Newsdesk Archive
An electromagnetic parallel exists between our brains and our atmosphere.
Hermes Trismegistus, thought to be an an ancient Egyptian philosopher, wrote "That which is Below corresponds to that which is Above, and that which is Above corresponds to that which is Below…” The phrase has been summarized as “As above, so below.”
Astronomers have detected a new "hot Jupiter" exoplanet orbiting a nearby T Tauri star known as TAP 26. The newly detected alien world, designated TAP 26 b, is about 66 percent more massive than Jupiter and is orbiting its parent star approximately every 10 days. The findings were presented in a paper published Jan. 6 on arXiv.org.
Freezing temperatures and a blanket of darkness spelled the end for the non-avian dinosaurs roughly 66 million years ago, according to a new study that suggests this massive extinction period was far more complicated than we thought.
A small team of researchers in the U.S. has found evidence in rock samples that suggests that oxygen levels during the Lomagundi Event were high enough to support the advancement of life on Earth.
Microbes that rank among the simplest and most ancient organisms on Earth could survive the extremely thin air of Mars, a new study finds.
The Martian surface is presently cold and dry, but there is plenty of evidence suggesting that rivers, lakes and seas covered the Red Planet billions of years ago. Since there is life virtually wherever there is liquid water on Earth, scientists have suggested that life might have evolved on Mars when it was wet, and life could be there even now.
NASA’s Curiosity rover may have found its third meteorite on Mars. This image, taken on 12 January as the rover explored a peak called Mount Sharp, appears to show an iron-nickel meteorite, one of only a handful spotted on the Red Planet.
Russia's space program and NASA are working together on a mission to Venus that would investigate some of the scorching-hot planet's biggest mysteries, including, perhaps, whether it harbors life.
A massive bow-shaped 'bulge' has been spotted in the upper atmosphere of Venus, and astronomers are trying to explain how it could withstand the gush of sulphuric acid clouds that are spinning faster than the planet itself.
Their best guess is that the strange, 10,000-km (6,214-mile) structure is the result of what could be the largest gravity wave ever witnessed in the Solar System, but there’s one problem - scientists didn’t think gravity waves could form this high up in the atmosphere.
An elongated coronal hole stretching across the face of the sun sent solar wind particles gushing toward Earth last week.
NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory has revealed a stunning animation of the phenomenon, showing the massive dark patch marring the surface of our star.
The sun has been in the same routine for at least 290 million years, new research suggests.
Ancient tree rings from the Permian period record a roughly 11-year cycle of wet and dry periods, climate fluctuations caused by the ebbing and flowing of solar activity, researchers propose January 9 in Geology. The discovery would push back the earliest evidence of today’s 11-year solar cycle by tens of millions of years.
The country is poised to cash in on one of its most valuable assets. But at what cost?
Related: Expert Warning: Current Conservation Efforts Won’t Save Tropical Forests
Forty of the world's biggest companies assembled in Davos agreed on Monday to come up with cleaner ways to make and consume plastic as waste threatens the global eco-system, especially in oceans.
One of the most commonly used arguments against human-caused climate change is that Earth has experienced severe fluctuations in temperature over its 4.5-billion-year lifespan, so it doesn’t make sense to start freaking out about it now.
Alt: Earth Temperature Timeline, XKCD
It’s a new low point. The area of the world’s oceans covered by floating sea ice is the smallest recorded since satellite monitoring began in the 1970s. That means it is also probably the lowest it has been for thousands of years.
The latest observations from the US National Snow & Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado, show how the ice extent has fallen to a new low this year (bright red trace in the graph below).
One of the major questions facing us today is how the present ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica will react to climate change. Simply put, the more we understand of the mechanisms that drove ice sheets to collapse in the past, the better we will be able to predict what will happen in the future.
