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Researchers have been sounding the alarm for years, but the US still has a big mercury pollution problem.
Exploring the depths and implications of Bloom's Taxonomy in learning.
The intricate world of adult learning theories and their real-world applications.
Our world is a strange and awesome place - but some things are just hard to believe!
Imagine the biggest wave you can imagine. Now make it bigger.
"Happy"
In news today: people still like jokes.
The idea that coffee is good for you is not a new one.
Surprisingly, getting neither isn't that bad for your results.
Scientific publishing is a competitive environment, under heavy scrutiny from reviewers, editor and peers. Over the years, some studies get retracted, and that’s not a bad thing in itself; a study can be retracted because more data is available, disproving it, or because a human or technical error snuck in – that’s perfectly understandable, and […]
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 […]
What if you could increase your ability to remember with a pill? This may not be an idea just for science fiction novels. Scientists have discovered a method that could strengthen long-term memories. A protein called PKR functions to maintain a relatively low level of excitability by enhancing GABA synaptic transmission. GABA is an inhibitory […]
You can’t believe everything people say, but you sometimes can’t even believe what you hear, especially if you’ve had 3 or more cups of coffee. Australian researchers from La Trobe University have just published a study suggesting that people on a major coffee buzz are prone to hear and seethings that aren’t there. The thins […]
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 […]
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 […]
Researchers at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill have found that more and more young adults are suffering from a condition that has traditionally been the problem of older adults – high blood pressure. The researchers believe that general problems, such as an unbalanced diet, coffee, and obesity are the main causes for this surge […]
Autism is still yet poorly understood, and researchers are just starting to figure out the mechanisms behind this strange condition which seems to affect more and more children (and not only) with each passing year. A 6 year autism study The ambitious six year effort attempted to gauge the rate of autism in a South […]
First of all, don’t think of alien species as extraterrestrials; if you came here wanting to hear about that – sorry. Thankfully, the sci-fi scenario is not upon us. I’m talking about species which haven’t originated from Antarctica – seeds, fungi, microorganisms, they go wherever they are taken, and wherever people take them. If you […]
This is one of those studies which makes you realize that being a researcher definitely has some unexpdected perks; it was funded by ERSC, and let me tell you, to get a grant from them, you really have to have a solid project, because the approval rate is somewhere around 17%. What they concluded from […]
Law is a highly demanding field, in which its practitioners are required to have an objective and stoic approach at all times, but a recently published very interesting study shows that court judges can be just as biased as any of us and their rulings, however rational we’d love them to be, are influenced by […]
The topic of modification of data in scientific research is definitely a hot one; the frequency at which researchers fabricate or falsify data is extremely hard to quantify and make a statistic from it. Many different studies or surveys have tried to do this, but the results varied greatly and were difficult to compare and […]
Girls like pink, boys like blue. Girls have long hair, boys have short hair. And so on, so on – my mom says this is all common sense, I say this is social programming that propagates stereotypes, and the latest research relating to this is a study called Math–Gender Stereotypes in Elementary-School Children recently published […]
Bears are some of the most amazing and loved animals out there, and to find out that up until a few months ago nobody made a thorough study about their hibernating was really sad for me. Until this, almost everything we knew about hibernating was that… well, bears do it’; they go into their dens […]
For physicists, antimatter is probably the most valuable substance ever; the slightest bit of it could provide extremely valuable information that can help clear out some of the most stressing issues in modern physics. However, the thing is these little gifts are pretty hard to wrap. However, the ALPHA project at CERN achieved this remarkable […]
One of the “highlights” of being a student or a young employee is having to stay up at night and study and/or do a lot of work. When coffee alone just won’t cut it, many turn to energy drinks. However one of the most common practices regarding energy drinks is mixing them with alcoholic beverages. […]
You know those days when you go to the beach, and it’s just too hot outside, so you have to use some cream and all ? Well, it’s a little harder if you’re a whale. A recent study conducted that a whole lot of whales displayed blisters caused by sun damage. Laura Martinez-Levasseur, from the […]
That’s right people, all the life on this beautiful planet (yep, that includes you) could descend from alien zombies. Well, this is indeed a slight imagination leap, but what I’m talking about are viruses; dead viruses, to be more exact. Dead viruses who contained information, enough information to pave the way for lifeforms to appear. […]
This amazing snailfish is just one of the animals new to science that have been uncovered by Oceanlab scientists; the expedition was studying one of the world’s deepest trenches, an environment thought to be void of fish of any kind, but researchers were surprised to find out that even the bottom of the trench was […]
Scientists working for the UN reported today that they have erradicated the Rinderpest virus, a virus that is deadly for cattle. Rinderpest would be only the second virus erradicated by mankind, after smallpox. It caused massive damage in the Middle East, Africa and Asia, having a survival rate of only 10-20%. The UN’s Food and […]
After an exciting discovery of a habitable earth-like planet, skepticism settles back in as a second team of scientists casts some doubt on the claim. Nicknamed Gliese 581 g, the planet in case stirred up the scientific world, promising to be the holy graal of exoplanets after it was discovered by Steven Vogt of the […]
