Starting 2012, the U.S. military plans to begin construction of one of the largest solar-powered electrical plants in the country, which is to be finished and fully operational by 2014. The plant will generate an enormous 500 megawatts of energy, several hundred times more than the largest current such facility, that on Nellis Air Force Base, which outputs only 14 megawatts. The project aims at reducing the carbon emissions of the military power grid by more than 4 million tones over the next 25 years, with estimated savings at about $21 million. The future plant will only be second to the one currently being constructed by OptiSolar, ... [read more >>] These unbelievable pictures taken from an airplane flying over the rainforest separating Brazil from Peru show the members of what is considered to be one of the last uncontacted tribes on Earth. Painted in red, two men with their heads partially shaved stand ready to attack with longbows the unknown object passing above their heads, while a woman painted in black stands behind the two.Unnecessary aggression? Hardly! This may in fact be the first time when they see an airplane, and it is believed that these people never had any contact with the outside modern world. And hopefully, they never will. Their society, language, eating habits, pai... [read more >>] The letter sent by Albert Einstein to philosopher Eric Gutkind in January 1954 - " one year before the physicist's death" - detailing his beliefs about God and the Jewish people was auctioned on Thursday at Bloomsbury Auctions in London, and sold for the sum of 404,000 US dollars, including the buyer's premium. The letter had an auction starting price of 8,000 US dollars, 25 times less than that the obtained price. According to Rupert Powell, Bloomsbury director, the name of the buyer is yet unknown, but that person is probably a theoretical physics passionate."This extraordinary letter seemed to strike a chord, and it gave a deep... [read more >>] Few people are in any way like Napoleon and that happens because on average our conscious mind, based on working memory, can juggle with a maximum of 3 to 4 items at a time, informs the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal. Working memory is a temporary storage place for information, the data that we can pay attention to and manipulate. Previous studies established that the limit of the working memory is of about 7 items, thus explaining why telephone numbers usually are no more than seven digits long. But this new research shows that the real capacity of the working memory is lower when people cannot employ tricks like... [read more >>] Over 6.6 billion people inhabit the planet today. With all that, 70,000 years ago, no more than 2,000 people existed, as revealed by a new research carried out at Stanford University and published in the American Journal of Human Genetics. 70,000 years ago, our species was represented only by a small isolated African population, fighting to survive severe drought."This study illustrates the extraordinary power of genetics to reveal insights into some of the key events in our species' history. Tiny bands of early humans, forced apart by harsh environmental conditions, coming back from the brink to reunite and populate the world. Truly a... [read more >>] Islam is conquering the world, and not by sword but by number. There are already more Muslims than Roman Catholics, turning the Islamic religion into the world's largest religious denomination, as signaled by L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper. The world's Catholics may make 1.13 billion people, while the Muslims go to around 1.3 billion. "For the first time in history, we are no longer at the top: Muslims have overtaken us. Figures for 2006 showed that Catholics accounted for 17.4% of the world population while Muslims accounted for 19.2%," Monsignor Vittorio Formenti, compilier of the Annuario Pontificio, the Vatic... [read more >>] We do not know if it's the Bhopal accident or just a large population pool, but India comes with really weird human newborn cases. An Indian woman has just delivered a baby girl with two faces. The girl had four eyes, two noses and two mouths. The six-day old baby girl, whose parents are Vinod and Sushma Singh, is already being regarded as a reincarnation of the Hindu God of wisdom Ganesha (the elephant-headed god). The child was born in the Gautam Buddha Nagar district of Uttar Pradesh, 50 km (30 mi) north east of New Delhi. When the locals of the remote village (called Sani) where the family of the girl reside found about this, they ... [read more >>] Let's get rid of foolish misconceptions: no, men don't look for intelligent women! What they want, and most of us know it, is a blue-eyed, blond-haired woman who gains less than her boyfriend or husband, not touching this way his masculine pride (now we know why we don't find Paris attractive). The latest research, carried out by the online dating site ukdating.com, was made on a poll of 66,000 men, who appeared to be eager to date a woman who was not heavier than 60 kg (132 pounds), lived on her own and occasionally wore glasses. 54% of the subjects avoided a possible mate earning over £25,000 ($ 50,000) annually. The top te... [read more >>] Let's face it: men come from Mars, women from Venus. Women hear from a conversation just words like shopping, money, jewel, gold, diamond, spending, and so on. Men hear just sex, football, boobs, a**, beer, chicks and so on. A new study published in "Neuropsychologia" comes with another element to the overwhelming difference in brain structure between the sexes: teen males and females employ somewhat different brain areas when processing speech. It's no secret that girls get higher marks than boys in most language tests, assessing verbal fluency and word memory. The team made by cognitive scientists Douglas Burman and James Booth,... [read more >>] The Big Mac combination may be an insidious caloric bomb loaded with starches and oils, but a new research of the plants that people around the world eat has found it, if you can believe this, as a symbol of a varied diet brought by globalization!The team from the University of Calgary and Stellenbosch University in South Africa has made a phyllogenetic analysis of what we eat (how are the plants we consume related). "Generally speaking, we eat very broadly from the tree of life. Others have looked at the sheer number of plant species we consume but nobody has ever examined whether the plants we eat are clustered in certain branches. It tur... [read more >>] | 
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