Alt: Inception of the last ice age
The Popol Vuh, a corpus of mythological and historical narratives according to the Quiché-Maya people, and Izapa Stela 5, a carved stela found at the ancient Mesoamerican site of Izapa in Mexico, provide a fascinating insight into Mexican history. In fact, together, they may reveal that some of the ancestors of the Quiché-Maya came from across the sea.
The third of six sunken Spanish ships that were lost in a hurricane in 1559 has been discovered off the coast of Pensacola, Florida.
Ancient Egyptians who buried their deceased kin in pots may have chosen the burial vessels as symbols of the womb and rebirth, scientists argue in a new paper.
Egypt will restore hundreds of coffins dating back thousands of years to the time of the pharaohs as part of an American-Egyptian project to preserve and document one of the world’s oldest civilisations, a director of the project said.
There are hundreds of books with illustrations of the earliest human artworks. Images of bison, mammoth, lions and horses from famous cave sites like Chauvet, Lascaux, Altamira and Rouffignac shine out from these pages.
Maybe this Neanderthal was a rock hound?
An international group that includes a University of Kansas researcher has discovered a brownish piece of split limestone in a site in Croatia that suggests Neanderthals 130,000 years ago collected the rock that stands out among all other items in the cave.
A 600-year-old Buddha statue has been discovered in a reservoir in east China's Jiangxi Province after water levels fell during renovation work.
A local villager first spotted the head of the Buddha last month when the water level fell by more than 10 meters during work on a hydropower gate, official state news agency Xinhua reported.
An artificial intelligence headset that records your brain waves and then composes original music tailor-made to improve your mood has been developed by Japanese scientists.
The synthesized music is meant to possess the power to uplift a person's feelings.
Alt: The AI that can write a symphony just for you: Headset claims to be able to lift wearer's mood with a personalized score made from their brain waves
Facebook already has your name, your friends and your photographs: now it might want your thoughts too.
Job advertisements posted in California suggest that the social network is planning to develop telepathic technology that can read brain waves - a way of sharing that would go far beyond status updates or sharing holiday snaps.
Alt: Facebook has a mysterious team working on tech that sounds a lot like mind reading
By mimicking the way neurons fire in the hippocampus during natural memory creation, a brain implant was used to successfully plant memories in the brains of rats.
Though human implementation is far off, this breakthrough in cracking the hippocampus' mathematical "memory code" has very important implications for health and research.
A new technique for programming human stem cells to produce different types of tissue on demand may ultimately allow personalized organs to be grown for transplant patients.
Related: Human Organs-on-Chips
When Samantha Deffler was young, her mother would often call her by her siblings' names — even the dog's name. "Rebecca, Jesse, Molly, Tucker, Samantha," she says.
A lot of people mix up children's names or friends' names, but Deffler is a cognitive scientist at Rollins College, in Winter Park, Fla., and she wanted to find out why it happens.
Past research has shown that we have a very limited capacity to perform two or more tasks at the same time and brainpower suffers when we try.
But my new study suggests that some people are better at multitasking online than others. Being able to switch between multiple web pages and successfully find what you want all comes down to how good your working memory is.
People with synesthesia experience the sensory world in a unique way — for example, they "taste" words or "hear" colors. Now, new research suggests that people who learn a second language but aren't exposed to that second language very early in life are more likely to have this sensory-switching ability than those who are natively bilingual.
Related: Bilingualism may save brain resources as you age
Related: Babies remember their birth language - scientists
One in five people is affected by a synaesthesia-like phenomenon in which visual movements or flashes of light are “heard” as faint sounds, according to scientists.
The findings suggest that far more people than initially thought experience some form of sensory cross-wiring – which could explain the appeal of flashing musical baby toys and strobed lighting at raves.
Research finds darker skin is associated with perceptions of evil
In two initial studies, the researchers specifically looked at whether the media tends to run darker photographs of celebrities and politicians when writing about their transgressions.