A recently discovered planet is just about the right size and is in the right place to host life; as a matter of fact, astronomers seem quite sure it hosts life, and we’re talking more than microbes. Still, current technology doesn’t allow scientists to search for chemical markers of life. About 20 light years away, […]
Researchers at Emory University School of Medicine have conducted a study showing that the deletion of a particular gene makes mice smarter by unlocking a mysterious part of the brain, thought to be totally unflexible until now. When the gene, RGS14, is disabled, mice learn how to figure out mazes faster and more effective than […]
Boy, you just can’t have enough octopus, that’s for sure – they’re really amazing creatures, that often surprise us. Now, a venomous octopus living in the frozen waters of Antarctica is definitely awesome, but how is this useful? Well, according to Bryan Fry, of the University of Melbourne, it is. He and his team have […]
As if the domesticated dog’s position as, “man’s (or woman’s) best friend” was not entrenched in the human zeitgeist enough, research from Brian Hare out Harvard’s Anthropology department indicates that not only are dogs far more adept than Chimpanzees- our closest genetic, extant relative- at interpreting human social cues, but that domesticated dogs are superior […]
Storm elves and sprites are electric luminous fleeting phenomena that sometimes naturally occur in the upper atmosphere. A team of Spanish researchers managed to make a high speed recording of the phenomena and publish it in the Journal of Geophysical Research. Practically, sprites are electrical discharges shaped like a carrot or a column that form […]
A new study has shown that most people who think they have food alergies (over 80% in fact) actually don’t suffer from such problems. This has taunted some doctors for years and years, and AOL Health looked into this misdiagnosis. The study concluded that it is in fact a number of factors that lead to […]
As any fourth grader will tell you, photosynthesis is (in layman terms), the process through which plants (and bacteria, algae, etc) get the sugars and other organic compounds they need using energy from sunlight. However, during last week’s synthetic biology conference in Boston, a biologist from Harvard took things to a whole new level, presenting […]
c If you want your kids to be healthier, thinier and smarter, then you probably should keep them away from TVs while they’re toddlers. A recent (and quite shocking) joint study conducted by Université de Montréal, the Sainte-Justine University Hospital Research Center and the University of Michigan revealed that television exposure at ages of 2 […]
Yes ladies and gents, researchers have produced the whole genome sequence of the 3 billion “letters” (nucleotides) in the Neanderthalian genome, and the results are interesting to say the least. For starters, up to 2 percent of present day human DNA outside of Africa originated in Neanderthals; this result suggests that the Neanderthals, Homo neanderthalensis […]
The first touchable scientific results of the Herschel infrared space observatory are spectacular indeed; not only is it showing previously hidden details of star formation, but it also shows thousands of distant galaxies “building” stars with incredible energy and covering the Milky Way in wonderfully coloured star clouds. Not only are the images spectacular by […]
Using DNA preserved for 25.000 – 43.000 years in bones from Siberian mammoths, a team of international scientists recreated mammoth hemoglobin and studied it, revealing interesting facts about the fascinating animals. “It has been remarkable to bring a complex protein from an extinct species, such as the mammoth, back to life,” says Professor Alan Cooper, […]
Barack Obama came out and said that it should be possible for NASA to send astronauts to Mars and bring them back safely by the mid 2030s. The US president said this while explaining the details of his plans with the US space agency at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Mister Obama has set […]
Two studies put Einstein’s theory, the General Theory of Relativity to a test unlike any other before. The two teams used extensive observations from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory to analyze galaxy clusters, the biggest objects in the Universe that are bound together by gravity (at least, that we know of). The first team produced results […]
The discovery of 9 new planets raises some serious questions on the matter of how planets are formed. Two astronomers from the University of California, Santa Barbara reported the discovery, and of them, two are spinning in the opposite direction the planets in our solar system are spinning. This, along with other recent studies of […]
The mimic octopus, Thaumoctopus mimicus is a species of octopus that grows up to 60 cm (2 feet) in length and is naturally colored with brown and white stripes and spots. So what’s so special about it? The mimic octopus can literally mimic the physical appearance and movement of fifteen different species, that we know of […]
Take a really good look at this picture; you may just be looking at the very thing that will defeat cancer. The black dots are nanobots, practically delivering a killing blow to the cancerous cells, and only to those cells. According to Mark Davis, head of the research team that created the nanobot anti-cancer army […]
According to a research conducted by researchers from the Cornell University the portions and the plates depicted in more than 50 paintings of the Last Supper have gotten bigger as time passed – way bigger. This finding seems to obviously suggest that as time passes, we eat more and more, which should raise some concerns; […]
At nearly 200 meters below the ice, there is no light, the temperature is way below 0 degrees, and scientists were expecting to find nothing more than a handful of microbes – and for good reason. So it’s easy to understand why they were so surprised to find not a single (evolved) life form, but […]
Just like any muscle in your body, if not used, the brain starts to degrade as time passes; this has been known for quite a while, but recently, a team from UC Irvine provided the first visual evidence of how learning protects the brain, thus proving that mental stimulation fights against the degrading effects that […]
Parts of the car’s bodywork could double up as it’s batter in a not so far away future; at least that’s what the people involved in the 3.4 million project believe. They are working on a prototype that can store and discharge electrical energy; the material is also light and very hard. Ultimately, this will […]
