Hasta La Gadget!

Condoms are a life-saving piece of tech, and for being little more than uninflated latex balloons, they do their job pretty well if you wear them. That’s the part that Bill Gates is working on. No, he’s not going around as a one-man condom-police army, but he is offering $100,000 to anyone who can make a condom less of a bummer to wear. More »

The universe is billions of years old, but new research suggests that it’s a bit older than we all originally thought. According to the European Space Agency, who looked at the findings by its Planck space probe, the universe is actually around 80 million years older than previously expected, making it just over 13.8 billion years old now.

The Planck space probe’s primary purpose is to scan the “cosmic microwave background” radiation spreading throughout the sky, which is leftover heat from the earliest moments of the beginning of the universe. Looking at data from the split-second after the Big Bang happened, scientists and astronomers have concluded that the universe is just ever so slightly older by around 80 million years.

The new findings mention a key theory called inflation, which states that the universe exploded from subatomic size to the massive size that it is now in just a fraction of a second. The Big Bang theory says that the universe as we know it today started out smaller than an atom, but exploded and expanded rapidly at a pace that was much faster than the speed of light.

The space probe studied the afterglow of the Big Bang and has recalculated the age of the universe, which now stands at 13.81 billion years old. The Planck space telescope was launched in 2009 at a cost of $900 million. It has spent 15 months so far mapping the sky and studying how our universe began. The telescope will stay in operation until later this year when it eventually runs out of cooling fluid.

[via Fox News/AP]

Universe is 80 million years older than previously thought is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

A group of German researchers announced this week that they have completed sequencing of a Neanderthal genome. The scientists say that the high-quality sequencing will be made available online for other researchers and scientists to study. The researchers were able to produce the genome using a toe bone found in a Siberian cave.

This published genome is said to be far more detailed than a previous “draft” Neanderthal genome was sequenced three years ago by the same team. The group of researchers operate from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. The researchers say that the new genome allows individual inherited traits from the Neanderthal’s mother and father to be distinguished.

In the future, the scientists hope to compare their new genome sequence to that of other Neanderthals as well as comparing the genome to another extinct human species with remains that were found in the same Siberian cave. The other remains are of an extinct human species called Denisovan. Certainly some researchers will compare this new genome to that of humans.

The group of researchers intends to publish a scientific paper based on new knowledge gained from studying the detailed genome. Specifically the researchers plan to refine knowledge having to do with genetic changes that occur in the genomes of modern humans after they parted ways with Neanderthals and Denisovians.

[via Fox News]

Complete Neanderthal genome published by German researchers is written by Shane McGlaun & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

It’s always interesting to learn how certain rocks are formed, and gold is one of those elements that is so precious and rare, yet very few people have any idea on how it’s formed in the Earth. According to a study conducted by a group of Australian geologists, 80% of the world’s gold deposits are actually formed in the blink of an eye thanks to earthquakes.

The process is called “flash vaporization,” which happens deep below the Earth’s crust, going down as far as 18 miles below, fault cavities from earthquakes fill up with fluids and are subject to extremely high temperatures and pressure, which leads to instant vaporization of these fluids that contain dissolved substances like gold and silicate minerals.

This process has always been theorized, but it’s been unclear as far as how drastic the pressure changes are. It turns out that an earthquake can create a dramatic drop in pressure, which forces the fluid to expand to as much as 130,000 times its original size — all of which happens in a split second, hence “flash vaporization.”

Of course, the link between gold deposits and earthquakes is nothing new, but the study finally quantifies how drastic the pressure changes are far beneath the Earth’s surface. About two-thirds of all known gold deposits consist of gold veins that are formed deep underground and can be mined directly, with 45% of the world’s gold mostly coming from South Africa.

[via io9]

Image via Flickr

Majority of the world’s gold deposits formed by earthquakes is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

With the help of the Antarctic’s South Pole Telescope and the ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array) radio telescope, Scientists were able to discover something amazing in the field of Astronomy. The scientists discovered that there was a “baby boom” of stars very soon after the Big Bang. The scientists discovered stars 12 billion light years away, an interesting observation considering the universe is 13.7 billion years old.

The scientists discovered that there were many star-forming galaxies, called Starburst Galaxies, that existed only 1 billion years after the Big Bang. These galaxies rapidly produced stars at a rate of 4000 per year, which completely outpaces our galaxy’s production of 1 star per year. Yashar Hezaveh, who lead one of the studies, stated that “there might have been very large scale galaxy formation and star formation that might have happened earlier than we thought.”

Hezaveh, and the other scientists, believe that the discovery of these new stars may help them understand what “caused the formation of these galaxies.” Some astronomers believe that these stars were made at rapid pace because of an abundance of cold gas. The astronomers used gravitational lensing, a process in which light bends while passing through a gravitational field in a galaxy or other massive objects, to observe the distant galaxies that they wouldn’t have been able to see otherwise.

The gravitational lensing distorts the images that the scientists are observing, so Hezaveh has to work on correcting these distortions in order to get a more accurate view of the galaxies. He, and the other scientists, hope to discover even more galaxies with the ALMA telescope. They have currently discovered 26 Starburst galaxies, but they hope to boost that number to 100. Along with discovering more Starburst galaxies, the scientists are even more excited to possibly image dark matter, which is said to make up 80% of all matter in the universe, and measure its properties.

[via CBC]

Galaxies produced stars shortly after Big Bang is written by Brian Sin & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.