Newsdesk Archive
Arecibo Observatory observations of galactic neutral hydrogen structure confirm the discovery of an unexpected contribution to the measurements of the cosmic microwave background observed by the WMAP and Planck spacecraft.
On a Friday night in December, I sat in a small room with 33 other audience members, each of us accompanied by a dancer in black. The dancers pulled out blindfolds and covered our eyes, and for a brief moment, all was dark and quiet and freighted with anticipation. Then, as a chamber ensemble began to play Claude Debussy’s String Quartet in G minor, the dancers began to “play” the music on our bodies.
Wandering off for an afternoon nap might not the best way to impress your boss – but scientists say it could improve your performance at work.
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania found a short sleep in the afternoon improves people’s thinking and memory skills and makes the brain perform as if it were five years younger.
Swearing may be considered impolite and vulgar, but a new two-part study has revealed a more gracious attribute for those with an off-color vocabulary: Honesty. According to the research, people are more likely to swear as a way to express themselves, rather than cause harm to others, and the more an individual swears, the more honest they are likely to be.
Mondays aren’t just hard on you, they are also tough on your emails.
A new study found that we tend to make more errors on the first day of the week - specifically typos in the subject line.
As you follow the snaking path of the Israeli-built wall that divides Jerusalem from Bethlehem you’ll find a kaleidoscope of different graffiti styles sprayed onto the bleak concrete slabs.
Ancient Egyptians may have become famous for the beautiful and complex tombs they built for their kings at the heart of pyramids, but they also buried their dead in ceramic vessels – a practice known as "pot burial".
Nefertiti is one of the most iconic persons of ancient Egypt. She is still extremely famous and faith in her great personality is visible in pretty much any book that mentions the queen. But who was she really? She may have been a remarkable person, but it is just as likely her fame was created through modern imagination.
Perception can drive the evolution of observable traits, a new study has demonstrated. Understanding perceptual abilities, including the ability to notice differences in stimuli, is critical to understanding the evolution of observable traits, the new report outlines.
A "clear signal" of urbanisation has been identified in the evolution of organisms, which has implications for sustainability and human well-being.
Two towns in North Dakota claim to sit at the geographical center of North America. They’re both wrong. And if it wasn't for one drunken evening, we’d never even have known.
Alt: Bull's-Eye: Geographer Pinpoints Center of North America
Feedback loops between record Arctic temperatures and the jet stream may be altering our weather
Related: Scientists watch growing Antarctic crack but aren't alarmed
Related: Waterworld—can we learn to live with flooding?
MARS has a real water shortage. It seems we have either misunderstood what its early years were like – or vast amounts of water are hiding beneath its surface.
A lot of evidence points towards Mars being warm and wet early in its history; features that look like rivers, lakes and outflows have been spotted both from orbit and by rovers on the surface, and a lot of the planet’s minerals contain water.
For years, scientists have been expressing their concern over how unprepared the world is for a potentially extinction-level asteroid or meteor strike.
We're getting better than ever at monitoring these incoming space rocks, but we still only get a few days or weeks notice when something is about to shoot past our planet. Luckily, up until now, nothing we've spotted has been on a collision course with Earth. But what happens if they are?
The largest-ever smartphone-based study examining the relationship between physical activity and happiness has found that even minimal levels of activity can have a positive effect on happiness.
The lumps of human brain tissue that help us tell one face from another grow all the way into adulthood, according to scientists who made the surprise discovery.
Until now it was thought that brain tissue growth halted in early life, with the organ adapting in later life by tweaking the connections between its neurons.
A protein known as FosB in the reward centre of the brain alters in chronically ill people suffering from an addictive disorder (e.g. heroin addiction): it is genetically modified, split off and shortened. This modification under the stimulus of the drug results in the protein being more stable and therefore remaining longer in this part of the brain than in its original form -- even as much as several weeks after withdrawal of the drug.
