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Just like when you lie certain things happen in your brain, the same thing happens when you think something about somebody. But what happens in our brain when we judge people or at least when we make an idea about someone? Those (and many other) questions have been tackled by MIT neuroscientist Rebecca Saxe. Her […]
I really hope everybody knows who Einstein is, and many people know why he is famous and how he left is mark in the scientific world. Still, aside from his brilliant results in physics (mostly), he is also very well known for his aphorisms, metaphors and overall interesting way of expressing himself. I’ve always […]
Photo by ±‡ U a € ï ¥ a H ‡± Life has ups and downs, reminding more or less of an emotional rollercoaster; but some memories stay in your memory way longer than the others. Emotional memories of traumatic life events (physical or mental), especially cases of accidents or serious illnesses are stored […]
I’ve always been fascinated by intelligence as a human trait. Smarter and more intelligent people seem to have this sort of aura that surrounds them, but how much of this ability is native and how much can be developed? Ever since the experiments conducted on fruit flies showed that the flies that were taught […]
Photo by bocavermelha Sometimes, animals are better than humans. Quite a lot of times actually, but that’s not the point here. We’re going to take a look at some record holding animals that are (or do things that are) just unbelievable! The biggest – the blue whale. Photo by Dan Shapiro. Credit: NOAA via pingnews […]
Well this sure sounds like a good plan to me… Scientists found out that Ketamine (also called Special K if you hang out with the right people), which is used as a horse tranquilizer but also as a club drug could ease depression. Who would have guessed ? Ketamine, which can also cause […]
Photo by konaboy Contrary to popular belief, “going green” is not something you can do just when you finish work or when you’re in the mood. It’s something that must became a part of your life at all time (when possible). Many people aren’t even close to realizing how much green potential your job has. […]
Well this is a bit of a stretch; the thing is an 87-million-year-old praying mantis was found encased in amber in Japan. Scientists believe it may prove to be very useful in establishing a connection between mantises from the Cretaceous period and modern-day insects.Researchers have been searching for this “missing link” for many […]
Our life may be better or worse, our health may be better or worse, but one thing has definitely improved over the past decades: technology; and that’s a really big thing. So what better way to prove the progress of technology than 2 pictures of Earth? The first was taken from the weather […]
I’m going to continue with this month’s mountain theme, as it seemed to be really loved (even more will follow after this). In the previous post I wrote, with the 5 highest mountains in the world I felt bad because I didn’t have the chance to mention two mountains which fascinated alpinists from all around […]
Recently, a team of researchers (with the help of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) and a host of international telescope partners) have managed to get the clearest observation yet of the “core” of a black hole. A black hole is a region of space in which the gravitational field […]
How can this be? Medicine has progressed… we have drugs for everything, surgery, etc. So how come people live less and less in a country that claims to be the most civilized in the world ? In fact, it decreased with more than six years for women between 1960 and 2000. Now, a new, long-term […]
Photo by Stefan Everybody (or almost everybody) believes that no matter what, USA remains “polluter no. 1”. Don’t take my word for it, just ask BBC’s environment analyst Roger Harrabin – he says the same thing. The industry is by far the most developed, so that would seem logical, despite the fact the China and […]
Photo by jago In a study conducted by researchers at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University that claimed a different perspective, it was published that it takes between 3,000 gallons and 6,000 gallons of water to power a 60-watt incandescent bulb for about 12 hours per day in a year. As it turns out, size […]
University of Maryland researchers have managed to shed some light in an important matter which puzzled medical scientists and not only for ages: how iron carried in human blood is absorbed and transported into the body. Among the benefits of this discovery I’ll just name a better understanding of iron deficiency, the world’s number one […]
Volcanic eruptions are impressive natural phenomena; it begins when pressure on a magma chamber forces magma up through the conduit and out the volcano’s vents. Seen on the TV or in the newspaper, they’re just fantastic and gorgeous. But if you’re unlucky enough to be there… it’s really deadly. But volcanic ash can also bring […]
Bikini Atoll (also known as Pikinni Atoll) is an uninhabited 2.3-square-mile (6.0 km²) atoll in one of the Micronesian Islands in the Pacific Ocean. Its historical importance lies in the fact that along with more than 20 nuclear weapons tests between 1946 and 1958, the world’s first test of a practical dry fuel hydrogen bomb […]
