The Sci Tech World

An alarming new investigation has revealed that over half of the drinking water in the US contains radioactive elements. The Environmental Working Group (EWG) have found that a good portion of the drinking water in all 50 states contains radioactive elements that may increase one's risk of cancer. The EWG analyzed almost 50,000 public water systems and discovered that the water supply consumed by 170 million Americans contains radioactive elements. In 27 states, water supplies were found to exceed the EPA's legal limits. The most common radioactive element the EWG found was radium. Radium enters groundwater naturally though deposits in the Earth's crust. Levels are higher when activities such as oil gas drilling disturbs the deposits from the rock and the soil. When this occurs, it releases ions and is known as "ionizing" .  The EPA categorizes all ionized radiation as carcinogenic and  sets safe levels , which are then enforced. In 158 public water systems used b...

Famous physicist Prof. Brian Cox has recently made an entry in one of astronomy's most inquisitive and vital questions: Given the high possibility of intelligent alien life randomly prevailing in the ceaselessly massive universe, why, still, haven't we discovered any sort of indication of it? What could be the reason? This question is very old and it was Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, who put forward this question in the 1950s, in what’s now known as the  He debated there’s inconsistency between the high possibility of alien life existing and the total absence of hard indication that intelligent life has ever developed outside of Earth. So he famously asked:  “Where is everybody?” So, Professor Cox considers that he might finally have the answer. But you will probably not like it. According to the article published on Sunday Times , Professor Brian Cox said: “One solution to the Fermi paradox is that it is not possible to run a world that has the power to destroy itself and th...

The telescope, which is worth £6.5billion, has been successfully tested in anticipation of its launch in 2019. Engineers working on the project are confident it will be able to capture starlight in focus and track astronomical targets. The James Webb telescope has been described as a 'time machine' that could help unravel the secrets of our universe. The telescope will be used to look back to the first galaxies born in the early universe more than 13.5billion years ago, and observe the sources of stars, exoplanets, and even the moons and planets of our solar system. When it is launched in 2019, it will be the world's biggest and most powerful telescope, capable of peering back 200 million years after the Big Bang. Mark Voyton, the manager for the Optical Telescope Element and Integrated Science Instrument Module said: "We're extremely elated to be here, especially after the successful completion of our cryovacuum and optical testing of the world's most magnific...

Virgin Galactic has completes another successful glide test flight of its VSS Unity plane in the Mojave Desert yesterday. The test saw the Unity craft safely manoeuvre to the ground from an altitude of 50,000 feet (15,000m). Each test competed is a dry run for rocket-powered test flights and yesterday’s test was VSS Unity seventh successful glide flight. The craft was taken up to an altitude of 50,000 feet by its from mothership VMS Eve before being released into a sharp descent. Unity accelerated to Mach 0.9 and at around 22,000 feet the water ballast was jettisoned, which is there to simulate the weight and positioning of the rocket motor. Following this the pilots, Mark 'Forger' Stucky and Michael 'Sooch' Masucci, completed the flight and landed the lighter craft, which simulated the conditions that would apply during a space flight. Virgin Galactic founder Sir Richard Branson claims VSS Unity, the second version of the company's SpaceShipTwo, will take people on...

Scientists from the University of Queensland, Australia, have used single particles of light (photons) to simulate quantum particles travelling through time. They showed that one photon can pass through a wormhole and then interact with its older self. Their findings were published in Nature Communications. The source of this time travel conundrum comes from what are called “closed time-like curves” (CTC). CTCs are used to simulate extremely powerful gravitational fields, like the ones produced by a spinning black hole, and could, theoretically (based on Einstein’s theory of general relativity), warp the fabric of existence so that space-time bends back on itself – thus creating a CTC, almost like a path that could be used to travel back in time. According to Scientific American, many physicists find CTCs “abhorrent, because any macroscopic object traveling through one would inevitably create paradoxes where cause and effect break down.” Others disagree with this assessment, however; i...

Scientists say they’ve found significant deposits of water ice hiding extremely close to the surface of Mars, a discovery that could be hugely beneficial for future Mars exploration missions. The findings, published in the journal Science, were led by Colin Dundas from the US Geological Survey in Arizona. The discovery was made using the HiRISE (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) instrument on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. They found eight mid-latitude locations where escarpments (or scarps), steep banks or cliffs that have been eroded away, had exposed huge cross-sections of ice. In some of the regions, the ice was an astonishing 100 meters (330 feet) thick, and it starts just 1 or 2 meters (3.3 to 6.6 feet) below the surface. What's more, the ice appears to be layered, not too dissimilar to sedimentary layers on Earth. This means the sheets could show us different geological periods in the history of Mars. “This gives us a much more detailed window into the vertical s...

