Newsdesk Archive
If it sometimes seems like the idea of antibiotic resistance, though unsettling, is more theoretical than real, please read on.
Public health officials from Nevada are reporting on a case of a woman who died in Reno in September from an incurable infection. Testing showed the superbug that had spread throughout her system could fend off 26 different antibiotics.
Retroviruses – the family of viruses that includes HIV – are almost half a billion years old, according to new research by scientists at Oxford University. That's several hundred million years older than previously thought and suggests retroviruses have ancient marine origins, having been with their animal hosts through the evolutionary transition from sea to land.
Two tiny tomatillo fossils have kicked the origin of nightshade plants back to the age of dinosaurs.
The fossils, pressed into 52-million-year-old rock, suggest that the nightshade family originated millions of years earlier than scientists had suspected, researchers report in the Jan. 6 Science.
A strange animal that lived on the ocean floor 500 million years ago has been assigned to the tree of life, solving a long-held mystery.
The creature has eluded scientific classification since the first fossil was discovered 175 years ago.
I held in my hands one of the first animals to drag itself out of the water and onto land. Christened “Tiny”, she (I like to think it was female, but we can’t actually tell) is entombed in a chunk of boring, black rock. I ran my hands over the surface, feeling the bumps betraying a stone pregnant with fossils. Yet, from the outside there’s no sign of the treasure within: no one has ever actually seen it.
Even a mild rise in temperature damages insect's ability to reproduce, new research indicates. Insect populations in high latitude countries are the worst affected. Identifying genes linked to increased and decreased reproduction may help understand how insects cope with climate change and controlling insect pests, say the scientists.
Related: Two New Bug Species Have All-Pink Females
Razza the rat nearly ended James Russell’s scientific career. Twelve years ago, as an ecology graduate student, Russell was releasing radio-collared rats on to small islands off the coast of New Zealand to study how the creatures take hold and become invasive. Despite his sworn assurances that released animals would be well monitored and quickly removed, one rat, Razza, evaded capture and swam to a nearby island.
Cheetahs sitting in fancy cars. Tigers running on the beach. Lions playing with chew toys.
It’s easy to find images on social media of pet owners in Gulf countries flaunting their exotic animals—but in the future there likely won’t be as many posted in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
Scientists have decoded "dog-directed speech" for the first time, and they say puppies respond to it.
Puppies reacted positively and wanted to play when researchers in France played them a tape of phrases like, "Who's a good boy?''
In H. G. Wells's The Island of Doctor Moreau, the shipwrecked hero Edward Pendrick is walking through a forest glade when he chances upon a group of two men and a woman squatting around a fallen tree. They are naked apart from a few rags tied around their waist, with "fat, heavy, chinless faces, retreating foreheads, and a scant bristly hair upon their foreheads." Pendrick notes that "I never saw such bestial looking creatures."
A robotics engineer is pioneering the use of robotics for first responders.
This new breed of machines could help save lives in situations where human responders are unable to safely reach victims.
A new lab procedure that could allow fertility clinics to make sperm and eggs from people’s skin may lead to “embryo farming” on a massive scale and drive parents to have only “ideal” future children, researchers warn.
Scientists have produced a new form of hydrogen in the lab — negatively charged hydrogen clusters.
Each cluster consists of hydrogen molecules arranged around a negatively charged hydrogen ion — a single hydrogen atom with an extra electron — at temperatures near absolute zero
Scientists at the University of Sydney have demonstrated the ability to "see" the future of quantum systems, and used that knowledge to preempt their demise, in a major achievement that could help bring the strange and powerful world of quantum technology closer to reality.
The AWAKE experiment at CERN made a breakthrough at the end of last year. A long-term technology-development project, its aim is to drag electrons through a plasma, behind a beam of protons, and provide a route to higher energies than the Large Hadron Collider
The universe is an astonishingly secretive place. Mysterious substances known as dark matter and dark energy account for some 95% of it. Despite huge effort to find out what they are, we simply don't know.
Those with a Pluto-the-planet-shaped void in their hearts have been eagerly following updates about Planet 9, a hypothetical world thought to be 10 times more massive than Earth and roughly 1,000 astronomical units (AU) away from the Sun. While there are naysayers aplenty, new research validates believers — and delivers some unexpected news about the planet’s rough childhood.
Chalk up one more loss for physicists searching for dark matter. Scientists with the XENON100 experiment have largely ruled out another experiment’s controversial claim of detecting dark matter.
A stem cell-based transplantation approach that restores vision in blind mice moves closer to being tested in patients with end-stage retinal degeneration, according to a study.
