Humans are image processing machines. But consuming data is hard. Watch this TED talk that helps to visualize how (relative) global money is spent, human fear scares, and facebook breakups trends, to name a few.
http://www.ted.com/talks/david_mccandless_the_beauty_of_data_visualization
Elon Musk of Paypal, SpaceX, Tesla and Solar City just announced free Tesla patents for everyone. Interesting move, check it out.
http://www.teslamotors.com/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-you
Children should be raised bilingual and adults should study a second language. New research confirms this is good for your brain.
Remember when scientists couldn’t explain how bees flew? This TED talk has some answers: they use leading edge vortices. Find out more by watching the TED talk.
Check out this amazing video of a star outburst. Watch as a giant dust ring expands and transforms. We have discovered so much about the stars and have so much more to learn. Being able to see and measure an event like this is truly amazing.
The star is called V838 Monocerotis, and more details can be found on it’s Wikipedia page.
Scientists have been able manipulate mosquito sperm such that they produce males 95% of the time. Females mosquitos are the ones that bite and are the carriers of malaria.
In tests with wild mosquitoes, entire populations of mosquitoes were bred to death within several generations. This result was achieved in 80% of tests.
Even if this break through is not perfect it would save millions of lives. It is estimated that over half a million people die from malaria every year.
An important question is what would the down stream impacts of a world without mosquitoes be? Fish eat a lot of larvae and only about 100 of 3500 species of mosquito bite humans.
This is an interesting Nature article about what would happen if we made mosquitoes extinct.
Sources:
http://phys.org/news/2014-06-scientists-malaria-carrying-mosquitoes-lab-male-only.htm
http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs094/en/
Electromagnetic fields are amazing. Watch.
The history of the moon is fascinating. It used to trail the Earth before it crashed into the earth. At least the is the predominant theory. New analysis of rocks from the moon have shown further support for this idea as published in Science.
There will be many more posts about the moon including topics on tides, how life started, how it is slowing the earth down and moving away from us, and how it helped us discover the composition of the sun.
For more on moon formation, this article is great. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_impact_hypothesis#Theia
Here at Sic Science we love ants. How cool is this Panda Ant. Doesn’t it look a little strange? Turns out it is not an ant at all but rather part of species of wingless wasps. Yes, wingless wasps. Which is interesting because ants are descendants of wasps.
Their sting is said to be strong enough to kill a cow, which is doubtful. They apparently also make a squeal when stepped on.
Find out more on Wikipedia, because, you know, it works in practice just not in theory.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutillidae