Lab accident leads to the discovery of a battery that can be used for hundreds of years Researchers at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) have discovered a way to design a battery so it doesn’t lose its charge after years of use. The team found that by using a gold nanowire in electrolyte gel rather than lithium, a battery could withstand 200,000 charging cycles and only lose 5% of its capacity.

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Submitted on September 21st 2016 by cone with 2 comments

I was a wayward kid who grew up on the literary side of life, treating math and science as if they were pustules from the plague. So it’s a little strange how I’ve ended up now—someone who dances daily with triple integrals, Fourier transforms, and that crown jewel of mathematics, Euler’s equation. It’s hard to believe I’ve flipped from a virtually congenital math-phobe to a professor of engineering. One day, one of my students asked me how I did it—how I changed my brain.

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Submitted on September 16th 2016 by socialiguana

Ubiquitous, mobile supercomputing. Artificially-intelligent robots. Self-driving cars. Neuro-technological brain enhancements. Genetic editing. The evidence of dramatic change is all around us and it’s happening at exponential speed.Previous industrial revolutions liberated humankind from animal power, made mass production possible and brought digital capabilities to billions of people. This Fourth Industrial Revolution is, however, fundamentally different. It is characterised by a range of new technologies that are fusing the physical, digital and biological worlds...

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Submitted on September 18th 2016 by drunkenninja

Yesterday, 375 of the world’s top scientists, including 30 Nobel Prize winners, published an open letter regarding climate change. In the letter, the scientists report that the evidence is clear: humans are causing climate change. We are now observing climate change and its affect across the globe. The seas are rising, the oceans are warming, the lower atmosphere is warming, the land is warming, ice is melting, rainfall patterns are changing and the ocean is becoming more acidic.

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Submitted on September 22nd 2016 by belangermira

When was the last time you used a pen? Perhaps to scrawl down a couple of groceries on a mangled shopping list or maybe to write a passive aggressive post-it note to your roommates to wash their dishes? Now cast your mind back to the last time you sat down and actually wrote out a letter to a relative or decided to hand write your latest essay.

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Submitted on September 20th 2016 by Petrox

China's first-ever space lab will die a fiery death in Earth's atmosphere toward the end of next year, Chinese officials said. The 9.4-ton (8.5 metric tons) Tiangong-1 spacecraft is currently intact and orbiting Earth at an altitude of 230 miles (370 kilometers), according to Wu Ping, deputy director of China's Manned Space Engineering office. That's a bit lower than the International Space Station, which usually stays about 250 miles (400 km) above the planet's surface.

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Submitted on September 20th 2016 by Apolatia with 3 comments

People born without sight appear to solve math problems using visual areas of the brain. A functional MRI study of 17 people blind since birth found that areas of visual cortex became active when the participants were asked to solve algebra problems, a team from Johns Hopkins reports in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "And as the equations get harder and harder, activity in these areas goes up in a blind person," says Marina Bedny, an author of the study and an assistant professor in the department of psychological and brain sciences at Johns Hopkins University.

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Submitted on September 21st 2016 by TNY

If you just got an email from a friend wondering why NASA is telling them they’re no longer a Scorpio, they’re an Ophiuchus now, you’re probably not the only one.

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Submitted on September 19th 2016 by kxh with 2 comments and with 1 Related Links:

1. Have the signs of the Zodiac moved? Added by kxh on September 19th 2016.

It's the oldest-ever example of indigo blue fabric.

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Submitted on September 16th 2016 by jcscher

NASA's Voyager I spacecraft has been steadily journeying away from the sun to the outer reaches of the solar system since its 1977 launch. As it travels farther out and enters a different region of the solar system, it's occasionally affected by coronal mass ejections -- shock waves caused from massive violent eruptions from our sun. There have been three of these space "tsunamis" since 2012, and the third one -- described by NASA on Monday -- has helped the space agency confirm something it posited in late 2013: that Voyager is the first Earth craft to travel into interstellar space.

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Submitted on September 19th 2016 by hxxp

Scientific research has consistently found a link between reading literary fiction and human empathy. Let's start taking these findings seriously.

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Submitted on September 16th 2016 by gladsdotter with 1 comments and with 1 Related Links:

1. "Literary" vs. "popular" fiction again Added by gladsdotter on September 21st 2016.

Some of the winning images from this year's competition.

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Submitted on September 17th 2016 by jcscher with 1 comments

Most of us have wondered what we might do if we didn’t need to work – if we woke up one morning to discover we had won the lottery, say. We entertain ourselves with visions of multiple homes, trips around the world or the players we would sign after buying Arsenal. For many of us, the most tantalising aspect of such visions is the freedom it would bring: to do what one wants, when one wants and how one wants.

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Submitted on September 21st 2016 by hedman

The search for alien life just got bigger. A lot bigger. The world's largest telescope will be completed this week in China and it has scientists very, very excited.With a whopping 1,640 feet (500 meter) wide dish the size of 30 football fields, the telescope will able to detect radio signals -- and potentially signs of life -- from distant planets.

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Submitted on September 22nd 2016 by zyery

Most of Singapore’s population speak the unofficial language or dialect known as Singlish. But why would the government rather it went away? James Harbeck takes a look.

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Submitted on September 21st 2016 by gladsdotter with 1 comments

In 1911, Marcellin Boule, a French paleontologist, published the first scientific description of the Neanderthal species. And let’s just say it didn’t have a lot of sex appeal. The skeleton in Boule’s volume, dubbed the "Old Man of La Chapelle," was a wretched creature: a hunched-over, brutish, dim-witted, primitive man clearly destined to fail in the game of "survival of the fittest."

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Submitted on September 19th 2016 by TNY

A modest developmental biology paper prompts breathless claims of egg-free embryos

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Submitted on September 20th 2016 by andromeda

The Hubble Deep Field, explained by the man who made it happen.

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Submitted on September 21st 2016 by rti9

The US Army Corps of Engineers finalized permits earlier this month for a $3.2 billion natural gas pipeline that will span 516 miles, crossing through the majority of Florida as well as large swaths of Georgia and Alabama. The pipeline project is owned by the Sabal Trail partnership, composed of Houston-based Spectra Energy, North Carolina’s […]

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Submitted on September 22nd 2016 by lostwonder

Despite having healthy eyes, Agnes finds it impossible to see more than one object at a time, while being blind to everything else around her. Her strange condition reveals surprising truths about the ways we all perceive the world.

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Submitted on September 20th 2016 by gladsdotter