Author: Bijoy Daniel

A team of archaeologists from Egypt and Switzerland unearthed the 3100 year-old tomb of a female singer in the valley of the kings – a woman not related to the ancient Egyptian royal families ever found there. This was published on numerous sites with faulty information, reporting that the tomb was 1100 years old (like […]

In the age where consumer electronic are purposely built with short lived life cycles, there might seem to be no interest for manufactures to invest in technology that enhances reliability. Sophisticated military controls or aerospace on-board circuitry are a different story though from your counter toaster – the kind of applications that yearn for working electronics that can […]

Germany keeps setting a right example of how renewable energy should be treated by the authorities, as opposed to the US, for example. In Germany, one of the world’s leading countries in this field, 51% of all renewable energy is owned by citizens and farmers, who use it for themselves or even sell it back […]

It was only the second ever Russian-made rocket, weighing 2.2 tons and launched with military or (at most) join industrial/military purposes; the launch was made from the European Space Agency. Surprisingly enough, it was financed by France’s defence ministry, and built with Italian-French joint venture Thales Alenia Space, costing almost 1 billion dollars. The satellite […]

Concluding a debate which lasted for over 7 months, the US Institute of Medicine has released a report that marks a turning point for chimpanzees, our closest relative, in terms of medical research. The panel laid out some stringent rules against all current and future chimp research, installing some dramatic penalties to those who disobey. […]

There are people out there who predict that the entire life on Earth will be wiped out in 2012 – or at least significantly crippled. But if you stop just a second and think about it rationally, you understand that this is nothing else but jibber jabbar, and people like this will keep ‘announcing’ the […]

What if you could increase your ability to remember with a pill?  This may not be an idea just for science fiction novels.  Scientists have discovered a method that could strengthen long-term memories. A protein called PKR functions to maintain a relatively low level of excitability by enhancing GABA synaptic transmission.  GABA is an inhibitory […]

Scientists from CalTech University have set a new world record for data transfer, after they successfully reached a combined rate of 186 GB/s, in both direction. Their work was presented at the recent SuperComputing 2011 (SC11) conference in Seattle. To put things into perspective 186 GBps would roughly mean 100,000 transferred Blue Ray disks in a single […]

NASA has developed a harpoon that would make even the most pretentious pirate jealous: it can latch on to comets with surgical precision, without having to land on them. The harpoon, which measures six feet tall (almost two meters) was made out of pair of springs normally used to provide the suspension for trucks; the […]

The Kyoto protocol is the only international pact aimed at fighting global warming; adopted on 11 December 1997 in Kyoto, Japan, it is signed and ratified by 191 states, the only major country not to sign it being (drum rolls)… the United States! Other states yet to ratify the Kyoto protocol include Afghanistan, Andorra and […]