Children born to obese parents are at increased risk of failing motor development and cognitive tests, according to an NIH-led study.
Related: New Guidelines Tell Parents When To Introduce Babies To Peanut Products
A steady decline over more than two decades has resulted in a 25% drop in the overall cancer death rate in the United States. The drop equates to 2.1 million fewer cancer deaths between 1991 and 2014.
A chance meeting between a spider expert and a chemist has led to the development of antibiotic synthetic spider silk.
Scientists have created a tiny biobot that can be implanted under the skin and deliver doses of drugs. The 3D-printed micromachine has no batteries or wires, but is activated through an external magnet. It’s only been tested in mice for now, but it could one day be used to deliver localized doses of chemo to treat tumors.
Drones could learn a thing or two from the birds and the bees.
If an aerial robot loses a part mid-flight, you would expect it to crash. But it could stay airborne by mimicking fruit flies, which can keep flying even after a catastrophic loss of limb.
Have you ever imagined what the world must look like to hummingbirds as they zoom about at speeds of up to 60 miles per hour? According to new evidence on the way the hummingbird brain processes visual signals reported in Current Biology on January 5, you can't. That's because a key area of the hummingbird's brain processes motion in a unique and unexpected way.
Anyone who has allowed a child to "help" with a project quickly learns that kids, no matter how intelligent or eager, are less competent than adults. Teenagers are more capable -- but, as every parent knows, teens can be erratic and unreliable. And it's not just in humans; obvious differences in behavior and ability between juveniles and adults are seen across the animal kingdom.
Sexual preference is influenced by males' adolescent social stress history and social status, according to a research team including Nicole Cameron, assistant professor of psychology at Binghamton University, State University of New York.
Would you have sex with a Homo sapiens neanderthalensis if they hadn’t gone extinct? Your ancestors may have.
Scientists are testing cave dirt for the presence of Neanderthal DNA from disintegrated skeletons from many thousands of years ago to answer the question about how often modern Homo sapiens and Neanderthals coupled, along with other intriguing mysteries.
There has long been debate among scientists regarding how Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals compared in terms of their cognition and intelligence. Some anthropologists believe Neanderthals were just as intelligent as modern humans, while others believe that Homo Sapiens endured over Neanderthals because they were superior in intelligence.
Archaeologists have recreated an ancient burial site in virtual reality, to help them study hard-to-access locations at the so-called Plain of Jars site in Laos and the millennia-old relics it contains.
Analysis of human handprints and footprints left in stone at Chusang, the earliest known settlement on the Tibetan Plateau, shows that the site could have been occupied nearly 13,000 years ago.
Alt: Footprints Found at Ancient Hot Springs Could Represent Earliest Settlement of Tibetan Plateau
Italian archaeologists have found an intriguing Stonehenge-like "calendar rock" in Sicily.
Featuring a 3.2-foot diameter hole, the rock formation marked the beginning of winter some 5,000 years ago.
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 fervor to erase history.
An Egyptian mummy, which experts thought for centuries was a dead bird, turned out to be a human baby after scans were performed in November.
Now, speculation has arisen that it’s the shameful love child of a pharaoh king who had a secret affair with a mistress.
Queen Silvia of Sweden believes her royal palace is haunted, according to a documentary to be aired on Swedish public television on Thursday.
She said she shares 17th-century Drottningholm Palace, with "small friends ... ghosts".
Analysis of a well-preserved ancient skull shows that ghost sharks—a group of elusive deep sea fish with abnormally large eyes and wing-like fins—are descended from a bizarre shark-like fish that lived 280 million years ago.
President-elect Donald Trump has called climate change a hoax created by the Chinese. The Chinese disagree—and are pumping billions of dollars' worth of investments into green energy over the next three years.
Related: India's double first in climate battle
The next few years could be pivotal for sustainable food in the realms of organic farming, sustainable fishing and plant based meat alternatives
An iceberg expected to be one of the 10 largest ever recorded is ready to break away from Antarctica, scientists say.