Suicide rates have been rising alarmingly in the U.S. and have reached a 30-year peak of 13 per 100,000 people, according to a 2016 report by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. As psychologists and public health officials scramble to find solutions, Michael Nadorff, a psychologist at Mississippi State University, argues that one treatable risk factor has been hiding in the dark: nightmares.
The great voyages of discovery, when seafarers such as Magellan and Cook conquered the world’s oceans, brought immense wealth and knowledge to Europe. But they came at a high price. More sailors died of scurvy—more than three times as many—as soldiers were killed in the American Civil War.
Have you tried the national dish gofio while on holiday on the Canary Islands? If so, you have eaten the same food as the original inhabitants ate, nearly 2,000 years ago. The island farmers have cultivated the same types of grain for over a thousand years.
Archaeologists working in Israel at a two-room military fortification dating back to the tenth century BCE, the time of King Solomon’s and David’s reigns, continue to discover new information. Discovered in 2014 in Israel’s Timna Valley, the gatehouse complex which included livestock pens, was built using heavy stones to defend against invaders.
Death during pregnancy or childbirth would have been common in the ancient world, but these stories are often invisible in the archaeological record. However, in a new study of ancient DNA, researchers reported evidence of a woman who died of a pregnancy complication — specifically, a fatal bacterial infection — 800 years ago at Troy.
Who needs men? A female shark separated from her long-term mate has developed the ability to have babies on her own.
Alt: Leopard shark makes world-first switch from sexual to asexual reproduction
They’re back. Scimitar-horned oryx have been reintroduced to the wild after a two-decade absence and are flourishing in their old stomping grounds.
The desert antelopes were once widespread across northern Africa, but were hunted to extinction in their natural habitat in the 1990s.
Caspian tigers, some of the largest cats that ever lived -- up to 10 feet long and weighing more than 300 pounds -- met a grim end in the middle of the 20th century.
Until the mid-1960s when they were designated as extinct, they ranged from modern-day Turkey through much of Central Asia, including Iran and Iraq, to northwestern China. The reasons for their extermination are many
The first ever recorded video footage showing snow leopards and common leopards sharing the same habitat on the Tibetan plateau has caused concern among conservationists.
A chemical that is thought to be safe and is, therefore, widely used on crops—such as almonds, wine grapes and tree fruits—to boost the performance of pesticides, makes honey bee larvae significantly more susceptible to a deadly virus, according to researchers at Penn State and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has designated the rusty patched bumblebee an endangered species — the first such designation for a bumblebee and for a bee species in the continental U.S.
A new study has found that the same chemical that gives New Zealand manuka honey its unique antibacterial properties is present in Australian varieties as well.
Because bacteria doesn't develop a resistance to this chemical, manuka honey could prove to be an invaluable tool in the global fight against antibiotic resistance.
For years, researchers have been tracking a particularly nasty family of superbugs called CREs, or carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae, which can thwart antibiotics in our last lines of defense. Researchers have watched in horror as clinical isolates gathered new molecular weaponry, spread through medical facilities across the globe, and started causing more and more life-threatening infections.
A new tool -- a type of ultraviolet light called UVC -- could aid hospitals in the ongoing battle to keep drug-resistant bacteria from lingering in patient rooms and causing new infections.
Duke researchers genetically modified Salmonella typhimurium to fight one of the most aggressive forms of brain cancer: Glioblastoma.
Lab tests in rats with extreme cases of glioblastoma showed an astonishing 20 percent survival rate, with the tumors going into remission over a period of 100 days.
MIT engineers have genetically reprogrammed a strain of yeast so that it converts sugars to fats much more efficiently, an advance that could make possible the renewable production of high-energy fuels such as diesel.
In a world struggling to kick its addiction to fossil fuels and feed its growing appetite for energy, there's one technology in development that almost sounds too good to be true: nuclear fusion.
Fracking creates noise at levels high enough to harm the health of people living nearby, according to the first peer-reviewed study to analyze the potential public health impacts of ambient noise related to fracking.
