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Scientists from North Carolina State University have successfully managed to engineer a new kind of soft, malleable memory device that can function like a memristor, while at the same time retaining the physical properties of your plain old, delicious Jell-O. Due to its consistancy, the device might find itself ideally suited for wet environments, where […]
The world bee population is at its greatest trial in years, as thousands of bee populations die off each year. Scientists are trying to salvage what’s left or even possibly enforce the current bees left by breeding a new pest resistant, cold impervious superbees. Beekeepers around the world have reported on their lowest honey crops […]
In the first ever-survey of its kind, geologists have managed to discover a chain of massive underwater volcanoes, some as tall as 2 miles, underneath the Antarctic waters near the South Sandwich Islands in the remote Atlantic Ocean. The South Sandwich Islands have always been known for their evident volcanic activity, ever since their discovery […]
Dubbed MBE, after the intricate molecular beam epitaxy process, this device developed by scientists at Sharp Laboratories in Oxford, England, can actually grow electrical components at a dazzling precision atom by atom. This is where razor sharp technology is at, as far as manufacturing goes, and this monstrous-looking device is capable of transferring atoms from […]
A recently published remarkable study describes how scientists from Japan have successfully manage to grow teeth inside a lab using mice stem cells. Takashi Tsuji from Tokyo University of Science and his team managed to achieve this after extracting stem cells from the molars of mice. They then transported these cells to the lab where […]
There were a lot of crazy exhibits on display at this year’s Robotech 2011, and one of the most impressive stands was that of Professor Hideyuki Sawada from Kagawa University in Japan who showed off an bizarre looking artificial mouth designed to look and function as close as possible to the real thing. With this […]
Paleontologists have unearthed in Montana the fossilized bone of a the last known dinosaur so far, dating back from 65.5 million years ago. The finding carries a big weight in supporting the currently leading asteroid impact dinosaur extinction theory. What paleontologists found was actually the horn of a thought to be triceratops in a sediment […]
New York to Paris – 8 hours. Who in their right minds would’ve thought 100 years ago that you could span more than 3600 miles in this kind of time span? Aviation has changed the way we view time and distances forever, and consequently the world is a much smaller place now. Humans aren’t the […]
A bit late on reporting this, but I’m still struck with amazement by this extremely peculiar case of precipitations. Last week a cold wave hit Chile and surroundings, including the Atacama desert, known to be the driest place on Earth, covering it in snow. In this area less than 50mm of rain on average is […]
Seriously, what the heck?
At 300,000 kilometers/second, the speed of light is constant in vacuum, such as space, when it encounters a different medium, however, such as glass or water, its speed is reduced. Another phenomena that can occur in addition is that light can be dragged when it travels through a moving substance, and scientists at University of […]
Using a new X-raying technique and device, based on synchrotron radiation, scientists have been able to map the pigmentation of creatures dead for million of years just by reading the traces metals in fossils left. “Every once in a while we are lucky enough to discover something new, something that nobody has ever seen before,” […]
Seiji Uchida is 49 years old and for the past 28 years he’s been left paralyzed from the waist down and to one of his arms after a dreadful car accident. He’s never lost hope of walking on his own two feet ever since, though, and now thanks to the marvels of Japanese robotics, his […]
On display at one of the featured stands at this year’s Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition is a pair of special glasses developed by scientists at Oxford University, which mixes technology already developed by gaming and smartphone manufacturers, and allows people with next to none vision orientate. ‘We want to be able to enhance vision […]
Each year for three weeks, professional cyclists suffer at great lengths, enduring both physical and mental pain, in the Tour de Frace. Considering each day means around 100 miles on a bike, most of the time uphill, though mountains and so on, there aren’t any losers at the Tour de France. If you manage to […]
Long before humans were even thinking about developing the nut and bolt mechanism for screwing one thing to another, mother nature had it all planned and implemented, in this weevil from Papua which attaches their legs to their bodies instead of the old fashion ball-and-socket joint. Weevils in Papua Weevils are beetles from the Curculionoidea […]
Physics is still not sure what to make of antimatter; theoretically speaking, after the Big Bang, matter and antimatter were created in equal amounts. But if this is the case, then where is all the antimatter ? Matter vs antimatter An antiparticle has exactly the same mass as a particle, but a opposite electrical charge, […]
