Posts

March 08, 2013

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7:07 PM | Amazing Videos Of Animals Catching Their Prey In Slow-Mo

Veiled Chameleon Catching Its Prey Stephen Deban/YouTube If you've never seen a Chinese Giant Salamander turn its mouth into a vacuum to slurp up its prey, or watched an archer fish take insects out of the air by firing little water grenades from below the surface, or beheld the veiled chameleon's alien purple tongue as it leaps out to snag a meal, you're in luck: Wired's Nadia Drake has combed YouTube for the best slo-mo videos of animals catching their prey, and put together a video gallery […]

March 07, 2013

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8:57 PM | If Earth Were Hosting An Alien Species, This Is What It Would Look Like

Tardigrade in Moss Click here to see this amazing image even larger. Nicole Ottawa & Oliver Meckes / Eye of Science / Science Source ImagesThe unkillable tardigrade rears its tiny, weird-looking head. In 2011, the European Space Agency launched Earth's weirdest creature, the tardigrade, into orbit for twelve days on an unmanned spacecraft. And I mean on the spacecraft--scientists attached the organisms to the outside of the rocket to test just how alien-like the very alien-looking tardigrade […]

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4:35 PM | Deaf Baby Hears His Mother's Voice For The First Time [Video]

An eight-month old infant gets his cochlear implant activated. Sciencefact, a Facebook page devoted to educational science news, posted this video last night, of an 8-month old baby who was born deaf getting his cochlear implant activated for the first time: [Sciencefact]

March 06, 2013

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11:00 PM | 10 Of The Best Nature Photographs Of the Year

Watching An Eclipsing Sun Set Colleen PinskiThe finalists for Smithsonian's annual nature photography contest are in, and they're stunning. Smithsonian magazine has chosen its top picks for its 10th annual photography contest, which draws submissions from amateurs and professionals around the world. This year's finalists for best nature photo include an unforgettably soulful gorilla from the Bronx, a jaw-dropping galaxy rise behind Mt. Ranier, and the delicate wings of a juvenile Spectacled […]

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6:30 PM | New Smart Material Will Form Instant Casts For Accident Victims

A company in Spain has developed a fabric that hardens like plastic when applied to a vacuum. Paramedics may soon have a new instrument for their emergency first aid kits--a smart fabric that, when exposed to a vacuum, stiffens to create a plastic-like mold. The fabric could act as a kind of insta-cast, allowing emergency workers to quickly immobilize parts of a victim's body that may be vulnerable to permanent damage, like the neck and back. According to a press release provided by Tecnalia, […]

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3:29 PM | Watch 15,000 Volt Currents Meander Across A Sheet Of Plywood [Video]

These branching scorched patterns look just like river systems. Melanie Hoff, an art student at Brooklyn's Pratt Institute, connected cables carrying 15,000 volts of electricity to a large sheet of plywood and then filmed the results. Check out her video, and then find out how to make your own Lichtenberg Figure: [Via Colossal]

March 05, 2013

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8:30 PM | Can We Humans Build Cities That Don't Freak Us Out?

Outside PopSci's Office Google StreetviewNew research tries to measure the impact of streetscapes on our mental health. If you condensed all 200,000 years of humanity's existence into a one hour-long video and then played it back, you would have to wait 58 minutes for people to build their first city-like habitat--a honeycomb-like mud-brick town of 5,000 in present-day Turkey. Half a minute later, you'd see another city, in Iraq, surge to 50,000 people, and 45 seconds after that, Egypt's […]

March 04, 2013

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9:28 PM | 5 Things You Should Know About The Baby Cured Of HIV

HIV CDCEarly treatment answers some questions, raises others 1. The baby girl was cured with standard anti-retroviral drugs. When the baby was born in a Mississippi hospital in 2010, pediatric specialist Hannah Gay began treating her with three anti-retroviral drugs just 31 hours after she was born. This combination treatment has been around since the mid-1990s, and remains the biggest breakthrough in the fight against a disease that has claimed tens of millions of lives over the past few […]

March 01, 2013

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10:31 PM | World's Sexiest Octopus Ostracized By Biologists

Larger Pacific Striped Octopus Roy CaldwellDue to its peculiar lifestyle and mating habits, the larger Pacific striped octopus has been largely ignored by scientists. It doesn't even have a Latin name. In 1991, a biologist named Arcadio Rodaniche published a short abstract describing a new species of octopus he had discovered in Panama. This new octopus, Rodaniche claimed, had a lifestyle quite unlike any other species of its kind: While the mating and breeding habits of most octopuses seem to […]

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8:28 PM | Robot Of The Week: Artas Harvests Living Human Hairs, One By One

Artas, the Hair Robot Restoration RoboticsCould you use a few thousand hairs? This robot can find them. Artas is the first ever FDA-approved hair transplant robot, designed to accomplish the painstaking, yet technically difficult task of harvesting hundreds to thousands of individual hair follicles from a suitably lush patch of human skin. Cosmetic surgeons can take the grafts and re-implant them in balding or bare areas. The implanted follicles connect back up with the blood supply and […]