NASA's $1 billion Juno spacecraft completed its 10th high-speed trip around Jupiter on December 16. The amazing spacecraft gets relatively close to the biggest gas giant planet of our solar system and takes new photos with its JunoCam instrument roughly every 53 days, while traveling at speeds up to 130,000 mph. It can take days or sometimes weeks to receive the images, but the wait is worth it. The latest batch of photos features countless swirling, hallucinatory clouds and storms. Researchers at NASA and the Southwest Research Institute uploaded the raw image data to their websites in late December. Since then, dozens of people have processed the black-and-white files into gorgeous, calendar-ready color pictures. "As pretty as a planet can get, but get too close and Jupiter will END YOU," Sean Doran, a UK-based graphic artist who regularly processes NASA images, said about the new images in a tweet. These images clearly show the beauty of the gas giant. Here are some of...

Niagara falls are a spectacular place to visit at any time of year, however in winter, especially seriously cold winters like North America is currently experiencing, they are truly a breathtaking sight. While the bitter temperatures have caused chaos in some areas and affected the New Year’s plans of millions, one upside to the big chill is the raw beauty of nature. Many areas of the falls have frozen, forming huge, elaborately shaped ice formations dangling precariously on the rocks, giving the impression of a Narnia-like winter fantasy land. You can scroll down below to check out some of the gorgeous pictures for yourself, they make you feel cold just looking at them!    

[caption id="attachment_2035" align="alignnone" width="715"] Singularity of black hole is sucking matter of nebula[/caption] Brian Greene , professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University and co-founder of the World Science Festival , explains what we know about time travel so far. Following is a transcript of the video. Brian Greene: I’m Brian Greene, professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University and co-founder of the World Science Festival. It’s critical that you realize that there are two types of time travel , and they are radically different. Time travel to the future? Definitely possible. We know how to do it because Einstein showed us the way over a hundred years ago. It’s surprising how few people actually really know about this in their bones. He showed that if you go out into space and travel near the speed of light, and you turn around, and you come back, your clock will be ticking off time more slowly. So, when you st...

Three space telescopes have detected an increase in the frequency of X-flares eruptions of a giant black hole located at the center of our galaxy. After a new long-term monitoring process, scientists are trying to figure out if this is a normal behavior that went unnoticed because of limited supervision, or if it is possible that these flares are triggered by the recent passage of a mysterious object. By combining information provided by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and XMM-Newton, with observations from the Swift satellite, astronomers were able to carefully track the activity of the supermassive black hole in the Milky Way during the last 15 years. The supermassive black hole, aka Sagittarius A, weighs just over 4 million times the mass of the sun and the X-Rays are produced by hot gas flowing towards the black hole. The new study reveals that Sagittarius A, only produces an average of one bright X-ray flash every ten days. Over 150 observations from NASA’s Chandra X-ray and XMM-...

An international team of astronomers from Chile and Germany has managed to capture an image of unprecedented detail of another star — that isn’t the Sun — the red supergiant star Antares. The team has also made the first map of the velocities of material in the atmosphere of a star other than the Sun, revealing unexpected turbulence in the extended atmosphere of Antares. Antares, also designated Alpha Scorpii, is a well-studied, close red supergiant star at a distance of 554 light years. It is the fifteenth-brightest star in the night sky and the brightest star in the constellation of Scorpius. With a diameter about 700 times that of the Sun and a mass about 12 times solar, Antares is one of largest stars. This is the most detailed image ever of the red supergiant star Antares, or any other star apart from the Sun. Image credit: K. Ohnaka / ESO. It is thought that Antares started life with a mass more like 15 times that of the Sun, and has shed three solar-masses of material during its...

Black holes. Portals. Dark matter. Parallel worlds. Team Instinct. As common as these terms are today, we're sadly still no closer to knowing the true nature of the universe we live in. To make things worse, we may never reach that day. We are still trying to reach that point. But in attempting to understand these concepts, we use two distinct sets of rules: Quantum Mechanics, which is the study of all things super-small (atoms, quarks, Ant-Man on occasion), and General Relativity, which is the study of larger things (people, planets, also Ant-Man). The issue? Two sets of rules don't exactly make it easy to explain the already mind-boggling terms listed above. For example, dark matter can be both infinitesimal and super-massive at the same time, so how can we possibly put something like this into perspective? That's where String Theory comes in. String theory is a hypothetical explanation that could potentially unify ALL MATTER in the known universe, big or small. Wouldn...

Kids really are the best scientists. Their sense of unflappable curiosity hasn’t been eroded away by the expectations of being an adult in an increasingly rat race-like world. They often ask the most cutting-edge, pertinent questions – and, as demonstrated by a young wunderkind, they often tell the most memorable stories.An 18-year-old from the Philippines by the name of Hillary Diane Andales just recently explained some parts of Einstein’s theories of relativity in a relatively short video clip. For her amazing efforts, she’s won the highly-coveted 2017 Breakthrough Junior Challenge; consequently bagging $400,000 in education-related prize money, including $250,000 in several scholarship funds. The Breakthrough Prize, also sometimes dubbed the Oscars of Science, mainly aims to award those working in the fields of physics, life sciences, and mathematics. The initiative was actually founded back in 2012, and was co-founded and sponsored by a range of entrepreneurs and science aficionado...