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After James Cameron, the director of movies such as Titanic and Avatar, became the first man to perform a solo voyage to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, the deepest point on Earth, another Hollywood director is set for an astonishing feat; but Steven Spielberg won’t be hitting rock bottom – instead, he will be […]
The most complex object on Earth is the human brain. However, even though it’s intertwined by billions of nerve fibers almost in a chaotic fashion, scientists who have used sophisticated mathematical analysis of advanced imaging data found that the neural pathways that carry electrical signals through the brain are arranged in a very simple manner, resembling […]
Boston Dynamics is at the forefront of robotic research and development at the moment, fact very easily attested just by checking out a few of their amazing robots developed during the past year alone, like the cheetah-bot which broke the robot land speed record, the gecko-like bot which can climb walls effortlessly or the terrifyingly […]
Billions of years ago, the Earth was unrecognizable from the life supporting paradise it is today. Fossilized raindrops from some 2.7 billion years ago, conserved in time as rain dropped onto volcanic ash during an eruption, which eventually solidified into rock known as tuff, has revealed some very interesting facts about Earth’s ancient atmosphere. The discovery […]
Africa proves yet again that it’s the cradle of the hominid family, and in consequence the human species. Scientists have found foot fossils in Ethiopia that don’t match those of any kind of hominid discovered thus far, dating from 3.4 million years ago, making the specimen contemporary with Lucy, an Australopithecus afarensis specimen, of vast […]
Scientists at MIT and Harvard University teamed up to figure out what would be the simplest 3-D structure capable of collapsing and morphing due to instability. Their inspiration came after the scientists came across a popular toy, spherical in shape and fitted with movable parts and hinges, which allows it to easily dimple in size […]
Astronomers at Nottingham Trent University have presented evidence that a 4000-year-old stone monolith, located at Gardom’s Edge less than an hour’s drive from Manchester, was used by Neolithic locals at the time as an astronomical marker. The monolith is 7.2-foot tall (2.2-meter), triangular in shape, angles up toward geographic south, and features packing stones arranged around […]
Cloaking has turned into a subject of great interest for scientists in the past decade, most likely because of its military potential. We’ve seen some exciting prototypes developed, from optical invisibility cloaks to temporal cloaks, and now French scientists at the University of Aix-Marseille have added a new member to the cloaking family, one that renders […]
Hailed as yet another big step towards devising working quantum computers, scientists at Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB) have successfully managed to generate quantum qubits inside a semiconductor for the first time, instead of vacuum. A qubit is the quantum analog of a bit. While a bit must be read either as a 0 or 1, the qubit can […]
The Moon has fascinated researchers and poets alike since ancient times, but while the latter all agree on its beauty, scientists are still debating how the satellite was formed; recently, a new isotopic analysis seems to shed some new light on the matter, making things even more interesting than they were before. Most believe that […]
The small yet pleasant city of Bugarach in southwest France is flooded with tourists, but the thing is most of them are preoccupied by UFOs instead of the local countryside. The town located near the Pic of Bugarach mountain which has no more than 200 inhabitants is getting more and more spotlight from doomsday visitors […]
When the brain deems an experience meaningful enough, it will transfer that information from short-term storage, where typically information like where you put your car keys or the phone number of a person you just met gets stored temporarily, to your long-term memory, offering the possibility to be accessed at a later time. Neurologists claim […]
Researchers at MIT have developed a new revolutionary technique, in which they re-purposed the trillion frames/second camera we told you about a while ago, and used it to capture 3-D images of a wooden figurine and of foam cutouts outside of the camera’s line of sight. Essentially, the camera could see around corners, by transmitting […]
After a three year effort, researchers at Virginia Tech have successfully managed to create a silicone robot that functions underwater by mimicking the motion of a jellyfish. The robot can propel itself thanks to the heat-producing reactions catalyzed by its surface, and since it uses hydrogen and oxygen found in the water as fuel, the Robojelly can theoretically […]
The now retired Concorde turbojets were the fastest civilian airliners in the world, capable of carrying passengers from Paris to New York in just 3.5 hours, traveling at supersonic speeds. However, lack of market appeal, combined with high maintenance costs, lead to its regrettable retirement from service with no civilian airliner to replace it, not even to […]
Since it was first discovered more than four hundred years ago by Galileo Galilei, Jupiter’s innermost moon Io has played an important part in the development of astronomy. Still with secrets to be revealed, a team of US scientists have recently formulated the first complete global geologic map of Jupiter’s satellite. The moon of Io is […]
