By Tibi Puiu on Oct 20, 2015 11:27 am
 It probably took a bit of convincing for man to turn wolves into dogs through domestication. At least this is not settled for debate: dogs branched from Eurasian grey wolves some 15,000 years ago. What's less clear is where did this first happen. After embarking on a huge study which led them to analyze the genetic markup of hundreds of dog breeds, Adam Boyko at Cornell University thinks he's finally got an answer: dogs were first domesticated in Central Asia, or in modern day Nepal and Mongolia.
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By Tibi Puiu on Oct 20, 2015 10:21 am
 Used to make almost everything from skyscraper girders, automobiles, and appliances to thumb tacks and paper clips, steel is one of the world's most vital materials. While there's been a great amount of research invested into steel, most of it has concentrated on making various grades of steel, with little focus on the surface itself. Understanding that there's a great interest and need for steel surfaces that can stay clean and don't corrode under harsh biological conditions, a group of material scientists at Harvard have come up with a squeaky clean coating that does just that.
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By Mihai Andrei on Oct 20, 2015 10:06 am
 A 300 meter long (984 ft) glass suspension bridge, 180 meters (591 ft) above the ground has recently opened in Hunan, part of China’s Shiniuzhai National Geological Park. As if that wasn’t scary enough, the entire thing is made of glass-like material, and it’s transparent. Eloquently named Haohan Qiao or ‘Brave Men’s Bridge’, the bridge is an adventure in itself, as the
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By Tibi Puiu on Oct 20, 2015 07:26 am
 You've probably heard some of the headlines: eBay hacked; Apple hacked etc. It's infuriating when your private records, which you shared with a company you trust, get breached. But it's often easy to lose sight of the fact that nowadays it's not only companies that get hacked - it's normal, nine to five, credit card holding individuals that get hacked too. Cybercriminals use all sorts of methods to spoof millions of twitter or facebook accounts and extract private information they can later use to steal your identity, extort you or hack other accounts. As such, we should all be a lot more responsible. Here's a brief infographic made by the Digital Guardian which shows how oversharing on social media can be harmful and some practical tips on how to protect your data.
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By Dragos Mitrica on Oct 20, 2015 04:01 am
 NASA's Cassini probe recently observed mysterious, huge amounts of plasma on the fringes of Saturn's magnetic field; surprisingly, they were shooting hundreds of thousands of kilometers inward.
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By Mihai Andrei on Oct 20, 2015 02:35 am
 In the fight with cancer, we need any piece of help we can get. With this in mind, a group of researchers set out to investigate the animals that don't get cancer (or rarely do) - especially elephants and naked mole rats.
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By Tibi Puiu on Oct 19, 2015 04:09 pm
 The last time humans set foot on the moon was 1972. Feeling confident it had clearly showed its superiority over Russia, the US felt no more reason to prove itself and immediately shut down subsequent missions. Once with funding gone - and its budget has been thinning since - NASA had to settle for less ambitious goals, and it's not like we can blame them. Building on outpost on the moon, versus say the International Space Station, is not only a lot more expensive, but also impractical. Recent findings, however, suggest there's a lot to gain from having an outpost on the moon, of some sorts at least. That's because the interest has shifted from prestige, or at least not only, to the potentially bountiful economic activities. Minerals, helium-3 (fuel) or precious metals can all be mined from the moon, trillions worth. But before you can shuttle minerals back from the moon, you at least need a footing of some sort. Understanding this, the European Space Agency and Roscosmos banded together to send a robotic probe to an unexplored region of the moon. The ultimate goal, they say, is to prepare the ground for humans.
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By Mihai Andrei on Oct 19, 2015 03:45 pm
 This is a polished marble of a pallasite – a type of stony-iron meteorite, consisting mostly of centimeter-sized olivine crystals. Olivine is a silicate mineral often found in the Earth’s mantle. Pallasites were once thought to originate at the core-mantle boundary of differentiated asteroids that were subsequently shattered through impacts, but that theory has been replaced recently by another one, which
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By Mihai Andrei on Oct 19, 2015 03:33 pm
 Some parts of Mexico are plagued by a severe drought, threatening food security and local agriculture. But the same drought created a surprising, ghostly appearance: a 16th century church emerging from the middle of a reservoir. The Nezahualcoyotl reservoir, located in southern Mexico, has dropped over 25 meters (80 feet) due to this year’s drought. As the water levels dropped
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By Alexandru Micu on Oct 19, 2015 03:00 pm
 In an experiment proposal that sounds more like an evil genius' plan than a reputable science endeavour, CERN's LHC atom smasher in Geneva, Switzerland will be cranked up to the highest energy levels ever, as scientists hope to detect or create miniature black holes. If successful, scientists hope that the experiment will uncover extra dimensions hidden in our universe.
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