyzed the DNA from 7,000-year-old bones of two cavemen unearthed in Spain, and have managed to sequence fragments of their genomes, making them the oldest modern human specimens ever found thus far. Ironically, the researchers found that the cavemen bear little genetic resemblance to people living in the region today, instead sharing ancestry with current populations […]
In today’s fast evolving world of tech, miniaturization is crucial. In most portable consumer electronics goods, like smartphones or tablets, the typical lithium-ion battery takes up quite its share of space, impending further sensible miniaturization of design. A new technique developed by scientists at Rice University might, however, render battery volume to a minimum, following the advent of a […]
Last year, we reported on this incredible study from NASA scientists, where the possibility of a vast ocean of water beneath the surface of Titan, one of Saturn’s moon, was discussed. The study was in its incipient form, and now researchers have released a new report in which they conclude it’s very much likely that a huge […]
In a fantastic discovery, a team of Chinese and US archaeologists have come across fragments belonging to a 20,000 year-old bowl in modern day China, confirmed as the earliest evidence of pottery. The findings push back the invention of pottery by 10,000 years and suggest that human were more socially advanced than previously thought. The pottery fragments […]
Not even the quickest pistol drawer from the wild west could have ever stand a chance against the Janken robotic hand at rock-paper-scissors, the favorite game for settling who needs to get out and buy beer. Developed by Ishikawa Oku Laboratory at the University of Tokyo, the Janken robot, which is the name of the game […]
That’s right. Scientists have found that one of our early ancestors, the Australopithecus sediba, South African species from two million years ago, used to have an unique diet of forest fruits and other woodland plants. Basically, all the other hominids, we currently know of, focused more on grasses and sedges. This makes A. sediba a truly […]
You’re not the only that doesn’t like math, it seems. A new study from scientists at Bristol’s School of Biological Sciences found that biologists pay less attention to theories that are dense with mathematical detail. The scientists involved in the study compared citation data with the number of equations per page in more than 600 evolutionary biology papers […]
A talented team of students from the University of Maryland’s Clark School of Engineering has set a new record for the longest flight time for a human-powered helicopter. The helicopter in question, called “Gamera II”, after the flying monster turtle of Japanese films and the university’s terrapin mascot, was devised and built by the students themselves. First thing that […]
In an extraordinary feat of science, Japanese scientists have used induced stem cells to grow into a liver-like tissue in a dish. The researchers have a long way ahead of them before they can grow livers safe for human transplants, which is the main goal, however even at its current stage, the tissue grown by the […]
Scientists at MIT, Brown University, and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center may have come across an incredible discovery, after data from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), a spacecraft which orbits the Moon from pole to pole, suggests water ice might be present inside a massive crater, called the Shackleton crater. The researchers used the spacecraft’s laser altimeter to illuminate the crater’s interior with […]
The Higgs boson or the God particle, as it’s also been commonly referred to, is a hypothetical particle that endows other elementary particles with mass. Confirming its existence is of crucial importance to physicists at the moment, otherwise scientists would be forced to rethink another method of imputing mass to particles. Last year, scientists at CERN registered a hint; […]
Today, only 10% of the currently published scientific papers are open access; freely available to the public online in their entirety. A recently published report commissioned by the UK’s Minister of Science encourages scientists to publish their works in open access journal and claims the benefits of an open access system outweigh the downsides. The […]
The Standard Model of Physics is currently the accepted model which describes how sub-atomic particles behave and interact in the Universe. A recent analysis of data gathered by a decade-long experiment at the US Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, shows a certain particle decay happening at a pace far exceeding that predicted by […]
Hand stencils, red dots and animal figures currently represent the oldest examples yet found so far in cave art in Europe; using a new, improved technique, researchers have dated the walls at 11 Spanish locations, including the World Heritage sites of Altamira, El Castillo and Tito Bustillo, and found that one motif, a faint red […]
As it turns out, no one single factor was powerful enough to wipe out the woolly mammoth – instead, a sum of factors acted towards their demise, much like many animals are threatened today. Woolly mammoths roamed the globe for 250.000 years, wandering from North America to Europe to Asia, until they were driven extinct […]
Be it a bacteria or a fully complex being, say a human, all living, biological organisms undergo lighting fast protein structure reassembly in response to environmnetal stimuli. For instance, receptor proteins in the sinus are stimulated by various odor molecules, basically telling the organism that there’s food nearby or it’s in the vicinity of danger (sulphur, methane, […]
Hidden for more than 100 years for being too ‘graphic’, a set of images depicting ‘hooligan behaviors, including sexual coercion’, sodomy and necrophilia by Adelie penguins observed during captain Scott’s 1910 expedition were revealed, analyzed and interpreted. George Levick, a surgeon and the medical officer on Scott’s famous 1910-1913 expedition to the South Pole, called […]
This time last year, the whole scientific community was faced with one of the most controversial findings in recent history – namely, that neutrinos could travel at a speed greater than the speed of light, fact which would directly contravene with Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity and, in consequence, force scientists to rethink the fundamental laws that […]
