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Paleontologists have long believed that complex organic molecules couldn’t survive fossilization; but to contradict this long standing belief, some 350-million-year-old remains of aquatic sea creatures uncovered in Ohio, feature exactly that type of molecules. The animals i n case are called crinoids, but are probably better known today as “sea lilies”; they are absolutely […]
A new study by scientists at University of British Columbia and Université Paris Descartes found that babies growing up in bilingual environments are more than well equipped to tackle the challenge of distinguishing between the two from a very early age – as young as seven months old according to the findings. Scientists, linguistics and […]
Now, I’m not advocating alcohol consumption, but truth be told most of us take alcohol for granted, and I’m not referring to abusing either. Millions of years ago, our ancestors and primate relatives had a very poor ability of metabolizing ethanol — the alcohol in beer, wine and spirits — and were it not for their […]
A British academic has stumbled upon a 500 year old warrant for one of the most famed people in history: Niccolo Machiavelli. Prof Stephen Milner from Manchester University discovered the historic document almost by accident, as he was browsing through town criers and the proclamations in the Florence archives. The 1513 proclamation, which called for […]
A team of international researchers from US and China have employed a novel method to link enzymes together and then encapsulate them in a polymer shell. This enables the enzymes to work sequentially in chemical reactions, just like in nature. To illustrate their enzyme batch, a group of mice were intoxicated with alcohol and then injected […]
The weekend that has just passed was a tight one for asteroid news. At the center was of course the much raved about “2012 DA14” – the closest asteroid of this significant size to flyby Earth since recorded history – which actually speared passed Earth at an altitude of 27,700km, a few thousand kilometers below the […]
Most brain-machine prosthetic research today is focused on supplementing a missing sense, like medical devices that restore hearing or sight. In a novel research, however, scientists at Duke University Medical Center have literally granted rodents a sixth sense after they implanted them with an experimental prototype that allows rats to “touch” invisible infrared light. At first, six rats […]
While the world was asleep, a few days ago North Korea made its latest nuclear test, the third that we know of. This has prompted intense international pressure on the North Korean regime, as you might imagine, what’s interesting, rather frightening actually, is that seismic activity shows the nukes are getting ever bigger. Pyongyang said […]
Myth, wonder, mysticism these are just a few concepts that has entertained and has fascinated the human mind for thousands of years. Be it from boredom of life’s seemingly casual existence or drawn by aspirations of a higher self, many people have been, currently are and will be for a long time seduced by what […]
Researchers at University of Utah have recently demonstrated that it is indeed feasible to construct a topological insulator from organic compounds. Topological insulators are deemed very important by scientists because of their unique property of conducting electrons on their edges, while at the same time acting as an insulator on the inside. These capabilities make it […]
Highschool students whose friends have higher grades than them have a significant tendency to raise their own grades over the course of a year, a study conducted by Hiroki Sayama from Binghamton University and his collaborators from Maine-Endwell High School in Endwell, New York, including 4 high school students. Previous research had already shown that […]
Chances have it, if you’re working in the field of manufacturing, medicine, research or even sales, that some of your co-workers are robots. Which is no wonder, since robots today are a lot cheaper and efficient than most humans when simple or repetitive tasks are required, or on the contrary when high precision and delicate […]
Using 21st century nanotechnology, researchers have discovered a new mineral in samples from a meteorite discovered in Antarctica in 1969. The meteorite is 4.5 billion years old and originates from an asteroid orbiting between Mars and Jupiter. The new mineral has alluded scientists for some time since its discovery by a Japanese expedition team to Antarctica […]
MIT engineers have created genetic circuits in bacterial cells that not only perform logic functions, but also remember the results, encode them in the cell’s DNA and pass it on for generations to come. Biotechnology The circuits, which are described in Nature Biotechnology could have a swarm of appplications, most notably long-term environmental sensors, efficient […]
Researchers at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, have developed a three-legged silicon robot that uses chemical reactions to help it leap up to 30 times its own height. Combustion is typically used in hard systems like internal combustion engines where the heat generated by the chemical reaction can be withstood, but this latest demo proves that […]
The long debated idea of women and men being ‘just friends’ has been given a serious blow, as a new study suggests that men’s relationships with their female friends may be fuelled by an undercurrent of sexual attraction regardless of whether they are single or not; the feeling, however, is not mutual. University of Wisconsin […]
