Consider the Bear Stearns Alt-A Trust 2006-7, a $1.3 billion drop in the sea of risky loans. Here’s how it worked:
As the credit bubble grew in 2006, Bear Stearns, then one of the leading mortgage traders on Wall Street, bought 2,871 mortgages from lenders like the Countrywide Financial Corporation.
The mortgages, with an average size of [...]
Martialis heureka is a living relic of the earliest stages of ant evolution. Scientists have unearthed an ancient ancestor of ants from the soil of the Amazon rain forest that is probably the species from which all other ants evolved.
University of Texas at Austin evolutionary biologist Christian Rabeling, who discovered the blind, subterranean and predatory [...]
Using data from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft and two telescopes on or near Earth, an international team of scientists has found that one of the solar system’s largest and newest storms – Jupiter’s Little Red Spot – has some of the highest wind speeds ever detected on any planet.
Jupiter’s “LRS” is an anticyclone, a storm [...]
A team of researchers, led by Stony Brook University paleontologist David Krause, has discovered the remains in Madagascar of what may be the largest frog ever to exist.
The 16-inch, 10-pound ancient frog, scientifically named Beelzebufo, or devil frog, links a group of frogs that lived 65 to 70 million years ago with frogs living [...]
A photograph of a 3 cm drop of ferrofluid, a suspension of magnetite in oil.
Harvard University today unveiled a brand-new website, HarvardScience, devoted to all matters related to science at the various schools, departments, institutes, and hospitals of Harvard University.Now, although Harvard is not as scientifically astute or as storied as its geeky neighbor MIT, [...]
Dogs that bite children have often not bitten kids before, but they tend to have underlying behavioural or medical problems, indicates research in the journal Injury Prevention.
The same can be said of children who bite dogs.
The research team analysed the circumstances surrounding 111 cases of dog bite over a period of four years. All the [...]
Australia’s new $200m synchrotron in Melbourne could contribute to the fight to save the Tasmanian devil from the outbreak of facial tumour disease currently decimating devil populations, according to Dr Jeff Church from CSIRO Textile and Fibre Technology in Geelong.
Dr Church says he will use the synchrotron to see if the disease causes any biochemical [...]
In terms of height they are worlds apart. The world’s tallest man, Bao Xishun today shook hands with He Pingping who claims to be Earth’s shortest.
But these two men actually hail from the same region of Inner Mongolia.
While Mr Xishun, 56, towers above everyone at an astonishing 7′10″, 19-year-old Mr Pingping is a mere 2′5″ [...]
Computer geek hypochondriacs have long wished for a medical diagnostic program where you tell the computer what you feel like, and it will tell you what you’ve got.
An early effort in this direction was launched in the late 70’s by our Harvard undergraduate roommate, who was developing it while a student at Colombia [...]
A Dutch escort agency is launching a special virgin service for computer geeks.
Sociology student Zoe Vialet, who set up Society Service last year, says she has had a lot of demand from virgins.
She says most of them work in the IT sector and added: “They are very sweet but are afraid of seeking contact with [...]
While perusing the Sunday paper, an odd scrap often catches in the old cranial craw, requiring rumination and later regurgitation. Case in point, from that paragon of American journalism, Parade Magazine:
Nancy Cassidy, from Falls Church, VA, asks Ms. Smartypants, aka Marilyn von Savant, the Smartest Woman in the World, as certified by the Guinness Book [...]
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A 40,000-year-old skull found in a Romanian cave shows traits of both modern humans and Neanderthals and might prove the two interbred, researchers reported on Monday.
If the findings are confirmed, the skull would represent the oldest modern human remains yet found in Europe.
The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy [...]