gear Push settings
The effects alcohol has on our brain are still not perfectly understood, and the general opinion and even some studies are biased because… well, generally speaking, alcohol is bad for you, and we tend to forget that students drink, teachers drink, scientists and artists drink. But according to a study conducted by the Waggoner Center […]
Cyanide is nasty. I don’t care if you’re a venomous snake, an elephant or Charlie Sheen, cyanide is something you don’t want, which makes it an excellent defense mechanism. Lotus corniculatus, commonly known as the bird’s-foot trefoil, a plant common throughout Europe, Asia and Africa has evolved so that it’s leaves have a cyanide reservoir, […]
Yellowstone is without a doubt one of the most fascinating places on the face of the planet. But it doesn’t only attract families or people who want to relax, but it attracts scientists as well, and among them, geologists and geophysicists hold a top spot. University of Utah researchers made the first large-scale picture of […]
DNA nanotechnology is one of the most exciting branches of nanotechnologies, especially because it uses the ability of natural DNA strains to self assembly. Prof. Alexander Heckel and his doctoral student Thorsten Schmidt of Goethe University set out with exactly that thought in mind when they created two DNA rings with the size of only […]
I’m still left in awe after stumbling across this marvelous feat of engineering, which perfectly applies nature’s concepts to science and engineering technology. Seeing the SmartBird model in action immediately makes one imagine one of the world’s greatest minds Leonardo da Vinci on Florence’s hilltops studying and sketching the flight of birds for his aeronautical […]
On the 28th of March the Swift telescope observed a peculiar gamma-ray blast in a distant corner of the visible universe, some 3.8 billion light years away, bewildered astronomers around the world. The powerful blast is theoretically caused, scientists say, by a black hole located in the center of the distant galaxy whose gravity tore […]
In a recent act that just baffles my mind, Tennesee, not one of the US brightest states, has passed a bill that makes it easier for virtually any creationist teacher to include religion in science class. They did this by including mythology in science classes to promote critical thinking. Now I wonder, do you think […]
Big guns and big boats go well hand in hand most of the time, and the latest experimental weaponry unveiled by the US Navy, dubbed the Maritime Laser Demonstrator (MLD), will be sure to please any old sea dog. The diode-pumped solid-state high-energy laser weapon was developed by Northrop Grumman, and its capabilities were demonstrated […]
It’s not that uncommon for two stars to dance, but when three of them get together, and dance without singing, now that’s something uncommon. What do I mean ? Well, binary star systems are not really only in Star Wars, they’re quite common throughout the galaxy, but as it turns out, trinary systems might not […]
Volcanoes have fascinated human beings since the dawn of time; thankfully, now we know enough not to think of them as powerful earth/fire gods, but to understand them as the magnificent phenomena they are. However, there are still many things we still haven’t been able to figure out them, and even if we would have, […]
The number of elephant poaching in Africa has increased dramatically, as well as the Chinese demand for ivory, and according to most, this is not a coincidence at all. The growing demand for ivory in China, combined with the country’s growing influence on the dark continent work together and are leading to the tragic decline […]
The seismological events near Japan are far from reaching an equilibrium; a 7.4 or 7.5 earthquake on the Richter scale struck apan’s Miyagi Prefecture and its vicinity in northeastern Japan at 23:32 p.m. (1432 GMT) local Time Thursday, the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) said. The area is not so far away from the major 9.0, […]
Humanoid robots, affectionately called androids, have fascinated SciFi writers for generations now, leading to the creation of some of the most memorable characters in cinema, like Start Trek’s Data or Blade Runner, but as technology keeps progressing the line between reality and fiction seems to get ever thinner. It’s enough to check out the video […]
The LHC isn’t the only particle accelerator doing serious business these days; scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island working at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) have managed to achieve something that was previously thought to be impossible. In that way, the title is a bit misleading – you cannot really break a […]
According to a research conducted by anthropologists from Arizona State University, there seems to be a big increase in the general negative attitude people living in diverse societies have towards obese individuals. The study was made on 680 correspondents across 9 countries who were asked to agree or disagree with various statements expressed by scientists […]
Extraordinary enough, an ancient Greek tablet dating far as back as 1450-1350 BC was found last summer in an olive grove in what’s now the village of Iklaina, which makes it the oldest readable piece of writing found in Europe. The position and time frame of the artifact places it in the time of the […]
