Old Secret Society Code Cracked
It sounds like a plot line from a fictional page turner. Locked inside a coded message is the politics and rituals of a secret society. The message is 105 pages long and contains a combination of...
View ArticleDead Sea Teems with Tiny Life
It turns out the Dead Sea isn’t so dead after all. Microscopic life is thriving in the super salty environment, according to new findings by a German and Israeli team of scientists. They found new...
View ArticleQuantum Levitation Hovers on the Horizon
Science has proven it’s possible to make the Back to the Future II hover board a thing of the future. But first scientists need to overcome the need to flash freeze the object in order to turn it into...
View ArticleLargest Whale Fossile Bed Unearthed in Chile
For seven million years at least 80 ancient whale skeletons have been preserved in the high desert of Chile. Now a road project threatens the ancient burial ground. But developers of the new highway...
View ArticleHelp Name the New Elements
The latest additions to the periodic table of the elements finally have placeholder names. It was earlier this year when elements 114 and 116 were admitted onto the coveted list of elements. At the...
View ArticleEarth-like Planet Fuels Excitement for Space Exploration
The question is the subject of movies, science fiction novels and our own curious minds. Are we alone in the universe? Prevailing scientific wisdom says yes but more and more the answer appears to be...
View ArticleSearch Narrows for Particle to Explain All Mass
For physicists the search for the elusive subatomic particle that gives all things mass is tantamount to the search for the Holy Grail. That’s one reason why scientists call the much-theorized but...
View ArticleKepler Finds First Earth-Sized Planets
Just a couple of weeks after announcing the discovery of a planet within a distant solar system that is orbiting in what astronomers called the habitable zone for life, another exciting announcement...
View ArticleSharks Begin Climate Adaptation Strategy
Recently scientists in Australia discovered that two species of sharks are interbreeding. The common black-tip shark and the Australian black-tip shark have started producing hybrid sharks. Marine...
View ArticleParasitic Fly Could Explain Bee Disappearance
In 2006 bees began disappearing. Entomologists have never been exactly able to pinpoint the cause of syndrome, which they now call colony collapse disorder. It occurs when the worker bees abandon the...
View ArticleTiniest Vertebrate Hops into the Limelight
Every few years biologists struggling to understand the evolutionary constraints placed on the largest and smallest of animals happen upon — usually by accident– a new contender. But that little...
View ArticleIBM Cracks Atomic Hard Drive Code
Right now there are about one million magnetized atoms involved in one bit of information. A bit is defined as a variable that can have only two possible values, 1 or 0. In computing those values are...
View ArticleWhite House Stages Science Fair
President Obama fires a marshmallow gun and lets robots roam his White House at the White House Science Fair. Three-year-old Danielle Fairchild probably can’t grasp the magnitude of what she’s...
View ArticleWater Race at the Bottom of the World
The Russians proudly claim the honor of being the first nation to reach the subglacial waters of Lake Vostok buried deep beneath 12,000 feet of Antarctic ice. This feat has been ongoing for 20 years...
View ArticleSpeed of Light Still Fastest Despite Neutrino Experiment
Antonio Ereditato was correct not to call his measurement of subatomic particles moving faster than the speed of light a discovery. And now after further scrutiny, the finding is falling apart. The...
View ArticleOcean Explorers Plumb the Depths for Science
For the last seven years famed film director James Cameron has been working to build a tiny submarine capable of exploring the deepest reaches of the ocean. Later this month, the blockbuster creator...
View ArticleFossil Hunters Find Camels in Panama
Paleontologists got a brief glimpse into Earth’s tropical past when the U.S. built the Panama Canal Zone almost 100 years ago. But the scientific world didn’t know what was there until the unearthed...
View ArticleNew Clue Prompts Expedition to Find Amelia Earhart
Amelia Earhart’s disappearance has been one of the long-standing mysteries of a modern age and it has endured since the determined woman pilot vanished while trying to be the first person to fly solo...
View ArticleNumber Crunching Reveals Martian Life…Maybe
Scientists may have found life on Mars 36 years ago and just not realized it. During the Viking lander mission to the red planet in 1976, robotic probes scooped up soil samples, including some...
View ArticleComplexity Analysis Finds Life on Mars…Probably
Gilbert Levin and Ann Straat spent over three years trying to convince the scientific establishment that they had found life on Mars during the Viking lander missions in the 1970s. But their findings...
View ArticleChris Lintott: Glactic Zookeeper
Self-deprecating astronomer Chris Lintott is terribly British. From his post at University of Oxford he keeps tabs on the universe and everything in it. He says, “This is a problem because the...
View ArticleMeteorite Hunters Strike it Rich in Gold Rush Town
A fireball from space screamed across the weekend morning sky last Sunday, creating a sonic boom as it broke the sound barrier and shaking parts of California and Nevada. That was the signal from...
