Image courtesy of Konstantin Yolshin/Alamy
Scientists have discovered a new smell that is “fragrant, chemical, perfumery, aromatic, floral, soapy, sweet, fruity and medicinal” yet indistinguishable all at the same time.
Measure your brainwaves. Send them to your computer, smartphone or tablet. Strengthen your mind.
That’s what the new brain-sensing headband ‘Muse’ promises to bring to the world by mid-2013. Muse is the literal brainchild of Canadian company Interaxon, who sports over a decades worth of research in the realm of brain to computer interfaces. The team firmly believes that brainwave recognition technology will soon reshape the way we interact with our gadgets, and each other.
Today in Japan, Pepsi Special launched, promising to block the absorption of fat in it’s drinkers.
It’s widely accepted that frequently drinking soda pop can make you fat, especially if you’re genetically predisposed to obesity, so this is a rather interesting development.
Via DVice
What can support up to 4,000 times it’s own weight, withstand blasts of dynamite, and is used by NASA to collect comet dust?
If you guessed aerogel, you are correct!
Aerogel is one of the cooler synthetic substances that science has to offer. It was actually only invented in 1930, and only came into existence as the result of a bet between two chemists: Samuel Stephens Kistler and Charles Learned.
Can this machine operate forever?
Since at least the 12th century, man has sought to create a perpetual motion machine; a device that would continue working indefinitely without any external source of energy.
A large scientific contingent thinks such a device would violate the laws of thermodynamics, and is thus impossible.
Could it be that as a race, we don’t fully understand the laws of physics and such a device may indeed be possible? What would the ramifications be if we could actually build a perpetually moving device?
Via PropheticAlert
It’s the eternal debate; where does the human soul go after we die? This isn’t about religious denominations, this is about the two main contingencies on the matter. Do we go to Heaven or Hell, or is life a random occurrence that took billions of years to manifest?
Via Darpa.Mil
Functional electronic devices that can dissolve in water or other fluids at a set point in time offer up a myriad of possibilities to the world.
DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, has funded a successful study conducted by researchers at Northwestern University, Tufts University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign that showcased the feasibility of dissolvable or transient electronics to the world. How we can use this technology in the real world is where things get interesting.
IC 1101
And you thought Felix Baumgartner’s stratospheric leap made you feel small.
We’re discovering incredible facts about the universe seemingly everyday. We think the universe is 13.7 billions years old and it is currently expanding. There are theories that the universe could be infinite, and theories that there could be multiple universes. For our purposes today, we’re going to stick with just the facts, and talk a little bit about the largest galaxy known to man, the creatively named IC 1101!
Courtesy of First Warning Systems
October is breast cancer awareness month. Each year, over one million women worldwide are diagnosed with breast cancer. Within that same time frame, 400,000 women will die from this disease. This doesn’t have to be the case. With early enough detection, it can be halted nearly 100% of the time.
The main issue is that cancerous tumors are extremely small and often undetectable for nearly a decade via current methods! Not only that, the options available today have a surprising number of negatives including radiation exposure, discomfort and false positives at an alarming rate of over 40%!
Courtesy of Oregon State University
Here’s a pretty remarkable and relatable image to take in. We’ve all seen the ancient insect preserved perfectly in amber, but never have we seen what is essentially a live look at an ancient predator at work.
In what scientists are calling a 100 million year old discovery, a social orb-weaver spider can be seen on the brink of attacking a parasitic wasp. Both of these exact species are extinct today, but remarkable similarities can be seen to current insects in both in their appearance and behavior.