Science

Saturn’s moon Pan is a dainty little thing with a diameter of just 17 miles (28 kilometers) across. It’s also shaped like a piece of ravioli. The moon, Pan, is Saturn’s second-innermost tagalong, and it’s only about 35 kilometers across. What makes it so interesting, as plainly seen in the new pictures, is that it’s not round. Pan has been ... Read More »

A project attempting to grow potatoes in Mars-like conditions has reported positive preliminary results. Potatoes bred by the International Potato Center in Peru were grown in a CubeSat – a miniature satellite box – developed with Nasa. The CubeSat was on Earth but hermetically sealed so that that no air or water from Earth’s atmosphere could be exchanged with the ... Read More »

A team from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) wanted robots to be a more natural extension of our bodies. In the demonstration, robot arms were given the task of placing either a canister of paint or a ball of wire into an appropriate box. The human controller, meanwhile, wearing an electroencephalography (EEG) cap, would have their brainwaves ... Read More »

A new research has raised doubts over the ability of trees to offset carbon emissions, finding that common trees can’t store as much carbon as previously thought. Published in the Nature Climate Change journal, the research found that Australia’s iconic Eucalyptus forests are likely to need additional soil nutrients in order to grow and take advantage of extra carbon dioxide ... Read More »

Historic hair samples collected from Aboriginal people show that following an initial migration 50,000 years ago, populations spread rapidly around the east and west coasts of Australia. “The mitochondrial dates reported here for Aboriginal Australian arrival and dispersal appear considerably older than recent estimates from nuclear genomic data that suggest a single ancestry population started to differentiate as recently as ... Read More »

Researchers at IBM and EPFL have shown for the first time that it is possible to store in and retrieve information from single-atom magnets. The breakthrough can have significant implications for the miniaturization of magnetic memory devices. As memory devices are becoming increasingly smaller, it was hypothesized whether the elementary storage unit could one day be as small as a single ... Read More »

A team of scientists led by physicists at the University of Maryland-based Joint Quantum Institute (JQI) have created the world’s first time crystal using a chain of atomic ions. Crystals such as ice or diamond are made of atoms arranged in a repeating pattern in space. These new time crystals have atoms follow a repeating pattern, but in time rather ... Read More »

Ancient DNA found in the dental plaque of Neandertals – our nearest extinct relative – has provided remarkable new insights into their behaviour, diet and evolutionary history, including their use of plant-based medicine to treat pain and illness. Published today in the journal Nature, an international team led by the University of Adelaide’s Australian Centre for Ancient DNA (ACAD) and ... Read More »

Researchers have for the first time filmed rare True’s beaked whales underwater.. True’s beaked whale was discovered more than a century ago but little about it is known and it remains one of the least understood creatures on the planet. The True’s beaked whale belongs to a family of cetaceans called Ziphiidae that includes 22 species of beaked whales. Despite ... Read More »

A B.C. conservation group is raising the alarm about the state of the province’s grizzly bear population. The recently-formed charitable organization, the Grizzly Bear Foundation commissioned a three-person board of inquiry to investigate the status of the bears. None of the members is a scientist, but they met with government officials and scientists, and held public hearings across the province. ... Read More »

Scientists are using brain scans to learn more about the signals our brains give when we make a mistake called “error-related potentials”. A team from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and Boston University is working on this problem, creating a feedback system that lets people correct robot mistakes instantly with nothing more than their brains. Using data ... Read More »