A long-running rift in the Larson C ice shelf grew suddenly in December and now just 20km of ice is keeping the 5,000 sq km piece from floating away.
While the evidence supporting global warming is plentiful, those looking to deny it have had very few fact-based arguments in their arsenal. One of those arguments has been an apparent slowdown in the increase of ocean temperatures during a period around the turn of the century, from 1998 to 2012, which has become known as the “global warming hiatus.”
Globally, 2016 edged out 1998 by +0.02 C to become the warmest year in the 38-year satellite temperature record, according to scientists. Because the margin of error is about 0.10 C, this would technically be a statistical tie, with a higher probability that 2016 was warmer than 1998. The main difference was the extra warmth in the Northern Hemisphere in 2016 compared to 1998.
Scientists have solved a puzzling break in continuity of ocean warming records that sparked much controversy after climate data was published in the journal Science in 2015.
The primary circulation pattern in the Atlantic is assumed to be stable by most scientists, but new simulation suggests collapse could happen if atmospheric greenhouse gases continue to increase
Alt: 'The Day After Tomorrow' could become a reality: Ocean currents may collapse in the 'near future' plunging the Northern hemisphere into an ice age, warn scientists
Plans to use advanced technology for marine archaeology, specifically for searching for and then documenting ancient sunken cities in the Mediterranean, are shaping up quickly for 2017.
The Instructions of Shuruppak are a set of 4,600-year-old Sumerian proverbs given by a king to his son, which essentially set out how he should behave. The ancient inscriptions were engraved in cuneiform script on clay tablets, and today they are among the oldest surviving literary texts in the world.
The recent discovery of the grave of an ancient soldier is challenging accepted wisdom among archaeologists
In The Iliad, Homer tells of how Agamemnon, king of Mycenae, led a fleet of a thousand ships to besiege the city of Troy. Classical Greeks (and Romans, who traced their heritage to the Trojan hero Aeneas) accepted the stories in The Iliad and The Odyssey as a part of their national histories, but in later centuries scholars insisted that the epic battles fought between the Trojan and Mycenaean kingdoms were nothing more than myth and romantic fantasy. Before the eighth century B.C., archaeologists argued, societies on the Greek mainland were scattered and disorganized.
Imagine being able to collect the DNA of a human ancestor who's been dead for tens of thousands of years from the dirt on the floor of a cave. Sounds fantastic, but scientists in Germany think they may be able to do just that. If they're successful, it could open a new door into understanding the extinct relatives of humans.
The historian Michael Scott’s worst moment in the miles of tunnels deep under Naples, which he has been exploring for a BBC documentary, came not from fear of earthquake or volcanic eruption, nor among crumbling Roman quarries or the eerie rusting remains of cars seized and dumped under Mussolini’s regime.
NASA's plan to send astronauts to Mars within the next few decades still faces several challenges before humans can actually set foot on the red planet. One of the most significant problems is providing shelter for human explorers on the planet that can safely house them for long periods of time in a completely alien environment.
While NASA struggles to find ways to destroy asteroids and meteors before they crash into the Earth, the Sun is doing its part by ripping asteroids apart at their cosmic seams and casting their tiny pieces into the solar wind. Should NASA try bumping space objects into a tight solar orbit so they get bumped off by the Sun?
Asteroids ahoy. NASA just announced the destinations for its next low-cost space ventures: the Trojan asteroids that flank Jupiter and the large metallic asteroid 16 Psyche. Both targets will reveal secrets of the early solar system.
Physicists have finally demonstrated the magnetic behaviour of a special class of 2D materials in the lab, delivering the first experimental proof of a widely accepted hypothesis proposed more than 70 years ago.
Astronomers in the US are setting up an experiment which, if it fails – as others have – could mark the end of a 30-year-old theory
Quantum computing has long seemed like one of those technologies that are 20 years away, and always will be. But 2017 could be the year that the field sheds its research-only image.