I’m not fond of alarmist theories or “bad things are happening, fast” attitude, but… bad things are just going to happen soon in California. The likelihood of a major quake of magnitude 7.5 or greater in the next 30 years is 46%-and such a quake is most likely to occur in the southern […]
What makes us different is not who we are, not what we think, but the decisions we make. That defines us, it’s what makes us different from others. But aside what you’d want to think, it turns out decision-making may be a process handled to a large extent by unconscious mental activity. A team of […]
Green fuels are a really hot topic, with every single day bringing a new (claimed) discovery or breakthrough, but many of them are just minor improvements. Still, every once in a while you hear about something that sounds really promising (like green gasoline). Now it seems that chemists are describing development of a “revolutionary” process […]
Researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison have made a significant breakthrough in the development of biofuels (“green gasoline”), a liquid identical to standard gasoline yet created from sustainable biomass sources, such as poplar trees and switch grass. Poplar plants have been in the scientific spotlight before, as they are considered to disarm toxic pollutants 100 […]
The first lungless frog has been discovered lurking in the jungles of Borneo. This amphibian is totally enigmatic, at least until now, for scientists who haven’t been able to figure out how come it gets all its oxygen through its skin. Scientists first discovered these frogs about 30 years ago but because they’re so rare, […]
The threat that global warming is has definetly been underestimated, and if something doesn’t develop quite fast that could handle this problem or at least diminuate its effects (could it be iron fertilization?), the perspectives are quite dire. Everything and everybody is affected, and the effects include the melting of glaciers and the destruction of […]
A University of Washington fish expert claims to have discovered a whole new species of fish, that would rather crawl into crevices than swim, and that may be able to see in the same way that humans do. Well this is certainly something unexpected, and there is no species that does the same kind of […]
The hunt is on for finding other planets we can live on; this is probably the next step for us as a species, and may just be crucial, considering how things are developing on Earth. But we haven’t had much luck with that so far. Now, scientists are using a method which is claimed […]
After the “crash site” in Peru, meteorites keep the headlines again! This time, scientists from the University of Oxford and the University of Aberdeen found the biggest meteorite to ever crash in the British islands. The scientists believe that a large meteorite hit northwest Scotland about 1.2 billion years ago near the Scottish town of […]
Well somehow BBC always manges to find a way to surprise and thrill us; while I was browsing their site I somehow managed to not see the story about the flying penguins (no bull, just follow me). Luckily, environmental graffiti paid more attention and they found this fascinating video. Yes, penguins to take off and […]
According to a new research, published in PLoS, as the total number of different species in a certain group grows, the chance of the rate of new species apprearing decreases greatly. The research team believes these findings suggest that new species appear less and less as the number of species in a region approaches the […]
The date of March 19, 2008 will be remembered as a very important day in astronomy and science; it’s the day mankind had its first chance of witnessing the birth of a black hole. It all started when the “Pi of the Sky” telescope detected the brightest ever optical outburst from a distant place, about […]
Prions (or proteinaceous infectious particle; on comes from analogy to virion) are the nasty little buggers responsible for disorders such as mad cow disease and other neurodegenerative diseases. They’re dangerous especially as they’re really hard to detect before symptoms appear. Now, according to Nature, scientists are trying to develop sensors that can detect […]
Recently, the University of California, Riverside provided some materials that shocked me, to say the least. According to that research, scientists from all around the world have reconstructed changes in Earth’s ancient ocean chemistry during a broad sweep of geological time, from about 2.5 to 0.5 billion years ago. What they found was that the lack of […]
There’s always been a lot of effort put into understanding what (if something) makes humans superior to other man-like mammals. The science world seems to be split into two camps, which can’t agree with each other. Now, researchers at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, Emory University, have identified a language feature unique to the […]
Professor David Lambert and his team from the Allan Wilson Centre for Molecular Ecology and Evolution performeda study of New Zealand’s “living dinosaur” the tuatara. They recovered DNA sequences from the bones of ancient tuatara which are up to 8000 years old. The conclusions they drew were amazing: despite all the ods, the tuatara has […]
In what is a great leap for science, scientists from UCLA and the University of Washington have succeeded in creating “designer enzymes,” a major milestone in computational chemistry and protein engineering. The two groups were led by UCLA’s chemistry professor Kendall Houk and Washington’s biochemist David Baker. Designer enzymes will have applications for defense against […]