From the campfire to the water cooler, people have always gathered around to share the latest news. White rhinoceroses, it turns out, do the same thing—only their choice of meeting place is a giant pile of poop.
Chickens have a reputation for being profoundly dumb, but in fact they are remarkably intelligent and may even be empathic
There is something odd about chickens. Globally they number more than 19 billion, making them one of the most abundant vertebrate species on the planet. Yet many people have little or no contact with the birds – at least, not while they are alive.
Men who regularly eat red meat have a higher risk of developing an inflammatory bowel condition called diverticulitis than men who don't have much red meat in their diet, a new study finds.
Alcohol switches the brain into starvation mode, increasing hunger and appetite, scientists have discovered.
In tests on mice, alcohol activated the brain signals that tell the body to eat more food.
If the goal is to ease or extinguish fearful emotional memories like those associated with post-traumatic stress disorder, alcohol may make things worse, not better, experiments in mice suggest that. Results of their study demonstrate, they say, that alcohol strengthens emotional memories associated with fearful experiences and prevents mice from pushing aside their fears.
A study conducted by a researcher with Harvard University suggests that wealthy people are less likely to support income redistribution through a tax on the very rich after having recently been exposed to an obviously poor person.
It started as a dare.
Bob Rutherford's friend didn't believe the Saskatoon man could make a cheap knitting machine that worked really, really fast.
That's when Rutherford got to work.
Dentists have devised a treatment to regenerate rotten teeth that could substantially reduce the need for fillings in the future.
The therapy works by enhancing the natural ability of teeth to repair themselves through the activation of stem cells in the soft pulp at the centre.
The human-controlled Prosthesis bot, backed by Furrion, relies on electro-hydraulics with direct haptic feedback to generate motion.
And, it’s designed to go head to head with other robots in giant ‘mech’ races.
Modern medicine often feels like magic: A technician pricks your skin, draws a drop of blood and whisks it away into another room. Oftentimes, this gives the doctor enough information to make a diagnosis and prescribe a treatment. But for people in developing countries, these kinds of diagnostics can be more science fiction than reality.
It was discovered in the 1850s, but details on this rare ancient Egyptian treasure have remained a mystery to experts.
Now, the 3,400-year-old fragmented wooden box has been pieced together by a museum in Scotland.
Swedish archaeologists have unearthed a dozen burial sites near the southern city of Aswan that date back almost 3,500 years to the New Kingdom era of ancient Egypt, the Antiquities Ministry said on Wednesday.
Archaeologists excavating an ancient quarry site in Egypt have unearthed dozens of tombs cut out of rock, child burials, goat and sheep remains and, mysteriously, the full skeleton of a crocodile on the floor of a courtyard.
A tunnel at Stonehenge has finally given the go-ahead after decades of delays despite fears that it could blight the historic landscape.
The Government has confirmed that it intends to turn the whole length the A303, which passes within a few hundred metres of Stonehenge, into a dual carriageway with a 1.8 mile long tunnel.
Pre-European human populations of the Amazon Basin may have affected our contemporary understanding of the forest's structure and composition, and thus our calculations of its impact on carbon dioxide remediation, according to new findings published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
New research shows they shared many behaviors that we long believed to be uniquely human. Why did science get them so wrong?
We last shared an ancestor at some point between 500,000 and 750,000 years ago. Then our evolutionary trajectory split. We evolved in Africa, while the Neanderthals would live in Europe and Asia for 300,000 years. Or as little as 60,000 years. It depends whom you ask. It always does
Researchers have used camera traps to film tool-use that is unique to chimpanzees in Ivory Coast.
The footage revealed that the clever primates habitually make special water-dipping sticks - chewing the end of the stick to turn it into a soft, water-absorbing brush.
New research suggests our last common ancestor with these monkeys possessed the vocal machinery needed to speak
To the untrained listener, a bunch of babbling baboons may not sound like much. But sharp-eared experts have now found that our primate cousins can actually produce humanlike vowel sounds.
A gibbon living in the tropical forests of south west China is a new species of primate, scientists have concluded.
The animal has been studied for some time, but new research confirms it is different from all other gibbons.
A male snow monkey has been observed attempting to have sex with female sika deer on Japan’s Yakushima Island, in an unusual example of interspecies mating behaviour.
It is only the second recorded example of sexual relations between two distantly related species.
The baby monkey may have been fake, but the emotions that its “death” provoked were heartbreakingly real.
A troop of langur monkeys in India mistook a lookalike robotic camera for one of its own, and began mourning for it after believing it had died.
