Hey there, science fiction. Defence contractor, Pegasus Global Holdings is building a replica of Rock Hill, a South Carolina city, in the middle of the New Mexico desert as a testing ground for futuristic infrastructures – self-driving cars, green buildings and next-generation Wi-Fi. It’ll be an uninhabited laboratory – they’re calling it “an amusement park for scientists.”
People over at MIT have developed a piece of open-source software that lets you drag files from your phone to your computer or tablet or whatever with a swipe of a finger. It’s simple and clever and looks like the future – and it works. They’re calling it Swÿp. Take a look at the demo after the jump.
Late yesterday afternoon, you may have been alerted to the fact that we had found out that Salome the cheetah from the Hoedpsruit Endangered Species Centre was due to give birth to her first litter of cubs at some point during the following 24 hours. Her first cub was born at approximately 19h20 last night. Click through for more.
A new startup called Urthecast is in the process of putting together HD cameras to be fitted to the International Space Station, so that people can watch real-time video of the planet from space. Which is at once really cool, and sort of pointless. The footage is looking impressive, though – take a look.
Interorbital Systems, an American aerospace company that constructs rocket and spacecraft, has announced an exciting product development: you can now very cost-effectively buy, and launch your own satellite into orbit.
The City of Cape Town has released its official report on the fatal shark attack that claimed the life of bodyboarder, David Lilienfeld, 20, on Thursday at Kogel Bay, “Caves”, near Gordons Bay. In it, the City concluded that the tagging of False Bay sharks for a documentary could not be directly linked to the attack.
Wherever humans and wild animals come into close contact with one another, there will likely be negative consequences for one or the other, or both. 13-year-old Richard Turere, who lives in Empakasi, on the edge of the Nairobi National Park, just south of Nairobi, has invented a system that keeps his family’s cattle safe from lions that had previously sought an easy meal from their herd.
Yesterday NASA managed to capture the clearest-yet footage of a solar flare in process after magnetic fields on the Sun’s northeastern curve exploded in huge streams of plasma and sun stuff. The footage only accounts for about five seconds of explosion, but it’s very, very cool, both in and out of time-lapse.
UC San Diego physicist, Dmitri Krioukov got ticketed recently for running a stop sign – which isn’t unusual. What is unusual is the fact that, rather than pay the $400 fine and move on, Krioukov wrote a mathematical paper proving that the cop who ticketed him had a “perception of reality that did not properly reflect reality.”
Advice from the first official British government report into fracking has been published today. In it, British ministers have been informed that they should allow the controversial process of fracking for shale gas to be extended there, this despite the process having been blamed for causing two earthquakes.
A rather large group of former NASA scientists and astronauts have come together to express their distrust at the way NASA thinks about climate change. They’ve written a letter, in which they criticise the Goddard Institute For Space Studies for telling fibs about man-made carbon dioxide.
A juvenile mammoth – nicknamed “Yuka” – was found entombed in Siberian ice near the shores of the Arctic Ocean, and shows signs of being cut open by ancient people. The frozen carcass is believed to be at least 10 000 years old – and could prove to be the first mammoth carcass revealing signs of human interaction in the region.
Have you ever wondered what the universe would look like on a single photo? You did!? Well, what a coincidence, because NASA has just released this infrared map of the entire universe. This serves as a capstone for a bigger cosmic map – containing 18 000 images and 560 million different objects. It took NASA fourteen years of preparation and three years of data collection.
This is a pretty cool feat by James Cameron, who just returned from the bottom of the Marianas Trench – the deepest place in the world. To put it in perspective for you, if you took Mount Everest, and turned it upside down, it still wouldn’t be able to touch the bottom, not even by a kilometer. Video inside. It’s incredible.
For the first time ever, South African scientists have generated non-embryonic stem cells, the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) has announced. Harvested from adult skin cells, theoretically, these stem cells can grow into any type of adult cell.
NASA officials have announced that the first launch of a commercially built space capsule to the International Space Station is scheduled for the end of April. California-based Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) are the dudes responsible for the capsule in question, the unmanned Dragon spacecraft.
Before you begin to make fun of the headline used for this article, we must tell you that the vermin extractors will also be serving an educational purpose. Johannesburg’s general owl population has been in decline for years as a result of urbanisation, but new owl projects are helping to combat this.
Bad. Ass. NASA has released a new space atlas, detailing over 560 million stars, galaxies and asteroids, many never seen before. The 18 000 awesome images were taken by NASA’s infrared space telescope, the Wide-field Survey Explorer (WISE). Take a look at some of the incredible space-images after the space-jump.
There is no error in that headline – Nokia has really just unveiled the PureView 41-megapixel-sensor camera in one of its new smartphones – the Lumia 808. Additionally, the device has extremely good sound recording capabilities and will also allow the user to capture video content in full HD.
The universe as we know it is safe for now, and so is Einstein’s theory of special relativity. Physicists who shocked the scientific world by claiming particles could move faster than the speed of light have admitted they made a mistake. Their reasoning: a faulty fiber-optic cable in a GPS receiver.
It’s normally the scientists and engineers that go up into space, but NASA has realised that while people are up there, they need to eat. Whilst a little ahead of itself, a study has opened in Hawaii to find a chef for Mars. Do you have what it takes?
The human race is going to have to start believing in science – and quickly – if we want a hope in hell of surviving the environmental crisis we’re facing. This was the sentiment at a recent gathering of the world’s pre-eminent scientific minds in Vancouver. At the meeting, thousands of scientists discussed the problem that their industry is “under seige”, and that the world needs help to believe in science again.
BBC weather forecaster, Alex Deakin, managed to predict what no other weather forecaster has previously forecast on Saturday evening’s BBC World weather report. He meant to say “sunshine”, but he definitely didn’t, and instead conjured up a very strange weather prediction indeed. N5FW.
A bunch of emails have been leaked from the Heartland Institute, the think tank vaguely infamous for being at once massively skeptical of climate change and funded by billionaire global warming deniers, the Koch Brothers. The emails suggest that the Institute has been paying scientists and bloggers to discredit climate change research.
Last week 2oceansVibe correctly doubted the authenticity of footage that claimed a woolly mammoth had been spotted by a government-employed engineer in the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug region of Siberia. The video became an internet sensation, making headlines around the world. But now everyone is having a laugh at The Sun, Michael Cohen and Barcroft Media.
The 102 turbine Walney Offshore wind farm located approximately 15 kilometres off Walney Island, Cumbria, in the Irish Sea in the UK, is about to start harvesting the wind. It will provide electricity for 320 000 homes and the project has cost £1 billion.
Scientists have done something they have been working on for over two decades: successfully drilled more than three kilometres through sheer Antarctic ice into a freshwater lake to take a sample. All they really know now is that Lake Vostok has had no contact with atmospheric pollutants for millions of years.
An 83-year-old woman has successfully had her lower jaw replaced with a 3D-printed model by scientists at Belgium’s University of Hasselt. This is the first such implant in the world, and was a much faster process than traditional artificial implants – we’re taking hours instead of days.
Here is a good reason why statistics should rather be left to the professionals. A new report by the South African Institute of Race Relations “revealed” that South Africa’s white population was declining by about 0.3% every five years. The City Press then “extrapolated” the figures and concluded that whites would be extinct by the year 2161. Now people are freaking out.
Beer companies around the world: we expect to see you using this technology soon, please. West Coast Chill Pure Energy Drink is based on natural ingredients and contains no sugar, caffeine, artificial colours or flavours. But, why it’s really unique, is because the can will have a tab the consumer will push to automatically cool it down.