Newsdesk Archive
In 2007, plant biologists passionately argued the meaning of the word “neurobiology.” The year before, an article published in Trends in Plant Science had announced the debut of a new scientific field: plant neurobiology. The authors suggested that electrical potentials and hormone transport in plants bore similarities to animal neuronal signaling, an idea that raised the hackles of many a botanist.
The idea that dogs are more intelligent than cats has been called into question.
Japanese scientists say cats are as good as dogs at certain memory tests, suggesting they may be just as smart.
Dogs appear to prefer reggae and soft rock over other genres of music, according to researchers.
The Scottish SPCA and the University of Glasgow have published a paper which suggests music affects dogs' behaviour.
In a twist on the classic Turning test, scientists have created artificial single-cell organisms able to convince natural cells that they are real.
While this shows that artificial cells can indeed communicate with living organisms, the researchers note that there is more work to be done.
Draper is creating genetically modified, bionic, dragonfly drones who will help with pollination by using flashing lights to guide their movement.
If this development seems more science fiction, that's because it does resemble an episode of Black Mirror, but hopefully without the sinister twist.
The robots of the future will be coming soon, rolling along at a lumbering pace with those goods you just ordered.
The six-wheeled, knee-high robots from startup Starship Technologies are part of a new wave of automated systems taking aim at the "last mile" delivery of goods to consumers.
The 20-day poker tournament between four human pros and an artificial intelligence program concluded last night. The AI, named Libratus, was created by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and bested its opponents by $1.76 million in chips. “The best AI’s ability to do strategic reasoning with imperfect information has now surpassed that of the best humans,”
In music, you have scales. In Jiu Jitsu, it’s drilling. Most of us just call it practice. Whatever you label it, many believe that greatness, heck even mere competency, requires training a skill well past proficiency. It's continuing to practice your free throw even after you've nailed every shot. It's playing through that song one more time even though you've made no mistakes.
Who needs Mensa? If you want to find out if someone has a high IQ, just tell them a string of sick jokes and then gauge their reaction.
A new study in the journal Cognitive Processing has found that intelligence plays a key role in the appreciation of black humour – as well as several other factors, notably a person’s aggression levels.
You might think being naked surrounded by a group of total strangers would make you more self-conscious about your body.
But it seems the opposite is true.
Have you ever felt weighed down by your material possessions? The boundless variety of stuff that humans manufacture — tractors, buildings, ballpoint pens, Hello Kitty backpacks — has serious heft: 30 trillion metric tons, a new study estimates. That’s about 50 kilograms for every square meter of Earth’s surface.
Police from 18 countries have recovered more than 3,500 stolen works of art and ancient artefacts of “great cultural importance” in an operation last year, according to the European police agency.
In ancient Rome, the patricians (from the Latin word patres, meaning ‘fathers’) were one of the main classes of Roman society. They were the ruling class, and enjoyed great prestige as well as special privileges, which they gladly lorded over the other inhabitants of Rome – for as long as they could.
Ancient Mayans went through two periods of collapse. The first — called the Preclassic collapse — occurred in the second century A.D., and the second — called the Classic Maya collapse — occurred in the ninth century A.D., when many of the ancient civilization’s cities were abandoned.
An ancient network of roads that stretched over 150 miles has been discovered in the jungle of Guatemala, according to high-tech scanning carried out in the area.
Used by the Maya for travel and transporting goods, the causeways were identified in the Mirador Basin, which lies in the far northern Petén region of Guatemala, within the largest tract of virgin tropical forest remaining in Central America.
An amazing collection of ancient seeds, some up to 10,000 years old, was saved from harm and destruction in Syria after a group of scientists in Aleppo managed to smuggle their valuable stockpile out of the country. Syria is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, and some of the seed varieties date back to the dawn of agriculture in the Fertile Crescent.
Islamic State militants have destroyed a tetrapylon and part of a Roman theatre in the ancient city of Palmyra in the group’s latest attack on Syria’s heritage.
“This is a horror film and we will see more of it, as long as the city is under their control it will remain a hostage,” said Maamoun Abdulkarim, the country’s director of antiquities.