Now we know – zapping the brain with electricity really does seem to improve some medical conditions, meaning it may be a useful tool for treating depression.
Could flashing the "peace" sign in photos lead to fingerprint data being stolen?
Research by a team at Japan's National Institute of Informatics (NII) says so, raising alarm bells over the popular two-fingered pose.
For years, researchers have known that carbon, when arranged in a certain way, can be very strong. Case in point: graphene.
Graphene, which was heretofore, the strongest material known to man, is made from an extremely thin sheet of carbon atoms arranged in two dimensions.
Japanese scientists believe they have established the identity of a "missing element" within the Earth's core.
They have been searching for the element for decades, believing it makes up a significant proportion of our planet's centre, after iron and nickel.
From Nuna to Amasia, researchers are finding new clues to supercontinent comings and goings
Reconstructing supercontinents is like trying to assemble a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle after you’ve lost a bunch of the pieces and your dog has chewed up others.
About 70 percent of the coral in the Sekiseishoko area, the largest coral reef in Japan, is dead, an Environment Ministry survey has found.
A recent study found that the Great Barrier Reef was nearly destroyed roughly 125,000 years ago due to rapid sea-level rise from melting glaciers and polar ice sheets. If left unchecked, the Earth could be headed for similar sea levels in the future.
There’s a pretty story we tell ourselves about environmental problems: Once you fix them, they immediately start to improve.
Smog works like this. In cities where air quality is a problem, smog tends to worsen on weekdays, because millions of people are commuting and factories are fully productive. On weekends, when fewer people drive, the air tends to clear.
The question of life on Venus, of all places, is intriguing enough that a team of U.S. and Russian scientists working on a proposal for a new mission to the second planet — named Venera-D — are considering including the search for life in its mission goals.
It took NASA's New Horizons space probe almost a decade to trek its way across the Solar System for 2015's historic Pluto flyby – and when it got there, it discovered stunning towers of ice reaching 500 metres into the sky.
Pluto's relationship with its moon Charon is one of the more unusual interactions in the solar system due to Charon's size and proximity. It's more than half of Pluto's diameter and orbits only 12,000 or so miles away. To put that into perspective, picture our moon three times closer to Earth, and as large as Mars.
For decades, science popularizers have said humans are made of stardust, and now, a new survey of 150,000 stars shows just how true the old cliché is: Humans and their galaxy have about 97 percent of the same kind of atoms, and the elements of life appear to be more prevalent toward the galaxy's center, the research found.
A giant ancient sequoia with a hollowed-out tunnel that drew thousands of visitors each year in California toppled over on Sunday during heavy rains, according to a nonprofit group.
The Pioneer Cabin tree was “barely alive,” according to a volunteer at the Calaveras Big Trees State Park, about 90 miles east of Sacramento, and it was not immediately clear what would become of the sequoia.
Can thermal solar energy be stored until wintertime? Within a European research consortium, scientists have spent four years studying this question by pitting three different techniques against each other.
Engineers at the University of California, Riverside have taken inspiration from biological evolution and the energy savings garnered by birds flying in formation to improve the efficiency of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) by more than 30 percent.
Cadillac is launching a subscription service that will allow customers to drive and swap out whatever vehicle they want — be it an Escalade or a CTS-V — whenever they want, for a flat monthly fee. Book by Cadillac is a $1,500-a-month contract-free service that the manufacturer says will eliminate the hassle that comes with owning a vehicle.
Initially, trains in the Netherlands were set to run entirely on renewable energy by 2018. However, it seems officials have been able to beat that goal by an entire year. As of the first of January this year, all public transport trains are being powered by renewable energy, namely from wind power.
The first self-sufficient boat powered only by emission-free energy will start a six-year trip around the world in the spring.
Energy Observer, a former multi-hull race boat converted into a green vessel equipped with solar panels, wind turbines and a hydrogen fuel cell system, will be powered by wind, the sun and self-generated hydrogen.
Orbiting debris could be making Tabby’s star blink
When you are a messy eater, it can take a long time to clean up after a meal. The slow dimming of Tabby’s star and the sudden dips in its light may be caused by an orbiting cloud of debris left over from when it partially gobbled a planet.
The report from an alleged UFO sighting by the Chilean military over two years ago has just been declassified and the internet is abuzz with speculation – this is one mystery that has experts completely stumped.
Related: Has an alien spaceship been spotted in Italy? Bizarre UFO footage shows an unusual green halo of light in the sky
Related: 'Star Trek' UFO Sighting
In 2022, a new, temporary star of sorts could be added to the night sky.