A chronic inflammatory process that occurs in some, but not all, older people may trigger cardiovascular problems, a new Stanford study shows. Part of the solution might be found in a cup of coffee.
Alt: How Your Morning Coffee Might Slow Down Aging
It's January, the month of new diets and gym memberships. In the spirit of starting off a brand new year, there's no reason not to eat healthier and move around more. But if your aim is just to lose pounds, you might be on the wrong track. In her new book, The Secret Life of Fat, biochemist Sylvia Tara reveals what many dieters have suspected for a long time: There's more to losing weight than just eating less and exercise.
Flies with a history of eating a high sugar diet live shorter lives, even after their diet improves. This is because the unhealthy diet drives long-term reprogramming of gene expression, according to a team of researchers.
Put down the cake. Going on a permanent diet could make you live longer, if findings from monkeys hold true for people.
A long-running trial in macaques has found that calorie restriction makes them live about three years longer than normal, which would translate to about nine years in people.
There are some 200 different types of cells in the body, but they can all be traced back to stem cells. Before they differentiated into heart, liver, blood, immune cells, and more, they were called pluripotent, meaning they could become anything.
With its catalogue of headstands and one-legged contortions, it might be thought yoga was best left only to those in peak physical condition.
Acupuncture may be an effective treatment option for babies with infantile colic -- those who cry for more than three hours a day on three or more days of the week -- reveals research.
When we feel ostracised, we’re more likely to behave aggressively. Previous research suggests that vengeance on those who we think have wronged us can be driven by a sense of justice, and may activate neural reward centres. But being ostracised can also lead to generalised aggression, even lashing out at unrelated people, so there seems to be more going on.
People who cram all their exercise into one or two sessions at the weekend benefit nearly as much as those who work out more frequently, researchers say.
A study of more than 60,000 adults in England and Scotland found that “weekend warriors” lowered their risk of death by a similar margin to those who spread the same amount of exercise over the whole week.
Washington State University researchers have developed a soy-based air filter that can capture toxic chemicals, such as carbon monoxide and formaldehyde, which current air filters can't.
The research could lead to better air purifiers, particularly in regions of the world that suffer from very poor air quality.
Bioengineers at The University of Nottingham are trialling how to use shrimp shells to make biodegradable shopping bags as a 'green' alternative to oil-based plastics, and as a new food packaging material to extend product shelf life.
Forget about oil or gas – you should be worrying about the less discussed but far more concerning fact that the world is running out of clean, drinkable water.
As a new year dawns, it is hard not to be dazzled by the current pace of technological change in food and agriculture. Only last month, news emerged of a crop spray with the potential to increase the starch content in wheat grains, allowing for yield gains of up to 20%. This development comes hot on the heels of major breakthroughs in gene-editing technologies – using a powerful tool known as Crispr – over the course of 2016.
They’ve cracked it. Small ants carry home large seeds to eat all the time, but no one knew exactly how they managed to break through the seeds’ tough exterior.
It turns out that Florida harvester ants, Pogonomyrmex badius, have developed a clever farming strategy to do so – they plant seeds, wait for them to germinate and then eat the soft spoils.
Biologists at UC San Diego who recently found that bacteria resolve social conflicts within their communities and communicate with one another like neurons in the brain have discovered another human-like trait in these apparently not-so-simple, single-celled creatures.
In 1989, the fall of the Iron Curtain and the removal of border fences along the edges of the former Soviet Union wasn’t only the first step in today’s borderless Europe where citizens are able to travel more freely.
Madagascar’s beloved ring-tailed lemurs (Lemur catta) have all but disappeared from many of the island nation’s forests. According to two worrying new studies, the species’ population has fallen to between 2,000 and 2,400 animals—a shocking 95 percent decrease since the year 2000.