I was very surprised to see today’s Google doodle center piece occupied by an animated Bunsen burner experiment, familiar to anyone with a high school diploma (should be, at least), in the memory of Robert Bunsen, its creator, born 200 years ago. What’s very curious, however, is that the burner, named after Bunsen, was not […]
The Large Hadron Collider at CERN has started doing some serious business. This time, an extremely rare particle containing equal parts of matter and antimatter popped up during experiments at the world’s largest and hottest particle accelerator. The particle, named a B meson is made out of one quark (the building blocks of protons […]
Tiger populations throughout the world are facing a dramatic decline, and are faced more and more with extinction; the future looks pretty dire for these amazing creatures, but maybe there is still hope for these magnificent creatures. A recent census conducted in India showed 295 more tigers than last year, which can only be good […]
A 2500 year old British skull is not a major surprise for archaeologists, but a brain inside it, now that’s not your average Kinder surprise. The fact that shrunken fragile organ still exists raises some serious questions about organ preservation and how often researchers can expect to find this kind of things. What’s interesting is […]
The sun is the biggest source of energy on our planet, and it’s all natural. It’s enough to realize that in one hour the sun produces enough energy to power all the electrical needs of the word for an entire YEAR! Naturally, research has been underway for many years now for means of practically and […]
Ever since the 9.0 earthquake in Japan, there has been a growing mainstream interest for earthquakes, which will probably fade away as time passes, only to be revived when the next big temblor strikes. However, the good news is that, even for a brief period of time, seismologic studies are given the attention they […]
In a world where the king words are ‘buy low, sell high’, speed is of upmost importance. Stock trading has become more and more reliant on modern ways of transmitting and processing information, and in this process, fiber optic plays a crucial role. While fiber optic does work at 90 percent the speed of light, […]
An official press release by Iranian state-controlled news site Fars News, claims that remarkably enough the Islamic Republic has managed to be the first nation ever to build a flying saucer. And no, I didn’t google the image from above, it’s been used instead officially by the news agency to illustrate the press release, although […]
Amoebas are the first eukaryotic creatures, they’re about 1.000.000.000 years old, and still exist today, with a myriad of forms and evolutionary tweaks, interspersed with familiar lineages like animals and plants. The general consensus regarding them was that they are asexual, meaning that they just divide on their own and not engage in sexual […]
Quantum computers – closer thank you think The microprocessors used today are absolutely amazing on their own; it seemed, and for good reason, that there was little we could do to improve them. If anything was to top microprocessors, it would have to be something from a totally different league, which is just down […]
Religion is nowadays an extremely touchy subject; if you ask religious people about non religious people there’s a good chance you will get a pretty nasty response, something involving a kind of hell and divine punishment, while if you ask the other group, probably some bad words will probably come up. If you ask me, […]
In 1953, chemists Harold Urey and Stanley Miller conducted one of the most famous experiments of the past century, commonly known as the primordial soup, in which they tried to find out how the first sings of life on Earth surfaced by exposing a mix of gases to a lightning-like electrical discharge to create amino […]
The massive 9.0 earthquake was the last in a series that devastated countries across the boundary of the Pacific plate. Even Japan, perhaps the country who was the most prepared in the world for this kind of seismic activity, was hopeless in front of the temblor and the tsunamis it created. But after the earthquakes […]
Fossil hunting is for anybody – no matter how old, or how knowledgeable; all you need is a little information and some basic equipment, and you’re good to go. For Andrew Carroll and Thomas Smith, two North Texas sixth-graders, it required even less. Their adventures started when they found a bone while off playing and […]
There’s been a lot of fuss around tsunamis lately, especially seen as Japan, perhaps the most prepared country in the world, was devastated by them. A tsunami in the Atlantic however, is a rare sight, due to the fact that that there are no subduction areas, the most common cause of tsunami-causing earthquakes. However, even […]
In a time when a thing called the space race was in full swing, technological advance and cocky egos made a lot of people, mostly scientists, get disillusioned with visions of grander for the future. In the 1970’s Princeton physicist Gerard O’Neill with the help of NASA’s Ames Research Center and Stanford University showed that we can […]
Fog can be one of the most irritating natural phenomena, especially for drivers, photographers or simple visually impaired glasses-wearing individuals, because of the tiny droplts of condesed water that hang to a lens or glass. Quebec researchers, under the supervision of Université Laval professor Gaétan Laroche, say that they have managed to come up with […]
