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Daan Roosegaarde reached into the pocket of his suit jacket, pulled out a plastic bag filled with black powder, and waved it around. “This is Beijing smog,” Roosegaarde said, before gesturing to the seven-metre tall, gently humming metal tower we are stood next to in the Chinese capital’s art district, 798. “We collected it from the tower yesterday. Incredibly disgusting.” Dutch designer Roosegaarde’s smog souvenir may be disgusting, but it’s the byproduct of an invention that he has touted as a potential alleviator of China’s pollution problems. His “smog-free tower” sucks air, filters it with ion technology, with Roosegaarde having...

Atmospheric oxygen levels have declined over the past 1 million years, although not nearly enough to trigger any major problems for life on Earth, a new study finds.

Bioluminescent waves in San Diego, Red Tide Blue Waves, Alien footsteps on beach, Red Tide Surfing

In a commencement speech at Rutgers, President Obama took an indirect shot at Donald Trump and the Republicans: "Facts, evidence, reason, logic, an understanding of science: These are good things. These are qualities you want in people making policy . . . We traditionally have valued those things, but if you’re listening to today’s political debate, you might wonder where this strain of anti-intellectualism came from." Obama here indulges one of the hoariest progressive clichés: that they are the party of enlightenment, reason, and fact, while conservatives are ignorant obscurantists, “bitter clingers” to the superstitions of religion and tradition. This...

New Study Shows Awe Bad for ‘Science’ (If by ‘Science’ You Mean Atheism) Douglas Axe Psychology professors from Claremont McKenna, Yale and Berkeley have just published a study that should be “disconcerting to those interested in promoting an accurate understanding of evolution.” Specifically, they’ve identified an insidious factor that has crept into science films and videos, undermining the ability of viewers to be good Darwinists.Awe is the culprit, they say. All those jaw-dropping nature documentaries have been messing with our minds.Most wildlife shows are packaged with the usual Darwinian narrative, spoken in an authoritative tone that isn’t supposed to be...

Biologists discovered a new type of flat worm and dedicated it to the US president naming it Baracktrema obamai. Biologist Thomas Platt, who turns out to be Obama's relative, doesn't regard it to be offensive. He believes it should be an honor for the president adding that the parasite resembles his namesake very much. It's also 'long, thin and cute'.

A new species of blood fluke was found infecting the lungs of turtles in Malaysia. This parasitic flatworm has been dubbed Baracktrema obamai, in honor of the President of the United States (who is the fifth cousin twice removed of one of the discovering scientists). More...

One important task of science is to develop testable theories. And one important characteristic of a theory is the ability to falsify it with evidence gathered from experimentation. Predictions should be able to be made that would verify the theory if those predictions play out, or falsify the theory if the evidence contradicts the theory. If, for example, one theorizes that gravity is a force that causes objects with much larger mass, if unimpeded, to pull objects with smaller mass towards it, one can make the prediction that if he drops an apple from his hand, the larger mass of...

Explanation: Follow the handle of the Big Dipper away from the dipper's bowl, until you get to the handle's last bright star. Then, just slide your telescope a little south and west and you might find this stunning pair of interacting galaxies, the 51st entry in Charles Messier's famous catalog. Perhaps the original spiral nebula, the large galaxy with well defined spiral structure is also cataloged as NGC 5194. Its spiral arms and dust lanes clearly sweep in front of its companion galaxy (left), NGC 5195. The pair are about 31 million light-years distant and officially lie within the angular...

People who drink very hot beverages may increase their risk of developing cancer, a new investigation by the World Health Organization (WHO) has found. The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), the cancer agency of WHO, said last week that it classifies very hot beverages as "probably carcinogenic to humans." ... Specifically, drinking beverages at or above 149 degrees Fahrenheit (65 degrees Celsius) can cause cancer to develop in the esophagus, the IARC researchers wrote in their article, published June 15 in the journal The Lancet Oncology. "Clearly, more research will need to happen in the coming years to...

