Science Innovations

Top Aphrodisiacs By   Deepak Kumar You're planning a romantic night for that special someone. Everything seems aligned for passion -- there will be a full moon, flowers and the faint sounds of classical music on the stereo. That means this is no time for frozen dinners or Chinese takeout. You want a menu full of aphrodisiacs, or food items or herbs known for arousing sexual desire. Here's a list of things Cupid might serve if he were out of his love-inducing arrows. Oysters While we've encountered quite a few aphrodisiacs on this list that resemble the male reproductive organs, the oyster has the privilege of representing the females. Oysters are perhaps the most famous of aphrodisiacs; even well-known lover Casanova was said to eat them by the dozens. Besides the imagery of genitalia and the association with Aphrodite (the goddess of love and beauty, for whom aphrodisiacs are named, sprang from an oyster shell), oysters possess massive amounts of zinc. Witho...

Top 10 Amazing Science Studies   By: Dr. Deepak Kumar (Admin. & Pharmacologist) Believe it or not, there are amazing scientific studies going on right now—and not in a mad scientist lab with an Igor in tow. From medicinal marijuana to vaccines, Viagra to journaling, see just what is going on behind closed lab doors … beginning with No. 10 1: Can medicinal marijuana actually be ... medicinal? That's right, studies are just now beginning to show that a small daily dosage of the ganja can actually prevent Alzheimer's. Never mind that the stuff is known to cause memory loss (short term, anyway)—this study is shattering your entire belief system. And also giving you even more excuses to give your parents when you get caught. In an initial study, half a group of rats were given a dose, while the other half were not; surprisingly, it proved to reverse memory loss. And we're guessing those rats learned real quick how to use the pellet lever. Over. And ov...

Top 5 Tips for Spotting UFOs Posted by: Deepak Kumar Considering how many famous people — from former President Jimmy Carter to rock singer Sammy Hagar — have gone public about seeing UFOs over the years, you could easily get the impression that you're the only person in the world who hasn't seen one. But if you're not among the ranks of UFO spotters yet, there's no need to feel left out. Though a 2005 Gallup survey showed that about 25 percent of Americans believe that extraterrestrials have visited Earth at some point in the past, only about eight percent of Americans claim to have seen mysterious objects in the sky, a 2008 poll by Scripps Howard News Service and Ohio University revealed. The pollsters haven't yet thought to ask how many people want to see a UFO. But our guess is that plenty of folks are eager to be another Roy Neary, the character portrayed by Richard Dreyfuss in the 1977 sci-fi thriller "Close Encounters of the Third Kind....

Top 10 Alien Sightings Posted By: Deepak Kumar Apparently, the pageantry surrounding the royal wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton was so entertaining even extraterrestrials couldn't resist checking it out. At least that was the scoop from The Sun, a British tabloid. It ran stills lifted from a two-and-a-half minute video clip shot by a visiting tourist that showed a blurry blob the paper characterized as a "shimmering white object" hovering in the cloudless sky over Westminster Abbey on the morning before the wedding. "It changed shape, but stayed there for at least 30 minutes," the tourist explained in an Internet posting. "Then I lost sight of it." Skeptics might explain the ambiguous images as lens distortion, vapor trails from an aircraft, or perhaps just wishful thinking. But to believers in UFOs, the sighting provided yet another chapter in the vast annals of possible sightings of alien visitors. The National UFO Reportin...

Top Science Stories A carbon threshold breached, commitments to brain science made, mystery neutrinos found and human evolution revised—these and other events highlight the year in science and technology as picked by the blogger of Amazing Facts. July 25, 2014 |By Deepak Kumar Recovery of Oldest Human DNA For all the  astonishing advances in ancient DNA research  in recent years, scientists have maintained that they would never be able to sequence DNA from human fossils more than about 100,000 years old. But in December a team reported that it had managed to recover  well-preserved DNA from a 400,000-year-old thighbone  belonging to an extinct member of the human family. The thighbone comes from an important site in northern Spain known as the Sima de los Huesos. Previously researchers had obtained DNA from similarly ancient cave bear remains found at the site, raising hopes that recovering DNA from the fossil humans might be next. The ne...