While a number of today’s science innovations which most of us take for granted, like airplanes, automobiles, computers or space flight, have been outlined by imaginative science fiction writers before they were possible, it seems there’s a concerning blurred line between what has actually been made possible by science and what is of the realm […]
Romantics and astronomy aficionados alike (much of the same aren’t they?) will rejoice as this Saturday a rare spectacle of the moon will occur when it will come around closest its been to the Earth in 18 years! Much like planetary movement, Earth natural satellite movement is an ellipse, meaning it has points where its […]
Here’s something you probably didn’t know about your average internal combustion car engine: it only uses 15 percent for propulsion! Of course it could never go up to 100 percent or even close to this value, but fifteen is just too low. Researchers at Michigan State University thought about the same thing, so they built […]
Evan Michael O’Dorney, only aged 17, a gifted math whiz-kid was awarded by $100,000 from the Intel Foundation for placing 1st at the Intel hosted Science Talent Search, for a project in which he compared two ways to estimate the square root of an integer, discovering which one was the quickest. His research could provide […]
Plate tectonics is one of the most important theories, from the point of view of its practical effects on society – just look at the earthquake in Japan, or the iminent one in California, for example. More than 40 years ago, a man named J. Tuzo Wilson published a paper in Nature, describing how ocean […]
In a recent remarkable find in the war-torn country of Angola, archeologists have uncovered the fossil of what’s considered a new, up till now unknown, dinosaur. The dinosaur has been appropriately been dubbed Angolatitan adamastor – Angolatitan means ”Angolan giant”, while the adamastor is a sea giant from Portuguese sailing myths. A paper published on […]
A lot of critics are raving towards the end of the space exploration age, as aerospace budgets get ever thinner, shuttle programs get retired or the fact that the lunar surface has remained unscratched by human hand for years and years. Where governments might fail, however, one can always put faith in the ever much […]
It is generally believed, and taught in paleontology courses that the oldest evidence of life on Earth is 3.5 billion years old, and was found in Australia, thanks to some bacterial fossils. However, geologists from the University of Texas conducted a study that concluded that the tiny gaps in the Australian chert are nothing more […]
Scientists have dusted and cleaned some X-Ray equipment dating shortly after the discovery of the rays in 1895 and found that it creates some images of stunning quality, compared to its age and simple construction. However, the machine requires a radiation level of 1500 times bigger than a modern X-Ray. The machine, developed by school […]
The situation in Japan is far from calming down; the 9.0 earthquake and the tsunamis it triggered unleashed a chain of events which keep pointing towards a future that can only be dire. In his first official statement since the event, emperor Akihito says events at Fukushima are unpredictable, and he stated that he is […]
It’s been a while since we wrote something about the Large Hadron Collider, but this time, some researchers from the LHC come back with a jaw dropping theory – time travel. If this latest theory of Tom Weiler and Chui Man Ho is correct, than the LHC would be the world’s first machine able to […]
You don’t get any country better prepared for an earthquake than Japan. They know they are at risk, they are prudent, they have the money, the technology, and the work force; and yet, when hit by an earthquake of this magnitude, no matter how well prepared you are, you are in for some massive trouble. […]
The 9.0 (it seems this is the actual magnitude) earthquake that hit Japan on the 11th of March created an absolutely incredible number of aftershocks, some of which were pretty intense on their own. However, a few days before it, as stress built up the subduction area between the Pacific and North American plates, one […]
NASA’s Inspector General’s Office says an investigation is under way after a white powdery substance found at the Kennedy Space Center tested positive for cocaine. I wanted to insert some puns somewhere in this post about astronauts, cocaine, high and outer space, but by the time I finished researching for this post I remembered that […]
The devastating seismic event that struck Japan is affecting the entire world, and even the entire planet. While smoke continues to rise from the catastrophic temblor, Japan seems to have moved 8 feet inland, or even more, according to the USGS. “That’s a reasonable number,” USGS seismologist Paul Earle told AFP. “Eight feet, that’s certainly […]
Last year, researchers reported the finding of the biggest virus yet discovered, so big that it has more DNA than some bacteria; fortunately, this big bad guy only infects a small, unicellular organism and is absolutely harmless to humans. However, the same team of researchers comes back with another discovery, that the virus itself can […]
In the aftermath of the earthquake that violently struck Japan and the tsunamis it generated, the small, industrial city of Hitachi emerged unscathed from what Prime Minister Naoto Kan has described as Japan’s “worst crisis since the Second World War”, making it somewhat of a refuge for the hordes of refugees that flooded from many […]