Several minutes have been cut from about 10 minutes. We hope for SpaceX to have a quick recovery to flight. Ask for permission before using or cutting. Sharing in the original version is fine SpaceX - Static Fire Anomaly

On Saturday, astronomers discovered a new asteroid, just a few hours before it almost hit us. The asteroid is called 2016 QA2, and it missed the Earth by less than a quarter of the distance to the moon. That puts it about three times as far away from Earth as our farthest satellites. And we never saw it coming. So how did 2016 QA2 sneak up on us like that? For this particular asteroid, the answer seems to be that it has a very peculiar orbit. It's highly elliptical, which means it can usually be found hanging out by either...

The beach is constantly changing. The beach remains the same. It is a dynamic constant in our lives, a strand of sand to which we return year after year. This year, the first thing we noticed were all the rocks, a vein of smooth beach stones the size of belt buckles lying between the hard-packed sand of the intertidal zone and the hot, dry sand of the upper beach. Were these stones deposited upon the beach by a storm or perhaps exposed by same? They weren’t here last summer, at least not so exposed and so concentrated. The stone strip...

A man's craving for metal that led him to swallow 40 knives may sound bizarre, but such strange cravings can be symptoms of an eating disorder in which people ingest anything from dirt to talcum powder. The 42-year-old man in India said he had consumed the knives over a 2-month period, according to CNN. Some of the knives were folded up when the man ingested them, but some were unfolded, and extended to about 7 inches (18 centimeters) long. The man required a 5-hour operation to remove the knives. Because some of the knives were open, the man was bleeding...

It's been 2 1/2 months since the last birdy thread was posted. Florida is a bit too hot for this old man to get out and shoot much in high summer. However, today I had a visitor. A little blue heron was feeding on my front lawn. That seemed a tad unusual. There was also a flock of white ibis. This time of year the ibis begin to gather in larger and larger flocks preparing for their winter migration. I got a face shot of this youngster. Their eyes are cool Several weeks ago I saw a family of Florida...

Hindsight is 20/20, right? That’s the premise of a new book that poses the question: What if we were wrong? Chuck Klosterman’s “But What If We’re Wrong?” (Blue Rider Press, 2016) deals with the fact that the great march of history shows us that, well … we’re always wrong. Aristotle had his run as the smartest man on the planet, but he got disproved by Galileo, who was trumped by Newton, until Einstein ruled the roost. And while there have been some hints of “proving Einstein wrong,” nothing has really stuck. But even so, scientific “fact” is a fact only...

It’s Easy to Be an Atheist if You Ignore Science Although the general public is disconcertingly unaware of it, it is a fact that scientists do not have even the slightest clue as to how life could have begun through an unguided naturalistic process absent the intervention of a conscious creative force.Here are just a few well-chosen statements on the Origin of Life: (2016) “[There is] collective cluelessness…those who say this is well worked out, they know nothing, nothing about chemical synthesis…Those who think that scientists understand the details of life’s origin are wholly uninformed. Nobody understands…when will the scientific...

A seminal moment in the quantum technology field just happened: Google's team of scientists have simulated a hydrogen molecule from its quantum computers, a breakthrough that suggests it could “simulate even larger chemical systems,” writes one of Google Quantum’s engineers, Ryan Rabbush. The search engine’s achievement underscores the technology’s potential as Rabbush posits it can “revolutionize the design of solar cells, industrial catalysts, batteries, flexible electronics, medicines, materials and more.”

Do the joyless PC police want to be enemies of science? I suppose the last thing we need is for someone to take laughter and make it all serious, but I want you to know what a lot of serious scholars are starting to recognize: Laughing is good for you. It makes you healthier, more relaxed and less tense. It relieves stress. It even boosts your immune system! So if you’ve ever wondered why that joyless sourpuss you know is sick all the time, here you go.

This November, the National Geographic Channel will take audiences into outer space in a way we haven't seen before. From producers Ron Howard and Brian Grazer comes Mars, a six-part TV miniseries that blends documentary and science fiction to dramatize humankind's first trip to Mars in 2033--and io9 is proud to exclusively debut the first trailer.