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Scientists discover ‘amazing’ bedbug remedy by emulating old European housewives’ trickThey are stubborn, disgusting, and their eggs are increasingly infesting beds and couches across Western cities. But a simple solution might help us conquer bed bugs and their scourge.[JEWEL SAMAD/AFP/Getty Images]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/4270732d380122a43a9b3d8943c884cc/tumblr_ml2111F3s71s0oiwfo1_1280.jpg)
Scientists discover ‘amazing’ bedbug remedy by emulating old European housewives’ trick
They are stubborn, disgusting, and their eggs are increasingly infesting beds and couches across Western cities. But a simple solution might help us conquer bed bugs and their scourge.
[JEWEL SAMAD/AFP/Getty Images]
Keeping an eye on the Sun — This NASA image obtained April 10, 2013 and taken by the Solar Dynamics Observatory’s Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) instrument at 171 Angstrom shows the current conditions of the quiet corona and upper transition region of the Sun on April 9, 2013. (NASA/AFP/Getty Images)
Japanese scientists figure out how to read ‘visual contents’ of dreams with brain scans
A team of Japanese scientists have revealed they can scan your brain and tell what you are dreaming about at least 60% of the time.
In a study published Thursday in the journal Science, the team from Japan revealed how they were able to figure out what people were dreaming about.
“In this study, we tried to read out what we called the visual contents of dreaming from brain activity during sleep which is measured by functional MRI (fMRI),” said team scientist Yukiyasu Kamitani in an interview for Science’s podcast. (fotolia)
This image which looks like a scene from the Star Wars shows the tip of the “wing” of the Small Magellanic Cloud galaxy in a view from NASA’s Great Observatories. The Small Magellanic Cloud, or SMC, is a small galaxy about 200,000 light-years way that orbits our own Milky Way spiral galaxy. The colors represent wavelengths of light across a broad spectrum. X-rays from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory are shown in purple; visible-light from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope is colored red, green and blue; and infrared observations from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope are also represented in red. The spiral galaxy seen in the lower corner is actually behind this nebula. Other distant galaxies located hundreds of millions of light-years or more away can be seen sprinkled around the edge of the image.The SMC is one of the Milky Way’s closest galactic neighbors. Even though it is a small, or so-called dwarf galaxy, the SMC is so bright that it is visible to the unaided eye from the Southern Hemisphere and near the equator. Many navigators, including Ferdinand Magellan who lends his name to the SMC, used it to help find their way across the oceans. (NASA/AFP/Getty Images)
Maria Sibylla Merian turns 366 — Google celebrates by letting insects invade its logo
Maria Sibylla Merian changed the insect world with her illustrations — and she started when she was just 13.
Her youthful passion grew into a study of insects that would centuries later become the foundation for taxonomy.
Instead of studying lifeless preserved insects pressed in books, which was the common practice in the 1600s, Merian preferred watching a caterpillar evolve into a butterfly in its natural habitat. She began cataloguing the life cycles of plants and insects through her artwork — one of the first women to do so. (Wikimedia/Google)
Memo on puported UFO discovery in New Mexico becomes most read file in FBI’s electronic reading room
A single-page FBI memo relaying a vague and unconfirmed report of flying saucers found in New Mexico in 1950 has become the most popular file in the bureau’s electronic reading room.
The memo, dated March 22, 1950, was sent by FBI Washington, D.C. field office chief Guy Hottel to then-Director J. Edgar Hoover.
According to the FBI, the document was first made public in the late 1970s and more recently has been available in the “Vault,” an electronic reading room launched by the agency in 2011, where it has become the most popular item, viewed nearly 1 million times. The Vault contains around 6,700 public documents.(FBI/The Associated Press)
NASA set to launch Sunjammer, the largest solar sail in history, with hopes to revolutionize near space travel
It might not get you all the way to Cardassia Prime, but NASA hopes its newly launched solar-sail Sunjammer program will lead to a future where propellantless space craft are used for a multitude of functions beyond the Earth’s atmosphere.
“Once proven, solar sail technology could enable a host of versatile space missions, including flying an advanced space-weather warning system to more quickly and accurately alert satellite operators and utilities on Earth of geomagnetic storms caused by coronal mass ejections from the sun,” NASA said in a release.
Additionally, NASA sees the project as something that can work to help clean up the piles of floating space garbage in orbit. (NASA)
‘What has gotten into Thomas Nagel?’: Leading atheist branded a ‘heretic’ for daring to question Darwinism
The philosopher Thomas Nagel is not taking phone calls. His secretary at New York University says there have been hundreds, all wanting to reach the modern “heretic,” as a current magazine cover labels him, but he is not taking the bait.
All he did was argue in a new book the evolutionary view of nature is “false,” and now grand forces have descended upon him. He does not want to talk about it.
The vicious reception handed Mind & Cosmos, which urges deep skepticism about evolution’s explanatory power, illustrates the perils of raising arguments against intellectual orthodoxy.