A blood-sucking bat that usually looks to birds for its food seems to be adding human blood to its diet, according to a team of scientists in Brazil.
A small team of researchers from Italy, Norway and Austria has found evidence of an ancient extinct goose relative that once lived in what is now central Italy. In their paper published in Royal Society Open Science, the team describes the fossils they found, what they suggest the bird once looked like and possibly how it behaved.
It sounds like something out of Norse mythology, but new evidence suggests that all complex life on Earth, including humans, might have evolved from Asgard - a large group of microbes that were once found all over the world.
66 million years ago, the sudden extinction of the dinosaurs started the ascent of the mammals, ultimately resulting in humankind's reign on Earth. Climate scientists now reconstructed how tiny droplets of sulfuric acid formed high up in the air after the well-known impact of a large asteroid and blocking the sunlight for several years, had a profound influence on life on Earth.
Megalodon, the largest known shark that ever lived, had a taste for small whales and it went extinct when populations of their favorite prey collapsed as the Pliocene Epoch (5.3–2.58 million years ago) drew to a close, new evidence indicates.
Like spicy food? If so, you might live longer, say researchers at the Larner College of Medicine at the University of Vermont, who found that consumption of hot red chili peppers is associated with a 13 percent reduction in total mortality -- primarily in deaths due to heart disease or stroke -- in a large prospective study.
Global life expectancy has now reached an average that’s regularly in the 80s in Japan and Canada —and in the United States it’s reached a high of 78 years.
Have we reached the end of the line when it comes to living longer and healthier lives? Is there a point at which diminishing returns just mean any gains in lifespan are bound to be insignificant and temporary?
By examining the brains of 480 people that died between the ages of 16 and 106, researchers have learned that glial cells experience bigger changes than neurons during aging.
This information could lead to better treatment options for neurological disorders, such as dementia and Alzheimer's, or even ways to combat aging altogether.
The first day of the Brains vs. AI poker tournament is in the books, and the Libratus bot from Carnegie Mellon University emerged as the clear winner, collecting $81,716 to the humans $7,228.
The Pentagon may soon be unleashing a 21st-century version of locusts on its adversaries after officials on Monday said it had successfully tested a swarm of 103 micro-drones.
Every year, the U.S. Army uses hundreds of thousands of rounds of bullets for training purposes. That means plenty of metallic waste—refuse that can take centuries to break down. But one day, that training trash could turn into environmental treasure.
Inside every mouse lurks a natural-born killer. Researchers have identified the brain region that controls hunting, and have found a way to switch it on and off.
A new study reveals that a type of native birdsong, now lost in Britain, can still be heard in New Zealand where the birds were introduced in the 19th century.
By comparing recordings of yellowhammer accents in both countries scientists were able to hear how the birds’ song might have sounded in the UK 150 years ago.
Heavy rains in central Australia have brought to light a mysterious alien looking bug hatching from years of obscurity.
The bug, a remnant of prehistoric time, is a type of crustacean known as a Shield Shrimp, and there is one species in Australia, the Triops australiensis, which is commonly found in the middle of the continent.
Eight smart limbs plus a big brain add up to a weird and wondrous kind of intelligence
Octopus brains and vertebrate brains have no common anatomy but support a variety of similar features, including forms of short- and long-term memory, versions of sleep, and the capacities to recognize individual people and explore objects through play.
Killer whales and humans would seem to have little in common. We inhabit very different ecosystems, after all. Yet the two species share one unexpected biological attribute. Females of Orcinus orca and Homo sapiens both go through the menopause.
Should killer whales Skype? A new study suggests that virtual links between captive orca populations might be one way to improve the lives of these marine mammals.
Related: Dolphins held in captivity escape from Japanese tourist attraction
Japanese scientists find that macaque monkeys, like humans, know the limits of their own memory
Knowing one's limits can be a strength. Just ask Socrates, whose famous paradox is often summed up in the phrase: "I know one thing: that I know nothing."
