A little over a year ago, Caltech’s Lihong Wang developed the world’s fastest camera, a device capable of taking 10 trillion pictures per second. It is so fast that it can even capture light traveling in slow motion. But sometimes just being quick is not enough. Indeed, not even the fastest camera can take pictures Read more about Ultrafast camera takes 1 trillion frames per second of transparent objects and phenomena, can photograph light pulses[…]

A huge trash-collecting system designed to clean up plastic floating in the Pacific Ocean is finally picking up plastic, its inventor announced Wednesday. The Netherlands-based nonprofit the Ocean Cleanup says its latest prototype was able to capture and hold debris ranging in size from huge, abandoned fishing gear, known as “ghost nets,” to tiny microplastics Read more about A floating device created to clean up plastic from the ocean is finally doing its job, organizers say[…]

Expert human pathologists typically require around 30 minutes to diagnose brain tumors from tissue samples extracted during surgery. A new artificially intelligent system can do it in less than 150 seconds—and it does so more accurately than its human counterparts. New research published today in Nature Medicine describes a novel diagnostic technique that leverages the Read more about During Brain Surgery, This AI Can Diagnose a Tumor in 2 Minutes[…]

The most direct and strongest evidence for the accelerating universe with dark energy is provided by the distance measurements using type Ia supernovae (SN Ia) for the galaxies at high redshift. This result is based on the assumption that the corrected luminosity of SN Ia through the empirical standardization would not evolve with redshift. New Read more about New evidence shows that the key assumption made in the discovery of dark energy is in error[…]

If you know nothing else about particle accelerators, you probably know that they’re big — sometimes miles long. But a new approach from Stanford researchers has led to an accelerator shorter from end to end than a human hair is wide. The general idea behind particle accelerators is that they’re a long line of radiation Read more about This particle accelerator fits on the head of a pin[…]

n the 19th and early 20th centuries, millions of weather observations were carefully made in the logbooks of ships sailing through largely uncharted waters. Written in pen and ink, the logs recorded barometric pressure, air temperature, ice conditions and other variables. Today, volunteers from a project called Old Weather are transcribing these observations, which are Read more about How old ship logs are giving new insights into climate change[…]

The fossil fuels driving climate change make people sick, and so do impacts like extreme heat, wildfires, and more extreme storms, according to research published on Wednesday. In short, the climate crisis is a public health crisis. A new report from premiere medical journal the Lancet tallies the medical toll of climate change and finds Read more about Climate Change Is Already Making Us Sick[…]

Right now, in the Netherlands there is talk about reducing the speed limit from 130kph to 100kph in order to comply to emissions goals set by the EU (and supported by NL) years ago. Because NL didn’t put into effect any necessary legislation years ago, this is now coming to bite NL in the arse Read more about The effects of speed on traffic flow – also with a quick look at emissions and fuel consumption[…]

The first human vaccine against the often-fatal viral disease Ebola is now an official reality. On Monday, the European Union approved a vaccine developed by the pharmaceutical company Merck, called Ervebo. The stage for Ervebo’s approval was set this October, when a committee assembled by the European Medicines Agency (EMA) recommended a conditional marketing authorization Read more about The EU Has Approved an Ebola Vaccine[…]

New research from a duo of environmental engineers at Drexel University is suggesting the decades-old claim that house plants improve indoor air quality is entirely wrong. Evaluating 30 years of studies, the research concludes it would take hundreds of plants in a small space to even come close to the air purifying effects of simply Read more about House plants have little effect on indoor air quality, study concludes[…]

Source: xkcd: Earth Temperature Timeline

Last month was the hottest ever October on record globally, according to data released Friday by the Copernicus Climate Change Service, an organization that tracks global temperatures. The month, which was reportedly 1.24 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the average October from 1981-2010, narrowly beat October 2015 for the top spot. According to Copernicus, most of Europe, Read more about Hottest October ever: Earth just experienced its hottest October ever[…]

It only Tuesday, but more than 11,000 scientists around the world have come together to declare a climate emergency. Their paper, published Tuesday in the journal Bioscience, lays out the science behind this emergency and solutions for how we can deal with it. Scientists aren’t the first people to make this declaration. A tribal nation in the Read more about Thousands of Scientists Declare a Climate Emergency[…]

The U.S. is slowly being gripped by a flooding crisis as seas rise and waterways overflow with ever more alarming frequency. An idea at the forefront for how to help Americans cope is so-called managed retreat, a process of moving away from affected areas and letting former neighborhoods return to nature. It’s an idea increasingly Read more about Managed Retreat Buyout Efforts Have Relocated 40,000 Households to avoid rising seawater: Study[…]

Nearly a billion dollars a year is flowing into the organized climate change counter-movement The overwhelming majority of climate scientists, international governmental bodies, relevant research institutes and scientific societies are in unison in saying that climate change is real, that it’s a problem, and that we should probably do something about it now, not later. Read more about Meet the Money Behind The Climate Denial Movement[…]

Rapid progress in research involving miniature human brains grown in a dish has led to a host of ethical concerns, particularly when these human brain cells are transplanted into nonhuman animals. A new paper evaluates the potential risks of creating “humanized” animals, while providing a pathway for scientists to move forward in this important area. Read more about Rodents With Part-Human Brains Pose a New Challenge for Bioethics[…]

The next time you’re hunting for a parking spot, mathematics could help you identify the most efficient strategy, according to a recent paper in the Journal of Statistical Mechanics. It’s basically an optimization problem: weighing different variables and crunching the numbers to find the optimal combination of those factors. In the case of where to Read more about To find the best parking spot, do the math[…]

A man has been able to move all four of his paralysed limbs with a mind-controlled exoskeleton suit, French researchers report. Thibault, 30, said taking his first steps in the suit felt like being the “first man on the Moon”. His movements, particularly walking, are far from perfect and the robo-suit is being used only Read more about Paralysed man moves in mind-reading exoskeleton[…]

Their initial discovery had seemed like a contradiction because most other polymer fibres embrittle in the cold. But after many years of working on the problem, the group of researchers have discovered that silk’s cryogenic toughness is based on its nano-scale fibrills. Sub-microscopic order and hierarchy allows a silk to withstand temperatures of down to Read more about silk is proven to thrive in outer space temperatures[…]

Global shipping companies have spent billions rigging vessels with “cheat devices” that circumvent new environmental legislation by dumping pollution into the sea instead of the air, The Independent can reveal. More than $12bn (£9.7bn) has been spent on the devices, known as open-loop scrubbers, which extract sulphur from the exhaust fumes of ships that run on heavy fuel Read more about Thousands of ships fitted with ‘cheat devices’ to divert poisonous pollution into sea[…]

Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, have disproved the prevailing theory of how DNA binds itself. It is not, as is generally believed, hydrogen bonds which bind together the two sides of the DNA structure. Instead, water is the key. The discovery opens doors for new understanding in research in medicine and life sciences. Read more about DNA is held together by hydrophobic forces[…]

There’s been a lot of research into how to give robots and prosthesis wearers a sense of touch, but it has focused largely on the hands. Now, researchers led by ETH Zurich want to restore sensory feedback for leg amputees, too. In a paper published in Nature Medicine today, the team describes how they modified Read more about New prosthetic legs let amputees feel their foot and knee in real-time[…]