Get Started for FREE
Sign up with Facebook Sign up with X
I don't have a Facebook or a X account
 Your new post is loading...
Your new post is loading...
Scoop.it!
Science comes up with a lot of awesome stuff, and you don't need a Ph.D, a secret lab, or government funding to get your hands on some of the coolest discoveries. We've got a list of 11 mostly affordable gifts that are guaranteed to blow your mind, whether or not you're a science geek. 
No comment yet.
Sign up to comment
Scoop.it!
TED Talks Brute computing force alone can’t solve the world’s problems.
Scoop.it!
TED Talks At his Stanford University commencement speech, Steve Jobs, CEO and co-founder of Apple and Pixar, urges us to pursue our dreams and see the opportunities in life's setbacks -- including death itself.
Scoop.it!
Join over 3 million people who list their goals, share their progress, and cheer each other on. Start listing your goals now...
Scoop.it!
A scribe works on large walls, using markers pens to map conversations live at events, interpreting and drawing ideas quickly, using pictures, diagrams and symbols to make ideas visible and accessible. Over the last 15 years, working with lots of people, groups and individuals within many industries and professional cultures has given me tremendous insight. It has also helped me understand the different languages that these cultures can speak. The role of a Scribe in my view, is to act as a translator within these cultures to allow as many people as possible to understand the information being conversed. In essence the Scribe must be able to ‘speak’ the language in that culture.
Scoop.it!
Scientists at The University of Auckland’s Centre for Brain Research have succeeded in converting human skin cells directly into immature brain cells (or neural precursor cells). The team, assisted by funding from the Neurological Foundation of New Zealand, the Auckland Medical Research Foundation, and the Maurice and Phyllis Paykel Trust , has led the world in developing a fast and efficient means of accomplishing this without having to go through the intermediate stage of conversion to embryonic stem cells.
“This is an advance of huge significance to stem cell research on a global level,” says Principal Investigator, Associate Professor Bronwen Connor, who is head of the Neural Repair and Neurogenesis Laboratory at the University. “It has the potential to lead to a new understanding of neurodegenerative diseases such as Huntington’s, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.
Scoop.it!
It's not quite mind-reading, but dogs do monitor our eye movements and voice tone to predict our intent. One secret behind supposed canine ESP turns out to be a dog's ability to track human eye movements.The ability helps dogs to read human intent.Dog social skills are equivalent to that of six-month to two-year-old children. enlarge The careful watch of a dogs' eyes help the animal figure out what we're up to. Click to enlarge this image. Dogs often seem to be psychic, anticipating what we're going to say or do, and now research reveals one secret behind this canine ESP: Dogs intensely track our eye movements, which can be tied to intent. Human babies also possess the ability, described in the latest Current Biology. The discovery might help to explain why so many people treat their furry pals like their kids. NEWS: Dogs Probably Feel Sorry For Us "Dogs are receptive to human communication in a manner that was previously attributed only to six-month-old human infants," co-author Jozsef Topal told Discovery News. "They read our intention to communicate in a preverbal, infant-like manner," added Topal, who works in the Institute for Psychological Research at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
Scoop.it!
Jan. 13, 2011 - Star Trek fans know that apparently in the future space propulsion is produced through the combination of matter and antimatter. The problem with antimatter though is that it’s scarce and most scientists agree the only way to produce it on Earth is through artificial means. At least, that was the belief until scientists using NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope discovered a previously unknown phenomenon that occurs above thunderstorm clouds. It turns out that in addition to producing rain and lightning, thunderstorm clouds also produce antimatter. The discovery is the first time antimatter has been found to be created naturally on Earth. Antimatter particles are created within a terrestrial gamma-ray flash (TGF) which is produced inside thunderstorms in association with lightning. These TGFs occur around 500 times a day, but the vast majority go undetected. Gamma rays contain a high amount of energy and occur when particles of antimatter strike normal matter. TGFs with energies of 511,000 electron volts have been detected by Fermi. The Fermi spacecraft was originally designed to detect high-energy events in space. Scientists have now found that the spacecraft can be a valuable in detecting high-energy events occurring on Earth as well. Most of the TGFs detected by Fermi were the result of it being immediately above a thunderstorm, though in four other cases the storms were relatively far away. Those distant storms were detected as a result of TGFs producing high-speed electrons and positrons, an electron’s antimatter counterpart, which rode Earth’s magnetic field to strike the spacecraft.
Scoop.it!
