Biologists Look to the Dawn of Life to Study the Causes of Cancer
Has cancer touched your life? People who have loved ones or friends afflicted with the disease are often left to wonder why cancer exists at all. The answer, like the disease, is surprisingly complicated. Cancer is part of life’s ancient apparatus. The disease is not a modern aberration, but a bygone survival response embedded […]
Gut Microbes in Athletes: The Next Big Thing in Sports Doping?
Do you worry about bacteria a little more than the next person? You squeezed out of the womb without a single microbe. But you began to draw entire colonies of bacteria the moment you pushed through your mother’s birth canal. By the time you could crawl, you were living inside a swarm of unseen microorganisms. Our bodies […]
Eating to Save the World
Worried about global warming and your grandchildren’s future? Would you change your diet to give them a better chance of a life worth living? An international team of scientists has warned that current dietary trends are a threat to human health and the environment. The team has issued a report saying we need a global […]
Robot Contact Lens Switches Focus When You Blink
Researchers in California have made a contact lens that automatically zooms and switches focus between near or far objects. Created by scientists from the University of San Diego, the lenses use natural electric signals in the human eyeball to switch focus. The team discovered that the electrical potential between the front and back of […]
Daedalus: Are Flying Footsoldiers the Future of the Royal Marines?
The inventor and co-founder of Gravity Industries, Richard Browning, has tested his invention – the Daedalus jetpack – over open water for the first time. Browning tested his jet-powered suit in the Solent, a body of water between mainland Britain and the Isle of Wight in the UK. The 39-year-old former Royal Marine Reservist regularly […]
Raising Sons and What They Teach You
Arguments over the religious views of Charles Darwin have never ceased to enthrall fools and the seriously learned alike. There are harshly conflicting descriptions of his religious opinions, with atheists most loudly claiming he was one of them. “He’s an infidel,” one Victorian coachman had famously declared. By revealing that we are more garden slug […]
Scientists May Have Just Discovered a Way to Forecast Volcanic Eruptions
When Hell roars, the world trembles. For 500 years, Mount Pinatubo sat in imperturbable meditation — a stone giant unmoved by the tumult of passing centuries. When the volcano erupted in June 1991, it exploded with devil fire, hurling five cubic kilometers of gas-charged magma skyward. The earth groaned as the volcano disgorged burning boulders […]
Optical Illusion Creates Impression of Color Where There is None
Human vision is an amazing facility. Having evolved over many millions of years, it performs tasks that are beyond the capabilities of earlier visual systems. Remarkable as they are, however, our eyes have well-known limitations. Researchers have in fact identified a vast number of ways to make human eyes misjudge size, movement, and color. An […]
Emoji Domain Names: Thing of the Future or Passing Fancy?
Human beings have communicated with each other using simple pictures for thousands of years. The oldest known cave paintings are over 40,000 years old. This ancient — and uniquely human — form of communication has, of course, found its way into today’s internet culture. Cult Status People use little digital icons to convey emotion or […]
Take Those Magnetic Eyelashes Off during MRI Scans, Radiologists Warn
In medieval times, polite society encouraged women to pluck their eyelashes. The peculiar practice began after the church declared that eyelashes were simply too erotic. Those days are happily long gone. Indeed, the world has since formed quite an infatuation for long, full eyelashes. Women today go through some lengths to darken, extend, and […]
