Certain sand dunes make their own desert music, singing, booming, or even “burping” — a naturally occurring musical instrument. Scientists have discovered that these distinct sounds are each created by different types of waves moving through the dunes.
via Gizmodo
In 1837, Italian physician Camilo Golgi devised a reaction to stain the wispy dendrites and axons of neurons, making it possible to see brain cells in situ. In 1875, he published his first scientific drawing made possibly by his chemical reaction, seen here. It’s an illustration of the never fibers, gray matter, and other components of a dog’s olfactory bulb.
via … Read More → "The first drawings of neurons"
Over at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, the Steinhart Aquarium biologists say that it’s not enough to keep octopuses fed and healthy. The highly-intelligent cephalopods get unhappy if they don’t have things to do with their minds.
As … Read More → "Captive octopuses get bored unless you give them puzzles"
You may have heard of a little thing called mindfulness, a meditation style that focuses on being aware and accepting of thoughts, feelings, and sensations you have in the present moment. Oprah loves it. Tech CEOs love it. It might make you less obese. It’ll probably make you less stressed. But it might also tamper with your memory, new research finds.
In one of the few … Read More → "Mindfulness might create false memories, new study finds"
A survey of 1541 randomly selected US adults ranked the country’s fears as of 2015. Items that ranked above climate change included corruption, mass surveillance, cyber-terrorism, bio-warfare, identity theft, running out of money, economic collapse, credit card fraud, Obamacare, illness, nuclear attack, meltdowns and civil unrest and tornadoes.
via Boing Boing
Don’t break out your cocktail shakers yet, though.
Scientists using a radio telescope at the Institut de Radioastronomie Millimetrique in Sierra Nevada, Spain found that Comet Lovejoy contains two basic building blocks of life: alcohol and sugar. Specifically, ethyl alcohol and glycolaldehyde.
Comets often contain the earliest identifiable materials from the formation of a solar system, so these findings give us important information about the early history of our solar … Read More → "Scientists: Comet Lovejoy contains alcohol and sugar"
In a paper presented at the 2015 SIGGRAPH Asia conference, researchers from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, and Stanford University demonstrated the ability to transfer facial expressions from one person in a video to another in real time. In other words, the technology … Read More → "Technology can put someone else’s expressions on your face"
Our sense of touch is made possible thanks to thousands of “mechanoreceptors,” which are distributed throughout our skin. The more pressure that’s applied to one of these sensors, the more electrical pulses it sends to the brain, thus increasing the tactile sensation that we experience. Led by Prof. Zhenan Bao, scientists at Stanford University have now created synthetic skin that containselectronic mechanoreceptors, which could give prosthetic limbs or robots a sense of touch.
… Read More → "Electronic skin could give prostheses and robots a sense of touch"
Microsoft Research, in collaboration with the University of Hong Kong and the University of Tokyo, has unveiled a new animation drawing system that predicts what the artist will draw next based on the lines and shapes that he/she has already drawn. The system also offers the user ways to improve upon existing artwork, adjusting lines and shapes but not saving them until the artist … Read More → "Autocomplete software now exists for hand-drawn animation"
It’s virtually certain that some white dwarfs still have planets in orbit despite their violent histories, but seeing those planets has proven difficult… at least, until now. Astronomers using the Kepler space observatory have spotted a planet circling around WD 1145+017, a white dwarf 570 light years away. Not that it’s in great shape, mind you. The unusual light signature from the dying star hints that the planet is disintegrating under the star’ … Read More → "Astronomers find the first planet known to orbit a white dwarf"
