Tag: Science
Science is now telling us that bees will repeatedly go back to a plant to collect nectar, if the nectar is laced with caffeine. So bees are kind of like us! Are there some bees that are not morning bees and tell people not to talk to them until they’ve had their morning nectar? And do […]
Researchers at Brown University have successfully invented a wireless brain sensor, an implantable interface that translates thoughts into commands to a computer. This is the first ever wireless version of such a device; in the past, brain-computer interfaces always required a number of bulky cords. A wireless device like this has the potential to vastly […]
Scientists at the Tufts’ Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology have successfully “grown” functioning eyes for tadpoles by planting eye primordia in a tadpole’s tail and having it develop into an eyeball, with nerves and everything. To prove that the newly grown eye actually worked, scientists humanely cut and removed the original eyes from the […]
Today in frightening/awesome science news: scientists from Duke University have successfully wired together the brains of two rats, giving them the mental power to solve problems neither could tackle individually. Wirelessly, the researchers were even able to link two rats’ minds with one in North Carolina and the other in Brazil. The scientists set up […]
Ever wonder what it takes to rule Twitter? A team of researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology have reduced the art of increasing your followers to a simple science. After studying 500 different (non-celebrity) Twitter accounts over a period of fifteen months, they concluded that the most popular Twitters are, most importantly, those that […]
A couple weeks ago, science informed us that we shared traits with goddamn rat-things. (Radiolab is being a little more diplomatic and calling the creature “shrew-like,” but let’s be real, it’s a goddamn rat.) Now, Radiolab and the American Museum of Natural History are asking us to think of a good name for this ancestor […]
Students at the University of Surrey in the UK taking a Practical and Biomedical Bacteriology course imprinted their smartphone screens onto petri dishes with grow media to see what kind of bacteria was lurking. Three days later, they found #art. The colorized result are not just alluring abstract designs, there are narrative and performative elements […]
Having already pinpointed the happiest intersection in Manhattan at 7th and 77th (near Hayden Planetarium), the applied mathematicians at Computational Story Lab are expanding their scope in an effort to map out the existential condition of the entire country. Unlike art cartographer Eric Fischer who used geotag data of tweets to map density of twitter […]
Humans have been indulging in alcohol since the dawn of civilization. No, wait. Earlier! Turns out that humanity’s taste for booze dates back 10 million years, to a common evolutionary ancestor that we share with chimpanzees and gorillas. This is what scientists at the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution in Gainesville, FL have concluded based on […]
Researchers at UCLA have developed a way to reduce blood alcohol levels in drunk mice, in a study that could forebear a pill that would help you quickly sober up after a night of boozing. Scientists gave the rodents a nanocapsule filled with an enzyme that naturally metabolizes alcohol, and those animals dosed with the […]