One critique said if there were a philosophical Vatican, Prof. Nagel’s work should be on the index of banned books for the comfort it will give creationists. Another headline proclaimed Prof. Nagel is “not crazy.”
The book has won a British booby prize for “Most Despised Science Book” and prompted sneering remarks the author is centuries behind the times, and somehow missed the Enlightenment. (Carl de Souza/AFP/Getty Images; Illustration Andrew Barr/National Post)
Hands of Japanese engineer Yasushi Matoba (L) on water projecting lights as on a screen on March 20, 2013 during the 15th edition of Laval Virtual, an international meeting on vitual reality and converging technologies, in Laval, western France. (JEAN-FRANCOIS MONIER/AFP/Getty Images)
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Stunning new view of Big Bang’s afterglow shows universe is even older than we thought
New results from a look into the split second after the Big Bang indicate the universe is 80 million years older than previously thought but the core concepts of the cosmos — how it began, what it’s made of and where it’s going — seem to be on the right track.
The findings released Thursday bolster a key theory called inflation, which says the universe burst from subatomic size to its now-observable expanse in a fraction of a second. (AFP PHOTO / ESA / LFI)
Holy Spock! BlackBerry inventor now wants to build Star Trek-like tricorder
Mike Lazaridis, inventor of the BlackBerry smartphone, is starting a $100 million quantum technology fund that’s aiming to turn devices like the medical tricorder from “Star Trek” into reality.
“What we’re excited about is these little gems coming out,” Lazaridis said in an interview in Toronto. “The medical tricorder would be astounding, the whole idea of blood tests, MRIs — imagine if you could do that with a single device. That may be possible and possible only because of the sensitivity, selectivity and resolution we can get from quantum sensors made with these quantum breakthroughs.”
Gold veins produced in an instant during earthquakes, new study claims
Long thought to be a slow process, a new study published in Nature Geoscience says that gold veins are produced in an instant by earthquakes.
Scientists have long known that veins of gold and other precious minerals form around fault lines, but it was generally thought that this process took an extremely long time.
However, the new study shows that quick changes in pressure could cause the gold to form, essentially, instantaneously.
What this means is that there are small bits of gold trapped in underground water flows that are super-heated and under super-high pressure. When the Earth shifts during a quake, the pressure on the water drops a thousandfold nearly instantly. Since the water is super-heated, the pressure was the only thing keeping it in liquid form. When the pressure goes away, it flash vapourizes and the elements within it, such as gold, remain in veins through the rock. (TED ALJIBE/AFP/Getty Images)
Tycoon plans to send middle-aged married couple on 16-month return trip to Mars
It is a road trip that could test the best of marriages: Mars. A tycoon announced plans Wednesday to send a middle-aged couple on a privately built spaceship to slingshot around the Red Planet and come back home, hopefully with their bodies and marriage in one piece after 501 days of no-escape togetherness in a cramped capsule.
Under the audacious but bare-bones plan, the spacecraft would blast off less than five years from now and pass within 160 kilometres of the Martian surface. The cost was not disclosed, but outsiders put it at more than $1 billion. (Inspiration Mars / The Associated Press)
The astronaut from next door: Canadian Chris Hadfield is quickly becoming the biggest name in space travel
Bread is a bad idea in space. Bread makes for crumbs and crumbs make for a mess in zero gravity, floating this way and that, and so a Canadian astronaut hankering for a peanut butter and honey sandwich will leave the Wonder behind for us earthbound slobs and reach instead for a fresh vacuum-sealed flour tortilla.
“A tortilla can be good for 18 months,” Chris Hadfield explains in a scene from “Chris Hadfield’s Space Kitchen,” the latest video from our man among the stars detailing everyday life aboard the International Space Station.
The 53-year-old makes peanut butter and honey sandwiches. In other dispatches, he has brushed his teeth, demonstrated how to clean up a water spill, bubble by bubble, by plucking the distended orbs from mid-air, jammed with Ed Robertson of the Barenaked Ladies, put on a goofy outfit to celebrate Mardi Gras, swapped tweets with William (Captain Kirk) Shatner, dropped a puck from the heavens on Hockey Night in Canada, fixed some space station gizmo of great scientific importance while sending out a daily stream of majestic photographs of the Earth below — the Sahara, the Australian Outback, the blinding lights of Beijing — via Twitter, Facebook, Youtube and Tumblr.
Amateur sleuth uses viral videos to trace the origins of Russian meteor
An investigation by an amateur sleuth using “Google Earth, YouTube and high-school math,” has led to a scientific study hunting down the origins of the meteor which hit Russia earlier this month.
Stefan Geens wrote on his blog Ogle Earth that he was inspired to look into the Russian meteor when he started seeing viral videos of it on the Internet.
“Might it be possible to use this viral footage with Google Earth to have an initial go at mapping the meteorite’s trajectory?” he pondered. (Ogle Earth Blog / Youtube; AFP PHOTO / URAL FEDERAL UNIVERSITY/ALEXANDER KHLOPOTOV)
