Author: Bijoy Daniel

Researchers successfully tested gene therapy in rats to stimulate the production of a chemical which naturally occurs in the brain and stops seizures from taking place. About 3.000.000 people are suffering from epilepsy in the US alone, and a major characteristic of this lifelong disease is uncontrollable seizures which prevent sufferers from normally carrying on […]

Butterflies are one of the most enchanting beings in the animal kingdom, a symbol of grace and beauty encountered in every art form. From a crawling larva to a majestic winged creature, it’s difficult not to take notice of the similarities between the butterfly’s metamorphosis process and the ups and downs life serves before one […]

One might think knitting and physics experiments don’t really have much in common, however astronaut  Dr. Don Pettit, currently on mission onboard the International Space Station, would think otherwise. Using an statically charged knitting needle made out of teflon (polytetrafluoroethylene), Pettit fired tiny droplets of water through a syringe towards the needle after which a marvelous […]

Hailed as a breakthrough in reconstructive surgery, an 83-year old woman had her lower jaw replaced by an exact 3D printed replica made out of titanium. The implant was made by heating and fusing together titanium ore, one layer at a time with a laser. The procedure took place last summer in the Netherlands, but […]

Whenever a massive object, with an equally massive gravitational pull, like black holes or galaxy clusters, falls between an observer, say a telescope, and a distant target in the background to be observed, than a gravitational lens is formed. Light emitted from the distant object gets twisted by the massive object, and ends up distorted […]

Last year NASA permanently retired the iconic shuttle program, since it became obsolete, too expensive, difficult to maintain and no longer resonated with the agency’s goals. Its successor is no other than the Orion capsule, a spacecraft capable of deep-space exploration missions developed by Lockheed Martin in collaboration with NASA. So far, it’s more or […]

In the popular TV series, Star Trek, one of the most fascinating devices featured, out of the whole myriad of blasters and tractor beams, is the tricorder,  a portable medical scanner and communication device which could detect biological phenomena such as increased blood flow around tumorous growths just by sweeping a person. The closest thing […]

The much dreamed off invisibility cloak is just a few tiny steps away, after remarkable research in the field, many backed by military interests, have sparked some amazing advances. In the last few years alone, scientists have managed to successfully cloak various objects either using meta-materials that bent light around an object to conceal it or […]

Current unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), commonly referred to as drones, are packed with state of the art technology, but despite this they’re not very smart as far as maneuvering around obstacles is concerned. Birds, for instance, can fly through forests at incredible speeds, traveling through out the whole woods  at times, with no risk of […]

Well if we can’t go to Mars, it seems Mars is coming to us… at least some chunks of it. Scientists have reported a rather unusual invasion by Martians: meteorite-like chunks that fell from the Red Planet in Morocco last summer. This is the first time since 1962 that researchers have confirmed such a sample, […]