Heavy metal: Life at the world's largest shipyard

How South Korea has become a global leader in shipbuilding.
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Learning to Chill

What would intelligent life look like in the frigid, final era of the Universe?
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Voyager

When they embarked on an epic adventure, the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft launched humanity on a bold new era of exploration.
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Experiment confirms quantum theory weirdness

The bizarre nature of reality as laid out by quantum theory has survived another test, with scientists performing a famous experiment and proving that reality does not exist until it is measured. Physicists have conducted John Wheeler's delayed-choice thought experiment, which involves a moving object that is given the choice to act like a particle or a wave. The group reversed Wheeler's original experiment, and used helium atoms scattered by light.
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New HIV Treatment Aims To Starve Out the Virus Instead of Actively Kill It

Trying to stop the human immunodeficiency virus—HIV—has not been too successful until recent history. But that does not mean that we are out of the woods yet. Still, the new developments show great promise; and one, in particular is incredibly innovative. “This compound can be the precursor for something that can be used in the future as part of a cocktail to treat HIV that improves on the effective medicines we have today,” explains study author Harry Taylor.
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When Does Consciousness Begin and End?

By studying different states of awareness, we’re narrowing in on what it means to be conscious.
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Common Kidney Tests predicts risk for cardiovascular disease

Simple factors of the kidney’s functions and damage predicts higher possibilities of heart failure and death from a fatal heart attack and stroke than traditional tests of cholesterol levels and blood pressure, new research suggests.
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Grippy not sticky: Stanford engineers debut an incredibly adhesive material that doesn't get stuck

A material inspired by the unique physics of geckos' fingertips could allow robotic hands to grip nearly any type of object without applying excessive pressure.
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Rich people will become immortal ‘god-like’ cyborgs in 200 years

Rich people living 200 years from now are likely to become “god-like” immortal cyborgs, while the poor will die out, an historian has claimed. Yuval Noah Harari, a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said the merger of humans and machines would be the greatest evolution since the appearance of life. He added the greatest minds in computer engineering already believe death is a mere technological problem with a solution.
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Weak electric current to the brain may improve thinking in people with schizophrenia

Lightly stimulating the brain with electricity may improve short-term memory in people with schizophrenia, according to a new study by researchers at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine
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Is This the First Computational Imagination?

The ability to read a description of a scene and then picture it has always been uniquely human. Not anymore.
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Massive triumphal marble arch built by Romans to honour Emperor Titus discovered

Archaeologists in Rome discover, at one end of the Circus Maximus chariot racing arena, the foundations of a huge triumphal arch built for the Emperor Titus.
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Memories emerge intact from cryogenic resurrection machine

While there have been advances in freezing and thawing animals that lack built-in cold survival responses, it wasn't clear whether important higher level functions, like memory, would emerge unscathed -- until now.
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2,400-year-old gold bongs discovered in Russia

The “once-in-a-century” discovery of a set of solid gold bongs has offered a glimpse into the little-understood lives of Scythians, who ruled vast areas of Eurasia for a thousand years 2,400 years ago.
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Jetliner dodges possibly 'catastrophic' collision with drone in NYC

A passenger plane about to land at La Guardia Airport avoided a potentially catastrophic collision with a drone over Prospect Park in Brooklyn on Friday morning, authorities said. Shuttle America Flight 2708 from Washington, DC, was about 10 miles from touchdown when the unmanned craft flew into its path at about 11 a.m., forcing the plane’s co-pilot to pull up about 200 feet to avoid a collision, they said. “The crew of the Embraer E170 reported...
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Why Are Some Glaciers Blue?

One of the most amazing sights in Antarctica is its stunning blue ice, rippling like a frozen sea. Patches of blue-hued ice emerge where wind and evaporation have scoured glaciers clean of snow. The translucent, wind-polished surface reflects a stunning turquoise color when the polar sun peeks above the horizon. Antarctica is the only place on Earth with these incredible stretches of blue ice.
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Saigas, an Endangered Antelope, Dying of Mystery Disease

In the past two weeks, more than a third of all saigas have been killed, conservationists have found.
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This Crazy Land Art Deflects Noise From Amsterdam’s Airport

To drown out flight noise, the Amsterdam Airport turned to large-scale landscaping.
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A Weird New Way To Extend Your Phone Battery

Don’t you hate it when your cell phone battery dies? Well, scientists are trying to make sure it never happens again!
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Incredible sunset on Mars

