NASA’s Monster "Curiosity" Mars Rover By The Numbers
Nov 29, 2011 Space
NASA’s massive new mobile space lab is set to touch down on the Red Planet next August — in a mission to find evidence of alien life.
Scientists ID ‘Morning Person’ Gene
Nov 29, 2011 Space
Napoleon Bonaparte, Margaret Thatcher, Leonardo da Vinci … history is full of? names of famous figures who accomplished historical feats on?reportedly few hours of sleep. Now, new research suggests?they may have had a ?certain genetic advantage. Scientists at?Germany’s Ludwig Maximalians University of Munich have found that one gene, called ABCC9, influences sleep duration and could explain why certain people seem able to operate on limited amounts of shut-eye. The researchers studied responses to a sleep survey from more than 4,000 Europeans in seven different countries and also scanned their genomes. They found that people who had two copies of a…
The incredible shrinking laboratory or ‘lab-on-a-chip’
Nov 29, 2011 Space
A lab-on-a-chip crams the pipettes, beakers and test tubes of a modern chemistry lab onto a microchip-sized wafer of glass or plastic to provide on-the-spot test results
WalkSafe app shields smartphone pedestrians (w/ video)
Nov 29, 2011 Space
Smartphone users who as pedestrians are not very smart about crossing and looking both ways now have a protective shield in the form of an Android app which they can download for free. A research team from Dartmouth College and the University of Bologna, Italy, are offering their new …
‘We’re blind to our blindness. We have very little idea of how little we know. We’re not designed to’
Nov 29, 2011 Space
A study was done after there were terror incidents in Europe. It asked people how much they would be willing to pay for an insurance policy that covered them against death, for any reason, during a trip abroad. Another group of people were asked how much they would pay for a policy that covered them for death in a terrorist incident during the trip. People paid substantially more for the second than for the first, which is absurd. But the reason is that we’re more afraid when we think of dying in a terrorist incident, than we are when we think simply of dying. You’re asked how much you’re willing to pay, and you answer something much simpler, which is: “How afraid am I?”
‘UFOs’ Disrupting Search for ‘God Particle’
Nov 29, 2011 Space
Unidentified falling objects, or UFOs, are getting in the way of the particle beam at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Physicists are trying to figure out what they are.
Coffee-Drinking Provides Raw Sewage Red Flag
Nov 29, 2011 Space
How many cups of coffee have you had today? A new study finds that your caffeine habit could provide a red flag to alert authorities of sewer leaks and overflows.
The Killer Whales That Prey on Great White Sharks [VIDEO]
Nov 29, 2011 Space
Off the coast of San Francisco, an unexpected killing challenged the great white shark’s supremacy as the ultimate predator when one became prey to a killer whale. Whale-watchers witnessed a stunning act of nature as a killer whale rose to the water’s surface with a great white in its mouth and held it there for…
‘Anthrax isn’t scary at all compared to this’: Man-made flu virus with potential to wipe out many millions
Nov 29, 2011 Space
The deadly virus is a genetically tweaked version of the H5N1 bird flu strain, but is far more infectious and could wipe out millions of people at a time.