A group of explorers and archaeologists were struck down by an aggressive tropical disease which eats through the face while uncovering the mysteries of a legendary lost city in Honduras.
Alt: Explorers find disease-cursed City of the Monkey God and nearly lose their faces to flesh-eating parasite
An international team of researchers has found evidence that suggests that Amazonia did not revert to savannah during the last ice age and instead remained forested. In their paper published in the journal Nature, the researchers describe how they retrieved stalagmite samples from a cave in one of the drier parts of Amazonia and used them to calculate not only how dry the area became during the last ice age, but what sorts of vegetation were growing
Australia was once home to giant reptiles, marsupials and birds (and some not so giant), but the extinction of this megafauna has been the subject of a debate that has persisted since the 19th century.
In the village of Nashtifan in northeastern Iran, Mohammad Etebari serves as the last keeper of an ancient tradition. Now elderly, Etebari has dedicated his life to keeping the town’s few dozen historic windmills turning.
Six years ago, Don Cameron, the general manager of Terranova Ranch, southwest of Fresno, Calif., did something that seemed kind of crazy.
In the distant future, America and Asia will collide – forming a new ‘mega continent’ called Amasia.
Computer simulations from Yale University researchers suggest that the continent will form in the far future, around 250 million years from now.
Extraordinary images captured in Canada have shown rare light pillars beaming up to the sky above the houses after a combination of sunshine and snow.
The pillars are caused when temperatures plummet so low that water molecules in the air freeze but remain stationary in vertical shafts.
An unparalleled image from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory is giving an international team of astronomers the best look yet at the growth of black holes over billions of years beginning soon after the Big Bang. This is the deepest X-ray image ever obtained, collected with about 7 million seconds, or 11 and a half weeks, of Chandra observing time.
KIC 8462852, also known as Tabby's star, has baffled scientists for more than a year and given rise to a popular 'alien megastructure' theory. The truth may be just as bizarre.
A mysterious signal that has confounded scientists for years has been traced to a spot in the sky more than 3 billion light-years away.
Almost a decade after the first fast radio burst (FRB) was discovered, an international team of researchers has pinpointed the origin of one such signal as a dwarf galaxy in the pentagon-shaped constellation Auriga.
One might find it curious that we divide the hours into 60 minutes and the days into 24 hours – why not a multiple of 10 or 12? Put quite simply, the answer is because the inventors of time did not operate on a decimal (base-10) or duodecimal (base-12) system but a sexagesimal (base-60) system. For the ancient Sumerian innovators who first divided the movements of the heavens into countable intervals, 60 was the perfect number.
The papers and social media are today full of claims of fake news; back and forth the accusations fly that one side of the political divide in the US has been filling the world with lies in order to discredit the other. We used to call this propaganda; now it’s fake news.
The end of December marked the 100th anniversary of the death of Rasputin, the “mad monk of Russia”, or “lover of the Russian queen” if you believe the Boney M song, though you probably shouldn’t. While the song is undoubtedly a floor-filler, unsurprisingly it is not exactly a reliable historical account of Rasputin’s life.
A hoard of neolithic pottery and flint tools believed to be more than 4,000 years old has been discovered in the east of Scotland.
Related: Archaeologists Unearth 1,500-Year-Old Settlement, Precious Jewelry in England
Related: Fascinating Artifacts Unearthed in TWO Newly Discovered Neighboring Anglo-Saxon Sites in England
8,500-year-old silk found in ancient tombs in China is now the oldest evidence of people using silkworms to create the highly-sought-after textile, pushing the date back for such an occurrence by thousands of years.
Eight hundred years ago, in a hardscrabble farming community on the outskirts of what was once one of the fabled cities of the ancient world, Troy, a 30-year-old woman was laid to rest in a stone-lined grave.
Like others in the Byzantine era graveyard, the woman's bones bore the unmistakable signs of a hard agrarian existence.