Sreys Blog Posts

When it comes to exploring the solar system, astronomers have an embarrassing secret. Despite 400 years of stargazing, they have discovered only two large objects that would have been unknown to the ancients: Uranus in 1781 and Neptune in 1846. Recommended for You That’s not for lack of trying. The possibility of an unknown planet just beyond observational reach has attracted astronomers like moths to a flame. A few have been successful. Several astronomers together discovered Neptune after noticing that the other planets were being gravitationally nudged by an unknown mass. Neptune didn’t entirely resolve these discrepancies, and the hunt continued into the 20th century, culminating in Pluto’s discovery in 1930. But Pluto turned out to be so small that it couldn’t account for the nudging. Indeed, it was later humiliatingly demoted to a “dwarf planet.”  But the hunt for a so-called Planet X continued until red-faced astronomers realized that the irregularities in...

New research published in Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences provides additional evidence that more intelligent individuals are more likely to prefer instrumental music. “I first became interested in this topic while working on a project looking into the relationship between personality traits and musical preferences. At the time, I was studying evolutionary psychology and became familiar with Satoshi Kanazawa’s Savanna-IQ Interaction Hypothesis,” said study author Elena Racevska, a PhD student at Oxford Brookes University. According to the hypothesis, intelligence evolved as a way to deal with new and unfamiliar things — resulting in more intelligent individuals having a greater preference for novel stimuli than less intelligent individuals. “After reading Kanazawa’s papers, one of which was on the relationship between intelligence and musical preferences , we decided to further test his hypothesis using a different set of predictors — namely, a different type of intelligence test (...

For a while now, astronomers have been confronting a conundrum. Studies of the early universe, looking at the era just after the Big Bang, tell us that the cosmos should be expanding at one speed. But when astronomers actually measure today’s universe, they find a  faster rate of expansion . Scientists have known that the universe is expanding for around a century. Astronomers like Edwin Hubble first noticed that every distant galaxy they could measure seemed to be moving away from Earth – and the farther they were, the faster they receded. In more recent years, astronomers have measured the expansion rate of today’s universe using the Hubble Space Telescope. And mysteriously, the number it found for our current expansion was some 9 percent off from the expansion rate of the early universe, as measured by the European Space Agency’s Planck spacecraft. At the time, astronomers said the odds were something like 1...

An armband that promises to help you kick bad habits like eating too much fast food or biting your nails is being sold by Amazon for £193 ($242). The Pavlok bracelet gives users a penalty of a 350-volt electric shock every time they step out of line.  It works for a wide range of nasty habits including smoking, sleeping in, spending too much time on the internet and even sleeping in. Users have to administer the shocks themselves or the Pavlok app can be downloaded by friends so that they can give you a buzz if they catch you out. Some habits – particularly those that are sleep related, such as not waking up at the right time – can be automated via the app. Scroll down for video  An arm band that promises to help you kick bad habits like eating too much fast food or biting your nails is being sold by Amazon for £193. The Pavlok bracelet gives users a penalty of a 350-volt electric shock every time they step out of line HOW DOES THE BAND WORK?  Pavlok ha...

T he next time a dog looks up at you with those big, soppy eyes and your heart begins to melt, be aware: you are being manipulated by 33,000 years of evolution. That is the conclusion of a new scientific study which argues that the raised eyebrows so beloved of owners are more of a survival strategy than an expression of friendship . The clues, its authors argue, lie in a comparison with wolves, which dogs began evolving from after they were first domesticated by Stone Age man. Anatomical analysis reveals that while modern dogs have developed small muscles around the eyes which allows them to raise their inner eyebrows, wolves possess hardly any comparable muscles. Such a stark diversion in what in evolutionary terms is a short period of time has led the researchers to believe that humans naturally favour canines able to look at them with big “puppy dog” eyes, giving them a selection advantage. Their findings complement previous studies which suggest that big eyes trigger a caregi...

Amazon Prime has a number of services you might already know and love. There’s the free two-day delivery, a music streaming service and a video streaming service that all come with your subscription. But there’s also free games . Yes, that’s right. Free games.  If you’re an Amazon Prime member you’ve probably heard about this, but if you set up an account on the company’s game streaming service, Twitch, you can link it to your Amazon Prime account to become a Twitch Prime member (or you can sign up for Twitch Prime on its own).  There are a few benefits to being a Twitch Prime member, including free in-game items and no ads, but the most recent and best benefit is the free PC games each and every month, plus discounts and in-game items. This is a great way to try out some games you’ve maybe seen streamed but haven’t had the chance to buy for yourself, totally free. Even if you’re not planning to play them straight away, it’s worth claiming them in the timeframe they’re av...

Scientists have grown a miniature brain in a dish with a spinal cord and muscles attached, an advance that promises to accelerate the study of conditions such as motor neurone disease. The lentil-sized grey blob of human brain cells were seen to spontaneously send out tendril-like connections to link up with the spinal cord and muscle tissue, which was taken from a mouse. The muscles were then seen to visibly contract under the control of the so-called brain organoid. The research is is the latest in a series of increasingly sophisticated approximations of the human brain grown in the laboratory – this time with something approaching a central nervous system attached. Madeline Lancaster, who led the work at the Medical Research Council’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, said: “We like to think of them as mini-brains on the move.” The scientists used a new method to grow the miniature brain from human stem cells, which allowed the organoid to reach a more sophisticated...