After decades of dreaming and preparation, scientists have finally put the Rosetta spacecraft into orbit around a comet. And now the Rosetta is about to land!
Say hello to the Blackberry Passport. This killer phone sports a huge 4.5 inch 1440x1440 LCD display, massive 3450 mAH battery, and a capacitive touch keyboard. According to its makers, the phone's resolution is perfect for seeing images accurately, and any doctor who wants to look at detailed x-rays on their smartphone couldn’t do any better than the device’s 4.5-inch screen.
Human trials are now planned. If successful, the simple, cheap HIV vaccine could be taken as a probiotic-like drink.
The new vaccine works in the opposite way to most vaccines - by suppressing, rather than triggering, an immune response. This is because HIV and SIV actually require immune cells known as CD4 T-cells in order to proliferate and establish an infection in the body.
This is a full-disk image of Mars, showing nearly an entire hemisphere of the Red Planet. It was captured this week by India's Mars Orbiter Mission and shows a storm brewing in the north (around the 11 o'clock position).
Good news for pain-pill poppers: Ibuprofen (found in Advil) may help you live longer. A new study shows that it increases life span in lab organisms, raising the possibility it does the same thing in people.
To put ibuprofen through its paces, biochemist Michael Polymenis of Texas A&M University, College Station, and colleagues gave yeast, nematode worms, and fruit flies doses of the drug that are comparable to what humans would take. The life spans of all three types of organisms increased if they received ibuprofen, the researchers report today in PLOS Genetics. In yeast, for instance, ibuprofen stretched life span by 17%, half of what researchers can produce by cutting the cells’ food supply (another approach to increasing longevity). ...
When a person dies from cancer, the culprit isn't usually the original tumor - it's metastasis, the spread of cancer cells throughout the body. Now, researchers have managed to package a drug in nanoparticles (a microscopic particle with at least one dimension less than 100 nm) so that it can target these cancer cells without, crucially, interfering with normal cells - and report that they've stopped cancer cells from spreading in mice. Nanoparticle research is currently an area of intense scientific research, due to a wide variety of potential applications in biomedical, optical, and electronic fields.
If you've ever been to the Netherlands, you probably noticed one of two things a) nearly everyone rides a bike or b) you're a lot shorter than everyone there. According to statistics, this countries population has gained an impressive 20 centimeters in the past 150 years and is now officially the tallest on the planet. While a rich diet and good health care is always a recipe for physical growth, a new study suggests something else is going on as well: The Dutch growth spurt may be an example of human evolution in action.
The study, published online today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, shows that tall Dutch men on average have more children than their shorter counterparts, and that more of their children survive. That suggests ge ...
As part of Donald Trump's cabinet pick, Myron Ebell, who is a director at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and a prominent climate change skeptic, will lead the Environmental Protection Agency's administration.
While Ebell has had no formal scientific education, and makes no claim to be a scientist, his view is that if public decisions are to be made according to scientific findings, than they should be discussed democratically by all people, not just scientists. Unfortunately, in the realms of science, public opinion doesn't matter much unless you're discussing the ethics of a scientific matter.
Appointing Ebell doesn't mean the environment is under threat, as suggested by the disenfranchised, New York Times. The discussion on global w ...
Sky gazers will be treated to a rare convergence of celestial events on 31 January — a blue moon, a supermoon, and a total lunar eclipse, all in one. The phenomenon, which hasn’t happened since 1866, graces the sky when the second full moon of the month (known as a blue moon) is in its closest position to Earth, making it appear even larger than usual — a supermoon.
The seldom-seen event will be visible in western North America, Asia, Australia, and elsewhere across the Eastern Hemisphere. So, if you’re in one of those lucky locations and want to see an event that’s literally once in a blue moon, here’s your chance.
The residents of Utqiaġvik, Alaska (formerly known as Barrow), saw the final sunset for 2018 last Sunday. The city is currently in complete darkness until the sun rises on January 23, 2019, which is when residents begin to see touches of light over the horizon again (due to the refraction and scattering of the atmosphere).
Between November 18 and January 23, there is a decreasing amount of twilight each day (see illustration below) during the first half of the polar night, and on the winter solstice (around December 21 or December 22), civil twilight in Utqiagvik lasts for a mere 3 hours. By January 27 or 28, the sun rises completely over the horizon.
Utqiaġvik is one of the northernmost public communities in the world and is the northernmo ...
Researchers from McGill University in Montreal have discovered a bacterium living in the frozen permafrost of the high Arctic. The permafrost bacterium, Planococcus halocryophilus strain Or1, grows and divides at -15°C and can even remain metabolically active at -25°C.
This bacteria is yielding clues about how extraterrestrial organisms might endure extreme conditions - as one of the things that makes it extremely hard for life to flourish in foreboding places like Mars and the moons of Saturn is the punishing cold. ...
This image shows 26 carbon atoms and 14 hydrogen atoms rearranging bonds. There has never been an image of a single bond resolve at this level of detail so close to the reaction time before.
The medication is designed to be injected right after a traumatic experience. It targets Oprl1, a receptor that researchers believe is responsible for attaching fear to traumatic memories.
Post-traumatic stress disorder is caused by many things, such as surviving an accident or exposure to violence. There are genetic risk factors, but many people who acquire the disorder had no predisposition. Symptoms include debilitating flashbacks and hallucinations of the event, avoiding close relationships, angry or violent outbursts, and an inability to return to the location where the traumatic experience occurred, among many others.
Swedish engineers have developed a system that turns sweat into potable water. The Sweat Machine spins clothes to extract liquid from the fibres, filters it and transforms it into water. Their developers say the water extracted from the machine is cleaner than ordinary tap water.
The hyperloop would be solar powered and connect cities up to 900 miles away from each other. The passenger pods would be enclosed, which diminishes concerns about weather and interacting with wildlife. The designer of the hyperloop is Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX and Tesla Motors.
There are still issues to work out before the plan would be practical, but it is an exciting look forward to alternative modes of transportation.
