Tag archive: science

Ever tried to find love through your computer? Online dating has grown into a large, billion dollar industry over the past 15 years, and has become a mainstream way to meet your future mate. However, a new study, led by Northwestern University Associate Professor of Social Psychology, Eli Finkel, examines the truth behind online dating sites, and the bold claims that science-based algorithms will find your soulmate. Finkel, along with four other… Read More

Sugar cane and corn may soon be sharing the biofuel spotlight with a new contender: seaweed. A new breakthrough to break down sugars in seaweed may make the abundant marine algae central to replacing fossil fuels. The breakthrough is credited to scientists from the Berkeley-based Bio Architecture Lab, Inc (BAL). According to the Scientific American, the BAL researchers used a genetically modified version of Escherichia colito (E. coli) to digest… Read More

Smartphones are great at a lot of things. Withstanding dunks and drownings in bath tubs, toilets, or beverages is not one of them. We will be more than relieved when phones are made out of waterproof and indestructible materials right out of the box, but for now the best we can do is bulky waterproof cases, which most of us aren't willing to sport on a regular basis because hey, they make that sleek and sexy new iPhone look like a brick… Read More

In today's installment of potentially catastrophic science experiments, scientists have plans to create a giant laser that can emit a beam with an amount of energy equivalent to all of the power the Earth receives from the sun combined, reports Richard Gray in the Telegraph. It is believed such a laser will have the ability to rip apart the vacuum of space — literally boil the underlying fabric of the universe. This veritable death… Read More

If you want to see something strange, you've come to the right place. Using a technology called “quantum trapping,” scientists can now make an object levitated in the air above a magnet. More interesting, it's locked to the magnet so well that its position in the air can be moved and it will stay in place, almost as if it's sitting on a table or an invisible stand of clay or something. Discovery explains the… Read More

Table salt helps preserve food, flavor food, and keep snowy streets driveable, but now it may help push hard drive capacity to the next level. In Singapore, researchers have discovered that salt is key to multiplying hard drive capacity by six times what it is today. Wired.co.uk reports that Joel Yang, of the Institute of Materials Research and Engineering (IMRE), is using sodium chloride (salt) to increase hard drive capacity from 1.9 tarabits… Read More

If watching people speak to themselves on Bluetooth headsets wasn't weird enough, now everyone may start kicking and flailing their legs around to control their smartphone or tablet. A group of researchers at the University of Bristol, UK and the University of Manitoba, Canada want to replace some touch actions on your phone with leg movements and kicks, reports New Scientist. While there are a number of potential issues with this… Read More

A new Harvard University study has proven that Homo erectus, an ancestor of ours, was cooking food as far back as 1.9 million years ago. While our ancestors definitely weren't baking cherry pies, scientists have found that they were heating food much earlier than we previously believed. Past research pinned the invention of cooking and the harnessing of fire somewhere between 400,000 and 1.5 million years ago, but few thought its origins… Read More

Scientists have never had a good handle on exactly how many species of plants, animals, and fungi there are on Earth. Estimates have ranged from 3 to 100 million species. However, a new study, published in PLoS Biology, has yielded a much more accurate (we hope) idea of how many different types of living organisms are on our planet. Scientists now believe that about 8.7 million species live on Earth, an estimate that's accurate, give or… Read More

A group of Australian and British geologists working in the Outback have discovered evidence of what may be the oldest-known fossils of life on Earth. The sulfur-based microbes they found are 3.4 billion years old, and might help the search for life on Mars. In an article in Nature Geoscience, the team led by David Wacey of the University of Western Australia and Martin D. Brasier of the University of Oxford said they'd found microfossils… Read More

There have been 20-30 major Hollywood alien apocalypse movies released in the last year or so, and more are on the way. They're unavoidable. Some of them are cataloged here, but there are almost too many to count. As such, it's no wonder that scientists have hostile aliens on the brain. Several researchers have released a study that says there is a good chance aliens will come and wipe us out if they think we're irresponsible,… Read More

A black scientist that applies for a federal research grant with the National Institute of Health (NIH) is notably less likely to receive funding than a white one, according to a study published in the journal Science [pdf], which was sponsored by NIH. The NIH revealed that for ever 100 funding applications it considered for approval, 29 of the grants were awarded to white scientists. That compared with 16 that went to black scientists.… Read More

If you're reading this on a computer, chances are you're sitting down, and if you've been sitting for more than an hour, your lifespan may have just dropped by an additional 22 minutes. That is, if you believe the results of a new study by the University of Queensland. Australian researchers have found that those who averaged six hours of TV (or sitting sedentary) per day lived about five years less than those who watched no… Read More

Maybe this sounds familiar: one day an isolated Insupiat Eskimo village in northwestern Alaska is plugging along like everything's fine. Then, out of nowhere, the town is attacked by a horrifying orange goo washing up from the ocean. Okay, maybe it wasn't quite that dramatic, but it did indeed happen. Kivalina, a town of 425 that sits on Alaska's coast 625 miles from Anchorage, flashed into the national spotlight a few days… Read More

The scientific community has only just started to discover the various risks and benefits associate with social media and the ways in which it is changing everything from human interaction to childhood development. But according to a recently revealed study, using Facebook and other technology may have negative effects on the mental health of children and teenagers. These findings were unveiled by Dr. Larry D. Rosen, a professor of psychology… Read More