Thursday, 9 February, 2012

Owning a StarCAVE, an interactive virtual reality theater where scientific models are projected stereoscopically on every surface, including the floor, is probably a biologist’s single best bet at getting on MTV’s “Cribs.” Now showing: RNA. “You can fly over a strand of DNA and look in front, behind and below you, or navigate through the [...]

The green Jell-O torpedo you see above is called a salp. Typically the gelatinous little ocean creatures are less ostentatious, but researchers have lent this one some flouresceine dye for a photo-op. They’re interested in the swimming habits and propulsive wakes — here seen as a green plume on the left — of salps because [...]

For aerial navigation in cramped spaces it’s bat MAV to the rescue. Big bucks have been pumped into micro-aerial vehicle (MAV) research due to interest from the surveillance industry. Traditional fixed-wing and propeller driven flight doesn’t scale down well for tight, close quarters maneuvering. Flappy flight on the other hand has gotten bats out of [...]

Through infancy and childhood, our ability to discern and reproduce the unfamiliar speech sounds of other languages declines. Due to a severe lack of preschool-aged linguists perhaps, precise classification of the click consonants of the N|uu click language of the southern Kalahari has evaded linguistics for nearly 100 years. Some N|uu clicks are produced by [...]

We’ve all seen optical illusions, but this illusion will surprise you like a hammer blow to your thumb.  Check out the short video above if you haven’t already now. As Olaf Blanke indicates, up to 75 percent of us are partial to the rubber hand’s cheap mind trick.  For this experiment, paintbrushes were used to [...]

Everyone’s seen them do it. They’re out in the yard, rooting out who knows what, pawing at all sorts of dirty things that ought to be left alone, and then they come in and kiss the unsuspecting right on the mouth! For the sake of good hygiene, humans should be trained better. At least that’s [...]

Sponsored by the National Science Foundation, artist Aaron Koblin processed U.S. Federal Aviation Administration data to create a portrait of America using brushstrokes of light 1,000 miles across. Over time, the flight paths of nearly 20,000 planes filled in the shape of the country without directly depicting any of its geographic features. The emergence of [...]

In an experiment that could only have come out of California, UC Berkeley researchers decided to see what would happen if they chucked a gecko into a wind tunnel. Who says science can’t be fun? Looking for inspiration for building more maneuverable robots, the researchers pointed a powerful fan straight up to simulate freefall conditions [...]

You’ve seen photos of lunar and solar eclipses, or maybe you’ve even been present for one yourself, but have you ever seen an eclipse of the Earth? Astronaut Bill McArthur and flight engineer Valery Tokarey snapped this photo from aboard the International Space Station on March 29, 2006 during a total eclipse of the sun. [...]

If you were to draw lines representing your social connections to all your friends, your friends’ friends, and your friends’ friends’ friends, what would it look like? For Jeffrey Heer of the University of California, Berkeley, it looks like a big blue ball of glittery fuzz. In this image, Heer is represented at the center [...]