Studies

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In the year 2011 alone, the US faced 14 extreme weather events, while Japan registered record rainfalls and the Yangtze river basin in China suffered a record drought. The year 2010 saw Russia in the midst of its hottest summer in centuries, while Pakistan and Australia received record-breaking amounts of rain, highly atypical for the region. […]

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– 201203robojellyfish

After a three year effort, researchers at Virginia Tech have successfully managed to create a silicone robot that functions underwater by mimicking the  motion of a jellyfish. The robot can propel itself thanks to the heat-producing reactions catalyzed by its surface, and since it uses hydrogen and oxygen found in the water as fuel, the Robojelly can theoretically […]

– 201203full 600px Tycho supernova xray

Supernovae are one of the most energetic and brightest events in the cosmos, often so powerful they outshine whole galaxies. They’re considered  to play a major role in our understanding of the Universe, which is why scientists have invested so much time and effort into studying them. A recent study of X-ray and ultraviolet observations from […]

– 201110What Do Polar Bears Eat

Global warming has significant consequences to Earth’s ecosystems, each effect triggering another one in a slew of chain reactions. Frighting enough, rising temperatures and changed global weather patterns has caused certain types of plants and animals to become smaller, claims a new study published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change. Warmer and drier weather causes plants […]

– 20111056054406 shells pa

Overlooking the Indian Ocean, lies the beautiful Blombos Cave in South Africa. It was here that archeologists uncovered red and yellow dyes, as well as shell containers that could have been used as paint pots – all around 100,000 years old! This extraordinary find proves humans were thinking in a modern way hundreds of thousands of […]

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We’ve become so accustomed to the imagery of huge stacks of solar panel arrays stretching across the scorching desert, that the idea of implementing solar panels in some of the coldest spots on Earth might be quickly judged as feeble. In reality, Japanese scientists claim in a recently published study that the most energy efficient […]

– 201110black plague bacteria

The black plague, or black death as it’s also referenced, is a deadly infectious disease which killed off more than a third of Europe’s population during the middle ages. The bacteria responsible for the disease has been confirmed by genetic scientists as Yersinia pestis, and recently, building off the research which found this particular strain, […]

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Humans, as well as most mammals, have only two sets of teeth to make with during their entire lifetime. However, a new research published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which studied the dental structure of mole rats has shown that the species is an exception to this rule. In fact, […]

– 201110Picture 3 36

A few days ago I reported how researchers found a myriad of new virus strains inside raw sewage. On a related, more intriguing, note French scientists have recently discovered the largest virus ever discovered so far in the ocean waters off the coast of Chile. Scientists estimate it’s between 10 and 20 times the size […]