Now that Republicans have quietly drawn a path to give away much of Americans’ public land, US representative Jason Chaffetz of Utah has introduced what the Wilderness Society is calling “step two” in the GOP’s plan to offload federal property.
The earth is currently in the midst of a mass extinction. Experts suggest that by the middle of the century, as many as two-thirds of the planet’s species could be extinct. The most likely cause of this sobering phenomenon is climate change, which is throwing off the balance of natural ecosystems and forcing animals to migrate or adapt to changing weather conditions.
Despite these facts, Republican leaders in the US have signaled that they intend to roll back the influence of the Endangered Species Act, claiming it is not being used as Congress intended when it passed the law in 1973. An Australian professor has suggested a different approach to the problem: privatizing wildlife.
Mika Peck, a conservation ecologist at England's University of Sussex, was frustrated. He'd been researching and publishing papers for years on the near-extinction of the Ecuadoran brown-headed spider monkey, and not much was happening to change the primate's extremely threatened status.
Not much, that is, until he started connecting the monkeys to gourmet chocolate.
Why do people commonly go out of their way to do something nice for another person, even when it comes at a cost to themselves—and how could such altruistic behavior have evolved? The answer may not just be in our genes, but also in our microbes.
The growth of bacteria can be stimulated by antibiotics, scientists at the University of Exeter have discovered.
The EPSRC-funded researchers exposed E.coli bacteria to eight rounds of antibiotic treatment over four days and found the bug - which can cause severe stomach pain, diarrhoea and kidney failure in humans - had increased antibiotic resistance with each treatment.
Healthy microbes make for a healthy coral reef. And if that microbiological community is disrupted by overfishing, pollution or climate change, it can contribute to the decline of reefs.
The first pictures of a huge coral reef system discovered in the Amazon last year have been released by environmental campaigners.
The Amazon Reef is a 9,500 sq km (3,600 sq miles) system of corals, sponges and rhodoliths, Greenpeace says.
It has long been established that approximately 85 percent of the Earth's core is made of iron, while nickel makes up an additional 10 percent. Details of the final 5 percent - believed to be some amount of light elements - has, until now, eluded scientists.
Scientists have confirmed the existence of a “lost continent” under the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius that was left-over by the break-up of the supercontinent, Gondwana, which started about 200 million years ago.
An image of a 'dome' in Antarctica has sparked claims there was once a civilisation living in the frozen continent.
The picture, which is said to be from Google Earth, shows an oval-shaped structure that is believed be 400 foot (121 metres) across.
Creepy footage showing 'a fleet of UFOs' hovering over the border between the USA and Mexico has mysteriously disappeared from the internet.
The 14 minute-long film showed a group of seven or eight lights dancing above a border control post in Tijuana, Mexico.
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In 1950, physicist Enrico Fermi asked a very important question over lunch at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Based on the number of galaxies we know exist, how many stars are inside those galaxies, and how many planets potentially orbit those stars, probability states that there should be alien life.
So, where is everybody?
A UK, Canadian and Italian study has provided what researchers believe is the first observational evidence that our universe could be a vast and complex hologram.
Theoretical physicists and astrophysicists, investigating irregularities in the cosmic microwave background (the 'afterglow' of the Big Bang), have found there is substantial evidence supporting a holographic explanation of the universe - in fact, as much as there is for the traditional explanation of these irregularities using the theory of cosmic inflation.
Alt: Lost in space? A brief guide to the ‘holographic principle’ of the universe
New measurements of neutrino oscillations, observed at the IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the South Pole, have shed light on outstanding questions regarding fundamental properties of neutrinos. The findings could help fill key gaps in the Standard Model, the theory that describes the behavior of fundamental particles at every energy scale scientists have been able to measure.
A team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in Japan, examining data from that country's moon-orbiting Kaguya spacecraft, has found evidence of oxygen from Earth's atmosphere making its way to the surface of the moon for a few days every month. In their paper published in the journal Nature Astronomy, the researchers describe what data from the spacecraft revealed.
