World's oldest known fossils push evidence for life back by 220 million years

The oldest fossils known to date have been discovered in 3.7 billion-year-old rocks in Greenland by an Australian-led team of researchers.

Continue reading...

Why scientists are losing the fight to communicate science to the public

Scientists and science communicators are engaged in a constant battle with ignorance. But that’s an approach doomed to failure, says Richard P Grant. (Aug. 23, 2016)

Continue reading...

Scientists might have accidentally found a cure for cancer

Scientists might have accidentally made a huge step forward in the search for a cure for cancer — discovering unexpectedly that a malaria protein could be an effective weapon against the disease. Danish researchers were hunting for a way of protecting pregnant women from malaria, which can cause huge problems because it attacks the placenta. But they found at the same time that armed malaria proteins can attack cancer, too — an approach which could be a step towards curing the disease.

Continue reading...

TD9 Development up to 2016-08-31, then +5 Day Forecast.

This animation models surface winds of the development of TD9 up to the current day, 2016-08-31, then seamlessly shows the +5 day potential path of the storm, up to 2016-09-01. The entire sequence is then repeated showing wind power density. Data from the GFS 2016-08-31T06:00Z run. Hurricane Gaston makes an appearance then spins out of the frame harmlessly.

Continue reading...

Researchers discover how human immune receptors become activated in the presence of harmful substances

In George Orwell's classic dystopian novel Animal Farm, as the barnyard devolves into chaos the slogan "all animals are equal" quickly becomes "all animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others". The same might be true for the tiny immune receptors scattered across the surface of our T-cells. Before now, it was unclear how these complex molecular receptors recognised harmful invaders (or antigens) and sent warning signals into the cell. It was largely assumed that "all receptors were equal".

Continue reading...

New Published Results on the 'Impossible' EmDrive Propulsion Expected Soon

New results on the controversial, “impossible” EmDrive propulsion system could be soon published in a prestigious peer-reviewed scientific journal, according to credible rumors. “It is my understanding that Eaglework’s new paper has been today accepted for publication in a peer-review journal, where it will be published,” said high-reputation poster José Rodal, Ph.D, on the NasaSpaceFlight forum, which is often the primary source of updates for all things EmDrive. “Congratulations to the Eagleworks team!” The poster added that the sources of the leak are not employed by NASA.

Continue reading...

People enhanced the environment, not degraded it, over past 13,000 years

Human occupation is usually associated with deteriorated landscapes, but new research shows that 13,000 years of repeated occupation by British Columbia’s coastal First Nations has had the opposite effect, enhancing temperate rainforest productivity. Andrew Trant, a professor in the Faculty of Environment at the University of Waterloo, led the study in partnership with the University of Victoria and the Hakai Institute. The research combined remote-sensed, ecological and archaeological data from coastal sites where First Nations’ have lived for millennia.

Continue reading...

9 Incredible Meteorite Craters That Look Straight Out of 'Deep Impact'

Our planet is pockmarked with the scars of these extraterrestrial visitors.

Continue reading...

The Decline of Tube Feeding for Dementia Patients

The proportion of nursing home residents with advanced dementia who receive a feeding tube has dropped more than 50 percent, a new national study has found.

Continue reading...

Aphantasia: When Your Mind's Eye Fails You

'Aphantasia' describes a phenomenon neuroscientists have only been studying for a few years: the inability to "see" images in the mind.

Continue reading...

Nasa lab to publish 'impossible' fuel free EmDrive paper

The so-called EmDrive creates thrust by bouncing microwaves around in an enclosed chamber, and uses only solar power - and now a Nasa lab is set to reveal its findings on the technology.

Continue reading...

The Belief in Human Supremacy Is Destroying Our Planet

Right now the University of Michigan Wolverines football team is hosting the Minnesota Golden Gophers. More than 100,000 humans are attending this football game. More than 100,000 humans have attended every Michigan home football game since 1975. There used to be real wolverines in Michigan. One was sighted there in 2004, the first time in 200 years. That wolverine died in 2010. More people in Michigan—“The Wolverine State”—care about the Michigan Wolverines football team than care about real wolverines. This is human supremacism.

Continue reading...

Dogs Understand Human Words and Intonation

Dogs have the ability to distinguish words and the intonation of human speech through brain regions similar to those that humans use, a study in the 2 September issue of Science reports. The results reveal important insights into the neural networks needed to understand speech, hinting that perhaps both humans and dogs may have relied on similar networks that were already in place before language evolved, and later adapted to process speech.

