While traditional diamonds are formed over billions of years deep in the Earth where extreme pressures and temperatures provide just the right conditions to crystalize carbon, scientists are working on more expedient ways of forging the precious stones. An international team of researchers has succeeded in whittling this process down to mere minutes, demonstrating a Read more about Scientists Produce Rare Diamonds In Minutes At Room Temperature[…]

Airglow is the natural “glowing” of the Earth’s atmosphere. It happens all the time and across the whole globe. There are three types of airglow: dayglow, twilightglow and nightglow. Each is the result of sunlight interacting with the molecules in our atmosphere, but they have their own special way of forming. Dayglow forms when sunlight Read more about Aurora vs Airglow vs STEM[…]

Many hopes for a return to a semi-normal life after COVID-19 revolve around vaccines, but those injections have limits — they’re harder to deploy in low-income and rural areas where there’s no guarantee of easy distribution. Science may offer a more accessible alternative, though. Columbia University researchers have developed a nasal spray that has successfully Read more about Nasal spray might prevent COVID-19 infections – it does in ferrets[…]

Scientists have found evidence that frozen methane deposits in the Arctic Ocean – known as the “sleeping giants of the carbon cycle” – have started to be released over a large area of the continental slope off the East Siberian coast, the Guardian can reveal. High levels of the potent greenhouse gas have been detected Read more about ‘Sleeping giant’ Arctic methane deposits starting to release, scientists find[…]

MIT researchers have now found that people who are asymptomatic may differ from healthy individuals in the way that they cough. These differences are not decipherable to the human ear. But it turns out that they can be picked up by artificial intelligence. In a paper published recently in the IEEE Journal of Engineering in Read more about Artificial intelligence model detects asymptomatic Covid-19 infections through cellphone-recorded coughs[…]

A team of physicists led by Professor Patrick Windpassinger at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) has successfully transported light stored in a quantum memory over a distance of 1.2 millimeters. They have demonstrated that the controlled transport process and its dynamics has only little impact on the properties of the stored light. The researchers used Read more about Physicists successfully carry out controlled transport of stored light[…]

In the chart here we see global transport emissions in 2018. This data is sourced from the International Energy Agency (IEA). Road travel accounts for three-quarters of transport emissions. Most of this comes from passenger vehicles – cars and buses – which contribute 45.1%. The other 29.4% comes from trucks carrying freight. Since the entire Read more about Cars, planes, trains: where do CO2 emissions from transport come from?[…]

A team of US astrophysicists has produced one of the most precise measurements ever made of the total amount of matter in the Universe, a longtime mystery of the cosmos. The answer, published in The Astrophysical Journal on Monday, is that matter consists of 31.5 percent—give or take 1.3 percent—of the total amount of matter Read more about Super precise measurement of all matter in universe made[…]

Public health crises have spawned conspiracy theories as far back as when the Black Death ravaged Europe in the 1300s, as people desperately try to make sense of the chaotic forces disrupting their lives. While modern science offers a better understanding of how diseases infect people and how to contain them, COVID-19 conspiracy theories are Read more about COVID-19 Conspiracy Theories Are a Public Health Threat[…]

For the first time, climate scientists have compiled a continuous, high-fidelity record of variations in Earth’s climate extending 66 million years into the past. The record reveals four distinctive climate states, which the researchers dubbed Hothouse, Warmhouse, Coolhouse, and Icehouse. These major climate states persisted for millions and sometimes tens of millions of years, and Read more about High-fidelity record of Earth’s climate history puts current changes in context of orbital variation[…]

A surprising number of hillstream loaches—a family of Asian fish—are capable of walking on land using all four limbs, according to a new study. It’s a discovery that could explain how some of the earliest animals managed to stroll on solid ground. South Asian hillstream loaches are a family of small fish that can often Read more about Several Fish Can Secretly Walk on Land, Study Suggests[…]