Alt: Traces of Oxygen on the Moon Come from Earth's Plants
The Earth may be leaving its mark on the moon in more ways than previously thought.
A little bit of oxygen from our planet's atmosphere is escaping and ending up on the lunar surface, according to new research – and this may have been happening for billions of years.
It’s no longer just a wild theory. Two independent teams of physicists have followed a recipe to build the world’s first versions of an enigmatic form of matter – time crystals.
Tying a knot can be tricky. Just ask any kid struggling with shoelaces. And scientists have it even harder when they try to make knots using tiny molecules.
Now, in the journal Science, a team of chemists says it has made a huge advance — manipulating molecules to create the tightest knot ever.
For the first time, researchers have filmed light creating a ‘sonic boom’ - officially known as a photonic Mach cone - using a new type of ultra-speed camera that can capture an incredible trillion frames per second in just one take.
There’s a known rule-breaker among materials, and a new discovery by an international team of scientists adds more evidence to back up the metal’s nonconformist reputation. According to a new study led by scientists at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and at the University of California, Berkeley, electrons in vanadium dioxide can conduct electricity without conducting heat.
Doctors have used a brain-reading device to hold simple conversations with “locked-in” patients in work that promises to transform the lives of people who are too disabled to communicate.
The testing of injecting RNA into Alzheimer's patients to reduce the levels of tau proteins is a possible new treatment for the more than 5.1 million people living with Alzheimer's.
The treatment has shown some limitation in the testing done on chimps, more testing will be done on primates to discern the safety and efficacy on humans.
Eating your five-a-day could help prevent Alzheimer’s, a new study suggests, after scientists found people who were deficient in vitamin A were more likely to develop the disease.
Scientists monitored more than 300 elderly people in China and discovered that those with higher levels of the vitamin were 60 per cent less likely to have developed dementia.
The concept of being able to predict the sex of a baby during early pregnancy or even influence it by eating or doing certain things when trying to conceive has been the subject of public fascination and debate for many centuries. But surely the sex of a foetus is exclusively determined by the father’s sperm, carrying an X chromosome for girls and a Y chromosome for boys?
Depending on which economist you ask, big inequalities in wealth are either an essential engine for growth—the reward that motivates people to work hard, innovate, and prosper—or a ticking time bomb capable of unleashing mass misery, social upheaval, or even violent revolution.
Related: The Key to Good Luck Is an Open Mind
Whoever discards this image from the presence of Salmanu puts it into another place, whether he throws it into water or covers it with earth or brings and places it into a taboo house where it is inaccessible, may the god Salmanu, the great lord, overthrow his sovereignty; may his name and his seed disappear in the land; may he live in a contingent together with the slave women of his land
These are the translated words of the curse etched onto an ancient Assyrian artifact dating back to 800 BC
The caves were hidden high above Alaska’s Bluefish River, at the base of a limestone ridge in the middle of a sprawling wilderness. When a helicopter reconnaissance of the river spotted the caves in 1975, it may well have been thousands of years since the last humans entered them—or so hoped archaeologist Jacques Cinq-Mars.
Legend has it that hundreds of years ago, a rich, powerful city stood in the jungle of what is now eastern Honduras. Then, suddenly, all of the residents vanished, and the abandoned city became a cursed place?—?anyone who entered risked death.
In a captivating real-life adventure tale, journalist and novelist Douglas Preston argues that the legend is not complete fiction. The Lost City of the Monkey God is his firsthand account of the expedition that uncovered the sites of at least two large cities, along with other settlements, that may form the basis of the “White City” myth. Even the curse might be rooted in reality.
TITANIC director James Cameron thinks he’s found Atlantis. His documentary team has stumbled upon a cluster of six 4000-year-old anchors just outside the entrance to the Mediterranean.
Myth? History? Or just a good storytelling opportunity?
An international team of anthropologists has uncovered a 38,000-year-old engraved image in a southwestern French rockshelter—a finding that marks some of the earliest known graphic imagery found in Western Eurasia and offers insights into the nature of modern humans during this period.
