First things first: You're a mutant. But don't waste your time trying to fly or look through people's clothes, as your amazing mutant powers are "not having pseudopods" and "consisting of more than a single cell." All of evolution results from random changes in DNA, and now scientists have recorded the current rate of human mutation.
Continue reading "Does Human Evolution Have a Mutation Rate? New Research Says "Yes"" »
Mankind has always been driven by contradictory drives. The relentless
curiosity that pushes us forward and is directly responsible for our
progress from caves to cities. The fear of change that tells us "hang
on, these caves/cities are really nice, we don't want to risk losing
them." There isn't any greater potential threat to the status quo than
the discovery of extraterrestrial life, which is why some people would
prefer we didn't try.
Continue reading "Is Detection by an Exo Civilization a Threat to Earth? World's Experts Debate -A Galaxy Classic " »
Two tiny worms much smaller than a rice grain and a strange crustacean
that has no eyes and poisonous fangs are among several new species of
marine life discovered living in total darkness in in a mile-long
underwater cave in Lanzarote, Canary Islands, located in the Atlantic
off the coast of North Africa. The cave is believed to have been formed
by a volcanic eruption about 20,000 years ago.
Continue reading "3 New Species Found Living in Total Darkness in Canary Islands' Underwater Cave " »
Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd don't need to suit up for this one. NASA's
Chandra X-ray Observatory has found a cosmic "ghost," and scientists
think it is evidence of a huge eruption produced by a supermassive
black hole equal in power to a billion supernovas. The source, HDF 130,
is over 10 billion light years away and
existed at a time 3 billion years after the Big Bang, when galaxies and
black holes were forming at a high rate.
Continue reading "Astronomers Zoom in on "Ghost" Black Hole -Equal to One Billion Supernovas " »
"Technology
has overtaken nature in some domains but lags far
behind in the cognitive processing of received sense impressions. My
dream is to endow robots with multiple sensory modalities. Instead of
always building in more cameras, we should also along the way give them
additional sensors for sound and touch."
Leo van Hemmen,
chair of theoretical biophysics, Technische Universitaet
Muenchen.
Continue reading "Can Robots be Created With a "Sixth Sense"?" »
In further proof that the universe can kick our butt at just about
anything, the double galaxies of NGC4676 are putting on a pyrotechnics
display that Jerry Bruckheimer couldn't imagine if he mainlined LSD and
directly applied two thousand volts to his visual cortex. They're
colliding in a process leading astrophysicists describe as "totally
awesome". They've got a sense of cinema style to it too, drawing the
stellar spectacular out in extreme slow-motion - a few hundred million
years, now showing in a cosmos near you. We think astronomers could do a better name these fantastic objects. What would you name them?
Continue reading "Image of the Day: You Name the Cosmos" »
A plot for the next Ridley Scott space thriller? The eye of the next generation HAL 9000? Guess again. NASA is experimenting was an extremeophile bacteria that could survive on another planet. In an Earth lab, Deinococcus radiodurans (D. rad) survive extreme levels of radiation, extreme temperatures, dehydration, and exposure to toxic chemicals.
Continue reading "NASA's NextGen Astronauts - Bacteria With the Ability to Survive Radiation & Rapidly Repair Its Own DNA" »