NASA's Curiosity Mars rover recorded this sequence of views of the sun setting at the close of the mission's 956th Martian day, or sol (April 15, 2015), from the rover's location in Gale Crater. The four images shown in sequence here were taken over a span of 6 minutes, 51 seconds.
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The Intelligent Plant

Depending on whom you talk to in the plant sciences today, the field of plant neurobiology represents either a radical new paradigm in our understanding of life or a slide back down into the murky scientific waters last stirred up by “The Secret Life of Plants.” Its proponents believe that we must stop regarding plants as passive objects—the mute, immobile furniture of our world—and begin to treat them as protagonists in their own dramas, highly skilled in the ways of contending in nature.
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Self-folding robot walks, swims, climbs, dissolves

A demo sparking interest at the ICRA 2015 conference in Seattle was all about an origami robot that was worked on by researchers. More specifically, the team members are from the computer science and artificial intelligence lab at MIT and the department of informatics, Technische Universitat in Germany. "An untethered miniature origami robot that self-folds, walks, swims, and degrades" was the name of the paper...
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The Digital Language Divide

How does the language you speak shape your experience of the internet?
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The Voyager Golden Records

The Voyager Golden Records are phonograph records which were included aboard both Voyager spacecraft, which were launched in 1977.
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Dinosaurs Were Warm-Blooded, Scientist Suggests

In a 2014 study, a team of scientists led by Dr John Grady of the University of New Mexico suggested that non-avian dinosaur metabolism was neither endothermic nor ectothermic (cold-blooded) but an intermediate physiology termed ‘mesothermic.’ Based on his knowledge of how dinosaurs grew, Dr D’Emic re-analyzed that study, which led him to the strikingly different conclusion that dinosaurs were more like mammals than reptiles in their growth and metabolism.
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Learning How To Learn: Why You Need To Face Difficulty

The way we learn is outdated. Schools don’t get it right, and we’re starting to see why.
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Study shows that 'lost' memories can be recalled

Using mice in a lab, researchers have shown that a memory "lost" to amnesia may actually be blocked from retrieval rather than excised from the brain. Researchers found that when blocking protein synthesis within a group of cells in the hippocampus they were able to prevent mice from recalling a trained memory of being shocked when put inside a specific cage. Once the synthesis was permitted to happen again, the mice recalled why they feared the cage...
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New Shape-Memory Metal Practically Never Wears Out

A new shape memory material stays strong even after tens of millions of transformations. It may finally pave way for widespread usage of the futuristic materials. In theory, shape-memory metals ought to be revolutionizing every corner of technology already, from the automotive industry to biotech. These futuristic metals—which can be bent and deformed but pop back to their original shape when heated or jolted with electricity—have already existed for decades.
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Multitasking makes you stupid, studies find

Several scientific studies around the world have concluded the brain doesn't switch tasks like an expert juggler.
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This has Been a Month of Extreme Weather Around the World

Even for a world getting used to wild weather, May seems stuck on strange.
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Germany passes Japan to have world's lowest birth rate

A study says Germany's birth rate has slumped to the lowest in the world, prompting fears labour market shortages will damage the economy. Germany has dropped below Japan to have not just the lowest birth rate across Europe but also globally, according to the report by Germany-based analysts. Its authors warned of the effects of a shrinking working-age population. They said women's participation in the workforce would be key to the country's economic future.
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Your Brain Can’t Handle the Moon

What is this new theory?” the long-retired New York University cognitive psychologist, Lloyd Kaufman, asked me. We were sitting behind the wooden desk of his cozy home office. He had a stack of all his papers on the moon illusion, freshly printed, waiting for me on the adjacent futon. But I couldn’t think of a better way to start our discussion than to have him respond to the latest thesis claiming to explain what has gone, for thousands of years, unexplained...
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How Math’s Most Famous Proof Nearly Broke

Andrew Wiles gave a series of lectures cryptically titled “Modular Forms, Elliptic Curves, and Galois Representations” at a mathematics conference in Cambridge, England, in June 0f 1993. His argument was long and technical. Finally, 20 minutes into the third talk, he came to the end.
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Tropical Storm Andres Forms in the Northeast Pacific; Not a Threat to Mexico

The Northeast Pacific's first named storm of 2015 is here.
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The Dragon Autopsy

Try to imagine how hard it would be to skin a Komodo dragon. It is harder than that. The problem is that the giant lizard’s hide is not just tough and leathery, but also reinforced. Many of the scales contain a small nugget of bone, called an osteoderm, which together form a kind of pointillist body armor. Sawing through these is tough on both arms and blades.
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Immortal But Damned to Hell on Earth