The presence of water on ancient Mars is a paradox. There’s plenty of geographical evidence that rivers periodically flowed across the planet’s surface. Yet in the time period when these waters are supposed to have run — three to four billion years ago — Mars should have been too cold to support liquid water.
The arrival of water on our planet wasn’t a last-minute job.
Water came to Earth on icy comets after most of the planet and its core were formed, about 4.5 billion years ago, according to a leading theory.
Our planet may be blue from the inside out. Earth’s huge store of water might have originated via chemical reactions in the mantle, rather than arriving from space through collisions with ice-rich comets.
This new water may be under such pressure that it can trigger earthquakes hundreds of kilometres below Earth’s surface – tremors whose origins have so far remained unexplained.
More than 13,000 feet under the sea, scientists have found a volcanic wonderland unlike any other place on Earth.
The newfound ecosystem is crawling with life—hairy snails, ghostly shrimp, and weird worms—including some species that may be new to science.
'The first time we can really say we expect offshore wind to be in the next decade on the same sort of cost structure as other power generators'
The cost of electricity produced by offshore wind turbines has fallen by a third in just four years, according to a new report.
A new way to extract radioactivity from water could help purify the hundreds of millions of gallons of contaminated water stored after the Fukushima nuclear plant accident, say researchers.
Two children treated with gene-edited cells to kill their cancers are both doing well more than a year later. The baby girls were both given the experimental treatment only as a last resort, but clinical trials of the therapy are now getting underway in children and adults in the UK.
Imagine if your doctor’s office was more like an Apple Store mashed up with a fancy gym: a modern white-and-wood aesthetic, replete with fancy gadgets and gleaming touch screens, for which you paid a monthly fee to visit as often as you wished.
Mindfulness meditation, the practice of paying more attention to the present moment, helps lower stress hormones and decreases inflammation in the body, scientists have proven for the first time.
The training has been growing in popularity in recent years, with the NHS recommending mindfulness as a way to reduce stress and anxiety.
Scientists want to know if astronauts can hibernate during long spaceflights. First, they need to understand what hibernation is
For five teams racing to reach the moon, it’s 2017 or bust.
Today, X Prize and Google announced that just five of 33 initial teams have secured an elusive—yet essential—launch contract, which means they have rides on rockets that will send them toward the moon, and so they are able to vie for the coveted Google Lunar XPRIZE.
A laser-driven tidal wave could test a question that has long plagued physics: is the information inside a black hole lost forever or somehow preserved through the mysterious machinations of quantum mechanics?
The defining feature of a black hole is thought to be that anything that crosses the event horizon – the proverbial point of no return – can never escape and is lost forever.
If multiverses seem weird, it’s because we need to revamp our notions of time and space.
The name of the image—the “Flammarion engraving”—may not ring a bell, but you’ve seen it many times. It depicts a traveler wearing a cloak and clutching a walking-stick; behind him is a varied landscape of towns and trees; surrounding all is a crystalline shell fretted with countless stars.
To most people, crystals mean diamond bling, semiprecious gems or perhaps the jagged amethyst or quartz crystals beloved by collectors.
To Norman Yao, these inert crystals are the tip of the iceberg.
For nearly 100 years, scientists have dreamed of turning the lightest of all the elements, hydrogen, into a metal.
Now, in a stunning act of modern-day alchemy, scientists at Harvard University have finally succeeded in creating a tiny amount of what is the rarest, and possibly most valuable, material on the planet, they reported in the journal Science.
Astronomers have just made a new measurement of the Hubble Constant, the rate at which the universe is expanding, and it doesn't quite line up with a different estimate of the same number. That discrepancy could hint at "new physics" beyond the standard model of cosmology
Alt: Speedy universe expansion challenges Einstein’s theory
It is microscopic, looks a bit like a jellyfish, and survives in a place that would kill every other known animal species
In 2010, it seemed that biology textbooks would have to be rewritten. At the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea, in one of the most extreme environments on Earth, one research team found evidence of an animal able to live its entire life without oxygen.