A group of astronomers has predicted that, five years from now, two faraway binary stars currently orbiting each other will collide, creating an explosion so bright that it will be visible to the naked eye. If accurate, the so-called "red nova" would be the first ever to be predicted by scientists on Earth.
A newly proposed technique could make it possible to search for life on alien planets much sooner than scientists had expected.
Related: Impostor planet exposed by astronomers
Related: Astronomers detect a fast rotating group of stars in our galaxy
Monster black holes sometimes lurk behind gas and dust, hiding from the gaze of most telescopes. But they give themselves away when material they feed on emits high-energy X-rays that NASA's NuSTAR (Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array) mission can detect. That's how NuSTAR recently identified two gas-enshrouded supermassive black holes, located at the centers of nearby galaxies.
Every few thousand years, an unlucky star wanders too close to the black hole at the center of the Milky Way. The black hole's powerful gravity rips the star apart, sending a long streamer of gas whipping outward. That would seem to be the end of the story, but it's not. New research shows that not only can the gas gather itself into planet-size objects, but those objects then are flung throughout the galaxy in a game of cosmic "spitball."
Researchers have known for a while that a star called Gliese 710 is headed straight for our Solar System, but they have now worked out precisely when it should arrive.
Early Monday morning, while people on the East Coast were making coffee, dropping kids off at school, and cursing in traffic, a space rock as big as a 10-story building slipped past Earth.
Alt: Another near miss: Is Earth ready for an incoming space rock?
The moon is made of moons, new simulations suggest. Instead of a single colossal collision forming Earth’s cosmic companion, researchers propose that a series of medium to large impacts created mini moons that eventually coalesced to form one giant moon.
Alt: Study crashes main Moon-formation theory
The moon is a very old soul, it turns out.
A new analysis of lunar rocks brought to Earth by Apollo astronauts suggests that the moon formed 4.51 billion years ago — just 60 million years after the solar system itself took shape.
Some of the most distant stars in the Milky Way may have been lifted from another galaxy, research released Wednesday shows.
The unintended donor, known as the Sagittarius dwarf, is one of dozens of miniature galaxies that loop around the Milky Way. The Sagittarius dwarf is located about 3.4 million light-years away from Earth.
"Jia Jia" can hold a simple conversation and make specific facial expressions when asked, and her creator believes the eerily life-like robot heralds a future of cyborg labour in China.
Billed as China's first human-like robot, Jia Jia was first trotted out last year by a team of engineers at the University of Science and Technology of China.
A robot companion for older people aims to promote activity and tackle loneliness by nudging them to take part in digital and physical activities.
Related: Half a million older people spend every day alone, poll shows
Mothers hold their children more on the left and wild mammals seem to keep their young more on that side too, at least when fleeing predators.
Now it seems many mammal babies prefer to approach their mother from one side too – and the explanation may lie in the contrasting talents of each half of the brain.
Alt: Mother-baby bonding insight revealed
Roughly 90% of humans are right-handed and this is one of the traits that separates us from most other primates who don’t really show any overall preference for left or right handedness.
It’s believed that handedness played an important role in human evolution, with a recent study on the earliest evidence of right-handedness in the fossil record shedding light on when and why this trait arose. Interestingly, the clues were found not in our ancient hands, but in our ancient teeth.
Tarantulas are more like us than we thought: Many of them are "right-handed."
While biologists used to believe that showing a preference for the right or left side is unique to humans, more and more studies are showing that other animals, like kangaroos, do it too.
Related: Wild Tarantula Eats a Foot-Long Snake in a First
For the first time in the United States, a species of bumblebee is endangered.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced Tuesday on its website that the rusty patched bumblebee (Bombus affinis), once a common sight, is “now balancing precariously on the brink of extinction.” Over the past two decades, the bumblebee’s population has declined 87 percent, according to the announcement.
In Porto Ferreira, a city in the countryide of São Paulo state, over 10 million honey bees were killed in a matter of days by airborne spread pesticides.
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.
The ghosts of Ice Age mammals can teach valuable, real-world lessons about what happens to an ecosystem when its most distinct species go extinct, according to a Yale University study.
A 2,400-year-old tomb filled with the skeletons of at least six people has been discovered in northern Iraq. Among the artifacts found in the tomb is a bracelet decorated with images of two snake heads peering at each other.
The oldest evidence of silk made by silkworms has been found buried in 8,500-year-old tombs in China, revealing that people may have used the luxurious material thousands of years earlier than previously thought, a new study finds.
Roads of more than 240 kilometers long designed, traced and built by the ancient Maya have been discovered in Guatemala, near the border with Mexico.
