Three years ago, the nine-year-old son of palaeoanthropologist Lee Berger found an intriguing fossil in a collapsed Malapa cave — the collarbone of a 2 million year-old hominin previously unknown to science. Further searches of the same site revealed 220 more bones of the same species, from infants to adults, with two particularly complete young adults […]
Last month, planetary science suggested a new explanation of the dramatic asymmetry of our Moon’s two sides; one, “our” side, is flat and low, while the other (the “dark side”) is a mountainous terrain. The dichotomy could arise, researchers say, from a collision between our moon and a smaller companion. As a smaller body, had […]
Scientists have either found clear evidence that dark matter exists, have shown we can pretty much rule out dark matter, or have found a big old bunch of “probably”. To cut an expanding story short, dark matter is the name given to what’s assumed to make up the large proportion of the universe that isn’t […]
A musical investigation into the nature of atoms and subatomic particles, the jiggly things that make up everything we see. Featuring Morgan Freeman, Stephen Hawking, Michio Kaku, Brian Cox, Richard Feynman, and Frank Close. “The Quantum World” is the eleventh installment in the ongoing Symphony of Science music video series. [Via G.TDW]
Neil deGrasse Tyson on human intelligence. [Youtube]
“When I was a boy, books by Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein and their colleagues excited me, inspiring a lifelong fascination with space and the science and technology that would get us there,” said Tom Doherty. “From Fulton and his steamboat, through Alexander Graham Bell and Edison, to Silicon Valley and the advent of the internet, innovative Americans have […]
When you get the flu, viruses turn your cells into tiny factories that help spread the disease. In this animation, NPR’s Robert Krulwich and medical animator David Bolinsky explain how a flu virus can trick a single cell into making a million more viruses. [Via Super Punch]
New Hubble Videos Show Star Jets in Action 14 years’ worth of high-resolution pictures from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have been spliced together for the first time to create video footage of Herbig-Haro objects–high-velocity jets shooting from the poles of baby stars. The outflows are relatively short-lived, astronomically-speaking, continuing for about 100,000 years before […]
I combined everyday soap bubbles with exotic ferrofluid liquid to create an eerie tale, using macro lenses and time lapse techniques. Black ferrofluid and dye race through bubble structures, drawn through by the invisible forces of capillary action and magnetism. [Vimeo]