Category Archives: Basic News

Astronomers Find a New Type of Planet: The “Mega-Earth” | www.cfa.harvard.edu/

Astronomers announced today that they have discovered a new type of planet – a rocky world weighing 17 times as much as Earth. Theorists believed such a world couldn’t form because anything so hefty would grab hydrogen gas as it … Continue reading

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Spiders know the meaning of web music | University of Oxford

Spider silk transmits vibrations across a wide range of frequencies so that, when plucked like a guitar string, its sound carries information about prey, mates, and even the structural integrity of a web.The discovery was made by researchers from the … Continue reading

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Confirmed: An Asteroid Killed the Dinosaurs

Scientists have unearth credible evidence to confirm a large asteroid was responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs over 66 million years ago, it has been announced. This particular extinction event, which paved the way for the evolution of our … Continue reading

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Butterfly Wings Inspire Better Sensors

Imitating nature is not a new idea. When the GE team put Morpho wings under a powerful microscope, they saw a layer of tiny scales just tens of micrometers across. In turn, each of the scales had arrays of ridges … Continue reading

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Artificial intelligence ‘will take the place of humans within five years’ – Telegraph

Mr Aksenov, now 21 years old, founded technology company London Brand Management in 2011. The company provides an AI service for big brands who want to outsource customer or staff interactions to computers. Customers send questions in to LBM’s system … Continue reading

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Human evolution: Fifty years after Homo habilis : Nature News & Comment

Half a century ago, the British–Kenyan palaeoanthropologist Louis Leakey and his colleagues made a controversial proposal: a collection of fossils from the Great Rift Valley in Tanzania belonged to a new species within our own genus1. The announcement of Homo … Continue reading

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Brace for impacts : Nature News & Comment

When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its previous report in 2007, some scientists and many environmentalists were still loath to talk about adapting to climate change. The policy focus was squarely on reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, and even … Continue reading

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Winding Down Possibilities

For a technical scientific term, entropy is pretty popular. I mean, it was the title of an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, after all. Search the Internet for “entropy” quotes and you’ll find them by everybody from Anton Chekhov … Continue reading

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Palaeontology: Shovel face | The Economist

YUNNAN province, in China, is home to the Luoping formation, a trove of spectacularly preserved fossils of creatures that roamed the seas 240m years ago, during the Triassic period. The latest—and arguably most spectacular yet—is Atopodentatus unicus, described this week … Continue reading

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New spin on zebra stripe origins › News in Science (ABC Science)

A weird zebra-stripe pattern discovered in Earth’s inner Van Allen radiation belt is generated by the planet’s rotation, according to new research. The study, reported in the journal Nature, changes science’s understanding of Earth’s radiation belts, and may provide new … Continue reading

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The Germ Theory of Democracy, Dictatorship, and Your Cherished Beliefs – Pacific Standard: The Science of Society

Anyone with a basic grasp of biology knows that all animals have immune systems that battle pathogens—be they viruses, bacteria, parasites, or fungi—on the cellular level. And it’s also fairly well understood that animals sometimes exhibit outward behaviors that serve … Continue reading

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Elephants recognize the voices of their enemies : Nature News & Comment

Humans are among the very few animals that constitute a threat to elephants. Yet not all people are a danger — and elephants seem to know it. The giants have shown a remarkable ability to use sight and scent to … Continue reading

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Publishers withdraw more than 120 gibberish papers : Nature News & Comment

The publishers Springer and IEEE are removing more than 120 papers from their subscription services after a French researcher discovered that the works were computer-generated nonsense. Over the past two years, computer scientist Cyril Labbé of Joseph Fourier University in … Continue reading

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Scientist proposes revolutionary naming system for all life on Earth

A Virginia Tech researcher has developed a new way to classify and name organisms based on their genome sequence and in doing so created a universal language that scientists can use to communicate with unprecedented specificity about all life on … Continue reading

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A simple exercise to increase your happiness and lower depression, the greatest maps of imaginary places, David Foster Wallace on leadership, and more

Celebrated Italian novelist, philosopher, essayist, literary critic, and list-lover Umberto Eco has had a long fascination with the symbolic and the metaphorical, extending all the way back to his vintage semiotic children’s books. Half a century later, he revisits the … Continue reading

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1 In 4 Americans Thinks The Sun Goes Around The Earth, Survey Says : The Two-Way : NPR

A quarter of Americans surveyed could not correctly answer that the Earth revolves around the sun and not the other way around, according to a report out Friday from the National Science Foundation. The survey of 2,200 people in the … Continue reading

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Where does the Amazon start?

The Amazon is believed to be the world’s largest river. A tough question has been where that river actually begins. Naming its source has evidently been difficult as centuries of efforts indicate. With technology and scholarship on hand why should … Continue reading

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Study on evolution of flu viruses may change textbooks, history books

The study, published in the journal Nature, provides the most comprehensive analysis to date of the evolutionary relationships of influenza virus across different host species over time. In addition to dissecting how the virus evolves at different rates in different … Continue reading

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Scientists reading fewer papers for first time in 35 years : Nature News & Comment

A survey of the reading habits of US university researchers saw a drop in the traditional, paper-based consumption of information. A 35-year trend of researchers reading ever more scholarly papers seems to have halted. In 2012, US scientists and social … Continue reading

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How Vaccine Fears Fueled The Resurgence Of Preventable Diseases

For most of us, measles and whooping cough are diseases of the past. You get a few shots as a kid and then hardly think about them again. But that’s not the case in all parts of the world — … Continue reading

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Capitalism vs. Democracy – NYTimes.com

Thomas Piketty’s new book, “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” described by one French newspaper as a “a political and theoretical bulldozer,” defies left and right orthodoxy by arguing that worsening inequality is an inevitable outcome of free market capitalism.Piketty, a … Continue reading

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Grand Canyon is not so ancient : Nature News & Comment

A longstanding geological fight over the age of one of the most iconic landscapes in the United States — Arizona\’s Grand Canyon — may finally be over. The massive chasm does not date back 70 million years, as earlier work … Continue reading

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Drinking from the Cool Cosmic Stream : Scientific American

A glimpse of the ancient universe hints at how galaxies grew so rapidly via Access : Drinking from the Cool Cosmic Stream : Scientific American.

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What caused a 10-year winter starting in 536?

A winter that lasts years isn\’t just a problem in Game of Thrones. Roughly 1500 years ago, our world was turned upsidown by a winter that witnesses say \”never ended.\” Now there is scientific evidence that there really was a … Continue reading

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How toilet paper explains the world

At different stages in our lives, we require more and less of certain hygienic products: First diapers, then mostly toilet paper and menstrual maintenance items, and as bowels become more difficult to control, a different kind of diaper. It stands … Continue reading

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