One of the biggest anthropological mysteries scientists have been trying to unravel is the long put question of how did humans develop bipedal movement. There have been many theories formulated hypothesizing why our ancestors eventually switched from four limbs walking to two – some appealing, some a bit too far the edge. A recent study […]
Researchers at Yale University have successfully mange to utilize a novel MRI technique to 3-D image the insides of hard and soft solids, like bone and tissue, opening the way for a new array of applications, like previously difficult to image dense objects. Typically, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) can produce a 3-D image of an object […]
All 80.000 items from Albert Einstein’s archives, including a huge number of manuscripts, personal correspondence with several lovers and a touching letter to his ailing mother are going to be published online. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which currently owns the Einstein collection is currently uploading high-res pictures of his scientific works, letters on social […]
Ancient human settlements have changed the landscape around where they live in such a way that today, 8000 years later, archaeologists can tell if an area was inhabited – using little more than images taken from a satellite. Deep in the Middle East, beyond the impressive mounds of Earth which marked the bigger, known cities […]
We’ve reported in the past about the frightening, ever growing cases of honeybee population dye-offs of the past few years, and while no immediate or long term plan has been effective thus far, it seems at least that scientists are identifying the causes. It’s been known for some time that some classes of pesticides are […]
If you think today’s urban air, thickened with noxious smog, is terrible, just imagine how the Earth was filled in a shroud of hydrocarbons some 2.5 billion years ago. Back then, a haze dominated by methane engulfed the atmosphere such that light could barely reach the ground, similarly to what can be seen today on […]
The amazing properties of graphene are being put to use more and more, as Evan Reed and Mitchell Ong from the Stanford School of Engineering have described a new way of engineering piezoelectrics into graphene. The study was published in the ACS Nano Journal. When you apply a mechanical stress to certain materials, such as […]
Last September the whole scientific community was set ablaze by a the controversial claim set forth by CERN scientists, part of the OPERA experiment, in which they announced that they had measured neutrinos traveling at a velocity faster than the speed of light – 60 nanoseconds faster to be more exact. The implications of this […]
General Motors has always invested in technology which goes beyond the automotive applications for which the company is primarily known, a philosophy which I find most praise worthy, and teaming up with NASA is sure to always output performance. The latest to result from their partnership is the K-glove, a robotic glove designed to aid […]
An incredible find was publicized just earlier – fossils remains from stone age people were unearthed from two caves in China. Upon further inspection it was found that the bone features, particularly skulls, were unlike any other human or early ancestor remains ever found, suggesting that the researchers may have actually found a new species […]
Yeah, that’s right, you read the title correctly; a group of French researchers believe they can steer lightning with lasers; sorry, but I just feel a need to repeat that: steer lightning with lasers! Basically, the system works by creating a ‘virtual lightning rod’, causing lightning to strike in the same place over and over […]
In a landmark liftoff, the first privately owned spaceship which can carry passengers will head for a test flight beyond the atmosphere this year – and over 500 people have reserved seats already. More and more companies are starting to look at space tourism as a reliable source of income, and another company has just […]
The Cambrian era marked a profound change on life on Earth, sparking the rapid development of complex organisms and a diversification of the ecosystem, thus the term “Cambrian explosion“. Prior to this period, animals were simple and small, as well as soft bodied, with no hard parts to display. A team of paleontologists at University […]
The human brain is wired to see all kinds of patterns in various shapes. The most common one is that of the human face, most often encountered in our day to day lives, be it in the coffee, a fire hidrant or a cut off potato (I saw Jesus!). The moon makes no exception either. […]
Paleontologists have recently named two new horned dinosaur species, closely related to the famous Triceratops, which were dug up from a site in Alberta, Canada some time ago. Dubbed Unescopceratops koppelhusae and Gryphoceratops morrisoni, the dinosaurs are extremely tiny, as far as plant eating dinosaurs dating back from the late Cretaceous go, and belong to the Leptoceratopsidae family of […]
A team of researchers at Vienna University of Technology constructed various nanoscale models of incredible precision (St. Stephen’s Cathedral, London’s Tower Bridge or a F1 race car), using a technique called two-photon lithography. The device which the researchers used for their high precision 3D printing is an order of magnitude faster than others such similar, and opens a […]
Atomic clocks are the current most accurate time and frequency standards, capable of operating with an uncertity of only a second in millions of years. A new research currently in the work by scientist from the University of New South Wales seeks to track time with an unprecedented accuracy of a mere 20th a second in […]
A group of researchers at MIT have successfully managed to create a light emitting diode (LED) that has an electrical efficiency greater than 100%. This might sound preposterous, and against everything you learned in physics, however the system is still governed by fundamental laws of thermodynamics. This extraordinary power conversion efficiency was obtained by a […]
