The study reveals that just about any two random people from anywhere in Europe, even those living on opposite sides of the continent, share hundreds of genetic ancestors from only 1,000 years ago. In fact, a person living in the United Kingdom shares a chunk of genomic material with someone living in Turkey 20 percent of the time.
The Higgs mechanism is meant to account for the mass of everything, right? Well no, only the fundamental particles, which means that electrons derive their mass entirely from the Higgs interaction but protons and neutrons, made of quarks, do not. In fact the quark masses are so small that they only make up about 1% of the mass of the proton (and a similar fraction of the neutron). The rest of the mass comes from the energy in the gluon field. Gluons are massless, but there is so much energy in the field that by E=mc^2 there is a significant amount of mass there. This is where most of your mass comes from and the mass of virtually everything around you.
It’s a paradox of ocean life: The largest mammals, like dolphins and whales, survive on the tiniest food, like krill. (Picture trying to make a full meal out of flying kernels of popcorn!) So how do these big animals gather enough food to live? At TEDYouth 2012, Kelly Benoit-Bird discusses new research that shows large sea animals actually herding their tiny food into big, bitable chunks.
Mars One will set up a permanent human settlement on Mars in 2023, and in two weeks received 78,000applications for the One-Way trip to Mars.
Last week, Russian researcher Andrei Zlobin announced that stony fragments collected from a riverbed in 1988 are “probably Tunguska meteorites,” and are likely the remains of whatever cosmic object — thought to be either a comet or an asteroid — entered Earth’s atmosphere over the boggy region of Siberia on June 30, 1908, detonating with an estimated force of 5 megatons and leveling over 800 square miles of forest.
The mystery of Saturn’s bright, youthful appearance is a step closer to resolution. And it actually has to do with gas.
Do you want to go to Mars? Well here’s your chance to get connected for a double barreled dose of Red Planet adventure courtesy of MAVEN – NASA’s next ‘Mission to Mars’ which is due to liftoff this November from the Florida Space Coast.
For foreigners, learning to speak Chinese is a hard task. But learning to read the beautiful, often complex characters of the Chinese written language may be less difficult. ShaoLan walks through a simple lesson in recognizing the ideas behind the characters and their meaning — building from a few simple forms to more complex concepts. Call it Chineasy.
An insect’s ability to fly is perhaps one of the greatest feats of evolution. Michael Dickinson looks at how a fruit fly takes flight with such delicate wings, thanks to a clever flapping motion and flight muscles that are both powerful and nimble. But the secret ingredient: the incredible fly brain.
Score another point for the National Science Foundation’s Green Bank Telescope (GBT) at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in Green Bank. They have opened our eyes – and ears – to previously undetected region of hydrogen gas clouds located in the area between the massive Andromeda and Triangulum galaxies. If researchers are correct, these dwarf galaxy-sized sectors of isolated gases may have originated from a huge store of heated, ionized gas… Gas which may be associated with elusive and invisible dark matter.