The use of facial recognition software for commercial purposes is becoming more common, but, as Amazon scans faces in its physical shop and Facebook searches photos of users to add tags to, those concerned about their privacy are fighting back.
AN ALGORITHM that analyses facial expressions and head movements could help doctors diagnose autism-like conditions and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
There is no simple test for autism or ADHD, but clinicians usually observe someone’s behaviour as part of the assessment.
A team of scientists has discovered that a particular region of the brain is affected in those with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). They believe that finding the brain region which causes social deficits in those with the condition could point towards new types of therapies.
Have you ever met someone who just wasn't into music? They may have a condition called specific musical anhedonia, which affects three-to-five per cent of the population. Researchers have discovered that people with this condition showed reduced functional connectivity between cortical regions responsible for processing sound and subcortical regions related to reward.
An Irish surgeon's breakthrough overturned more than a century of medical belief and may lead to improvements in digestive surgery and recovery
Alt: The human body may have a new organ—the mesentery
With our news reports speaking of gunfire epidemics, outbreaks, and plagues, firearm violence often sounds like a disease. But according to a new study, it often acts like one, too. In fact, catching a bullet may be a little like catching a cold—albeit a really bad one.
One woman’s unique experiences are helping us understand the nature of synaesthesia.
We don’t know yet what causes synaesthesia, which links senses and can enable people to taste words or smell sounds, for example. It may be at least partly genetic, as it tends to run in families.
They're one of the most persistent puzzles in modern astronomy.
As the name suggests, Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) are short-lived - but powerful - pulses of radio waves from the cosmos.
Alt: Strange Radio Bursts Seen Coming From a Galaxy Far, Far Away
Among the most iconic sites of Jerusalem is the Western Wall, a sacred and holy place of prayer and meditation for thousands of Jewish visitors, many of whom come to its location from thousands of miles away.
It’s widely acknowledged that the pain experienced during childbirth is pretty rough. Even if you haven’t experienced having a child yourself, seeing women scream in television and films while they give birth to a new baby would make anyone cringe. That’s why doctors have been trying to find ways to help manage, if not completely avoid the pain.
The beauty in the design of NeuroTracker — the video game aimed at heightening cognitive agility the way lifting dumbbells develops muscles — is allegedly its simplicity. Just by asking the eyes to track spheres as they bound around a 3D screen, athletes can prepare their brains to perform in a way that no other film room could replicate.
Researchers have found promising results for treating depression with a video game interface that targets underlying cognitive issues associated with depression rather than just managing the symptoms.
How do you recover from a bad trip? A “psychedelics sanctuary” is set to open in New York this month, the first US therapeutic facility for users of psychedelic drugs.
Instead of focusing on going cold turkey, the centre will use psychotherapy and group support to help users come to terms with any intense and difficult experiences they might have had while taking hallucinogenic drugs.
For tireless drugs campaigner Amanda Feilding, the past 45 years feel almost as though they’ve been frozen. While there were a vast number of research studies into psychedelic substances such as LSD between the 1950s and 60s, the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 imposed such strict regulations that even heavily supervised lab testing became almost impossible.
‘Time of birth was significantly related to being a day person or a night person,’ the scientists reported in the Journal Of Social Psychology. ‘The results suggest a critical period for setting the biological clock for alertness may be the moment of birth.’
Vitamin D deficiency may increase the risk of chronic headache, according to a new study from the University of Eastern Finland. The findings were published in Scientific Reports.
Eating a Mediterranean diet has been linked to less brain shrinkage in older adults.
Human brains naturally shrink with age. But a study that followed 401 people in their 70s found that the brains of those who adhered more closely to a Mediterranean-style diet shrank significantly less over a period of three years.
Most of us associate car pollution with coughing and wheezing, but mounting evidence is linking air pollution to a less obvious health effect: Dementia.