Imagine a supercomputer so advanced that it could hold the contents of a human brain. The Google engineer Ray Kurzweil famously believes that this will be possible by 2045. Organized technologists are seeking to transfer human personalities to non-biological carriers, “extending life, including to the point of immortality.” My gut says that they’ll never get there. But say I’m wrong. Were it possible, would you upload the contents of your brain to...
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Understanding Tesla’s Potemkin Swap Station

The return of battery electric vehicles (BEVs) to the US market nearly a century after internal combustion technology swept them aside is one of the most compelling automotive stories of the last decade, bringing a much-needed injection of fresh ideas and enthusiasm to an increasingly mature and commodified industry. Though BEVs remain less than 1%…
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How to Learn 30 Languages

Some people can speak a seemingly impossible number of tongues. How do they manage it, asks David Robson, and what can we learn from them?
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How, and why, a journalist tricked news outlets into thinking chocolate makes you thin

This spring, the journal International Archives of Medicine published a delicious new study: According to researchers at Germany’s Institute of Diet and Health, people who ate dark chocolate while dieting lost more weight. The media coverage was instantaneous and jubilant: “Scientists say eating chocolate can help you lose weight,” read a headline in the Irish Examiner. “Excellent News: Chocolate Can Help You Lose Weight!” Huffington Post India boasted.
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Mystery of holes in Swiss cheese finally solved

The mystery of Swiss cheese and its disappearing holes has finally been solved.
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New study links 'unprecedented' dolphin deaths with 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill

The Deepwater Horizon oil spill was back in 2010, but the effects are still being understood. A new NOAA study finds the spill is directly linked to the deaths of an "unprecedented" number of bottlenose dolphins — a link that BP denies. It appears that no amount of cleaning can fix the long-term effects of oil contamination in fragile coastal habitats. It appears that no amount of cleaning can fix the long-term effects of oil contamination in fragile coastal habitats.
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Is Europa habitable? NASA mission will use these 9 instruments to find out

NASA has unveiled how a spacecraft bound for Europa will help to figure out if the Jupiter moon has the right conditions for life, as many scientists think it may. The mission, expected to launch in the 2020s, will carry nine instruments chosen from 33 proposals, that are specially designed to find out if Europa is habitable, NASA announced Tuesday.
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A project to find and photograph the oldest living things in the world

I had little idea of what I would discover when I set out to find and photograph the oldest living things in the world. I expected…
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Robot wars will leave humans utterly defenceless warns AI expert

The development of lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS) that select targets without human intervention could violate fundamental principles of human dignity, according to one AI expert. Stuart Russell, professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, highlighted in the journal Nature the ethical decision faced by the artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics communities about whether to oppose or support the development of such systems.
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Is This Planned Ghost Town the City of the Future?

At the end of a six-mile road in a dry valley in southern New Mexico, researchers are building a first-of-its-kind testing ground for the future. Here among the cottonwoods and coyotes, they are creating a city designed to serve as a living laboratory for the latest in cutting-edge technology, such as goods-delivering drones and roads filled with driverless cars. It’ll be identical to any other city except for one thing: No one will live there.
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Researchers find ‘lost’ memories using light

Memories that have been 'lost' as a result of amnesia can be recalled by activating brain cells with light.
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Alberta creationist Edgar Nernberg digs up what scientists are calling the most important fossil finds in decades

The Lord works in mysterious ways — and apparently, He has a pretty ironic sense of humour, too.
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Inside the war on coal

The war on coal is not just political rhetoric, or a paranoid fantasy concocted by rapacious polluters. It’s real and it’s relentless. Over the past five years, it has killed a coal-fired power plant every 10 days. It has quietly transformed the U.S. electric grid and the global climate debate.
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What if Sydney University’s complementary medicine research shows it's useless?

Nearly a quarter of Australians with chronic health problems use complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) and the bewildering range and often changing nature of these products are often of unknown efficacy, and may have important adverse or beneficial interactions with prescribed medicines.
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Fort McKay: The Canadian town that sold itself to tar sands

The tiny Alberta town is one of the world’s single biggest source sites of carbon pollution. The community grew rich on oil, and was wrecked by oil. So local, Cece Fitzpatrick, decided to run for chief, promising to stand up to the industry which came there 50 years ago...
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