The mouth-agape gesture is so quotidian and universal that it seems like it should already have one of those prosaic sidebars in a high school biology textbook. However, scientists have still not fully cracked the relative mystery behind the yawn (notably, some have argued it’s a tool for regulating brain temperature) or figured out why a single occurrence of the phenomenon can ricochet across a crowded room so easily.
Cryonics enthusiasts will be pleased to hear that scientists have demonstrated the ability to revive frozen life not just after a couple years or even a couple of decades. They can bring something back to life that’s been frozen for fifteen centuries. The previous record was just 20 years.
A team of researchers from the British … Read More → "Scientists revive moss that was encased in ice for 1,500 years"
According to data sent back by NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft, the planet Mercury is now 8.6 miles smaller in diameter than it was a few billion years ago. But it’s not shrinking because of the sun’s heat -it’s actually getting smaller because it’s cooling down.
All planets are chilling and shedding heat to varying degrees, and Mercury is no exception, despite being the closest … Read More → "Mercury shriveling like a raisin"
If you’re lucky, you may not lose your job to a robot in the future. That doesn’t, however, mean that your boss won’t lose his or her job to a robot in the future. And if (when) that happens, what’s it going to be like working for a robot? A study from the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada, suggests that you’ll probably obey them nearly as predictably as you would a human.
… Read More → "Study suggests that you will obey your future robot boss"
A team of scientists may have detected a twist in light from the early universe that could help explain how the universe began. Such a finding has been compared in significance to the detection of the Higgs boson at the LHC in 2012.
What they detected is known as primordial B-mode polarization and is important for at least two reasons. It would … Read More → "Cosmologists finally capture an elusive signal from the beginning of time"
Easily missed in the White House’s jaw-dropping $3.9 trillion, door-stopping 212-page budget for 2015 was an extra $55.1 million for the National Park Service. That tiny boost in the NPS’s $2.6 billion budget would allow the Park Service to add 200 new staffers, ending a long-term hiring freeze, and to prepare for its centennial in 2016.
While President Ulysses S. Grant established Yellowstone as the first national park in 1872, it was President … Read More → "Why we should all go to National Parks"
In the latest development in condescending technology, a facial recognition system is in the works to allow your car to detect when you’re upset and try to curb dangerous road rage driving habits. You know, as long is it doesn’t cause a vicious cycle where it slows down because you’re mad, and you start yelling, “Don’t you patronize me!”
Écol Polytechnique F& … Read More → "In the future, your car will react to your emotions to make you a better driver"
Cubestormer 3 is a robot with just one job—to solve a scrambled Rubik’s Cube as swiftly as possible. Today, at the Big Bang Fair in Birmingham, UK, it did the task in an astounding 3.253 seconds, faster than any human or robot in the world. Just … Read More → "Lego robot with a smartphone brain shatters Rubik’s Cube world record"
Once common in America, the prairie chicken called the Heath hen went extinct in 1932. Until recently, there was no hope of seeing the bird in motion again. But a 1918 film was found, in bad condition, a few years ago and has now been restored for viewing. Wayne Petersen of Mass Audubon calls it “the birding equivalent of an Elvis sighting.”
“I had heard about this film through various channels … Read More → "Lost footage of extinct bird found"
MIT engineers are developing “soft robots” with bodies made of silicone that is actuated by fluid flowing through veins in the material. They’ve just demonstrated a soft robotic fish.
“As robots penetrate the physical world and start interacting with people more and more, it’s much easier to make robots safe if their bodies are so wonderfully soft that there’s no … Read More → "Robot fish and the dawn of “soft robots”"