Continue reading...

How Does the Language of Headlines Work? The Answer May Surprise You.

How headlines have changed as media has evolved -- and how they haven't.

Continue reading...

Archaeologists are fuming over a new study about how early hominin Lucy died

It’s not every day that researchers crack a case this cold. Lucy, the iconic hominin found in present-day Ethiopia, died 3.18 million years ago. Her cause of death has remained a mystery since her remains were first discovered in 1974.

Continue reading...

Yet Another Tropical System may Emerge as a Post-Labor Day Threat to Caribbean, US

Another strong tropical disturbance will move off the coast of Africa early this week and bears watching for strengthening and impact on the Caribbean and the United States during September.

Continue reading...

Will This “Neural Lace” Brain Implant Help Us Compete with AI?

“Can we just inject electronic circuits through a needle into the brain, or other tissue, and then connect it, and then monitor? Yes, we can, and that’s where we are today.” By Kiki Sanford

Continue reading...

The U.S. plans to build the most advanced fusion reactor ever

The US government has put its weight behind efforts to create an economically viable fusion reactor, endorsing a new category of designs that could become the most efficient and viable yet. Re-creating the atom fusing processes that sustain the sun on Earth has long been one of the holy grails of modern physics. Hydrogen fusion has been powering out Sun for the past 4.5 billion years now, and it’s still going strong — a machine that could safely and stably harvest these processes would offer humanity safe, clean, and virtually endless energy.

Continue reading...

Study shows one way that scientific progress is broken

Virtually nobody reads or understands rebuttals to scientific findings

Continue reading...

Solar powered pipe desalinates seawater into drinkable fluid.

For the 2016 land art generator initiative, Khalili engineers propose a solar powered pipe to desalinate seawater into drinkable fluid.

Continue reading...

Will a Merged Tesla-SolarCity put a Solar-Powered Battery in every Home?

Critics don't think Tesla can sell enough home batteries to justify its acquisition of SolarCity, but what they're underestimating is the potential for innovation the Gigafactory brings.

Continue reading...

Going to Pot

Humboldt County's marijuana boom is destroying a unique redwood forest ecosystem and killing some of California's rarest wildlife. Now veteran pot farmers are fighting the ‘green rush’ to make cannabis cultivation truly sustainable. By Todd Woody. (Apr. 18, 2016)

Continue reading...

World's oldest needle found in Siberian cave that stitches together human history

The 'Sensational' discovery in Denisova Cave is at least 50,000 years old, BUT it wasn't made by Homo sapiens.

Continue reading...

Not a Drill: SETI Is Investigating a Possible Extraterrestrial Signal From Deep Space

The implications are extraordinary and point to the possibility of a civilization far more advanced than our own.

Continue reading...

The Orion Nebula (M42)

Continue reading...

A decade on, vaccine has halved cervical cancer rate

The world's first cancer vaccine has halved the number of new cervical cancers ten years after it was first administered in Australia.

Continue reading...

Stop Using the Word Pseudoscience

A guiding tenet has emerged through years of climate change discussions and other polarizing scientific debates: Framing issues as “us versus them”—with a clear ingroup and outgroup—encourages polarization. The term pseudoscience inherently creates this framing, pitting those who believe in “real” science against those who believe in “fake” science. But these discussions really indicate whom we trust. And maybe if people trust alleged pseudoscience over science, we should be discussing why, rather than dismissing their values and beliefs.

Continue reading...

New Startup Aims to Commercialize a Brain Prosthetic to Improve Memory

Kernel wants to build a neural implant based on neuroscientist Ted Berger’s memory research. By Eliza Strickland. (Aug. 16, 2016)

Continue reading...

Scientists have discovered that human-induced climate change dates back at least to 1830

Continents and oceans in the northern hemisphere began to warm with industrial-era fossil fuel emissions nearly 200 years ago, pushing back the origins of human-induced climate change to the mid-19th century. The first signs of warming from the rise in greenhouse gases which came hand-in-hand with the Industrial Revolution appear as early as 1830 in the tropical oceans and the Arctic, meaning that climate change witnessed today began about 180 years ago.

Continue reading...

Major rivers of Vietnam’s Mekong Delta become unusually deeper

Vietnamese scientists have warned of the unusual increase in the depth of two major rivers in the Mekong Delta, with sand mining and hydropower dams said to be the cause. (Aug. 16, 2016)

Continue reading...

Are We Really So Modern?

