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Astronomers say there are at least 17 billion Earth-sized planets in the...
Back in June of last year, astronomers working with the Kepler space telescope made the bold proclamation that all stars have planets. While this is all fine-and-well (if not intuitively obvious),...
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New video of Machine Perception Lab's creepy robot baby shows that it is...
We've known about Machine Perception Lab's super-realistic robot baby for quite some time now, but we've never actually seen it in action — at least until now. As this new video shows, roboticists...
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Is Stephen Hawking 'more machine now than man'?
There's a great piece over at Wired by anthropologist Hélène Mialet about Stephen Hawking and the various ways he's learned to adapt to — and even transcend — his severe physical limitations. While it...
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A disturbing glimpse of Australia's wildfires as seen from space
International Space Station Commander Chris Hadfield has snapped a series of images that capture the scale and devastation of wildfires that are currently blazing through parts of Australia. The...
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Finally, an explanation for why our fingers and toes get all pruny when...
Shriveled fingers and toes are something we're all familiar with, yet scientists have struggled to explain why it happens. A longstanding theory is that wrinkles are the result of water passing...
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The 12 cognitive biases that prevent you from being rational
The human brain is capable of 1016 processes per second, which makes it far more powerful than any computer currently in existence. But that doesn't mean our brains don't have major limitations. The...
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It's official: 2012 was the hottest year ever in the U.S.
Last year was pretty messed up as far as weather was concerned in the United States, and now we have the numbers to show why. According to the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C., the...
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Baby sharks may be the key to the ultimate shark repellent
Marine biologist Ryan Kempster noticed a very strange thing when he brought an electrical field close to the egg case of an embryonic shark: The unborn — and highly vulnerable — baby altered its...
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An entire pod of orca whales may be hopelessly trapped under arctic sea ice...
A dozen orca whales have become enclosed and trapped in arctic sea ice in Hudson's Bay about 30 kilometers (19 miles) off the coast of Inukjuak, Quebec. The whales are currently sharing a small hole...
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Why did the Vikings abandon Greenland?
For nearly 500 years, the Vikings lived and thrived in Greenland. Taking advantage of the Medieval Warm Period, they established outposts in the North Atlantic where they farmed and ranched. But quite...
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A drug that restores hearing in deaf mice
Advances in regenerative medicine are coming in fast and furious these days, and a remarkable new breakthrough can be added to the list. Scientists at Massachusetts Eye and Ear and Harvard Medical...
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Collector buys a camera at an antique shop — and it's filled with undeveloped...
Anton Orlov, a San Diego based collector of vintage photography equipment, recently visited an antique shop where he purchased a unique French stereoscopic camera called a Jumelle Bellieni. While he...
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Is it time to move past the idea that our brain is like a computer?
Ever since the days of Alan Turing, neuroscientists have, in increasing numbers, compared the human brain to a computer. It's an analogy that makes a hell of a lot of sense, and it's done much to help...
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NASA says NGC 6872 is the largest spiral galaxy ever discovered
Located about 212 million light-years from Earth, the massive spiral galaxy NGC 6872 has been known to astronomers for decades. But it wasn't until a recent survey of nearby star-forming regions that...
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Ancient Roman Vestal Virgin hairstyle re-created for very first time
Janet Stephens, a Baltimore hairdresser and amateur archaeologist, has recreated the hairstyle of the Roman Vestal Virgins on a modern head — but it wasn't easy. After becoming inspired by an ancient...
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IBM's Watson computer has parts of its memory cleared after developing an...
It all started a couple of years ago when IBM's Watson, the computer voted most likely to destroy us when the technological Singularity strikes, was given access to the Urban Dictionary. In an attempt...
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Watch how this robotic-like T7 virus infects a cell
If there was any doubt that viruses are basically microscopic machines, let this recreation of a T7 bacteriophage infecting an ecoli cell put those reservations to rest. In this animated video, the...
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Rare ground-level photo of Hiroshima bombing found in former Japanese...
One can only imagine what was going through the mind of the person who took this photo. Taken a mere two to five minutes after its detonation, it's a ground-level perspective of the atomic explosion...
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Scientific evidence that you probably don’t have free will
Humans have debated the issue of free will for millennia. But over the past several years, while the philosophers continue to argue about the metaphysical underpinnings of human choice, an increasing...
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A spiky spherical robot that will roll, tumble, and bounce its away across...
A team of researchers from Stanford University, along with scientists from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have proposed a new class of robots that...
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