All Hands To The Pumps! Here Comes The Sea
Just when you thought the news about climate change couldn’t get any worse, new projections suggest that the warming climate could melt the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets much sooner than previously thought, leading to a global sea level rise of at least 20 feet. The scientists behind the new research warn that if the […]
Increasing Soil Erosion Threatens World’s Food Supply
An ecologist from Cornell University reports that soil from the world’s croplands is being swept and washed away 10 – 40 times faster than it is being replenished. Astonishingly, an agricultural area the size of Indiana is destroyed every year. Cornell’s David Pimentel lamented that while climate change hogged the headlines, nobody cared much about […]
Chimps Command To Conquer An Itch
A paper entitled “Referential Gestural Communication in Wild Chimpanzees,” recently published in Current Biology, shows that chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) can effectively command their chimp buddies around using hand gestures just like their human relatives. This observation runs counter to previously held assumptions that “referential” gestures used to direct the attentions of others were a distinctly […]
When A Spotty Face Indicates A Healthy Partner
What ornithologists previously considered to be a male bird’s decorative plumage, has instead been found to have a far deeper significance in the case of the Collared Flycatcher (Ficedula albicollis) bird. Female birds were known to pick their mate based on the size of a spot on the male’s forehead, but instead of merely being […]
Big Problems From Small Avian Flu Mutations
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Super Strong Artificial Muscles Could Power Next Generation Of Robots
Nanotechnology researchers at the University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) have made chemically powered artificial muscles that are up to 100 times stronger than natural muscles. Fueled by alcohol or hydrogen, the muscles are also able to do 100 times more work per cycle than natural muscles. Dr. Ray H. Baughman, who headed up the […]
DNA Shaped Nebula Observed At Center Of Milky Way
Astronomers using the Spitzer Space Telescope have observed an astonishing double helix shaped nebula near the center of our Milky Way galaxy. The astronomers, writing in Nature, estimate the nebula to be around 80 light years in length and situated only 300 light years away from the massive black hole at the center of the […]
The Strange Matter Of Superfluidity
In his most recent experiments into superconductivity and superfluidity, physicist Randall Hulet of Rice University looks to have recreated the same quantum conditions that may occur at the heart of quark stars; the stars that are believed to be comprised of strange matter. Hulet’s observations fly in the face of conventional theories, because he has […]
Standing Room Only In Classroom Of The Future
What’s the best way to reduce obesity rates among children? Take their chairs away and make them stand, according to James Levine, a Mayo Clinic obesity researcher. And if this new initiative gets off the ground, children in the classrooms of the future will be schooled at “standing desks” equipped with new technologies. Childhood obesity […]
The Search For Rock
Sure to be on every geek’s Christmas wish-list is a tricorder-like device similar to that used by Spock in the television series Star Trek. Professor Robert Downs, the associate professor of geosciences at The University of Arizona in Tucson, says once he finishes cataloguing the spectral fingerprints for all Earth’s minerals, he’ll have an honest-to-goodness […]