Obviously there has to be a limit to how much to a tree can grow, but what exactly influences and in term limits the height of a tree? For a long time researchers have noticed that the taller the tree, the shorter its leaves. Recently, a team of scientists found that there has to be […]
For years scientists have been studying the salmon migration path, which is one of the most fascinating, yet dangerous. Once it’s born in its freshwater breeding location, the salmon heads for salt water in the ocean, before it returns to its exact freshwater stream of birth in order to restart the process – a journey that lasts […]
It’s remarkable what astonishing finds archaeologists today still manage to discover. A few years ago, no less than 17 new pyramids were discovered in Egypt. Recently, in neighboring Sudan a most impressive site filled with densely packed pyramids was unearthed, proving once again that there are still many hidden relics left in the world. The find was […]
A new study has shown that children develop an interest in animals very early – toddlers toddlers prefer to look at an animal (even a snake or spider) than play with a pile of attractive toys. The paper was published by a team led by Vanessa LoBue from Rutgers University, and it investigates young children’s […]
It’s a big day for math wizzez around the world – the largest known prime number has just shot up: (257,885,161 – 1) breaks a four year dry spell in finding new prime numbers. Prime numbers are numbers that can only be divided by themselves and 1. Going up from 2, the prime numbers are […]
A massive earthquake struck Wednesday east of Kira Kira in the Solomon Islands, with several already confirmed victims and injuries. “At 12 minutes past midday, a 7.9 earthquake in the Santa Cruz Islands (near the Solomon Islands) occurred. A shallow event.” He said. “The nearest part from our location estimate is an island called Ndeni, […]
Stereo sensing is a highly important skill that most animals possess that creates a directional perspective. Not all senses are stereo, however, in some animals. For instance, humans have stereo vision and hearing, however no stereo smell – the latter being a trait that not too many animals possess. The common mole has been found […]
The Eurasian Jays are among the most intelligent birds studied thus far by biologists, belong to the corvids, a group of birds that also includes crows. The latter are especially gifted, as they’ve been observed making use of tools, associate faces with behavior and even recognize when a fellow crow has died. Quite crafty fellows. […]
Contrary to what you might think, this is not some rainbow slime dripping on the rocks – this is the wicked opal. Opal has quite some unique properties in the geological world; it doesn’t have a crystalline structure so you can’t really say that it’s a mineral, but a mineraloid, yet somehow you see it […]
Gold prospecting’s future may very well lie in a Petri dish – a species of bacterium forms nanoscale gold nuggets to help it to grow in toxic solutions of the precious metal, according to a new study published in Nature Chemical Biology. The bacteria could be used to collect gold from mine waste, says Frank […]
We’re only in the early days of 3-D printing, but even now the breakthroughs made using such technology are most impressive like the genuine possibility of printing spare parts in space for the ISS, creating objects of great details on the nanoscale or even artificial muscles made using a 3-D printer. What’s fabulous though is […]
A new carbon dating technique developed by Australian scientists may warrant a new extinction theory for the Neanderthals, which according to the researchers made their last stand some 50,000 years ago or 15,000 years earlier than previously thought. If this is indeed a fact, then our distant extinct relatives may have never interacted with modern […]
The (still debated) asteroid that slammed into the Earth 65 million years ago and played a crucial role in wiping dinosaurs out, may have actually been a binary system- 2 asteroids engaged in an orbit around each other. Double trouble The surprising claim comes from analyzing the proportion of asteroid craters on Earth that were […]
The remains of the legendary Richard III have been found beneath a Leicester car park – where else? DNA, carbon dating and the whole shebang showed, beyond reasonable doubt, that the remains belong to the king, explained lead archaeologist Richard Buckley, from the University of Leicester, so the finding I was telling you about a […]
Researchers at The Rockefeller University and Paris University 13 have been studying a peculiar, yet highly fascinating ant species called Cerapachys biroi. The scientists were startled to find that many ants who had stepped out of line and laid eggs at an improper timing were executed by other ants belonging to the same colony, in order to […]
Scientists at New York University have created a type of synthetic particles that can bind and assemble into clusters, similar to how flocks of birds or schools of fish organize themselves in complicated patterns. Self-assembling materials are far from being new, but what distinguishes this new research is that the particles eventually organize themselves in what […]
Dean Keith Simonton, a psychology professor at the University of California, has published a comment piece in the journal Nature, where he makes a rather shocking and disturbing claim: mankind will never produce a genius like Newton, Einstein or Darwin. He claims that this will happen because we’ve already discovered all the most basic […]
