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POPS40 Facts About Sleep You Didn't Know Visit page to see all 40. Fact "- Scientists have not been able to explain a 1998 study showing a bright light shone on the backs of human knees can reset the brain's sleep-wake clock."
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POPSMajor biological discovery…inside the Chernobyl reactor "That is to say, the melanin molecule gets struck by a gamma ray and its chemistry is altered. This is an amazing discovery, no one had even suspected that something like this was possible. Aside from its novelty value, this discovery leads to some interesting speculation and potential research. Humans have melanin molecules in their skin cells, does this mean that humans are getting some of their energy from radiation? This also implies there could be organisms living in space where ionizing radiation is plentiful."
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POPSHuge hidden biomass lives deep beneath the oceans They found simple organisms known as prokaryotes in every sample. Prokaryotes are organisms that often have just one cell. Their peculiarity is that, unlike any other form of life, their DNA is not neatly packed into a nucleus.
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POPSSun + Water = Fuel Michael Grätzel, however, may have a clever way to turn Nocera's discovery to practical use. A professor of chemistry and chemical engineering at the École Polytechnique Fédérale in Lausanne, Switzerland, he was one of the first people Nocera told about his new catalyst. "He was so excited," Grätzel says. "He took me to a restaurant and bought a tremendously expensive bottle of wine." In 1991, Grätzel invented a promising new type of solar cell. It uses a dye containing ruthenium, which acts much like the chlorophyll in a plant, absorbing light and releasing electrons. In Grätzel's solar cell, however, the electrons don't set off a water-splitting reaction. Instead, they're collected by a film of titanium dioxide and directed through an external circuit, generating electricity. Grätzel now thinks that he can integrate his solar cell and Nocera's catalyst into a single device that captures the energy from sunlight and uses it to split water.
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POPSCaral: The first city in the New World A brief article on a stunning archaeological discovery in South America. About six years ago, Peruvian/American archaeologist Ruth Shady , introduced the "oldest city in America" to the world. It was Caral; an ancient city on the Pacific coast of Peru, with trade centers, temples and a pyramid complex not less impressive than its counterparts in Mexico and Guatemala. The most exciting thing about Caral was its age: The city was carbon dated to ca. 3000 BCE, which strongly suggested a radical change in history textbooks. All evidence show Caral was not an exception in the region and there are many more ancient towns, waiting to be discovered. Another interesting thing about Caral is, its surprisingly peaceful social order. Archaeologists found no city walls, no forts, no signs of an army and even not a single weapon in Caral. Once again, thanks to Ruth Shady for this fantastic discovery.
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POPSA Diamond Bigger than Earth Discovered The diamond is actually the crystallized interior of a white dwarf – or the hot core of a star that is left over after the star uses up its nuclear fuel and dies. It is made mostly of carbon and is coated by a thin layer of hydrogen and helium gases.
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POPSYour life is Perfect. We often don't know if we want something until we get it, and then find it wasn't what we wanted. Through that discovery, we can start to believe we really wanted something else, and the chase continues, turning goals into hurdles. Often confusing improvement with change. Perhaps another angle could be learning what we need to, but also trying to improve what we can already do well, without neglecting the opportunities to learn from what we can consider to be failures. We can change situations, but changing who we are may not be possible, and if it is we don't have the foresight to make it a likely improvement.
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POPS Does Time really Slow Down in a Crisis? Eagleman added this illusion "is related to the phenomenon that time seems to speed up as you grow older. When you're a child, you lay down rich memories for all your experiences; when you're older, you've seen it all before and lay down fewer memories. Therefore, when a child looks back at the end of a summer, it seems to have lasted forever; adults think it zoomed by." And though the results of this study can lead towards disorders linked with timing, such as schizophrenia, Eagleman believes "it's really about understanding the virtual reality machinery that we're trapped in,"Our brain constructs this reality for us that, if we look closely, we can find all these strange illusions in. The fact that we're now seeing this with how we perceive time is new."
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POPSWeird water Discovery challenges long-held beliefs about water's special properties
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POPSThe most important telescopes in history In celebration of the International Year of Astronomy in 2009, New Scientist takes you on an armchair tour of some of the most important telescopes ever built. For more information on these and other pioneering telescopes, read Eyes on the Skies: 400 Years of Telescopic Discovery by Govert Schilling and Lars Lindberg Christensen (Wiley-VCH, 2009). More interesting stuff on site
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POPSViruses can catch colds, says study that redefines life itself Prof La Scola and his colleagues were surprised to spot a smaller type of virus attached to the virus-making factory inside infected cells. The new virus - Sputnik - was unable to infect cells by itself but seemed to hijack the larger to achieve its infectious aims. By regulating the growth and death of plankton, giant viruses - and satellite viruses such as Sputnik - could be a major influence on ocean nutrient cycles and climate. "These viruses could be major players in global systems," Nature is told by Prof Curtis Suttle, an expert in marine viruses at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.
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POPSNo Moses, no Joshua, no (so-called) monotheism "In the text you have the story of the Israelites coming from outside, and then besieging the Canaanite cities, destroying them and then becoming a nation in the land of Canaan. Whereas archaeology tells us something which is the opposite. According to archaeology, the rise of early Israel is an outcome of the collapse of Canaanite society, not the reason for that collapse." * The principle of monotheism (the worship of a single deity), established first by the Jews and later to form the foundation for both Christianity and Islam, took much longer to take root than most people assume. In fact, the archaeological discovery of troves of household idols in ancient Canaanite towns and cities proves that the Israelites practiced polytheism long after they had been thought to have discarded the practice.
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POPS10 ancient Greek writers you should know Archimedes was a mathematician, engineer, inventor, physicist and astronomer. He is known for the invention of The Archimedes’ Screw, a mechanism for moving water that is still in use today. He also calculated the value of pi very precisely. Archimedes discovered how to define the volume of irregular objects by submerging them in water. According to legend, this discovery made him run out on the street naked (he was so excited that he forgot to get dressed) and cry “Eureka!” – I have found it.
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POPSSex, lies and some existential questions.. :-) So many orchids treat their pollinators so nastily, with false promises of food and sex or the occasional dunking of insect visitors into bucket-shaped petals full of liquid, that naturalists have puzzled over the relationship for more than a century. Darwin was so consumed by the odd interactions that after “The Origin of Species,” his next book was an entire volume on the subject, “The Various Contrivances by Which Orchids Are Fertilized by Insects.”
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POPSScientists Make Radio Waves Travel Faster Than Light A Los Alamos National Laboratory gadget, called a polarization synchrotron, combines radio waves and a rapidly spinning magnetic field, which forces radio waves to travel faster than the speed of light. The resulting phenomenon could lead to new technologies in health and communications.
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