A new study to be published in the scientific journal New Phytologist reveals that plants' odour bouquet changes depending on the type of enemy that attacks it. To the surprise of the researchers involved, native plants emit a special odour bouquet when they are attacked by exotic herbivores.
The effects of building a massive concrete wall range from increased emissions to blocked wildlife migration routes
Alt: Donald Trump's Great Wall on Mexican border will damage environment in 'insane act of self-sabotage'
“Make mud, not war.” That was the slogan of the American 54th Weather Reconnaissance Squad, the first military force to engage in weather warfare.
Throughout the Vietnam War, they flew 2,602 missions, releasing silver iodide, a compound that seeded clouds and exacerbated monsoons—or so the thinking went.
Tree crops like pistachios, peaches and almonds need a certain amount of cold weather every year. But scientists say that California's climate may become too warm for them to grow there
With climate change in our own era becoming increasingly evident, it's natural to wonder how our ancestors may have dealt with similar environmental circumstances. New research methods and technologies are able to shed light on climate patterns that took place thousands of years ago, giving us a new perspective on how cultures of the time coped with variable and changing environments.
Related: Moenjodaro 360 – A walkthrough of the ancient civilisation
The grave of an aristocratic woman and child in the south of Germany has been dated to 583 BCE, making it 2,600 years old.
A medieval skeleton found at a UK burial site has revealed clues to the history of leprosy, say researchers.
The remains were excavated from the site of one of UK's earliest known hospitals, near Winchester, Hampshire.
A gruesome and seemingly unique mutilation has emerged from a Roman Britain burial site in Northamptonshire – the skeleton of a man whose tongue had apparently been amputated and replaced with a flat stone wedged into his mouth.
Manipulative, dishonest and lacking in empathy – the traits that describe a psychopath aren’t particularly pleasant. But the idea that they are also fiendishly clever – as often portrayed in films and TV – isn’t quite true. In fact, in general, psychopaths seem to have below-average intelligence.
Elderly women who sit for more than 10 hours a day with low physical activity have cells that are biologically older than their chronological age by eight years compared to women who are less sedentary, research shows.
Related: The benefits of going bald: Men with less hair appear more intelligent, educated and honest
It was considered a teenager among the stars. But now one thing has become clear: this celestial object was formed when our galaxy was born. Why did researchers get it wrong for many decades?
Alien planets that orbit especially close to their stars have a bigger chance of losing their moons, which may reduce the chances that habitable alien moons will survive for very long around those planets, a new study finds.
Venus is completely shrouded by cloud, making it hard to see the surface below — but the clouds themselves are revealing some fascinating secrets about Earth's toxic twin.
The Earth’s magnetic field surrounds our planet like an invisible force field – protecting life from harmful solar radiation by deflecting charged particles away. Far from being constant, this field is continuously changing. Indeed, our planet’s history includes at least several hundred global magnetic reversals, where north and south magnetic poles swap places. So when’s the next one happening and how will it affect life on Earth?
The pressure of deep-ocean sound waves could be used to stop tsunamis in their tracks, researchers have found, by dissipating their energy across wider areas and reducing the height and speed of these monster waves before they reach land.
What price do we pay for civilization? For Walter Scheidel, a professor of history and classics at Stanford, civilization has come at the cost of glaring economic inequality since the Stone Age. The sole exception, in his account, is widespread violence – wars, pandemics, civil unrest; only violent shocks like these have substantially reduced inequality over the millennia.
Related: Stark inequality: Oxfam says 8 men as rich as half the world
Some of the wealthiest people in America—in Silicon Valley, New York, and beyond—are getting ready for the crackup of civilization
The minute hand on the Doomsday Clock ticked closer to midnight Thursday, as the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists said it's seeing an increase in dangers to humanity, from climate change to nuclear warfare. The group took the "unprecedented" step of moving the clock 30 seconds closer to midnight, to leave it at 2 1/2 minutes away.
Alt: The Doomsday Clock is now 2.5 minutes to midnight, but what does that really mean?