Ridges of Martian impact craters could be fossils of cracks in the Martian surface, formed by minerals deposited by flowing water, according to a new research. The findings, accepted for publication in Geophysical Research Letters, one of the most prestigious journals in the field, could explain a mysterious network of ridges that vein across the […]
They say that the bully is actually the victim – and studies on adolescent rats seem to support this idea; younger rats subjected to a stressful environment turn out to be aggressive adults, behaviors that may be explained by accompanying epigenetic changes and altered brain activity. Whoa, let’s slow down a little. Much like humans, […]
Birds may not be the smartest bunch out there, but man do they know how to navigate! Pigeons can get around towns and even continents with stunning accuracy – except for a particular spot in New York. Whenever homing pigeons were launched from that particular spot, they would always get lost. They could easily go […]
If you think intestinal parasites are a recent problem, you’d better think again. Ancient tapeworm eggs found in 270-million-year-old shark poop suggests these parasites may have plagued animals for much longer than previously believed. Tapeworm are nasty parasites that clink to the walls of the intestines of virtually all vertebrates (animals that have a backbone); […]
A facelift of the Colosseum brought to light centuries of markings and inscriptions on its walls, but archaeologists have little idea to what they mean. Removing the accumulated grime and calcification, experts discovered layers of inscriptions on the section of a wall depicted above, ancient designs in red and fade grey blended with black left […]
As of 2008, just about one in 100 people in the US is currently living in jail. This amounts to millions and millions of people currently incarcerated or roughly half of the total number of jailed people in the world. As to what are the social and legal causes that have lead to such an […]
For a few years now, Google has been developing what it claims to be the next generation in user interface, set to revolutionize the way to interact with the world. The project is called Google Glass and apart from a few incredible demos, these is still very little known about the product, apart from the […]
It’s a bird! No, it’s a plane! No, it’s… microbes ?! High up in the atmosphere, 10.000 meters above ground, researchers have found over 100 species of bacteria doing just fine in stormy clouds. Each year, hundreds of millions of tons of dust, water and man-maned pollutans make their way into the atmosphere, often traveling […]
A historic expedition that took over 10 years of planning and 3 years of preparation, a national effort from both researchers and students, finally concluded today. The team from Montana State University managed to drill into a lake that has been frozen for hundreds of thousands of years. After hauling equipment hundreds of miles across […]
Pound for pound, spider silk is one of the strongest materials in the world; it’s about five times stronger than a piano wire – and a piano wire has to put up with a lot of pressure. Researchers have long tried to develop materials which mimic the remarkable properties of spider silk, but only now […]
Samuel Yin, a Taiwanese businessman, has recently announced during a press conference in Taipei the founding of the Tang Prize, a foundation that aims to reward major achievements in the fields of science in a similar manner to the European Nobel Prize, only with bigger cash prizes, while also supporting research. With an estimated personal wealth […]
Scientists at Cornell University may have stumbled across the cornucopia gene for crops, after scientific investigations revealed that a certain gene allows some plants to photosynthesize 50% more efficient than most common plants, including crops like wheat or rice. The researchers hope through genetic manipulation that they may transfer this gene to crops, allowing for […]
I recently came across a map of the population density done in 1918, and I’d really like to share it with you, as well as discuss some aspects. Here it is: Also, here is a map of the population density now. At a first glance, they seem strikingly similar, the same yellow (low density) areas, […]
Dung beetles just climbed another ladder on the animal coolness scale – they are the only known species to navigate via the Milky Way. The tiny insects can orient themselves to the bright stripe of light generated by our galaxy, and move in a line relative to it, according to experiments conducted in South Africa. […]
A group of researchers at MIT have devised a new method for infiltrating cells with large molecules such as nanoparticles or proteins that is a lot more non-intrusive and doesn’t damage the cell. Imaging target cells or growing more stable stem cells might thus be possible with this method. Every cell has a membrane, which […]
Hydrogen is an extremely appealing energy source, despite the immense hurdles than come with storing it. Still fuel cells based on hydrogen are extremely useful, and a team of researchers at University at Buffalo may have found the fastest and most effective way of obtaining this element. Basically, it’s as easy as adding water. The scientists […]
A novel fabric primarily made out of cotton with a special polymer coating can absorb water from mist moisture during colder temperatures and automatically release it during warmer temperatures. This makes it an ideal solution for capturing water in places where every bit of it counts, like arid areas where night-day temperatures fluctuate from one […]