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5:44 PM | Scientists Put A Working Eyeball On A Tadpole's Tail

Tadpole With Grafted Eye Douglas J. BlackistonIt turns out we seriously underestimated the central nervous system. It's hard to say what's crazier: the fact that Tufts University researchers spent a year cutting out the tiny eyeballs of tadpole embryos and sticking them back on to the tadpoles' tails, or: the fact that, when they hatched, a few of the tadpoles COULD ACTUALLY SEE OUT OF THE EYES ON THEIR TAILS. As you know, this is not the way vision is supposed to work--your eyeballs are […]

February 27, 2013

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9:55 PM | Holographic Imaging System Could Let Firefighters See Through Flames To Rescue Victims

Rescue workers may soon have a new tool to locate victims amid the blinding smoke and chaotic flames of a house fire. When firefighters go looking for victims trapped inside a burning building, they often encounter rooms and hallways filled with thick, blinding smoke. If no flames are present, a rescuer can use an infrared camera to spot the heat signatures of warm, living bodies. But in the midst of a raging inferno, heat from the flames will overwhelm the camera's sensors and obscure nearby […]

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7:38 PM | 6 Things In Your Burger That Are Grosser Than Horse Meat

Ground Beef DreamstimeAn unintended hunk of horseflesh is one of the less alarming things that the meat processing industry can put in your ground beef.

February 26, 2013

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6:30 PM | Physicists Probe The Deep Earth For A Fifth Fundamental Force

Interactions NASAElectrons' spin may give rise to a force that allows particles to interact over very long distances. In general, people tend to use the phrase "force of nature" loosely, as in "she's a real force of nature." But physicists are pickier--they reserve the phrase for just four separate, universal forces they call the "fundamental forces": gravity, electro-magnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces, which hold the nucleus together and are involved with radioactive decay, […]

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3:30 PM | Why You Can't Stop Eating Cheetos

Betcha Can't Eat Just One Evan-Amos, via WikimediaA recent article in the New York Times Magazine delves into the science of junk-food craving. In a recent article in the New York Times Magazine, food scientist Steven Witherly describes Cheetos as "one of the most marvelously constructed foods on the planet, in terms of pure pleasure." The cheese puffs' greatest quality, Witherly says in the article, is its ability to melt in your mouth. "It's called vanishing caloric density...If something […]

February 25, 2013

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6:30 PM | Enjoy These Amazing High-Def Nature GIFs

We've picked out a few favorites from Head Like An Orange, home of hundreds of amazing nature GIFs. Marinus is a 28-year-old from the Netherlands, and he makes GIFs. But not just any GIFs: his Tumblr, Head Like An Orange, is a collection of some of nature's most stunning, weirdest, sweetest, and funniest moments. At least, they are the best moments captured on film, put into TV shows, and edited down into short, spellbinding loops. Are the ones we've picked out here the best GIFs on Marinus's […]

February 22, 2013

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7:24 PM | These Great Horned Owl Eggs Are About To Hatch [Live Video]

Watch some baby owls enter the world, in a window planter in Oklahoma. A family in Oklahoma City has set up two cameras around a planter box on their second-story window ledge, where a female Great Horned Owl has come to roost for the fifth time. The owl, named "Mrs. Tiger" by the little girl who lives on the other side of the window, laid two eggs about a month ago. Now those eggs are about to hatch. Any moment now, this Great Horned Owl momma will stand up, and we will see one--or maybe even […]

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3:00 PM | Scientists Are Developing A Blood Test To Determine Whether People Are Suicidal

Depression Blood Test U.S. NavyHopefully, they'll also use it to probe the underlying brain chemistry behind severe depression and several other mental disorders. Last year, researchers in Sweden published a study linking suicide attempts to higher-than-usual levels of quinolinic acid, a neurotransmitter associated with inflammation. Now, a team of scientists in Australia is using that finding to develop a blood test to measure levels of quinolinic acid in the blood. Ostensibly, the test […]

February 21, 2013

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5:29 PM | NASA Captures Rare, Beautiful Solar Rain [Video]

An eruption in July created a giant fountain of plasma many times the size of Earth. The rare event captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory last July is known as "coronal rain." It starts when a solar eruption spews plasma from the surface of the sun high up into the star's atmosphere; then, as the material cools and condenses, the charged particles that make up the plasma get trapped in the star's magnetic fields, and are shuttled along the magnetic field lines back to the sun's surface. […]

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3:57 PM | Who Supplies Apple With All Those Parts? [Infographic]

Global Map of Apple Suppliers ChinaFileAn interactive map of Apple suppliers around the world In an interview with Tim Cook last December, Bloomberg Businessweek asked the Apple CEO what it would take to "get Apple back to building things in the U.S." The question prompted Cook to share a little-known fact: the processor for the iPhone and iPad is already made in the U.S., he said, and so is the glass. "And next year," Cook added, "we are going to bring some production to the U.S. on the Mac." […]