In rats with completely severed spinal cords, it produced an 'astonishing degree' of nerve growth, scientists from the University Of California at San Diego said. A stem cell gel developed by scientists can regenerate broken spinal cord nerves, research has shown. The gel is applied to the site of an injury. In rats with completely severed spinal cords, it produced an 'astonishing degree' of nerve growth, U.S. scientists said. Treated animals which were previously paralysed experienced 'significant' functional improvement and were able to move all the joints of their affected legs.
Scoop.it!
Kane and Gelino's research suggests that habitable zone around stars might be larger than once thought, and that planets that might be hostile to human life might be the perfect place for extremophiles, like lichens and bacteria, to survive. "Life evolved on Earth at a very early stage in the planet's development, under conditions much harsher than they are today," Kane said. Kane explained that many life-harboring worlds might not be planets at all, but rather moons of larger, gas-giant planets like Jupiter in our own solar system. "There are lots of giant planets out there, and all of them may have moons, if they are like the giant planets in the solar system," Kane says. "A moon of a planet that is in or spends time in a habitable zone can be habitable itself." As an example, Kane mentioned Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, which, despite its thick atmosphere, is far too distant from the sun and too cold for life as we know it to exist on its surface. "If you moved Titan closer in to the sun, it would have lots of water vapor and very favorable conditions for life."
Scoop.it!
Casino magnate Sheldon Adelson has committed $100 million to defeat Barack Obama. Sarah Silverman has a proposal for him...
|
Scoop.it!
TED Talks Rob Legato creates movie effects so good they (sometimes) trump the real thing. In this warm and funny talk, he shares his vision for enhancing reality on-screen in movies like Apollo 13, Titanic and Hugo.
Scoop.it!
TED Talks At TEDIndia, Pranav Mistry demos several tools that help the physical world interact with the world of data -- including a deep look at his SixthSense device and a new, paradigm-shifting paper "laptop." In an onstage Q&A, Mistry says...
Scoop.it!
Amazing Mystery Photographer Comes To Fame After Her Death:
An incredible story. Vivian Maier was a nanny who lived in Chicago for most of her life and passed away in 2009 at the age of 83. Little more is known about her, except that she was an avid street photographer. Her work was discovered at an auction in 2007, more than 100,000 negatives and undeveloped rolls of film, sold by a storage facility who were cleaning out her locker for delinquent rent. Here is a small sampling of Vivian Maier's stunning work from the Maloof Collection, spanning from the 1950s to the 1970s. Many of the photos, if they had any information at all, only provided a year and/or city.
Scoop.it!
The secret life of everyday things.| OWNI.eu, News, Augmented...
Andrew McLaughin's curator insight,
March 18, 2014 7:25 PM
This article gave me ideas for how to potentially handle my video essay assignment. I would like to explore the way that headphones act when humans are not around, similar to toy story.
Scoop.it!
Prezi is a cloud-based presentation software that opens up a new world between whiteboards and slides. The zoomable canvas makes it fun to explore ideas and the connections between them.
Scoop.it!
The experiencing self lives in the moment; it is the one that answers the question “does it hurt?” or “what were you thinking about just now?” The remembering self is the one that answers questions about the overall evaluation of episodes or periods of one’s life, such as a stay in the hospital or the years since one left college.
Scoop.it!
Plants cry for help when an attack can be expected...
Eggs of insect pests deposited on plants trigger the production of scents by plants that affect different plant community members probably helping the plant to get rid of the pest before it becomes harmful. These results are reported the journal PLOS ONE by researchers, of the Laboratory of Entomology of Wageningen University and the Netherlands Institute of Ecology (NIOO-KNAW).
The research team, led by Nina Fatouros, tested how parasitic wasps, natural enemies of a common cabbage pest, the large cabbage white butterfly, and gravid butterfly females respond to black mustard, a cabbage relative, emitting scents during the initial phase of herbivore attack, when eggs are laid. They show that butterfly egg deposition triggers highly specific chemical and structural changes in the plant that attract different parasitic wasps attacking either butterfly eggs or caterpillars but repel egg-laying butterflies. However, egg deposition by a less common pest, the cabbage moth, does not trigger such changes. A specific plant response to butterfly egg deposition might help the plant defending itself before actual damage by hatching caterpillars starts.
Scoop.it!