Alt: Living near heavy traffic increases dementia risk, say scientists
He may not be the world’s most interesting man and, other than his government identification card, he has no proof that he’s the world’s oldest man – not even a newspaper announcement or a report card. But that didn’t stop Saparman Sodimejo, also known as Mbah Gotho, from recently celebrating the 146th anniversary of the date he claims he was born on … December 31, 1870.
Engravings of a cross and menorah carved side by side have been found in an ancient Israeli cave.
The 2,000-year-old symbols, though positioned close together, were likely carved hundreds of years apart, according to Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA).
Hundreds of killer Japanese Samurai may have been secret Christians who expressed their faith with codes hidden in their sword hilts, researchers have found.
The deadly warriors were banned from following religions after feudal Japan introduced strict anti-Christian measures in the 16th century.
Related: A still-sharp sword survived 3,000 years underground
The potato blight that killed about a million people in Ireland in the 1840s originated in South America, a new genetic analysis finds.
Until now, the origin of the fungus-like blight that devastated potato crops in Ireland and throughout Europe had not been pinned down.
Archaeologists used to have a tidy story to explain the earliest peopling of the Americas: During the last ice age, when sea levels were much lower, a band of intrepid travelers walked from East Asia, over the Bering land bridge, and into Alaska. From there, they followed an ice-free corridor east of the Canadian Rockies south onto the megafauna-rich plains, eventually spreading throughout North and South America by 11,000 years ago and leaving a trail of finely shaped “Clovis” spear points in their wake.
But the story is not so simple.
The first clue was provided by moles. As the creatures burrowed beneath a farmer’s field close to the border between England and Wales, they threw up fragments of what appeared to be medieval pottery.
Stuart Wilson, an archaeology graduate who was working in a toll bridge booth, took a gamble and bought the field for £32,000 when he could have been investing in his first house.
Alt: The lost city of Trellech: History fan spends his £32,000 life savings buying a field on a hunch - then is proved spectacularly right when he digs it up to discover the remains of a medieval town
New research is stirring the pot about an ancient Egyptian burial practice.
Many ancient peoples, including Egyptians, buried some of their dead in ceramic pots or urns. Researchers have long thought these pot burials, which often recycled containers used for domestic purposes, were a common, make-do burial for poor children.
Badgers discovered the burial site of 12th century Slavic warriors and a Stonehenge cremation burial. The Lascaux cave paintings were discovered by four schoolchildren and a dog. The 5,000-year-old corpse of Ötzi was discovered when hikers happened upon in the Alps. The Rosetta Stone was discovered by French soldiers expanding their fort.
Many discoveries in archaeology have happened this way, by accident. But archaeology now has much better tools than badgers and lucky amateurs with shovels.
Take, for example, the search for the ancient lost city of Itjtawy in Egypt.
The early universe may have contained more dark matter than there is today, new research suggests. The findings could help scientists better understand what the universe was like just after the Big Bang, researchers said.
Experts discuss the possibility that the universe could have started from a black hole, a scenario supported by the singularity, an occurrence found in only two instances — the Big Bang and black holes.
This could mean that each time a black hole is formed, a two-dimensional universe spawns.
Last year Asier Marzo, then a doctoral student at the Public University of Navarre, helped develop the first single-sided acoustic tractor beam—that is, the first realization of trapping and pulling an object using sound waves from only one direction. Now a research assistant at the University of Bristol, Marzo has lead a team that adapted the technology to be, for all intents and purposes, 3-D printable by anyone (with some assembly required, of course).
Finland has become the first country in Europe to pay its unemployed citizens a basic monthly income, in a radical pilot project aimed at reducing poverty and joblessness, while also cutting national spending and bureaucracy.
Two thousand people will receive 560 euros (£480) every month for two years, without having to report whether they are seeking employment or how they are spending the money.
