Reid Wiseman Is A National Treasure. There Are 46 More Of These.

Behold the most massive young galaxy cluster found in the early universe. How do these megastructures form? This newly discovered cluster, located 10 billion light years from Earth, gives us clues. Details here.

Credit: NASA’s Facebook Account

Today in the robot takeover: Disney has built a remote-control device that can climb walls  while Singapore scientists created an eerie artificial being that can remember your past conversations (and may haunt your dreams.)

Scientists extend an atom’s lifetime with a mirror

Scientists from Chalmers University of Technology have been able to extend the lifetime of an artificial atom, allowing it to remain charged for up to ten times longer. They achieved this by placing the artificial atom in front of a short circuit, which acts as a mirror. The distance between the atom and the mirror affects how long the atom “lives,” which is the time from when an atom is charged to when it returns to its ground state.

Research team leader and Professor of Physics Per Delsing says, “We can vary the lifetime of the atom by changing the distance between the atom and the mirror. If we place the atom at a certain distance from the mirror the atom’s lifetime is extended by such a length that we are not even able to observe the atom.”

Know more at: http://futurism.com/links/scientists-extend-an-atoms-lifetime-with-a-mirror/

The world’s oldest known fossils have been found - and they’re 3.7 billion years old

They could push back evidence for life on Earth by 220 million years.

The oldest fossils ever discovered have been found in Greenland, and they appear to have preserved the earliest signs of life of Earth.

Dated to around 3.7 billion years ago, the fossils contain evidence of stromatolites - layers of sediment packed together by ancient, water-based bacterial colonies - and could push back the origins of life in the fossil record by 220 million years.

Read more… 

China and the US create a ‘space hotline’ to avoid conflicts

The God Brain: Roundtable Discussion on God and Spirituality for Brain Games

NeuroscienceNews was invited by National Geographic’s Brain Games to participate in a virtual roundtable discussion on the question:

“Is belief in God innate in our brains, as if it were installed by some divine programmer? Or is spirituality a more complex evolving adaptation that has both helped and harmed us as a species?”

Let us know what you think.

Image: Jason Silva sits with Jonathan, a grad student at IDC Herzliya as they test out the virtual reality EEG cap and goggles. Photo Credit: NG Studios/Andy Fram.

A lot of people live in fear because they haven’t figured out how you’re going to react when faced with a certain set of circumstances. I’ve come to terms with this by looking deeply into whatever makes me fearful - what are the key elements that get the hairs up on the back of my neck - and then figuring out what I can do about it.

Chris Hadfield (via fyp-science)

Scientists Get Their First Glimpse At How New Memories Are Born

This is the closest we’ve come to watching new memories form in real time… http://futurism.com/scientists-get-first-glimpse-new-memories-born/

Questioning the reliability of research

This year, one of the top five most talked-about research studies was on the reliability of research findings.

The Reproducibility Project is a vast, multi-institution effort aimed to measure how often researchers could replicate psychology experiments and yield the same result. For the project, 270 academics, including researchers at UC Riverside, UC San Francisco and UC Davis, attempted to replicate the findings from 100 recently published psychology experiments.

They failed twice as often as they succeeded; in fact, only 36 percent of the replicated studies yielded results consistent with earlier findings.

That doesn’t necessarily indicate the original research wasn’t accurate or reliable, researchers say. Many factors, including a lack of detail into methodology, can influence replicability. But the report — published in August in the journal Science  — does highlight the challenge of producing reliable findings and suggests that more could be done to enable replicatable results.

Read the other research stories that got the world buzzing in 2015 →