According to a new study by scientists from University College London, it seems people who find optical illusion solving easier are less inclined to think about the process and understand how they came to that decision. This conclusion came after further analysis of data from a research conducted last year, which showed people with more […]
As you probably (and should) know already, symbiosis is a close interaction (often long term) between different species, both of which have something to win from this deal. But symbiosis between animals and bacteria… that’s definitely something new. Marine sandy bottoms This kind of environment seems dead, desert-like and empty, but if you were to […]
For the 2012 panicked or just the doomsday memorabilia collectors, Kacey Wong‘s doomsday survival suit will definitely spark interest. The Hong Kong artist has designed the robot-shaped suit inspiring herself after the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster, with the idea of protecting people from radiation leaking from nuclear power stations. Mobile and equipped with glowing […]
Whether its filling the space between oranges in a box or squeezing molecules between cells, wasted storage space is a problem to which people, and especially companies, have been trying to find a solution for a long time. A recently published research might lead to dramatic improvements of storage capabilities and in the field of […]
This Monday (June 27), an asteroid the size of a bus just buzzed our planet after a flyby which brought it closer to Earth than most satellites. Dubbed asteroid 2011 MD, it was first spotted by MIT’s Lincoln Near Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) program just last week on June 22, but there never was any […]
It was 1893 when Orlando Ferguson, a real estate developer based in South Dakota combined religious beliefs with some scientific theories and a big chunk of creativity to create this square map of the stationary earth. The map was accompanied by a 92 page lecture delivered by Ferguson, who referred to himself as a professor, […]
Were dinosaurs slow and lazy, as you see most reptiles today, or active and quick like you see them in the movies? It pretty much depends on their body temperature – if they are cold blooded or not. The kingdom of T-Rex It seemed to be a no-brainer that dinosaurs are cold blooded, relying on […]
What if you could power regularly used consumer electronics, like for say a laptop, just by using them? It’s an incredible prospect, one which Australian scientists from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) hope to turn into reality in the near future. Harnessing the power of piezoelectric technology, researchers successfully embedded a piezoelectric thin […]
It’s a bird! It’s a plane! No, it’s super sand! *tadam Researchers from Rice University have managed to develop a new kind of filtering sand, dubbed “super sand”, which has five times the filtering properties of regular sand. The advancement could provide an indispensable, cost-effective solution for the current water crisis in developing countries where […]
Launched in 1997 on a mission to study Saturn and its satellites, the Casisni spacecraft reached the system in 2004. Since then it has provided numerous invaluable scientific findings regarding the second largest planet in our solar system, and other important scientific findings alike. One such finding was detailed in a recently published study, which […]
Ghastly nails on a blackboard or deafening sires don’t come any close to a infant’s whining as far as annoying sounds are concerned, according to a recent study from SUNY New Paltz. In a fairly simple approach, researchers asked study participants to solve various math problems while a background noise was playing. Six sounds were […]
A team of neuro-scientists have managed to restore lost memories to rats by activating a part of their brains through an artificial memory chip – just like a sort of neuro-prosthesis. Further advances backed by this study might lead to the development of important leaps in long-term memory treatment, providing relief for Alzheimer or dementia […]
Akkadian, or Assyro-Babylonian, is the oldest attested written language – the code for the cuneiform writing system. Texts written in Akkadian date back as early as 2800 BC, and although it hasn’t been spoken for well over two thousand years, the language can be considered invaluable to the unraveling of the first human civilizations from […]
When you first hear of the work done by Miguel Nicolelis and his team, though the “cool factor” is high, you might wonder as to the practical application. Miguel has spent the last number of years (and, in fact, most of his career) working to gives our primate cousins a third (robotic) arm. In his […]
According to a recently published study, computer processor chips made out of nano-scale magnets could yield an efficiency close to the limit imposed by physics. A 100% efficiency is impossible in practice, since any mechanical or electrical process requires more energy than it theoretically needs because of dissipation, be it heat (most of the time) […]
An Australian engineer boosts that he has successfully managed to build a working hover bike, one, he claims, that you could ride to 173 mph at 10,000 feet and feel like any other motorcycle. So far, however, Chris Malloy’s prototype hoverbike hasn’t done any of the aforementioned claims, aside from hovering a bit over ground, […]
