Technology

Researchers have managed to produce a stable porous membrane that is 100,000 times thinner than the diameter of a human hair.

The membrane consists of two layers of the much exalted “super material” graphene, a two-dimensional film made of carbon atoms, on which the team of researchers, led by Professor Hyung Gyu Park at the Department of Mechanical and Process Engineering at ETH Zurich, etched tiny pores of a precisely defined size.

Whenever an asteroid or a comet hit the earth in the past, the impact melted tonnes of soil and rock, some of which formed glass as it cooled. Now, a thrilling discovery has found that these impact glasses stored the signatures of ancient life at the time of the impact.

Several such impact glasses have been unearthed from the soil of eastern Argentina, south of Buenos Aires.

These impact glasses are 6,000 to 9 million years old.

The negative impact of being bullied in childhood remains persistent and pervasive, and lasts nearly 40 years later as well, it has been revealed.

According to the study by King’s College London, the findings come from the British National Child Development Study which includes data on all 7,771 children born in England, Scotland and Wales during one week in 1958.

The parents of the children provided information on their child’s exposure to bullying when they were aged 7 and 11. The children were then followed up until the age of 50.

Nearly 2.5 tons of NASA science investigations and cargo are on the way to the International Space Station (ISS) aboard SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft .

The spacecraft launched atop a Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida at 3:25 p.m. EDT Friday, April 18.

The mission is the company’s third cargo delivery flight to the station through a 1.6 billion dollar NASA Commercial Resupply Services contract. Dragon’s cargo will support more than 150 experiments to be conducted by the crews of ISS Expeditions 39 and 40.

A Centipede reportedly ate a Snake from inside out as revealed by a post mortem report conducted by a group of researcher.

The scientist saw that a dead nose-horned viper where a centipede’s head was sticking out of its damaged abdomen, Discovery News reported.

The scientists said that the entire volume of snake’s body was occupied by the creature.

A new study has found that when a certain kind of stem cell is killed off experimentally, another group of non-stem cells can come out of retirement to replace them.

Johns Hopkins researchers have discovered the unexpected phenomenon in the organs that produce sperm in fruit flies.

The discovery sheds light on the tiny “environments” that stem cells occupy in animal bodies and may help explain how stem cells in tumors replenish themselves, the researchers said.

It may sound obnoxiously bizarre but these females have penis-like organs that leave males gasping for more. They even mate for an impressive 40-70 hours!

In a first such case, researchers have discovered cave insects in Brazil with rather novel sex lives.

The insects belonging to the genus Neotrogla are the first example of an animal with sex-reversed genitals.

“Although sex-role reversal has been identified in several different animals, Neotrogla is the only example in which the intromittent organ is also reversed,” said Kazunori Yoshizawa from Hokkaido University in Japan.

A new analysis by NASA-funded researchers suggest that ancient Earth might have had an extraterrestrial supply of vitamin B3 delivered by carbon-rich meteorites.

The result supports a theory that the origin of life may have been assisted by a supply of key molecules created in space and brought to Earth by comet and meteor impacts.

NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope has discovered what is supposed to be the first planet of Earth’s size that reportedly orbits a star in the “habitable zone”.

Paul Hertz, NASA’s Astrophysics Division director said that the discovery of Kepler-186f was a momentous step toward finding worlds like planet Earth.

“Future NASA missions, like the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite and the James Webb Space Telescope, will discover the nearest rocky exoplanets and determine their composition and atmospheric conditions, continuing humankind’s quest to find truly Earth-like worlds,” Hertz said.

Animal rights group PETA has urged India’s health ministry to ban the marketing and sale of animal-tested cosmetics and household products.

A statement issued by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) said such a move would place India in line with the European Union, which has banned the sale of all animal-tested cosmetics, and Israel, which has banned the sale of all cosmetics and household products that are tested on animals.

The skull of a newly discovered 325-million-year-old shark-like species suggests that early cartilaginous and bony fishes have more to tell us about the early evolution of jawed vertebrates-including humans-than modern sharks do, as was previously thought.

The new study, led by scientists at the American Museum of Natural History, shows that living sharks are actually quite advanced in evolutionary terms, despite having retained their basic “sharkiness” over millions of years.

Scientists have found new relationships between deep-sea temperature and ice-volume changes to provide crucial new information about how the ice ages came about.

Researchers from the University of Southampton, the National Oceanography Centre and the Australian National University developed a new method for determining sea-level and deep-sea temperature variability over the past 5.3 million years.

It provides new insight into the climatic relationships that caused the development of major ice-age cycles during the past two million years.

Researchers have found out the process behind nose becoming a pathfinder.

Researchers at the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience have said that brain connects smells to memories through an associative process where neural networks are linked through synchronised brain waves of 20-40 Hz.

Lead author, Kei Igarashi, said they know that neurons in different brain regions need to oscillate in synchrony for these regions to speak effectively to each other. Still, the relationship between interregional coupling and formation of memory traces has remained poorly understood.

A new research has discovered interacting proteins on the surface of the sperm and the egg essential to begin mammalian life.

According to the research, the proteins which allow the sperm and egg to recognize one another, offer new paths towards improved fertility treatments and the development of new contraceptives.