10 Amazing Animals that Use Camouflage 0

The animal kingdom is a wild, wacky place where animals have to be clever in order to survive. One of the most amazing techniques for survival is animal camouflage. Animals have the ability to mimic plants, ground cover, or even other animals in order to hide or hunt. The following is a list of some animals that are particularly gifted in the art...

10 Snowiest Places on Earth 0

Mt. Washington, New Hampshire 21.75 feet (6.6 meters)Mt. Washington may be best known for its powerful winds, but it makes the snow list as well. In fact, it's one of the snowiest spots in the eastern United States.Although the summit gets hit with a lot of snow, the snow doesn't stick around for long, according to meteorologists at the Mt. Washington...

Robotic Bug Gets Wings, Sheds Light On Evolution of Flight 0

Adding wings to a robotic bug improved running performance and stability. However, the boost may not have been good enough for flight. (Credit: Image by Kevin Peterson, UC Berkeley Biomimetic Millisystems Lab, All rights reserved.) When engineers at the University of California, Berkeley, outfitted a six-legged robotic bug with wings in an effort to...

Goats Could Increase the Risk of a Rare Lung Cancer, Researchers Find 0

Exposure to goats could increase the risk of a certain type of lung cancer, according to French researchers.The study, presented at the European Respiratory Society's Annual Congress in Amsterdam, has linked a professional exposure to goats with a distinct subset of lung cancer, known as pneumonic-type lung adenocarcinoma (P-ADC). This form of lung...

Hot Rocks Could Help Trigger Earthquakes 0

The heat from rocks scraping against each other could be a major cause of faults weakening in the beginning stages of earthquakes, scientists have found. When rocks grind against each other, they generate extreme temperatures at scattered microscopic bumps, called asperities, where they make contact. This process is similar to producing heat by rubbing...

Giant Amoebas Discovered in Deepest Ocean Trench 0

Gigantic amoebas have been found in the Mariana Trench, the deepest region on Earth.National Geographic Society Remote Imaging engineers Eric Berkenpas (bottom) and Graham Wilhelm prepare to deploy Dropcam. CREDIT: National Geographic Society Remote Imaging Dropcam During a July 2011 voyage to the Pacific Ocean chasm, researchers with Scripps Institution...

NASA's Spitzer Detects Comet Storm in Nearby Solar System 0

This artist's conception illustrates a storm of comets around a star near our own, called Eta Corvi. Evidence for this barrage comes from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, whose infrared detectors picked up indications that one or more comets was recently torn to shreds after colliding with a rocky body. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)NASA's Spitzer Space...

Nearby Planet-Forming Disk Holds Water for Thousands of Oceans 0

For the first time, astronomers have detected around a burgeoning solar system a sprawling cloud of water vapor that's cold enough to form comets, which could eventually deliver oceans to dry planets.An illustration depicting the sprawling cloud of cold water vapor that astronomers have detected around the burgeoning solar system at the nearby star...

Robot Builds Itself With Foam 0

Foambot (Image: Modular Robotics Laboratory)Combine off-the-shelf insulation foam and modular robot components and you get a self-assembling robot that could be fit to a variety of tasks. The Modular Robotics Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania, in a project led by Shai Revzen, has created a robot that can be assembled from foam that hardens...

Team Tokai wins 2011 World Solar Challenge 0

Team Tokai has just reached the finish line in Adelaide, Australia, to become the winner of the 2011 World Solar Challenge. The victory makes it back-to-back wins for the Japanese team which took out the previous event in 2009. The Tokai University Team has taken out the 2011 World Solar Challenge ( All Photos: Gizmag.com) All of the top three places...

Climate Change Could Shrink Animals 0

Climate change could result in a planet full of cold-blooded runts. A whale shark feasts on plankton. (Wikimedia Commons)In a warming world, copepods, tiny crustaceans that make up the bulk of the ocean's animal plankton, could end up stunted. Copepods cope with warmer temperatures by maturing faster, but they don't grow as fast as they mature,...

Black Death genome reconstructed 0

(Photo: Museum of London)It's hard to comprehend the impact of the Black Death. The "Great Pestilence" is believed to have originated somewhere in Northern Asia in the 1330s before hitting Europe in 1347. It killed an estimated 75 million people worldwide - that's around 25 per cent of all humans in existence at the time. Now in an effort to better...