People who like Pink Floyd references, rejoice, because NASA’s Gravity Recovery And Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission has beamed back its first video of the dark side of the moon. Click through to see what that astronaut that everybody forgets about saw while Armstrong and Aldrin were hogging all the glory.
This does not happen, but it has: an elephant has decided it would like to go for a few waves and has been spotted surfing the beach breaks in Nuarro bay, just off the coast of northern Mozambique. Elephants don’t go into the sea, period, so this is definitely a rare sighting.
Brazilian science takes on the US of A as the mystery of the porky C-section babies deepens…
A brand new study has revealed there really is no such thing as the female G-spot. So that’s disappointing. But scientists have been trying unsuccessfully to find the mysterious sexual hot button for so long now that we were all getting bored anyway. (Right?)
Weight loss? Disease prevention? Anti-aging? Cup of tea? A very sizeable chunk of change has just been granted to researchers who are eager to show the world the plethora of health properties attached to South Africa’s favourite tea, our humble rooibos.
Foreign interference from the USA could have been behind the $165 million failure that was the Phobos-Grunt probe to Mars by Russia. This is the opinion of Russian space agency Roscosmos, which is investigating the most recent disaster in what has been a series of “major space mishaps” for the nation.
I’d forgotten that this was something people still did! That metaphorical ‘Doomsday Clock,’ that the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists uses to represent the threat of nuclear war, was moved to five minutes to midnight, the closest to doomsday it’s been since North Korea’s 2007 nuclear weapons test.
NASA has launched an open-source portal to make it easier for agencies to evaluate and improve upon its projects. The initial setup works as a simple directory of open-sourced projects in development, which is hoped to expand into a platform for tracking, hosting and planning the various pieces of software created by the American space agency.
Super scientist, Professor Stephen Hawking turned 70 years old yesterday, defying all the odds in his battle with motor neurone disease. Unfortunately, he was not well enough to deliver his birthday address – his chance at reflecting at his life and career.
Phobos-Grunt, the 13-ton, US$ 170 million Russian space probe that was launched into orbit and promptly crippled by failed auxiliary engines, is due to crash back onto Earth soon. Russian space authorities have named January 15th as the likely re-entry date. In case you thought that your fears of high-speed orbital debris ended with 2011.
Five days into 2012 and we’ve already got fancy new technology. A team from Cornell University have developed a light-distortion device that can mask events as if they hadn’t happened; they managed to use light distortion to hide an event for 40 picoseconds. Which, granted, is 40 trillionths of a second, but the research is groundbreaking in the extreme.
Stephen Hawking is one of the most brilliant scientists of our lifetime, and author of “A Brief History of Time”. And he is currently shopping around for a new assistant. His website features a picture of his wheelchair, complete with wires and complex electronics. The caption reads “STOP PRESS: Could you maintain this?”
A team of scientists has finished developing a cheaply manufactured paint-like product prototype that they hope you will eventually be able to put on the outside of your home. The paint will generate electricity from light – electricity that can then be captured and used to power the appliances and equipment on the inside of your home.
A Brazilian woman has given birth to a baby with two heads this week. The boy has two brains and two spines but shares one heart, lungs, liver and pelvis. In the spirit of Christmas, she has decided to call her son(s) Emanoel and Jesus respectively.
According to the exciting world of Science, the men in white coats have discovered a molecule in the brains of mice that, when switched on, gives these mice super memories. This could work for humans too – but the question is, do you really want to?
It’s always nice when researchers employing a loosely scientific method produce results you were more or less expecting. Folks at the University of Portsmouth have determined that loud music makes people want to drink alcohol in greater quantities and at a much faster rate because the music makes it taste sweeter. Science!
Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have done the unthinkable. They’ve captured video at the speed of light, or, one trillion frames per second.
Police in Britain will soon be testing a shoulder-mounted laser that is capable of emitting a blinding wall of light from up to 500 metres away. It’s hoped the laser will help repel rioters and other troublemakers in an effort to prevent a repeat of the rioting that took place there earlier this year.
Not only are the beds about 77 000 years old, but it appears they were also designed to ward off insects like mosquitoes. The fossilized material has been found at an ancient cliff shelter known as Sibudu, which is near to Durban on our east coast, and continues to fuel the debate that modern man evolved out of Africa.
The Beagle Freedom Project rescues dogs that are bred and used for lab testing. These dogs are born in laboratories and live in cages their whole lives. The project recently rescued 40 dogs, between ages four and seven, who have never seen outside sunlight.
More and more of the technology that we see in the movies is becoming an everyday reality. The contact lens embedded with a tiny LED that can light up when a wireless signal is sent to it is one of these realities. Soon you’ll be able to stream your social media feeds and bring up other holographic images cybernetically.
In September, the science world was left in shock when workers at the world’s largest physics lab announced they had recorded subatomic particles travelling faster than the speed of light. Now, measurements by an opposing team of physicists suggest neutrinos cannot have travelled faster than the speed of light.
Scientists at UC Irvine (a university in California) have unveiled what is currently the world’s lightest man-made substance, an “ultralight metallic microlattice,” that is 100 times lighter than styrofoam, and 1 000 times less dense than water.
It’s 08h00 on a Monday morning, so how better to welcome the week than with some complex physical graphs and equations explaining the world’s most popular mobile gaming app, Angry Birds. Ready? Let’s go! (Ka-kaaw!)
A 13-ton, US$ 170 million Russian space probe that was launched on Wednesday, due for a rendezvous with one of Mars’ moons, has had a system fail before it even left earth orbit, and now threatens to do what asteroid YU55 didn’t. провалить!
Robots have been the subject of countless science fiction tales and blockbuster movies, most often portrayed as malicious machines that have become independent of their creators and use their inherent advantages to rise to the top of the food chain. Until very recently, this type of scenario could only ever exist in fiction.
Strokes can have massive effects on the body and mind, and are known to be occasionally transformative. Perhaps none more-so than the stroke experienced by Chris Birch during a rugby training incident in Wales. Birch,26, claims to have woken up after suffering a stroke feeling very different, and that the incident had turned him into a gay man. He was engaged to his girlfriend at the time.
An asteroid the length of four rugby fields will be speeding through Earth’s solar system tomorrow, at a closer proximity to us than the moon. Nothing of this magnitude has come nearly as close to colliding with our planet for 30 years. But rest assured the asteroid is not going to hit us. Not yet, anyway.
Commercial space travel is now literally months away, and it appears that a mission to Mars is not too far off either. Six men that have been locked in large steel piped tubes for 520 days emerged from isolation earlier today after a bid to simulate a mission to Mars. This is taking Survivor to the next level.
Okay, this might seem like it belongs in the same dark vault of impossible philosophical conundrums as “How much wood would a wood chuck chuck” but hear the hot IT nerd out: