The comet Sliding Spring whizzed past the Red Planet last week at a speed of over 203,000 km/h, coming as close as 140,000 km—a proximity that is not only very rare for comets, but never before seen for Mars. Not only has this allowed NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to take some extraordinary composite images for us […]
I’ll have one vanilla, one chocolate and one bioluminescent in a cone, please. You’re puzzled? So am I. Charlie Francis, an ice cream entrepreneur, has gone almost as far as Willy Wonka with this glowing ice cream. The protein that gives jellyfish their bioluminescence was the inspiration for this product, and now, after much time […]
50% Cotton, 40% Polyester, 10% Fire ant? Could fire ants be the new fabric on the market? Though probably not in the close future, their extraordinary traits are helping scientists come up with new materials. While a single fire ant is not that remarkable, when hundreds, or even thousands, of them act together in emergencies, […]
50,000-year-old fossilised feces have given evidence that the Neanderthals’ diets may have some presence in plants.As study at El Salt showed that all fecal samples found at an archaeological site in Alicante, Spain, which the Neanderthals occupied between 60,000 and 45,000 years ago, indicated that the Neanderthals ate animals.This was ascertained through the presence of the lipid coprostanol, […]
Tomatoes and other lycopene-containing fruit and vegetables have been shown to lower the risk of renal cancer in women. The study looked at over 90,000 women throughout the last 20 years, where the amounts of different vitamins and nutrients were estimated from the data provided in the questionnaires on their diets and supplement use. Throughout […]
A team of scientists at the University of California have taken inspiration from cat whiskers in order to develop extremely responsive sensors that could one day help robots to “sense” their surroundings. These ‘whiskers’ are constructed through painting a thin layer of electrically-conductive carbon nanotubes and silver particles onto strands of silicon. The carbon nanotubes […]