Being bad-tempered and pessimistic helps you to earn more, live longer and enjoy a healthier marriage. It’s almost enough to put a smile on the dourest of faces.

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Submitted on August 11th 2016 by gladsdotter with 7 comments

Official description: Curiosity approaching Murray Buttes locality on Sol 1421.

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Submitted on August 11th 2016 by ckshenn with 1 comments

Physicists working at the Large Hadron Collider reveal that mounds of data did not support the possibility of a new particle. By Dennis Overbye.

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Submitted on August 5th 2016 by AdelleChattre

Last year, the world freaked out over the discovery of a star that was dimming and flickering so erratically, it couldn't be explained by any known natural phenomenon - prompting one scientist to actually go there and suggest it could be evidence of some kind of alien megastructure. Follow-up studies have revealed no signs of alien behaviour, but NASA's Kepler Space Telescope has just spent around 1,600 days observing the star, and things have gotten a lot weirder.

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Submitted on August 7th 2016 by 8mm with 8 comments

So many mixed signals. So much nausea.

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Submitted on August 8th 2016 by gladsdotter with 11 comments

Many lower organisms retain the miraculous ability to regenerate form and function of almost any tissue after injury. Humans share many of our genes with these organisms, but our capacity for regeneration is limited. Scientists at the MDI Biological Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, are studying the genetics of these organisms to find out how regenerative mechanisms might be activated in humans. The ability of animals to regenerate body parts has fascinated scientists since the time of Aristotle.

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Submitted on August 7th 2016 by lexi6

Gorgeous galaxies and stunning stars make up this selection of pictures from the shortlisted entries for this year’s Insight Astronomy Photographer of the Year award. By Eric Hilaire.

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Submitted on August 10th 2016 by AdelleChattre with 2 comments

Mounting evidence suggests a lot of published research is false.

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Submitted on August 11th 2016 by rti9 with 2 comments

New research suggests that it is possible to create a new form of light by binding light to a single electron, combining the properties of both.

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Submitted on August 5th 2016 by Gozzin

How does a song we dislike at first hearing become a favourite? And when we try to look different, how come we end up looking like everyone else? By Tom Vanderbilt.

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Submitted on August 5th 2016 by AdelleChattre

Researchers from the University of Victoria and colleagues in the US and Jordan just unearthed the oldest evidence of protein residue on stone tools, suggesting that early humans living 250,000 years ago in the Middle East were already using instruments to obtain food from animals. Writing in the latest edition of the Journal of Archaeological Science, paleoanthropologist April Nowell and her colleagues explained they excavated a total of 10,000 stone tools from a site known as Shishan Mars, a desert oasis located close to Azraq, Jordan.

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Submitted on August 9th 2016 by messi

New techniques finger 19th century amateur fossil hunter in famous forgery. By Michael Price.

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Submitted on August 10th 2016 by AdelleChattre

Children who play online video games tend to do better in academic science, maths and reading tests, according to an analysis of data from over 12,000 high school students in Australia. The study found that students who played online games almost every day scored 15 points above average in maths and reading tests and 17 points above average in science. However, the study’s methodology cannot prove that playing video games were the cause of the improvement.

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Submitted on August 8th 2016 by hedman with 2 comments

Gravity is weaker than it should be – a new theory suggests that’s because the universe is full of invisible particle families which ignore each other.

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Submitted on August 5th 2016 by AdelleChattre

Researchers have discovered the wreck of a pioneering British steamship that sank in the Russian Arctic in 1878. The Thames was a 120-tonne steamship captained by decorated explorer Joseph Wiggins during his attempts to open a trade route between the UK and Siberia through the Arctic Ocean. Two researchers from the Russian Geographical Society, which is chaired by President Vladimir Putin, found its wreck in shallow waters on the Yenisei river near the village of Goroshikha just south of the Arctic Circle.

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Submitted on August 9th 2016 by zobo with 1 comments

Sleep just doesn't make sense. "Think about it," said Gero Miesenböck, a neuroscientist at the University of Oxford. "We do it. Every animal with a brain does it. But obviously it has considerable risks." Sleeping animals are incredibly vulnerable to attacks, with no obvious benefit to make up for it — at best, they waste precious hours that could be used finding food or seducing a mate; at worst, they could get eaten. "If evolution had managed to invent an animal that doesn’t need to sleep ... the selective advantage for it would be immense," Miesenböck said.

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Submitted on August 6th 2016 by hxxp

​​A new theory suggests that missing extra copies of the Higgs boson might explain why gravity is so much weaker than it should be.​

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Submitted on August 6th 2016 by drunkenninja

And what would happen if it actually works. By Sam Kean.

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Submitted on August 9th 2016 by gladsdotter with 1 Related Links:

1. This Man Will Get the World's First Human Head Transplant Procedure Added by gladsdotter on August 9th 2016.

Under the surface of the dwarf planet Ceres are strange jumbled zones that are mixes of ice and rock, a new study finds. This research suggests that Ceres might still be warmed by radioactive material in its interior, scientists say. With a diameter of about 585 miles (940 kilometers), Ceres is by far the biggest member of the asteroid belt located between Mars and Jupiter. Previous remote analysis of Ceres using ground- and space-based telescopes suggested that it was not as dense as other large asteroids such as Vesta.

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Submitted on August 7th 2016 by hedman

This robot unfolds like an origami after it’s swallowed. “The idea that you could repair a human body by swallowing something, instead of making cuts, is amazing,” says innovator Daniela Rus.

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Submitted on August 5th 2016 by drunkenninja