UC San Diego physicist, Dmitri Krioukov got ticketed recently for running a stop sign – which isn’t unusual. What is unusual is the fact that, rather than pay the $400 fine and move on, Krioukov wrote a mathematical paper proving that the cop who ticketed him had a “perception of reality that did not properly reflect reality.”
Advice from the first official British government report into fracking has been published today. In it, British ministers have been informed that they should allow the controversial process of fracking for shale gas to be extended there, this despite the process having been blamed for causing two earthquakes.
A rather large group of former NASA scientists and astronauts have come together to express their distrust at the way NASA thinks about climate change. They’ve written a letter, in which they criticise the Goddard Institute For Space Studies for telling fibs about man-made carbon dioxide.
A juvenile mammoth – nicknamed “Yuka” – was found entombed in Siberian ice near the shores of the Arctic Ocean, and shows signs of being cut open by ancient people. The frozen carcass is believed to be at least 10 000 years old – and could prove to be the first mammoth carcass revealing signs of human interaction in the region.
Have you ever wondered what the universe would look like on a single photo? You did!? Well, what a coincidence, because NASA has just released this infrared map of the entire universe. This serves as a capstone for a bigger cosmic map – containing 18 000 images and 560 million different objects. It took NASA fourteen years of preparation and three years of data collection.
This is a pretty cool feat by James Cameron, who just returned from the bottom of the Marianas Trench – the deepest place in the world. To put it in perspective for you, if you took Mount Everest, and turned it upside down, it still wouldn’t be able to touch the bottom, not even by a kilometer. Video inside. It’s incredible.
For the first time ever, South African scientists have generated non-embryonic stem cells, the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) has announced. Harvested from adult skin cells, theoretically, these stem cells can grow into any type of adult cell.
NASA officials have announced that the first launch of a commercially built space capsule to the International Space Station is scheduled for the end of April. California-based Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) are the dudes responsible for the capsule in question, the unmanned Dragon spacecraft.
Before you begin to make fun of the headline used for this article, we must tell you that the vermin extractors will also be serving an educational purpose. Johannesburg’s general owl population has been in decline for years as a result of urbanisation, but new owl projects are helping to combat this.
Bad. Ass. NASA has released a new space atlas, detailing over 560 million stars, galaxies and asteroids, many never seen before. The 18 000 awesome images were taken by NASA’s infrared space telescope, the Wide-field Survey Explorer (WISE). Take a look at some of the incredible space-images after the space-jump.
There is no error in that headline – Nokia has really just unveiled the PureView 41-megapixel-sensor camera in one of its new smartphones – the Lumia 808. Additionally, the device has extremely good sound recording capabilities and will also allow the user to capture video content in full HD.
The universe as we know it is safe for now, and so is Einstein’s theory of special relativity. Physicists who shocked the scientific world by claiming particles could move faster than the speed of light have admitted they made a mistake. Their reasoning: a faulty fiber-optic cable in a GPS receiver.
It’s normally the scientists and engineers that go up into space, but NASA has realised that while people are up there, they need to eat. Whilst a little ahead of itself, a study has opened in Hawaii to find a chef for Mars. Do you have what it takes?
The human race is going to have to start believing in science – and quickly – if we want a hope in hell of surviving the environmental crisis we’re facing. This was the sentiment at a recent gathering of the world’s pre-eminent scientific minds in Vancouver. At the meeting, thousands of scientists discussed the problem that their industry is “under seige”, and that the world needs help to believe in science again.
BBC weather forecaster, Alex Deakin, managed to predict what no other weather forecaster has previously forecast on Saturday evening’s BBC World weather report. He meant to say “sunshine”, but he definitely didn’t, and instead conjured up a very strange weather prediction indeed. N5FW.
A bunch of emails have been leaked from the Heartland Institute, the think tank vaguely infamous for being at once massively skeptical of climate change and funded by billionaire global warming deniers, the Koch Brothers. The emails suggest that the Institute has been paying scientists and bloggers to discredit climate change research.
Last week 2oceansVibe correctly doubted the authenticity of footage that claimed a woolly mammoth had been spotted by a government-employed engineer in the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug region of Siberia. The video became an internet sensation, making headlines around the world. But now everyone is having a laugh at The Sun, Michael Cohen and Barcroft Media.
The 102 turbine Walney Offshore wind farm located approximately 15 kilometres off Walney Island, Cumbria, in the Irish Sea in the UK, is about to start harvesting the wind. It will provide electricity for 320 000 homes and the project has cost £1 billion.
Scientists have done something they have been working on for over two decades: successfully drilled more than three kilometres through sheer Antarctic ice into a freshwater lake to take a sample. All they really know now is that Lake Vostok has had no contact with atmospheric pollutants for millions of years.
An 83-year-old woman has successfully had her lower jaw replaced with a 3D-printed model by scientists at Belgium’s University of Hasselt. This is the first such implant in the world, and was a much faster process than traditional artificial implants – we’re taking hours instead of days.
Here is a good reason why statistics should rather be left to the professionals. A new report by the South African Institute of Race Relations “revealed” that South Africa’s white population was declining by about 0.3% every five years. The City Press then “extrapolated” the figures and concluded that whites would be extinct by the year 2161. Now people are freaking out.
Beer companies around the world: we expect to see you using this technology soon, please. West Coast Chill Pure Energy Drink is based on natural ingredients and contains no sugar, caffeine, artificial colours or flavours. But, why it’s really unique, is because the can will have a tab the consumer will push to automatically cool it down.
A question for all those hyper-nice, socially aware, dream dinner party guests out there – have you ever considered that your people-pleasing tendencies may be making you fat?
People who like Pink Floyd references, rejoice, because NASA’s Gravity Recovery And Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission has beamed back its first video of the dark side of the moon. Click through to see what that astronaut that everybody forgets about saw while Armstrong and Aldrin were hogging all the glory.
This does not happen, but it has: an elephant has decided it would like to go for a few waves and has been spotted surfing the beach breaks in Nuarro bay, just off the coast of northern Mozambique. Elephants don’t go into the sea, period, so this is definitely a rare sighting.
Brazilian science takes on the US of A as the mystery of the porky C-section babies deepens…
A brand new study has revealed there really is no such thing as the female G-spot. So that’s disappointing. But scientists have been trying unsuccessfully to find the mysterious sexual hot button for so long now that we were all getting bored anyway. (Right?)
Weight loss? Disease prevention? Anti-aging? Cup of tea? A very sizeable chunk of change has just been granted to researchers who are eager to show the world the plethora of health properties attached to South Africa’s favourite tea, our humble rooibos.
Foreign interference from the USA could have been behind the $165 million failure that was the Phobos-Grunt probe to Mars by Russia. This is the opinion of Russian space agency Roscosmos, which is investigating the most recent disaster in what has been a series of “major space mishaps” for the nation.
I’d forgotten that this was something people still did! That metaphorical ‘Doomsday Clock,’ that the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists uses to represent the threat of nuclear war, was moved to five minutes to midnight, the closest to doomsday it’s been since North Korea’s 2007 nuclear weapons test.