Physicists at Brookhaven National Laboratory have successfully observed the creation of matter from two colliding photons of light, in accordance with Breit-Wheeler process, which was first posited in 1934.
The Russian Defence Minister wants to extract the DNA from the archealogical remains of Scythian warriors (9th to 2nd century BC) found in Siberia and use it clone an army of warriors. You would be forgiven in thinking this was the plot of a movie blockbuster but no, it was a conversation held during an online session of the Russian Geological Society last month.
Due to the differing focal points of coloured light, our eyes can't focus on blue as well as green and red light at the same time. As a result, our brain steps in and makes up the difference. Check out Caleb Kruse interesting post that illustrates this with some side by side comparisons of images with and without the blue channel.
Researchers from Trinity College Dublin used EEG monitors to scan the brain of musicians while they listened to a piece of music and imagined a piece of music they knew. The study found that the brain's electrical activity for listened music and imagined or expected music was the same except for being of opposite voltage. When the listened music matched the expected music in the brain, the positive and negative signals cancel each other out.
A former aerospace engineer turned YouTuber Rick Cavellero designed a land yacht that harnesses the power of the wind to propel itself faster than said wind. After online disagreements with physics professors, one who bet him $10,000 that it wasn't possible according to the laws of perpetual motion, he built the real thing and won the bet!
The Atlantic published an interesting article about how considering the opposite viewpoint when making a decision can lead to better decision making. The piece describes how research about the wisdom of crowds has evolved to demostrate that a change in mindset can help you to harness the power of your inner crowd, which on average leads to better decision outcomes.
Scientists have developed iAge, an inflammation based clock measure/test that can determine a person's biological age, which may be more or less than their chronological age, based on how healthy their immune system is at neutralising inflammation.
SuperBIT (the Superpressure balloon-borne imaging telescope) is a football stadium sized balloon that will float around the world at 40,000 feet in the stratosphere to take precision images of space with a precision stabilised telescope suspended from the bottom. The project hopes to achieve Hubble level image results without the cost of a launching an orbital telescope into space.
Engineers at University of California San Diego created a wearable fingertip device that can generate 400 millijoules of electricity from sweat during a 10 hour sleep. Apparently our fingertips produce 100 to 1000 times more sweat than any other part of our bodies!
Researchers at Rice Unievrsity have observed networks of fungi demostrate economic market principles of Walrusian equilibrium when they negotiate the exchange of carbon & nutrients with host organisms. Manipulating these interactions may allow the organisms to sequester even more carbon, on top of the 5 billion tonnes of carbon they already secure per year.