Should a comet be detected on a collision course with Earth, we'd have very little time to prepare, but our stockpile of nuclear warheads could be repurposed as insurance against this existential threat.
WHEN you need to save Earth from an incoming asteroid, try shooting at its bright spots. A new analysis of fragments of the Chelyabinsk meteor, which exploded over Russia in 2013, suggests that firing something at an asteroid’s lighter areas may be the best way to deflect it.
A newfound asteroid about the size of a bus zipped safely by Earth late Tuesday (Jan. 24), just days after its discovery.
The asteroid 2017 BX buzzed by Earth at a range of 162,252 miles (261,119 kilometers) — about 30 percent closer than the distance between the Earth and the moon
When a giant asteroid careened into Earth about 66 million years ago, the enormous collision led to the formation of an airborne "curtain" of sulfate molecules that blocked the sun's light and led to years of freezing cold and darkness, a new study finds.
Around 471 million years ago, life in our oceans exploded with new species. It was one of the greatest biodiversification events in our planet's history - but a new study suggests that, contrary to popular belief, this important moment in evolution wasn't triggered by meteorites.
It’s been said that the pterosaur, which can only be described as a bird-reptile-dinosaur-esque-thing, was the largest flying animal. This giant beast—which roamed the Earth during the Cretaceous period roughly 66.5 million years ago—was a reptile but not actually a dinosaur. Despite being winged, it wasn’t bird, either.
Alt: Giant flying reptile was top predator like a winged T. rex
The newly discovered “mighty traveler of Egg Mountain” is an ancient lizard that lived 75 million years ago.
That’s 10 million years before dinosaurs went extinct.
During the last Ice Age, Australia, Tasmania and New Guinea formed a single landmass, called Sahul. It was a strange and often hostile place populated by a bizarre cast of giant animals.
The 100-million-year-old remains of an alien-looking female insect — complete with a triangular head and bulging eyes — have been discovered encased in a glob of hardened resin called amber.
Researchers have identified a new species of wasp - and its rear end looks like an ant's head.
The researchers based at University of Turku in Finland named the wasp Clistopyga caramba, after the Spanish phrase 'Ay caramba!' used to express astonishment - describing the feeling the researchers felt when they saw the wasp for the first time.
Wasps have trading partners and compete for the 'best trade deals' - according to scientists from the University of Sussex.
In the study, the team from the University's School of Life Sciences, looked at how the economic rule of 'supply and demand' applies to populations of paper wasps
Scientists have created a human-pig hybrid in a milestone study that raises the prospect of being able to grow human organs inside animals for use in transplants.
Alt: The first human-pig hybrid embryo has been created in the lab
TRANSPLANT waiting lists could become a thing of the past if we could find a way to grow human organs inside other animals. Now mouse pancreases have been grown inside rats – a first step towards a ready supply of organs for transplant.
What is the smartest species in the world? You might think it's humans by a long shot, but the reality is a lot more complicated.
Frans de Waal, a primatologist at Emory University, has a new book out called Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? and in it he gives hundreds of examples of surprising intelligence from non-human species, including many instances where other animals appear to be smarter than we are.
Related: The 'almost human' gorilla who drank tea and went to school
Last September a paper came to the intriguing conclusion horses can understand abstract symbols. In a nutshell, horses learned how they could point to three symbols to let their caretakers know if the horses needed a blanket, or wanted their blanket taken off, or leave well enough alone. When the horses realized their demands were getting through the humans's thick skulls, they lined up to participate in the study to promote interspecies communication.
Scientists have created bacteria that thrive using an expanded "genetic alphabet".
The blueprint for all life forms on Earth is written in a code consisting of four "letters": A, T, C and G, which pair up in the DNA double helix.
The body keeps working to repair itself after death, according to a provocative new study that could offer insight into how we might put the big sleep on hold.
REM sleep is known to help solidify memories, but the mechanism for making memories more permanent is not well-understood. A recent study published in Nature Neuroscience shows that, during REM sleep, some of the structures neurons use to make connections with each other are pruned, while others are maintained and strengthened.