Are you overcome by ophidiophobia when you come across a snake in the wild? As it turns out, the abnormal fear of snakes, or other phobias, can alter how we think and perceive the world. “Our results show that emotion and perception are not fully dissociable in the mind,” said Emory psychologist Stella Lourenco, Ph.D.,…
For the past 50 years—since the discovery of a thousand-year-old Viking way station in Newfoundland—archaeologists and amateur historians have combed North America’s east coast searching for traces of Viking visitors. It has been a long, fruitless quest, littered with bizarre claims and embarrassing failures. But at a conference in Canada early in October, archaeologist Patricia…
Researchers in the U.S. have been shocked to discover a beluga whale whose vocalizations were remarkably close to human speech. While dolphins have been taught to mimic the pattern and durations of sounds in human speech, no animal has spontaneously tried such mimicry. But researchers heard a nine-year-old whale named NOC make sounds octaves below…
Silver-colored fish, such as herring, sardines and sprat, are bending the laws of physics, according to a new study published in Nature Photonics. The ability allows the fish to become invisible to predators. As researchers Tom Jordan and Julian Partridge from Bristol University explain, reflective surfaces polarize light, a phenomenon that fishermen or photographers overcome…
A 5,500-year-old tomb possibly belonging to a Stone Age chieftain has been unearthed at a megalithic monument in the shape of a ship called the Ale’s Stenar (Ale’s Stones). The tomb, in Sweden, was likely robbed of stones to build the Viking-era ship monument. “We found traces — mostly imprints — of large boulders,” said…
Blasting over two million lights years from the centre of a distant galaxy is a supersonic jet of material that looks strikingly similar to the afterburner flow of a fighter jet, except in this case the jet engine is a supermassive black hole and the jet material is moving at nearly the speed of light….
Geoengineering has been a hot topic of late and now comes a new study looking at the possibility of using solar geoengineering to counter the loss of Arctic sea ice by tailoring geoengineering by region and by need. A team of leading researchers developed a new computer model that promises to maximise the effectiveness of…
To quote the Finding Ada website, “Ada Lovelace Day is an international day celebrating the achievements of women in science, technology, engineering, and maths.” Ada Lovelace is an early nineteenth-century example of a hacker, and not just in the sense of someone who enjoys working with computers but also in the sense of someone who…
In a key step toward creating a working quantum computer, Princeton researchers have developed a method that may allow the quick and reliable transfer of quantum information throughout a computing device The finding, by a team led by Princeton physicist Jason Petta, could eventually allow engineers to build quantum computers consisting of millions of quantum…
NASA astronomers have discovered a stunning trend in galaxy evolution, according to a report from the space agency. The stunning trend in galaxy evolution goes back 8 billion years, say astronomers who looked at numerous galaxies through the Keck telescopes and NASA’s Space Telescope. “Astronomers thought disk galaxies in the nearby universe had settled into…