El Mirador is a late Maya preclassic city, located in Guatemala, in the heart of the Petén jungle, and it was recently revealed that the first network of super highways in the world was made there by this ancient civilization.
The modern-day corpse of a human-like hominid, preserved in a block of ice, encountered by researchers in the 1960s, you say? Surely the zoological discovery of the century!
A group of friends stumbled across an unusual arrangement of stones in Sicily, which experts have now confirmed form a prehistoric sundial dating back to the Bronze Age.
Many scientists consider graphene to be one of the most potentially useful materials ever created. The atom-thick chain of carbon atoms are strong, light, and promise many applications, from energy storage to pollution removal to waterproof coating.
Stuttering is cause by limited blood flow to part of the brain, a breakthrough study has found.
Researchers at the Children's Hospital Los Angeles discovered that stutters have reduced blood flow in region in the frontal lobe of the brain linked to speech production.
Earlier this week, a story begging to go viral fell onto writers’ laps: We have a new organ called the mesentery, which is a broad, fan-shaped fold that lines the guts. Here at Discover we pounced on the story, and so did CNN, the Washington Post, LiveScience, Smithsonian, Vice News Tonight, Jimmy Kimmel and many, many more.
Doctors have found a way to manipulate wounds to heal as regenerated skin rather than scar tissue. The method involves transforming the most common type of cells found in wounds into fat cells – something that was previously thought to be impossible in humans.
A tumour containing a miniature brain has been found growing on the ovary of a 16-year-old girl in Japan.
The 10-centimetre-wide tumour was discovered when the girl had surgery to remove her appendix. When doctors cut the tumour out, they found clumps of greasy, matted hair inside, and a 3-centimetre-wide brain-like structure covered by a thin plate of skull bone.
Researchers have reverse-engineered the ancient ritual practice that created one of the British Museum's most important artifacts—the Jericho Skull—revealing the face of a man whose remains were decorated and venerated some 9,500 years ago.
The tale of how an amateur archaeologist’s hunch led him to uncover a lost medieval town and spend £32,000 of his own money to buy the land, would stand to be the archaeological discovery of any year. On the border between England and Wales, the site of the medieval town of Trellech reveals much about a tumultuous period of history – and how the town came to be lost.
The giant winged bulls that once stood sentry at the nearly 3,000-year-old palace at Nimrud have been hacked to pieces. The fantastical human-headed creatures were believed to guard the king from evil, but now their stone remains are piled in the dirt, victims of the Islamic State group’s fervour to erase history.
The site of an ancient settlement in Shenyang, capital of China’s northeastern Liaoning Province, has been confirmed as dating back more than 2,000 years, the city cultural relics and archaeology institute said on Sunday.
Wait until those people pushing the razor-blades-by-mail-club hear about this! Archeologists examining a 2,300-year-old tomb in China found a sword covered in mud but still in its original scabbard. When they unsheathed it, the sword shined like new and cut like it has just been sharpened.
China has announced plans to set up an "environmental police" force tasked with enforcing pollution restrictions across the capital Beijing in a bid to improve the city's notorious air quality.
Rumor has it that the Chinese are testing that fabulous Sangraal of spacecraft propulsion—the EmDrive.
But the Chinese have been known to make some pretty fantastic, and insupportable claims; and there's so far not a shred of evidence that the EmDrive actually works.
Scientists have looked to a distant red giant star, L2 Puppis, to forecast what the future of our Solar System will be.
What they've found is a star that's almost a twin to what our Sun will become in about 6 billion years, and the discovery of an orbiting planet may be a preview of the Earth's far-future fate.
A new study may explain how dust particles on the moon "levitate" just above the surface, even though there is no wind or flowing water on the moon to kick-up the material.
Powerful solar storms can charge up the soil in frigid, permanently shadowed regions near the lunar poles, and may possibly produce "sparks" that could vaporize and melt the soil, perhaps as much as meteoroid impacts, according to NASA-funded research. This alteration may become evident when analyzing future samples from these regions that could hold the key to understanding the history of the moon and solar system.
A team of astronomers is making a bold prediction: In 2022, give or take a year, a pair of stars will merge and explode, becoming one of the brightest objects in the sky for a short period. It’s notoriously hard to predict when such stellar catastrophes will occur, but this binary pair is engaged in a well-documented dance of death that will inevitably come to a head in the next few years
Monster black holes may be lurking behind smokescreens in our cosmic backyard, say scientists. But they are still millions of light years away and much too distant to pose any threat to Earth.