![Nanoengineers can print 3D microstructures in mere seconds [Jacobs School of Engineering: News & Events] | Kool Look | Scoop.it](https://img.scoop.it/6wrLOCdBATqeXGLPrUd_dzl72eJkfbmt4t8yenImKBVvK0kTmF0xjctABnaLJIm9)
San Diego, Calif., September 13, 2012 – Nanoengineers at the University of California, San Diego have developed a novel technology that can fabricate, in mere seconds, microscale three dimensional (3D) structures out of soft, biocompatible hydrogels. Near term, the technology could lead to better systems for growing and studying cells, including stem cells, in the laboratory. Long-term, the goal is to be able to print biological tissues for regenerative medicine. For example, in the future, doctors may repair the damage caused by heart attack by replacing it with tissue that rolled off of a printer.
Scoop.it!
A picture inflates the perceived truth of true and false claims
Trusting research over their guts, scientists in New Zealand and Canada examined the phenomenon Stephen Colbert, comedian and news satirist, calls “truthiness”—the feeling that something is true. In four different experiments they discovered that people believe claims are true, regardless of whether they actually are true, when a decorative photograph appears alongside the claim. The work is published online in the Springer journal, Psychonomic Bulletin & Review.“We wanted to examine how the kinds of photos people see every day—the ones that decorate newspaper or TV headlines, for example—might produce “truthiness,” said lead investigator Eryn J. Newman of Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. “We were really surprised by what we found.”In a series of four experiments in both New Zealand and Canada, Newman and colleagues showed people a series of claims such as, “The liquid metal inside a thermometer is magnesium” and asked them to agree or disagree that each claim was true. In some cases, the claim appeared with a decorative photograph that didn’t reveal if the claim was actually true—such as a thermometer. Other claims appeared alone. When a decorative photograph appeared with the claim, people were more likely to agree that the claim was true, regardless of whether it was actually true.Across all the experiments, the findings fit with the idea that photos might help people conjure up images and ideas about the claim more easily than if the claim appeared by itself. “We know that when it’s easy for people to bring information to mind, it ‘feels’ right,” said Newman. The research has important implications for situations in which people encounter decorative photos, such as in the media or in education. “Decorative photos grab people’s attention,” Newman said. “Our research suggests that these photos might have unintended consequences, leading people to accept information because of their feelings rather than the facts.”
Scoop.it!
“Evolutionary selection, acting on a cosmic scale, tends to extinguish species which conspicuously advertise themselves and their habitats,” according to Adrian Kent, Centre for Quantum Computation, University of Cambridge. “Intelligent species might reasonably worry about the possible dangers of self-advertisement and hence incline towards discretion” -- the “Undetectability Conjecture,” put forth by Beatriz Gato-Rivera, a theoretical physicist at the Instituto de Fisica Fundamental (previously Instituto de Matematicas y Fisica Fundamental) of the CSIC (Spanish Scientific Research Council) in Madrid. According to Gato-Rivera, we may find ourselves in a universe in which there exist intelligent technological civilizations but they have chosen to be undetectable, camouflaging themselves mainly for security reasons (because advanced civilizations could also be aggressive). If the argument about the time scale for the appearance of life on Earth is correct, Hawking says "there ought to be many other stars, whose planets have life on them. Some of these stellar systems could have formed 5 billion years before the Earth. So why is the galaxy not crawling with self-designing mechanical or biological life forms?" Why hasn't the Earth been visited, and even colonized? Hawking asks. "I discount suggestions that UFO's contain beings from outer space. I think any visits by aliens, would be much more obvious, and probably also, much more unpleasant." Hawking continues: "What is the explanation of why we have not been visited? One possibility is that the argument, about the appearance of life on Earth, is wrong. Maybe the probability of life spontaneously appearing is so low, that Earth is the only planet in the galaxy, or in the observable universe, in which it happened. Another possibility is that there was a reasonable probability of forming self reproducing systems, like cells, but that most of these forms of life did not evolve intelligence."
Scoop.it!
Inside the right earpiece — that is, the horizontal support that goes over your ear — Google has packed memory, a processor, a camera, speaker and microphone, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi antennas, accelerometer, gyroscope, compass and a battery. All inside the earpiece. The biggest triumph — and to me, the biggest surprise — is that the tiny screen is completely invisible when you’re talking or driving or reading. You just forget about it completely. There’s nothing at all between your eyes and whatever, or whomever, you’re looking at. You can control the software by swiping a finger on that right earpiece in different directions; it’s a touchpad. Your swipes could guide you through simple menus. In various presentations, Google has proposed icons for things like taking a picture, recording video, making a phone call, navigating on Google Maps, checking your calendar and so on. A tap selects the option you want. In recent demonstrations, Google has a
|
