News Desk

It is likely to be one of the oldest prosthetic devices in human history: Together with other experts, Egyptologists have reexamined an artificial wooden big toe. The find is almost 3000 years old and was discovered in a female burial from the necropolis of Sheikh ´Abd el-Qurna close to Luxor. This area is currently being studied using state-of-the-art methods.

Aging should be based on the number of years people are likely to live in a given country in the 21st century, say researchers. By that logic, 70 may be the new 60.

The new study also predicts an end to population aging in the United States and other countries before the end of the century.

Older adults who lead an active sex life are more likely to have increased cognitive function, according to a new Oxford University research collaboration.

One of the well-known challenges of marriage is keeping the passion alive after years of partnership, as passions tend to cool even in very happy relationships. Psychological scientists have now developed an unconventional intervention for helping a marriage maintain its spark: pictures of puppies and bunnies.

When an empathetic partner holds a lover’s hand, their heart rates and breathing rates sync and her pain subsides, new research shows. Authors say such ‘interpersonal synchronization’ could play a role in the analgesic impacts of touch.

The megalithic Fertility Temple also known as “Chucuito” on the edge of Lake Titicaca in Peru is special and at the same time controversial basically for a single reason: its “sexuality”. Whether the upright stones are supposed to be phallic or represent magic mushrooms has caused much debate between historians for many years now.

From far away, El Volcán in the Nepeña Valley of coastal Peru might look like a natural feature in the landscape.

But this volcano is artificial, a mound or pyramid built by human hands with a crater dug out of the top. And some archaeologists are trying to figure out what it was used for.

Huge pulses of volcanic activity are likely to have played a key role in triggering the end-Triassic mass extinction, which set the scene for the rise and age of the dinosaurs, new Oxford University research has found.

There are some ideas that just won’t die. Like the villain in a movie, even when they’ve been shot with the bullets of refutation, scalded by heated discourse, and pushed off into the pool of disproven theories, these ideas still claw their way back, bedraggled and screaming, to attack us one more time.

For decades scientists have grappled with one of our planet’s greatest biogeographical mysteries: how the geologic history of the Amazon River basin has shaped its magnificent ecosystem. Now new research describes sedimentary evidence from eastern Colombia and northwestern Brazil that suggests the enormous basin was covered by ocean water at least twice in the past.

T he oxygen-poor “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico may be the biggest on record this year, nearly doubling in size to cover an area of ocean as large as Vermont, scientists at Louisiana State University estimate.

According to researchers at Aalto University, by using suitable systems, more than 80 percent of heating energy for Finnish households could be produced using solar energy. As the price of heating energy obtained from solar heating systems needed to be competitive with the currently used heating alternatives, calculations made by researchers showed that renewable energy could be used to cover 53 to 81 percent of annual domestic heating energy consumption depending on the technical implementation method.

Around the world, countries are claiming obscure and difficult-to-reach tracts of the deep-sea floor, far from the surface and further still from land. Why?

There is a long history of claiming newly discovered territories, of planting the flag at far outposts of the known world.

Corn is grown not only for food, it is also an important renewable energy source. Renewable biofuels can come with hidden economic and environmental issues, and the question of whether corn is better utilized as food or as a biofuel has persisted since ethanol came into use. For the first time, researchers at the University of Illinois have quantified and compared these issues in terms of economics of the entire production system to determine if the benefits of biofuel corn outweigh the costs.

Most cars and trucks in the United States run on a blend of 90 percent gasoline and 10 percent ethanol, a renewable fuel made primarily from fermented corn. But to produce the 14 billion gallons of ethanol consumed annually by American drivers requires millions of acres of farmland.

Fusion power has the potential to provide clean and safe energy that is free from carbon dioxide emissions. However, imitating the solar energy process is a difficult task to achieve.