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science

TECH: We May Finally Get Our Flying Cars

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Flying Car

A “flying car” company funded by Google co-founder Larry Page seems to finally have a prototype that looks something like a personal aircraft people might actually use. The company, Kitty Hawk, released a video and statement debuting the vehicle, called Cora, today (March 13). Cora looks a bit like a tiny, one-seater airplane, but its wings are studded with small, upward-facing propellers that allow it to take off and land vertically. According to the video, the Cora is fully automated and fully electric, and requires no piloting skills to operate. That’s a far cry from another device Kitty Hawk unveiled … Read more

SCIENCE: Why Did These Medieval European Women Have Alien-Like Skulls?

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egg-shaped skulls

The discovery of mysterious, 1,500-year-old egg-shaped skulls in Bavarian graves has stumped scientists for more than half a century, but now some genetic sleuthing has helped them crack the case: The pointy skulls likely belonged to immigrant brides who traveled to Bavaria from afar to get married, a new study explains. The finding indicates that these long-headed brides, who lived in the sixth century A.D., likely traveled great distances from southeastern Europe — an area encompassing the region around modern-day Romania, Bulgaria and Serbia — to what is now the southern part of modern Germany. The long trek was certainly arduous, … Read more

SCIENCE: This Woman Is Her Own Twin: What Is Chimerism?

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chimera

Twins often feel like they have a special connection, but for one California woman, the connection is particularly visceral — she is her own twin. The woman, singer Taylor Muhl, has a condition called chimerism, meaning she has two sets of DNA, each with the genetic code to make a separate person. The rare condition can happen during fetal development; in Muhl’s case, she had a fraternal twin that she absorbed in the womb, she told People magazine. The condition explains why Muhl has what appears to be a large birthmark on her torso. One side has a different skin … Read more

SCIENCE: How to Get Inside a Black Hole

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black hole - pixabay

SCIENCE Physicists have insisted for a long time that black holes are impenetrable ciphers. Whatever goes in is lost, impossible to study or meaningfully understand. Some small amount of matter and energy might escape a black hole in the form of “Hawking radiation,” but anything still inside the black hole is functionally disappeared from the physical universe. The idea is a basic premise of modern physics: If something falls into a black hole, it can’t be contacted, it’s future can’t be predicted. No observer could possibly survive traveling into the dark space, not even long enough to glance around and … Read more

Meet the New Tardigrade – Even Weirder Than the Old One

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Tardigrade

A newfound species of tardigrade, or “water bear,” with tendril-festooned eggs has been discovered in the parking lot of an apartment building in Japan. The newfound tardigrade, Macrobiotus shonaicus, is the 168th species of this sturdy micro-animal ever discovered in Japan. Tardigrades are famous for their toughness: They can survive in extreme cold (down to minus 328 degrees Fahrenheit, or minus 200 Celsius), extreme heat (more than 300 degrees F, or 149 degrees C), and even the unrelenting radiation and vacuum of space, as one 2008 study reported. They’re bizarre and adorable at the same time, with eight legs on … Read more

SCIENCE: Dying Brains Silence Themselves in a Spreading Dark Wave

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Brain

At the edge of life and death is a spreading dark wave. Scientists spotted it first in rabbits. In a series of papers published throughout the 1940s, Harvard biologist Aristides Leão described finding a sudden silencing of electrical activity in the exposed brains of his unconscious experimental animals after subjecting them to injuries — applying electrical shocks, poking them with glass rods or cutting off the blood in their arteries. The “spreading depression,” as he termed it, began at the injured spot within 5 minutes of the injury, before eclipsing more distant parts of the brain. Seven decades later, a … Read more

SCIENCE: Funky Protein in Platypus Milk Could Beat Antibiotic Resistance

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Platypus - pixabay

Posted for all of our platypus members… The milk of the platypus may contain a protein that can fight drug-resistant bacteria. Now, a new analysis of that protein reveals that its shape is as bizarre as the shape of the animal that excreted it. The protein has a never-before-seen protein fold, now dubbed the “Shirley Temple” thanks to its ringlet-like structure, according to researchers from the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) and Deakin University in Australia. “Platypuses are such weird animals that it would make sense for them to have weird biochemistry,” study researcher Janet Newman of CSIRO … Read more

SCIENCE: Electronic Skin May Help Prevent Robots from Crushing Us (Unless They Really Want To)

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robot - pixabay

A metallic robot hand with “Terminator”-like power sounds good for the movies. But what about a real-life future where that android is now cradling your baby or just shaking your hand? That’s when attributes like “gentle” and “sensitive” might be more warranted to avoid a human-crushing outcome. Electronic skin may be the answer, as it could give such robots (and even prosthetic limbs) the ability to sense how forceful their handshakes and cradles are when interacting with humans. A new electronic skin may also prove more robust than previous versions to prevent accidental damage. It could even heal with the … Read more

SCIENCE: Hidden Under the Ice

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Antarctica - pixabay

A huge, trillion-ton iceberg about the size of Delaware broke free from Antarctica’s Larsen C Ice Shelf in July 2017. As it moved away from its chilly birth mom and into the Weddell Sea, a vast expanse of water saw the light for the first time in up to 120,000 years. And this month, a team of scientists will venture to the long-ice-buried expanse to investigate the mysterious ecosystem that was hidden beneath the Antarctic ice shelf for so long. The newly exposed seabed stretches across an area of about 2,246 square miles (5,818 square kilometers), according to the British … Read more