Category: science

World’s Smallest Magazine Cover

While there’s no shrink ray in existence as of yet, scientists are hard at work at making magazines available for us, just in case we ever get down to the micrometer scale. In fact, a laboratory in Switzerland has managed to print an image so small that you could fit over 2,000 of them onto a single grain of salt. If they were to do this, the title of this article would be called “4,000 pandas on a grain of salt.”

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Read more: http://technabob.com/blog/2014/04/27/worlds-smallest-magazine-cover/#ixzz30ObBDbuq

Butterflies That Expend The Most Energy Live The Longest

Credit: Pave Väisänen

The more energy a creature uses, the more free radicals and other unstable, cell-damaging molecules its body produces. In many cases this can shorten the lifespan of the animal, but in the case of some butterflies, the opposite seems to be true.

Read more @ SciTechDaily

Australian Heat Wave Causes Gadgets to Fail

Australia needed new colors to show the forecast heatwave on their temperature map (they’ve since revised predictions down to 122ºF/50ºC). Credit: Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology

The Australian heat wave is getting so hot that Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology had to add new colors to its weather map. There are parts of Australia that have achieved temperatures above 122ºF (50ºC), temperatures which were off the scale until recently.

Read more @ SciTechDaily

US Ichthyologists Claim Political Interference

Threatened coho salmon have prompted environmental objections to dams on the Klamath River in Oregon. Credit: E. R. Keeley, USGS

US fisheries scientists are claiming that a supervisor threatened to eliminate their research division after the team had produced controversial model predictions of the survival and recovery of the threatened coho salmon (Oncorhynchus kisutch).

Read more @ SciTechDaily

Leptocephalus, The Transparent Eel Larva

Credit: Mie Prefecture Fisheries Research Institute

The marine eels and other members of the Superorder Elopomorpha have a leptocephalus larval stage, which are flat and transparent. This group is quite diverse, containing 801 species in 24 orders, 24 families and 156 genera. They arose in the Cretaceous period 140 million years ago.

Read more @ SciTechDaily

Scientists Make Brighter LEDs by Mimicking Fireflies

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Fireflies have inspired scientists to modify LEDs so that they are more than one and a half times more efficient. Researchers have studied the internal structure of firefly lanterns, the organs responsible for the insects’ bioluminescence.

Read more @ SciTechDaily

Current State of Polio Eradication

Administration of the RIBI oral polio vaccine. Credit: Flickr/RIBI

In Pakistan, nine health workers were killed last year. They were administering the polio vaccine, which has been cast by the Taliban as a plot against Islam. This is because the CIA used vaccination programs to get close to Osama bin Laden.

Read more @ SciTechDaily

Sequencing of Comb Jellies’ DNA Reveals that they Preceded Sponges

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Genome-sequencing data indicates that sponges were preceded by ctenophores, complex marine predators also called comb jellies.

Read more @ SciTechDaily

Nearby Star is At Least 13.2 Billion Years Old

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Astronomers have discovered one of the oldest stars in the known universe. They believe it is at least 13.2 billion years old and formed shortly after the Big Bang.

Read more @ SciTechDaily

Molecular Robot Mimics the Ribosome

Molecular-Robot-Mimics-Life's-Ribosome

Scientists have invented a nanomachine that mimics the function of the ribosome, which is the molecular machine that translates the genetic code into the body’s proteins.

Read more @ SciTechDaily