When Google Earth was first released I was simply struck with amazement by the myriad of features the software was bundled with. I never imagined I could have my very own state of the art satellite imaging from the comfort of my armchair and notebook. This may be common enough now (meanwhile Google maps popularized […]
After a long period of research and debates 114 and 116 are now the heaviest elements in the periodic table, after being recently added by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) and the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP). How heavy? Well at 289 and 292 atomic mass, respectively, they’re […]
It always baffles me to see how science news propagate; it seems whenever a study or a report is published, there are two waves of acknowledgement: the first one, science sites and magazines write about it, and the second one, the supermassive one, where the media picks it up. This is exactly the case here. […]
Biological systems have recently attracted the attention of mathematicians and computer scientists, who have been turning everything from quantum processes to RNA into logic gates. But before you get paranoid about DNA controlling Skynet, you have to know that these systems have only been successful on a small scale, calculating square roots on four-bit numbers, […]
We are living epoch changing times – literally. According to an influential and evergrowing group of geologists, there are more and more signs that we are living in an epoch that is like no other in the history of the Earth, and therefore it is required that we acknowledge it as so – the Anthropocene. […]
Project Icarus is an extremely fascinating initiative which aims to bring humanity closer to the stars. The latest theory proposed by scientists there is related to the development of system which could allow the harvesting of helium-3 gas from Uranus to fuel a possible interstellar mission. Uranus, then, seems to be a very resourceful planet, […]
What can possibly link together speed, strength, and the colour red ? Nope, it’s not a brand new Ferrari – it’s your muscles ! A new groundbreaking study published in the journal Emotion shows that if you see red, your reactions become faster, more powerful, and you won’t even realize it. Science and sports Of […]
Worms are definitely a tough bunch; you may see them as soft and vulnerable, but they can resist in conditions that would make even Les Stroud go ‘wow’. For example, a new study concludes that worms can live in up to 0.8 miles (1.3 kilometers) down. The worms from hell They have been rightfully named […]
Topping this week’s absurd news by far, this is one of the most preposterous things I’ve read in all my life. Seven seismologists are charged with manslaughter after they failed to predict the 2009 L’Aquila that made 300 victims. Earthquake prediction and other fairytales At the moment, and in the forseeable future, it is impossible […]
Two years ago, NASA’s LCROSS probe was looking for signs of water when it smashed into Cabeus crater at the moon’s south pole. It turned out to be one of those incredible fail moments, since not only did researchers found there was water from the data transmitted back, but that the surface was actually wetter […]
Much like humans, monkeys too exhibit signs of regret, and they wonder themselves what might have been, according to a recent study published by researchers from Yale. The study, published in the Neuron journal, suggests that aside from regrets, monkeys often wonder about how different actions would lead to different outcomes; as researchers state, aside […]
While a 3D map of the Universe using the light from 14,000 quasars has been previously released to the public by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which is considered the largest map of the known Universe, another version has been recently unveiled which scientists claim to be the most complete map. Called the 2MASS Redshift […]
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) continues on its quest to find out exactly what happened in the first seconds after the Big Bang, unveiling what is the densest material known so far to man. Exotic densest substance Known as the quark-gluon plasma, this amazing exotic substance can exist only at incredibly high temperatures or pressures, […]
Graphene is probably the ‘substance of the century’, and it will probably be for us what plastics were in the 1900s. Now, a flower-like defect in the material that can occur during the fabrication process could have a significant effect on graphene’s already impressive mechanical, magnetic, and electrical properties. Amazing graphene Graphene is practically a […]
Anomalocaridids were extremely weird animals, by today’s standards; but by the standards of the Cambrian, they were the hot guys. They had a long spiny head, powerful limbs which were probably used to snag prey and a series of blade-like filaments in segments across the animal’s back, which could have functioned as gills. During the […]
While scanning underneath the waters of Lake Michigan for shipwrecks, archeologists found something a lot more interesting than they bargained for.
If you ask me, one of the most interesting things regarding animal evolution is sex; the animal kingdom has expanded sex to such heights, that it is often unbelievable the kind of things some animals do. Such is the case with the androgenetic clams of the genus Corbicula. Just males – and doing fine Most […]