Researchers at McMaster University have developed a new technique to tease ancient DNA from soil, pulling the genomes of hundreds of animals and thousands of plants—many of them long extinct—from less than a gram of sediment. The DNA extraction method, outlined in the journal Quarternary Research, allows scientists to reconstruct the most advanced picture ever Read more about Researchers reveal a much richer picture of the past with new DNA recovery technique[…]

in a paper published on Aug. 17, in Nature Nanotechnology, Stanford scientists demonstrate a new approach to slow light significantly, much like an echo chamber holds onto sound, and to direct it at will. Researchers in the lab of Jennifer Dionne, associate professor of materials science and engineering at Stanford, structured ultrathin silicon chips into Read more about Scientists slow and steer light with resonant nanoantennas[…]

Nearly 60 years ago, the Nobel prize–winning physicist Eugene Wigner captured one of the many oddities of quantum mechanics in a thought experiment. He imagined a friend of his, sealed in a lab, measuring a particle such as an atom while Wigner stood outside. Quantum mechanics famously allows particles to occupy many locations at once—a Read more about Quantum paradox points to shaky foundations of reality[…]

In 1969, British physicist Roger Penrose suggested that energy could be generated by lowering an object into the black hole’s ergosphere—the outer layer of the black hole’s event horizon, where an object would have to move faster than the speed of light in order to remain still. Penrose predicted that the object would acquire a Read more about Experiment confirms 50-year-old theory describing how black holes could generate energy[…]

Researchers used a computer simulation to show how a flushing toilet can create a cloud of virus-containing aerosol droplets that is large and widespread and lasts long enough that the droplets could be breathed in by others. With recent studies showing the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19 can survive in the human digestive tract and Read more about Flushing toilets create clouds of virus-containing particles[…]

Astronomers have finally found hard-to-detect visible matter scattered across space, left over from the Big Bang, after searching for nearly thirty years, according to a study published in Nature. “We know from measurements of the Big Bang how much matter there was in the beginning of the Universe,” said Jean-Pierre Macquart, lead author of the Read more about After 30 years of searching, astroboffins finally detect the universe’s ‘missing matter’ – using fast radio bursts[…]

A team of University of Rhode Island scientists and statisticians conducted a sophisticated quantitative analysis of a mass extinction that occurred 215 million years ago and found that the cause of the extinction was not an asteroid or climate change, as had previously been believed. Instead, the scientists concluded that the extinction did not occur Read more about Asteroid, climate change not responsible for mass extinction 215 million years ago[…]

Sweden’s death rate per million (376) “is far in advance of Norway’s (44), Denmark’s (96) and Finland’s (55) — countries with similar welfare systems and demographics, but which imposed strict lockdowns…” reports the Guardian, “raising concerns that the country’s light-touch approach to the coronavirus may not be helping it build up broad immunity.” “According to Read more about Lockdown-Ignoring Sweden Now Has Nordic Europe’s Highest Per-Capita Death Rate and only 7.3% antibodies[…]

A compendium of practical facts rendered useless. Source: Stupid Calculations

In designing electronic devices, scientists look for ways to manipulate and control three basic properties of electrons: their charge; their spin states, which give rise to magnetism; and the shapes of the fuzzy clouds they form around the nuclei of atoms, which are known as orbitals. Until now, electron spins and orbitals were thought to Read more about Scientists break the link between a quantum material’s spin and orbital states[…]

Researchers at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, a Seattle nonprofit dedicated to neuroscience, have been painstakingly recording every brain cell and every connection between those neurons in mice for the past several years. The result represents major progress since an earlier, simpler map they released in 2016. The now-complete map encompasses about 100 million Read more about Gigantic new 3D map traces every neuron in a tiny mouse brain | Live Science[…]

Iceland’s testing yielded new leads for scientists about how the virus behaves. Early results suggested 0.6 percent of the population were “silent carriers” of the disease with no symptoms or only a mild cough and runny nose. Preliminary research suggests one-third of those who tested positive at deCODE infected someone around them, providing evidence that Read more about Iceland Has Tested 13% of Its Population for Coronavirus. They have days with 0 deaths. Here’s What It Found[…]

For National Geographic, Nina Strochlic and Riley D. Champine look back at the 1918 pandemic for clues about the future: The 1918 flu, also known as the Spanish Flu, lasted until 1920 and is considered the deadliest pandemic in modern history. Today, as the world grinds to a halt in response to the coronavirus, scientists Read more about Curves for the 1918 flu pandemic[…]