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Research

SPACE: Robot Bees on Mars

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Mars - robot bees

NASA has two teams of researchers working to design a robotic bee that can fly on Mars. The space agency announced the project on March 30. It’s in its early stages, but the idea is to replace modern rovers — which are slow, bulky and very expensive — with swarms of sensor-studded, fast-moving micro-bots that can cover much more ground at a relatively low cost. Literally called Marsbees, the little bots are “flapping wing flyers of a bumblebee size with cicada-sized wings,” NASA officials wrote. By Rafi Letzter – Full Story at SOURCE

SCIENCE: Can You Hear Colors?

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colors - pixabay

About 4 percent of the people on Earth experience a mysterious phenomenon called synesthesia: They hear a sound and automatically see a color; or, they read a certain word, and a specific hue enters their mind’s eye. The condition has long puzzled scientists, but a small new study may offer some clues. The study, published today (March 5) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, offers insight into what might be happening in the brains of people with synesthesia. Previous “studies of brain function using magnetic resonance imaging confirm that synesthesia is a real biological phenomenon,” said … Read more

SCIENCE: How to Get Inside a Black Hole

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black hole - pixabay

SCIENCE Physicists have insisted for a long time that black holes are impenetrable ciphers. Whatever goes in is lost, impossible to study or meaningfully understand. Some small amount of matter and energy might escape a black hole in the form of “Hawking radiation,” but anything still inside the black hole is functionally disappeared from the physical universe. The idea is a basic premise of modern physics: If something falls into a black hole, it can’t be contacted, it’s future can’t be predicted. No observer could possibly survive traveling into the dark space, not even long enough to glance around and … Read more

New Company Wants to Map Your Brain, But It Will Kill You

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Neurons - Pixabay

Four things are true: One, a startup called Nectome plans to embalm the living brains of dying people, with the promise that the preserved tissues might someday be brought back to life. Two, the grim plan has gotten a ton of press coverage in the past few days, ever since MIT Technology Review covered it on Tuesday (March 13). Three, most of that press coverage doesn’t cite any outside neuroscience experts. And four, all of the experts that Live Science contacted to discuss the story have expressed, one way or another, that they found the plan ridiculous. Nectome plans to … Read more

U+(N/T)M*G: Edge

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Out in a lonely spot, somewhere around the vast Australian desert, there sits a little machine one might mistake for a shiny table. And that machine did something our most powerful telescopes couldn’t do. It found the first stars. The EDGES is a highly sensitive radio telescope with only one job, to find the faint frequency signal from the one-hit wonders at the beginning of stellar formation. The blue ones which burned hot and died young in glorious nova, and seeded the Universe with heavier atoms. The deaths of those first cosmic pioneers gave rise to what we needed for … Read more

U=(N/T)M*G: Found

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Sometimes, in the course of innocuous browsing for a topic, one comes across a cool bit of science and an unexpected tidbit pops up that really gets the muse going. This happened to me today. Almost two decades ago, NASA launched a little satellite whose mission was to study our magnetosphere. The neat little guy, IMAGE, sent us back a lot of real photographic gems of our little mudball and information that added to our scientific understanding of our world. It showed us the unique qualities of the protective, living shield our core generates, and how it interacts with our … Read more

SCIENCE: How to Stop Light

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light - pixabay

Light moves fast. That’s kind of the whole point of light, at least the way most people think about it. Light shoots through the 93 million miles between Earth and the sun in just 8 minutes, it carries information all around the world nearly instantly, and its top speed of 186,000 miles per second (300,000 kilometers/s) turns out to be the absolute speed limit of the entire universe. But there are some physicists interested in turning that trait of light on its head, and slowing it way down. And in a new paper, published Jan. 3 in the journal Physical … Read more

TECH: Japan’s Next Robot News Anchor

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Robot News Anchor

At a mere 23 years old, Japan’s latest news anchor would make her parents proud — if she had any. Erica, a lifelike android designed to look like a 23-year-old woman, may soon become a TV news anchor in Japan, the Wall Street Journal reported. According to Hiroshi Ishiguro, director of the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory at Osaka Universityand Erica’s creator, the android will replace a human news anchor on the airwaves as soon as April, the Daily Mail said. Erica the android may be well suited for this desk job. For starters, she can capably recite scripted writing and sit … Read more

SCIENCE: Ancient Virus May Be Responsible for Human Consciousness

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virus - pixabay

You’ve got an ancient virus in your brain. In fact, you’ve got an ancient virus at the very root of your conscious thought. According to two papers published in the journal Cell in January, long ago, a virus bound its genetic code to the genome of four-limbed animals. That snippet of code is still very much alive in humans’ brains today, where it does the very viral task of packaging up genetic information and sending it from nerve cells to their neighbors in little capsules that look a whole lot like viruses themselves. And these little packages of information might … Read more

SPACE: Oxygen Isn’t the Only Possible Sign of Life

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search for life

Alien-life hunters should keep an open mind when scanning the atmospheres of exoplanets, a new study stresses. The time-honored strategy of looking for oxygen is indeed a good one, study team members said; after all, it’s tough for this gas to build up in a planet’s atmosphere if life isn’t there churning it out. “But we don’t want to put all our eggs in one basket,” study lead author Joshua Krissansen-Totton, a doctoral student in Earth and space sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle, said in a statement. “Even if life is common in the cosmos, we have … Read more