View ArticleBeauty Baryon Fits Physics
Since the 1960s theoretical phsycists have been working with a veritable elementary particle zoo that underlies the more familiar nucleic parts of atoms — electrons, protons and neutrons. And slowly...
View ArticleBrain May Look More Like Street Map Than Mess of Spaghetti
The human brain may be more like a street map — laid out on a grid — than a tangled mess of spaghetti. Neuroscientists have been trying to unlock the structure of the brain to unravel mysteries of...
View ArticleElectricity from Viruses May Power Personal Devices
Not every virus has a pathological purpose. Sure they make us sick regularly and terrorize our computers. But researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Lab in Berkeley have found a good use for...
View ArticleAsteroid Barrage Calls for Citizen Science Spotters
Potentially hazardous asteroids (PHAs) are orbiting space rocks that come within five million miles of Earth. As you can imagine, there are a lot of asteroids that qualify as regionally or globally...
View ArticleVenus Transits the Sun
Two years ago NASA launched the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) to study the sun. For the next three plus years the highly advanced spacecraft will examine the sun’s atmosphere, magnetic field and...
View ArticleHiggs Discovery Fills in Standard Model of Physics
The $10 billion particle accelerator doing high-energy physics experiments below the Franco-Swiss border just paid for itself with its first Eureka moment. The European nuclear energy agency known as...
View ArticleFamously Named Biological Organisms
Barack Obama has one. Bill Gates has one. Comedian Stephen Colbert has one and so does Elvis Presley. And now Jamaican Reggae artist Bob Marley has one. Each one of these notable men has a creature of...
View ArticleSDF: Higgs Boson Love Song
Editor’s Note: It’s Science Ditty Friday. Every Friday REALscience compiles a song (generally with an accompanying video) to kick your weekend off with a musical start. Have a favorite science song?...
View ArticleNew Culture Predates Clovis in America
Technology is an easy way to distinguish between cultures. Even among ancient peoples their technology set them apart from their contemporaries. Now, new research from Oregon shows once an for all...
View ArticleSDF: Life on Mars?
Editor’s Note: It’s Science Ditty Friday. Every Friday REALscience compiles a song (generally with an accompanying video) to kick your weekend off with a musical start. Have a favorite science song?...
View ArticleCyber Science Team Spots New Insect with Help of Flickr
It’s not that weird that Shaun Winterton was surfing the web looking at bug pictures earlier this year. After all, he is an entomologist at the California Department of Food and Agriculture. But while...
View ArticleNIH Uses DNA Detective Work to Curb Superbug Outbreak
The National Institutes of Health didn’t tell anyone outside its clinic in Maryland that it was fighting a major battle against a superbug for almost a year. And at times the agency didn’t know who...
View ArticleJunk DNA Finally Has a Purpose
If the human genome is the computer of our cells then newly discovered gene switches are the operating system. When the Human Genome Project finished sequencing the book of life 12 years ago,...
View ArticleScientists Aroused by Viagra’s Other Uses
The little blue pill that is extending men’s sex lives is hardly a one-trick pony. Scientists are discovering other uses for Viagra and will start clinical trials to use the erectile dysfunction drug...
View ArticleVegas Fossil Bed Could become Newest Ice Age Attraction
Las Vegas is the entertainment capital of America. But it is also located near one of the most prolific fossil beds in North America. Nevada university students dig in the dirt about 30 minutes off...
View ArticleLittle Girl Cured of HIV
While there is no cure for HIV a two-year-old girl in Mississippi has been “functionally cured” of the autoimmune virus that leads to AIDS. The case was discussed today at a retrovirus conference in...
View ArticlePrehistoric Camel Unearthed in Canadian Arctic Tells Climate Story
The story of climate change in the Arctic 3.5 million years ago and the discovery of the first known American camel -- a dromedary 30 percent larger than today's desert-dwellers -- started when...
View ArticleMars Rover Finds Ingredients for Life
NASA Press Conference, March 12, 2013 (36:07) The whole purpose of the most sophisticated and expensive science mission to Mars was to determine if the planet could have ever supported life based on...
View ArticleHiggs Boson Cements Place in the Standard Model of Physics
Last summer scientists decided that the Large Hadron Collider had spotted a Higgs boson, that elusive subatomic particle that has been theorized for a long time but never observed directly. It’s the...
View ArticleFrench Adults Functionally Cured of HIV
Just two weeks after a two-year-old Mississippi girl was reportedly cured of HIV, the Human Immunodeficiency Virus, a group of French research subjects have also been functionally cured of the virus...
View ArticleDark Matter Detected…Sort of
The simplest description of dark matter is matter that doesn’t interact with light. It also doesn’t directly interact with any atoms, which makes it almost impossible to observe. Only using...
View ArticleVoyager Hits the Heliopause
In the 1970s the son of Carl Sagan recorded the now iconic sentence, "Hello, from the children of planet Earth." Now 36 years later Nick Sagan watches with the rest of planet Earth as Voyager 1 leaves...
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