The following short video by the University of Oslo’s Physics’ Department explains how particles originating from deep inside the core of our sun creates Aurora Borealis, also commonly referred as northern lights, on our planet. [Source]
When a homo sapien male makes a loud noise rubbing his penis against his abdoment, it usually leads to a court appearance. When the male micronecta scholtzi does the same, it’s hailed as a new record in nature. The river bug, also known as a lesser water boatman, has been recorded at a hair under […]
Rajesh Rao is fascinated by “the mother of all crossword puzzles”: How to decipher the 4000 year old Indus script. At TED 2011 he tells how he is enlisting modern computational techniques to read the Indus language, the key piece to understanding this ancient civilization. [TED]
When the future promised us robots, I don’t think this is exactly what it meant. And for my part, it’s not really the Laundry-Folding Bot™ I had in mind, either. A project at the National University of Singapore intends to equip robots with all the human capabilities for love, including a fully functional endocrine system that […]
Stanford physicist Ingmar Riedel-Kruse has begun developing “biotic games” involving paramecia and other living organisms. He hopes the games lead to advances in education and crowd-sourcing of laboratory research while helping to raise the level of public discourse on bio-related issues. [Youtube]
Thanks to a recent development in optigenetics research, mice are teaching us about our own brains… by letting us control theirs. Christian Wentz from MIT has designed a mind-controlling hat for mice; the contraption is built of a pair of circuit boards, an antenna, and some advancements in remote battery tech, which allows a set […]
IBM has published a paper on drift-tolerant multilevel phase-change memory. That may not sound exciting, but it could mean memory chips that have all the benefits of flash memory, but work far quicker and last far longer. If that proves the case, the chips could become useful for business machines. The basic concept of phase […]
We Americans love us some polls. Go ahead, as me a multiple choice question about anything. Will there be a cure for cancer by 2050? World War III? A superior race of cyborg overlords? My answers are a) depends on which cancer you’re asking about, b) I do not know, c) Pfft. SHHYes! GOOD.is and […]
Say goodbye to the days when we all knew dinosaurs were cold-blooded wonderlizards who lazed about trying to warm up in the midday sun. U.S. and German scientists have developed a technique for accurately measuring the body temperature of dinosaurs. The study of 11 fossilized sauropod teeth reveal that the Brachiosaurus ran a toasty 38.2ºC (about 100.8ºF) […]
The Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) is a rover that will assess whether Mars ever was, or is still today, an environment able to support microbial life. In other words, its mission is to determine the planet’s “habitability.” Scheduled to launch in November or December of this year, the Curiosity rover should land on Mars in […]