Scientists from the University of Bath have revealed what may very well be the first law of evolution, which has a huge importance. The study was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and it shows the fact that evolution drives animals to become increasingly more complex. They analyzed fossils from the crustacean […]
Scientists from the American Geophysical Union published some fascinating findings concerning some unexpected luminous spots on Jupiter caused by its moon Io, which they have observed. Io is in fact in some ways similar to Earth, in that it causes auroras on its mother planet. It also has the most spectacular volcanic activity in the […]
While you’re sitting at home (or somewhere else) enjoying your internet connection you are probably not thingking about the 1.6 billion people across the world with no access to electricity. That’s roughly 1/4 of the world’s population! Something good to think about when you’re really pissed that your computer can’t support the latest shooting game. […]
Nature has its own way of protecting itself, and we should have already learned this (the hard way), because so many catastrophes have happened as a result of man’s destructive work. Look at the damage caused by the recent tsunamis; they would have been almost neglectable if we hadn’t destroyed the plankton, which has a […]
Nature published these findings of scientists from Houston, Texas, about the original proportion of oxygen isotopes in the Sun. This problem is still not fully solved, and it has even split the science world into two groups, which published contradictory results from analyses of lunar soils, believed to contain embedded solar oxygen because the Moon […]
An amateur Dutch archaeologist named Jan Meulmeester made a startling find which pleases scientists: an amazing collection of 28 flint hand-axes, dated by archaeologists to be around 100,000 years-old. He found them in an area about 13km off Great Yarmouth. Jan Meulmeester diggs regularly for mammoth bones and fossils in marine sand and gravel delivered […]
[digg-me] [reddit-me]After it was proved that Homo floresiensis (”Man of Flores”, nicknamed Hobbit) is a different species than humans, the tiny skeletons found in the caves of the Pacific islands of Palau let to the theory that similar remains found in Indonesia are a very unique species. The Palau skeletons which are from 900 and […]
Back in September, a meteorite crashed somewhere in Peru, scaring locals and digging a hole in the ground, but pleased scientists which had the opportunity of studying it. But it behaved so strangely that in fact it forces scientists to rethink the way alien objects behave when entering Earth’s atmosphere and when they hit out […]
The Cassini spacecraft has made numerous valuable discoveries along the time, such as the ‘building blocks’ of life on Titan, as well as the mountains there, and the partial rings of Saturn, and now scientists eagerly await the dive of the probe into the water plum of Enceladus, a moon of Saturn. This will be […]
Researchers from the University of Maryland started researching some characteristics of bacteriae from Chesapeake Bay that could lead to a process of converting large quantities of all kinds of plant products (including leftovers and trash) into ethanol and other biofuels. This sounds pretty dreamy but it’s quite possible as the technology is not at all […]
As you know (or at least should know), butterflies and moths are known for their metamorphosis from catterpillars to their adult form. This radical change involves not just a change of look, but it also includes changes in lifestyle, diet, sensorial impulses and many many other differences. So it would seem very probable that the […]
Mars has fueled many speculations for many centuries, and just several decades ago it was proved that there is no macromolecular life there. But still, there are numerous phenomenae that make it resemble Earth, such as avalanches. Whatsmore, recently scientists studying images from The University of Arizona found never-before-seen impact “megabreccia” and a possibly once-habitable […]
This project was backed up by U.S., Italian and German partners and it promised to be the next step in taking pictures of celestial objects. It consists of a giant binocular telescope on Mount Graham, Ariz, and it recently made its first picture, using the its twin side-by-side, 8.4-meter (27.6 foot) primary mirrors together, achieving […]
About 2.3 million diagnosed with diabetes just in the UK, and it’s estimated that some 750.000 people have it but don’t know yet. Most of them have diabetes type 2, which is caused mostly by obesity and usually develops in middle age. Type 1, or insulin-dependent diabetes, is a less common autoimmune disease that results […]
About a year and a half ago, the Natural History Museum in Oslo, Norway had announced the discovery of one of the largest dinosaur-era marine reptiles ever found; we’re talking here about a 15 meters (50 feet) feet long sea predator known as a pliosaur. This fossil (of over 150 million years of age) was […]
The idea of a comprehensive encyclopedia has been launched a long time ago, and the internet was the perfect way to make it possible and to promote it and make it popular. The internet has done its job too well, because the computers which hosted the encyclopedia were overwhelmed and couldn’t keep it alive when […]