Once flames brake loose, the close confinements of ships or subs suddenly transform into a hellish scene, claiming the lives of countless sailor. The U.S. Navy seeks to counter this deadly hazard by employing a mechanical firefighter among its ranks. Sophisticated, robust, and dexterous, this is a highly exciting project. Developed by the Naval Research Laboratory, the […]
In what’s arguable the most important physics discovery ever to come out of China, and a perfect example of “by the book” international collaborative effort, researchers report they’ve successfully identified the last piece of missing information needed to describe the mysterious neutrino oscillation. For a long time, scientists have been trying to discover how neutrinos […]
A Romanian scientist working at the University of Ohio captured the first-ever images of atoms moving within a molecule by applying a novel technique which basically turns the electrons of a molecule into flashbulbs; while this is currently only a new way to visualize molecules, researchers believe that one day it will be the key […]
Symbiosis is an absolutely fantastic adaptation in itself, but this case of deep sea symbiosis takes it to a whole new level: basically, a hermit crab uses an anemone as shell; scientists discovered this in a rare place, where to different extreme environments meet. Researchers discovered a junction of two strange environments off the coast […]
Since they were first introduced more than 70 years ago, electron microscopes have aided researchers from a diverse array of fields of science reach some of the world’s greatest scientific breakthroughs – most often they’ve been considered indispensable. They’ve well reached their limits, however, and University of Sheffield researchers sought to find an alternate route for sub-atomic imaging. […]
The biggest manhunt in physics history is steadily closing in on its target. Wanted – Higgs boson, also known as the God Particle. Reason – explain why objects have mass and provide “missing link” for standard model of physics. Sketch portrait – mass around 125 GeV. Last seen – Fermilab Tevatron particle accelerator. If you […]
Trees employ a fractal structure of branches to twigs to spread a wide array of leaves for maximized sunlight collection. Similarly, chemists at University of California, Davis developed a set of microscopic “trees” made out of silver, which the researchers claim might well form the basis for a new range of highly efficient solar cells […]
Paleontologists claim to have tracked the origins of humans and other vertebrates to a worm that swam in today’s Canada. The team concluded that the extinct Pikaia gracilens is the most primitive known member of the chordate family. The chordate family includes fish, amphibians, birds, reptiles and mammals – pretty much all of what we […]
Scientists at University of California have successfully managed to engineer a new kind of hydrogels, capable of self-healing, which can bind to each other in acidic conditions within seconds, forming a strong bond that allows for repeated streathching, similar to organic tissue, like the human skin. Hydrogels are made out of a network of hydrophilic […]
Since the start of the year, I’ve received quite a few questions regarding absolute temperatures – highest and lowest, so I decided to start a brief discussion around the two values, in which I will give the basic facts about them, so feel free to step in and add more info or questions. Absolute zero […]
Are you fed up with meaningless, rambling conference speakers? All too tired of phone calls around you at work? Wish there was a mute button for your girlfriend? Finally, all your prayers have been answered! Presenting the ultimate silencer, the speech-jamming gun. Japanese scientists, Kazutaka Kurihara at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and […]
Xinwei Wang, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Iowa State studies thermal conductivity – and he had a funny feeling about spiders; so he ordered eight spiders — Nephila clavipes, golden silk orbweavers — and put them to work eating crickets and spinning webs in the cages he set up. Wang has been looking for organic […]
Ground robots are currently typically deployed by the US military in various explosive-ordinance-disposal missions. However, robots are currently unable to fulfill their potential across a greater range of missions mostly due to issues regarding mobility and manipulation. However, DARPA is trying hard to face those obstacles, and when they team up with Boston Dynamics, you […]
It’s been less than a month since we published the last thing about the Cassini probe, and the amazing spacecraft has done it again; this time it detected a thin, oxygen atmosphere, on a moon of Saturn – Dione. The study was published in the Geophysical Research Letters At 1122 km in diameter, Dione is […]
This year’s TED conference (Technology, Entertainment, Design) recently took place in Long Beach, California, and as expect, the event was filled with a slew of amazing speakers, each with an idea definitely worth spreading. One presentation, however, particularly blew my mind, namely that of roboticist Vijay Kumar, who along with colleagues from University of Pennsylvania’s General Robotics, Automation, Sensing […]
During man’s exploits through out history, a great number of species were driven to extinction, either by excessive hunting, habitat destruction, disease or pest introductions and so on. There are currently around 11,000 animal species listed as endangered, and the list is getting ever thicker each day. During the past few decades, as awareness to […]
