The surprising forest devastation than a century ago erupted in the area of the Tunguska River in Siberia may have been caused by an asteroid only a fraction of the estimated dimensions and previously published, suggest the simulations on a supercomputer Laboratories Sandia National.

“The asteroid that caused such extensive damage was much smaller than estimated,” said lead investigator Mark Boslough, the impact that erupted on June 30, 1908. “That something so tiny can cause this kind of destruction suggests that smaller asteroids should be taken into consideration. Its diminutive size indicates such collisions are not as improbable as we thought.” (more…)

StarSolar, a breakthrough technology company established in Cambridge, Massachusetts, seeks to capture and use photons that usually pass through the solar cells without generating electricity. According to the company, their designs will halve the cost of solar cells, while retaining its effectiveness, something that equipararía solar energy to electricity price. (more…)

According to an article published on March 26, 2007 in Technology Review, MIT’s new research has found that a set of genes found in marine micro-organisms could provide a common bacteria the ability to generate energy from light.

With a simple modification, the bacterium E.coli, often used in laboratories, could pass for your cellular energy in sugar to a diet of light, a breakthrough that could be used in improving the production of biofuels, pharmaceuticals and other chemicals. (more…)

Young people can call for free, with some sticks

According to an article published on March 26, 2006 in the online version of The Guardian, the British summer youth may fail to give the can to his parents to pay their mobile phone calls by subscribing to a new service offering called in exchange for free advertising.

Blyk, a new company headed by former president of Nokia, has announced the signing of agreements with advertisers like Coca-Cola, L’Oréal and Buena Vista is about to reach an agreement with the operator Orange to launch the service to Through its network.Orange did not want to comment on anything, merely stating that it is always open to potential partnerships. (more…)

Contrary to assumptions that enjoyed far greater acceptance in the scientific community, a study has produced an unexpected result: the appearance of our earliest direct ancestor was significantly more apelike.

A computer-generated reconstruction by Dr. Timothy Bromage, a paleoanthropologist and Professor of Biomaterials and Basic Science and Craniofacial Biology, School of Dentistry at the University of New York, shows the skull of a 1.9 million-year-old rudolfensis belonged to Homo, the first member of the human race with a surprisingly small brain and a very prominent jaw, features commonly associated with more apelike members of the family of hominids that lived some three million years. (more…)

The jets of granular particles bouncing off a target in a simple experiment with equipment that fits on a table show a behavior similar to liquids, also observed during experiments on subatomic particles in giant machines, which simulates birth of the universe.

This surprising finding has been made by a team led by Sidney Nagel and Heinrich Jaeger, University of Chicago. The study also collaborated with Xiang Cheng and Daniel Citron (University of Chicago) and Varas Germain (University of Chile).

Scientists have gotten to know quite well the equilibrium phenomena governed primarily by temperature or pressure. But what happens to the phenomena that have been carried far beyond its equilibrium state, as a jet of sand? What about the quark-gluon plasma, the mixture of subatomic particles that existed perhaps for a few millionths of a second after the Big Bang? (more…)