February 20, 2013

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6:32 PM | Google Glass Shows Off New Interface, Impressive Functionality, Elite Availability

Last year, Google envisioned their augmented reality device as an in-your-face smartphone screen. But now they've created something much, much better. And you can get one. When Google released their original concept video for Project Glass last April, it seemed like the company was still struggling to dream up an interface that wasn't, at its core, a smartphone screen for your eyeballs. There would be pop-up notifications for text messages, calendar reminders, and weather alerts; there would be […]

February 19, 2013

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9:17 PM | A Look Inside The European Horse Meat Trade [Infographic]

Italian Horsemeat Imports The GuardianAn interactive map breaks down countries' imports and exports of meat from hinnies, horses, mules, and asses. One month into the great European horse meat scandal, two primary facts have emerged: first, it's become clear that some Europeans have been unwittingly consuming the flesh of their equine friends in products including, but not limited to, supermarket "beef" and frozen Nestlé pasta dinners; second, the scandal's perpetrators are as hard to […]

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5:16 PM | Here's A Video Of Last Week's Asteroid Fly-By

The 150-foot-wide chunk of rock and ice passed within the orbit of the moon and geosynchronous satellites. Hours after dashcams in Russia recorded a fiery, 50-foot-wide meteor hurtling through Earth's atmosphere, astronomers at the Observatorio del Teide in the Canary Islands captured this relatively peaceful video of asteroid 2012 DA14 as it streaked past Earth at a distance of about 17,000 miles. Compared to the Russian meteorite, 17,000 may seem like a lot of miles--the meteor exploded at a […]

February 14, 2013

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7:10 PM | World's First Bionic Eye Receives FDA Approval

First Bionic Eye Second SightThe new retinal prosthesis, called Argus II, can restore partial sight to people blinded by a degenerative eye disease. This morning, I was speaking with Brian Mech, the vice-president of the medical device company Second Sight, when his land-line rang. Mech had just been telling me about the fifteen years his company has spent developing the Argus II, a retinal prosthesis that restores partial sight to people with a degenerative eye disease called Retinitis […]

February 13, 2013

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10:30 PM | A Glimpse At Raytheon's Terrifying People-Tracking Software

Good guys can use social media to find out all about bad guys, and bad guys can use social media to find out all about you. In this screencast obtained by The Guardian, an investigator at the defense company Raytheon takes his viewers on a tour of the company's cyber-tracking software. Called Rapid Information Overlay Technology, or Riot, the software integrates data from several social networking sites so that the user can pull up all kinds of seemingly private information about people, from […]

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5:30 PM | The State of The Guardian's SOTU Infographic Is...Dumber

Dumb and Dumber The GuardianThis chart tells you that "the linguistic standard of the presidential address has declined" over time. The problem is, it's wrong. Yesterday, as a run-up to Obama's State of the Union address, The Guardian published an interactive infographic called "The state of our union is … dumber: How the linguistic standard of the presidential address has declined." The chart plotted the reading level of every SOTU address since the country's founding along a timeline. Each […]

February 12, 2013

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8:28 PM | Researchers Give Lab Rats Terminator-Like Infrared Vision

A neuroprosthetic device lets lab rats see in wavelengths beyond the visual spectrum. Researchers at Duke university have developed a neuroprosthesis that gives rats the ability to detect infrared light, a portion of the electromagnetic spectrum to which mammals are normally blind. After training a group of lab rats to visit "reward ports" inside a test chamber whenever LEDs at the ports lit up, the researchers implanted an array of tiny stimulating electrodes into the touch-sensing part of […]

February 11, 2013

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6:59 PM | Video: A 3-D Printed Silicone Robot Tentacle

Soft Robot Tentacle Matthew BorgatiAnd it's open source, so you can make your own at home. The fact that this soft tentacle robot bears such a striking resemblance to the male sexual organ is not entirely accidental: its maker, Matthew Borgatti, thinks that the "inflexible skeletal elements" used in state-of-the-art soft robots like Tuft's bendy caterpillar are limiting "in terms of their softness, organic-ness, and mimicry of nature." The silicone tentacle clearly fulfills all three of those […]

February 08, 2013

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10:38 PM | Fox News Claims Germany Has More Solar Power Than U.S. Because It's Sunnier There

Why Germany Generates More Solar Power E. ElertActually, Germany has significantly less sun--they're just putting their rays to better use. In this segment of Fox & Friends, called "Pulling the Plug: The Dim Future of Solar Power," co-host Gretchen Carlson asked asked Fox Business reporter Shibani Joshi why Germany has been able to generate so much more solar power than the U.S. "What was Germany doing correctly?," Carlson asked. "Are they just a smaller country, have they make it more […]

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9:30 PM | BigPic: Northeastern U.S., Meet Nemo

Nemo, February 8, 2013 NASALike Sandy, but colder Sandy was a colossal storm that formed when two giant low-pressure systems merged over the northeastern U.S. in early November. Nemo, on the other hand, is a colossal storm that formed when two giant low-pressure systems merged over the northeastern U.S. in February. But from space, the two storms look awfully similar: