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Gear How Stewart Butterfield Created Slack From a Failed Videogame At first, the software was hard to explain—nobody had ever used anything like it. It was based on a system his te...
New professorship in tissue engineering links molecular engineering, marine biology
The University of Chicago is creating a new professorship in tissue engineering to promote innovative work at the University’s Institute for Molecular Engineering and the Marine Biol...
NASA’s Aquarius returns global maps of soil moisture
Satellite readings of soil moisture will help scientists better understand the climate system and have potential for a wide range of applications, from advancing climate models, weat...
NASA-funded mission to study the sun’s energy
On July 14, 2014, a sounding rocket will be ready to launch from White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico a little before noon local time. Soaring up to 180 miles into Earth’s atmospher...
Study reveals strong links between Antarctic climate, food web
Steinberg, one of the Palmer program’s lead scientists since 2008, says the current study provides one of the few instances where marine researchers have a dataset of sufficient leng...
Smarter than you think: Fish can remember where they were fed 12 days later
Canadian scientists, however, have demonstrated that this is far from true – in fact, fish can remember context and associations up to twelve days later. The researchers studied Afri...
Scripps scientists discover evidence of super-fast deep earthquake
Scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego have discovered the first evidence that deep earthquakes, those breaking at more than 400 kilometers (250 miles) bel...
New research finds ocean’s most abundant organisms have clear daily cycles
But in a new study published in the July 11 issue of the journal Science, researchers working at Station ALOHA, a deep ocean study site 100 km north of Oahu, observed different speci...
BGI reports the evolutionary adaptations of Tibetans may have benefited from extinct denisovans
Shenzhen, July 2, 2014—An international team, led by researchers from BGI and University of California, presented their latest significant finding that the altitude adaptation in Tib...
World’s largest-ever flying bird identified
A reconstruction of the world’s largest-ever flying bird, Pelagornis sandersi, identified by Daniel Ksepka, Curator of Science at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Conn. Credit: Liz Bra...
Why ‘whispers’ among bees sometimes evolve into ‘shouts’
Researchers have in general thought about eavesdropping as a force that makes signals less conspicuous, leading to the evolution of ‘whispers’ to counter spying. Trigona hyalinata sp...
Supermassive black hole blows molecular gas out of a galaxy at 1 million kilometres per hour
Credit: NASA (Phys.org)—New research by academics at the University of Sheffield has solved a long-standing mystery surrounding the evolution of galaxies, deepening our understandin...
Reinterpreting dark matter
Research published in Nature Physics opens up the possibility that it could be regarded as a very cold quantum fluid governing the formation of the structure across the whole univers...
Why More Left-Handed Men are Born in the Winter
Are you left-handed or right-handed? Around 90 percent of the general population is right-handed, and most tools that are sold are optimized for people who work primarily with their ...
Satellite X-ray observations reveal neutron star with donut-shaped magnetic field and axial wobble
Some neutron stars, known as magnetars, possess powerful magnetic fields, which are stronger than any other known magnetism in the Universe. These intense magnetic fields somehow pro...
Doctors unite to increase access to quality health information
I’m still finding lots of articles that need a great deal of work before they reflect the best available medical evidence. Another initiative, the Wikipedia-journal collaboration, st...
Forecasting the development of breakthrough technologies to enable novel space missions
The report was not prepared to serve as a definitive guide for very specific technologies to be developed for future space missions but rather to inform on, and flag up, the main dev...
X-Rays May Reveal New Clues about Mysterious Dark Matter in Galaxy Clusters
Yet scientists may have found uncovered new clues when it comes to this particular type of matter. In this case, the scientists turned to galaxy clusters. Containing hundreds of gala...
These bricks are like Lego for full-sized buildings
Read more: Gallery: These bricks are like Lego for full-sized buildings The bricks feature open internal spaces for insulation, which means that buildings made with the bricks requi...
The Hunt for Dark Matter Continues: Supercomputer Simulations Chart the Evolution of the Local Universe
Dark matter is the key to everything we know about galaxies, but we still don’t know its exact nature, said Carlos Frenk, one of the researchers, in a news release. In this case, the...
Scientists Discover How the Shocking Electric Eel Evolved its Jolt to Stun Prey
Now, scientists have uncovered the evolutionary origins of this electric field and have found that the eel’s charge actually evolved from a muscle. In fact, worldwide there are hundr...
Researchers gain new understanding of Triceratops evolution
When the team studied Triceratops skulls’ morphology and position in the strata, they found that skulls showing only features of T. horridus appeared only in the lower section, while...
Insect diet helped early humans build bigger brains, study suggests
A steady diet of abundant ripe fruit and leaf-crawling insects may explain why Cebus can’t hold a stick to their Sapajus capuchin cousins when it comes to tool usage and other higher...
Engineers envision an electronic switch just three atoms thick
Computer simulations show that this crystalline lattice has the remarkable ability to behave like a switch: it can be mechanically pulled and pushed, back and forth, between two diff...
Ancient worlds could be kept ‘alive’ by gravitational nudges
In another few billion years, that heat will have largely dissipated and Earth’s geophysical activity will cease. It stands to reason that among the first habitable zone planets we w...