Studies

– 201203download

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 […]

– 201105twitter logo

Twitter prides itself in connecting the world and sharing everybody’s thoughts from every corner of the world, especially when it comes to news. But is this really true, or is this just a branding and marketing stunt ? According to a study conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, Twitter accounts […]

– 201105coffee

Lately, I’m feeling quite skeptical about the studies I read regarding coffee consumption, especially since it’s known that sometimes a major industry (like oil, or tobacco, or coffee) tends to… influence certain researchers to publish favorable results. I just recently wrote about how 9 out of the top 10 climate change deniers are influenced by […]

– 201105high school alcohol abuse

According to a recently published study, teens who regularly drink alcohol tend to spend more time on a computer surfing the internet on social networking sites, than other teens who don’t drink alcohol. As a conclusion that both somewhat bashes ‘nowadays teens’ and the Internet, the study concludes that a link between teenage drinking and […]

– 201105autism awareness

Autism is still yet poorly understood, and researchers are just starting to figure out the mechanisms behind this strange condition which seems to affect more and more children (and not only) with each passing year. A 6 year autism study The ambitious six year effort attempted to gauge the rate of autism in a South […]

– 201105zombie ant

New amazing yet gruelsome details have emerged, regarding how a fungus can control an unfortunate ant. Basically, the fungus infects the ant’s brain, and then tells it what to do, in a somewhat similar fashion to what a Goa’uld would do. Zombies in Thailand Venturing deep in the Thai forest, researchers have found a species […]

– 201105schizophrenia

Researchers from the University of Texas and Yale infected a computer with schizophrenia in order to find out more about how the human brain behaves and understands things. Human behaviour from a computer Computers can show some signs of virtual schizophrenia too, if they can’t ‘forget’ fast enough. So researchers used a virtual computer model, […]