A Laboratory of the Future Human Experience
What are these strange creatures capable of?
Talk about a long scientific experiment*. Japanese researchers have bred an unusual line of fruit fly called “Dark-fly” which has been kept in constant darkness for 57 years (1,400 generations). They’ve sequenced the Dark-fly’s genome and are now figuring out the genomic alterations linked to adaptation to living in the dark.
Continue reading… “Dark-Fly: A Line of Fruit Fly Bred in the Dark for 57 Years (1,400 Generations)”
Two new laws proposed by US legislators, the Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act, have been attracting a very negative reaction from the web community over the past couple of months, which is today culminating in a day of protests. Aiming to curtail copyright infringement on the web by giving the US government unprecedented new powers, both SOPA and PIPA have been rejected as overreaching and unhelpful laws that cannot coexist with a free and open internet.
A lot of websites (most notably Wikipedia) are going dark today in protest of SOPA.
But the humor site The Oatmeal easily wins for its hilarious GIF about the proposed law. In its own way, it does a better job of explaining what SOPA means than a lot of the serious sites out there.
Here it is after the jump. Watch and laugh…
I think it’s funny — “both haha” funny and “strange” funny — that we have almost no clue about 72% of the Universe.That nearly 3/4 chunk of the cosmic budget is dark energy, the mysterious force (or pressure, really)…
The sky over Tokyo seemed to fall in September of 1990, when the Nikkei stock index dove almost 20 percent in one month. Real estate prices would plummet and the financial sector would crack, trapping Japan in a “lost decade” of economic growth. Is the United States now set for its own? That prospect may not be as scary as it sounds.
Continue reading… “Studying Japan’s Dark Years to See How the U.S. Might Fare”
The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) is “a proposed ground-based 6.7 meter effective diameter (8.4 meter primary mirror), 10 square-degree-field telescope that will provide digital imaging of faint astronomical objects across the entire sky, night after night.” What’s that mean? Well, it means, if it’s built, we’ll have a telescope attempting to catalog the entire night sky into an absolutely massive 150 petabyte database. Awesome!
Continue reading… “New Telescope To Attempt To Catalog Entire Night Sky”
Chocolate has already been linked to many health benefits, and now, a group of scientists has given chocoholics another reason to savour their favourite sweet by suggesting that dark chocolate prevents heart disease.
Continue reading… “Dark Chocolate Could Help Prevent Heart Disease”
A pilot has successfully landed an aircraft in the Antarctica using night-vision goggles, a feat hailed on Saturday as historic and could lead to year-round flights to the frozen continent.
Continue reading… “Night Landing In Antarctica Hailed As Historic”