For all  our technological breakthroughs, we’re  still wrestling with the same basic questions as the Enlightenment philosophers. By Adam Kirsch.

Continue reading...

A Chocolate Pill? Scientists To Test Whether Cocoa Extract Boosts Health

Chocolate lovers may agree cocoa is the food of the gods, but how strong is the evidence that it boosts heart health? Researchers are recruiting for a new study aimed at answering this question. The capsules tested will contain about as much extract as you'd get from eating about 1,000 calories of dark chocolate, without the calories.

Continue reading...

Stackable Potato Chips | How It's Made

Continue reading...

How stress affects your brain.

The video below will show you exactly how chronic stress can affect the size of your brain, its structure, and how it functions, right down to the level of your genes.

Continue reading...

NASA's Juno Successfully Completes Jupiter Flyby

NASA's Juno mission successfully executed its first of 36 orbital flybys of Jupiter.

Continue reading...

Majority of mathematicians hail from just 24 scientific ‘families’

Most of the world’s mathematicians fall into just 24 scientific 'families', one of which dates back to the fifteenth century. The insight comes from an analysis of the Mathematics Genealogy Project (MGP), which aims to connect all mathematicians, living and dead, into family trees on the basis of teacher–pupil lineages, in particular who an individual's doctoral adviser was.

Continue reading...

New Virus Breaks The Rules Of Infection

A virus is generally like a little ball with a few genes. Now scientists have found one that's broken up into five little balls — as if it were dismembered.

Continue reading...

Elephants are the end of a 60m-year lineage – last of the megaherbivores

Four-tuskers, hoe-tuskers, shovel-tuskers are all wiped out – now only a fragment of this keystone species remains. By Patrick Barkham. (Aug. 12, 2016)

Continue reading...

The research is clear: electing more women changes how government works

What changes when there are more women in government? Probably a lot more than you think. Hillary Clinton clinching the Democratic nomination is, on one level, a symbolic breakthrough. Yesterday we lived in a country where no woman had ever won a major political party’s presidential nomination. Today that's no longer true. This is a huge and momentous step forward.

Continue reading...

Tropical Depression 8 forms off North Carolina Coast Sunday

The system could become Tropical Storm Hermine on Monday and pass just offshore of the Outer Banks, N.C., on Tuesday.

Continue reading...

Watch a Wasp Take Control of a Cockroach’s Brain

A video captures the dark side of insect mind control. By Katherine Harmon Courage.

Continue reading...

Too Old for Hard Labor, but Still on the Job

Some blue-collar workers trade the physical stress for related work that takes advantage of their knowledge and experience. By Christopher Farrell.

Continue reading...

Man fails paternity test because his unborn brother is the father of his child

It is thought cells from a miscarried sibling were absorbed by the man while he was in the womb. By Shehab Khan. (Oct. 24, 2015)

Continue reading...

Teen Pilot Claims World Record In Round-The-Globe Solo Trip

When 18-year-old Lachlan Smart touched down in eastern Australia on Saturday morning, he became youngest person to fly around the world solo in a single engine aircraft.

Continue reading...

NASA Submarine On Titan Will Look For Life

NASA is working on sending a submarine into the depths of the Kraken Mare — the largest ocean on Saturn’s moon Titan. There are really two big reasons why we want to go to Titan. Number one: “to determine if hydrocarbon based life is possible on Titan,” said Jason Hartwig, a NASA cryogenics engineer, in a presentation at the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts Symposium in Raleigh on Wednesday.

Continue reading...

At least 8 Tornadoes Touched Down in Indiana

The National Weather Service says a single, long supercell thunderstorm that moved through Indiana produced six tornadoes.

Continue reading...

Is Blue the New Green? Wave Power could Revolutionize the Renewable-Energy Game

There's enough wave energy in the oceans to power the world, and scientists are finally close to harnessing it.

Continue reading...

Double Tropical Threat Looms for Hawaii Next Week

Hawaii is facing not one, but two tropical threats next week as Madeline and Lester churn westward.

Continue reading...

The Neuroscience Behind Bad Decisions

Irrationality may be a consequence of the brain’s ravenous energy needs.

Continue reading...

New Exoskeleton Allows You to Feel Inside VR

As the virtual reality industry continues to grow, there is a growing product market for technologies enhancing users’ experience. Seeing in a virtual reality world is no longer enough, but feeling like you are in the VR world is what consumers now want. A new exoskeleton created by Dexta Robotics solves this problem by interfacing with VR games to enact feeling to users in accordance to what they see through the game.

Continue reading...