Related: Countries should put a universal basic income in place before robots take our jobs
Related: UK bosses make more in two and a half days than workers earn all year
The UK's Investigatory Powers Act is now in effect, placing Britain under some of the widest-ranging spying powers ever seen.
The law – passed last month but going into effect on 30 December – is intended as an update to Britain's often unwieldy surveillance legislation.
All 13,000 taxis in New York City could be replaced by a fleet of 3,000 ride-sharing cars if used exclusively for carpooling, according to research published today by MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). Instead of hailing taxis, passengers that use ride-sharing services for carpooling may lead to reduced traffic congestion, pollution, and fuel use.
To produce drugs sustainably and cheaply, anywhere you want. Whether in the middle of the jungle or even on Mars. A 'mini-factory' whereby sunlight can be captured to make chemical products. Inspired by the art of nature where leaves are able to collect enough sunlight to produce food, chemical engineers have presented such a scenario. Their prototype reactor is consciously shaped as a leaf
A tiny pink peanut is not a white rhinoceros. Nor is it a green turtle or a Bengal tiger. But until a few years ago the Carolina African runner peanut — at one time, the South's most praised peanut, packed with flavor and rich with oil — was much like the rhinoceros and turtle and tiger. That is, it was nearly extinct.
Don't look now, but that tree may be watching you. Several lines of recent research suggest that plants are capable of vision—and may even possess something akin to an eye, albeit a very simple one.
What’s good for the ocean might be bad for the planet. Fishing boats that target specific species, leaving others free to swim away, use more fuel than vessels intent on simply scooping up all the fish in their vicinity.
J2, the killer whale known as Granny, avoided being sold to a marine park in the 1960s and went on to lead a pod of orcas for another half century.
In the warm summer months, bats go about their business each night, flying and gobbling up insects (a benefit to us). Using echolocation (making calls and listening for returning echoes to figure out where objects are) they can hunt and navigate around obstacles in total darkness, often in large groups. But if everybody is echolocating at once, how do bats pick out their own echoes?
Chickens are not as clueless or 'bird-brained' as people believe them to be. They have distinct personalities and can outmaneuver one another. They know their place in the pecking order, and can reason by deduction, which is an ability that humans develop by the age of seven. Chicken intelligence is therefore unnecessarily underestimated and overshadowed by other avian groups.
Alt: Chickens exhibit Machiavellian tendencies, scientists discover
For decades now, the drumbeat of dinosaur news has been their similarity to birds. They were warmblooded! They had feathers! And they’re still around, because birds are actually dinosaurs.
All true, but those that were nonavian dinosaurs, as they are now called, were not all beak and tweet. They were closely related to other living reptiles like crocodiles, and new findings about how long their eggs took to hatch bring that point home.
Alt: Did Dinosaur Eggs Lead To Their Doom?
A new study from the George Washington University's Center for the Advanced Study of Human Paleobiology (CASHP) found that whereas brain size evolved at different rates for different species, especially during the evolution of Homo, the genus that includes humans, chewing teeth tended to evolve at more similar rates.
Drilling and filling a cavity is an uncomfortable affair, even when a dentist is gentle. Instead of getting that standard treatment, patients can now have antimicrobial liquid called silver diamine fluoride brushed on cavities.
Interactive 3D models of human joints, showing how common medical complaints have arisen and how we are likely to evolve in the future, have been created at Oxford University.
A single breath into a newfangled breathalyzer is all doctors need to diagnose 17 different diseases, including lung cancer, irritable bowel syndrome and multiple sclerosis, a new study found.
In 2016, scientists combined the genes of three people in an effort to make a baby free of an inherited disease. But the process doesn't wipe out all faulty mitochondria, and could pose new risks.
Advances in genetics could one day eliminate diseases like cancer — but might also wipe out geniuses like Stephen Hawking from our future, warns one scientist.
Dr. James Kozubek says altering human genes to erase depression or Schizophrenia, for example, could stop the rise of the next Shakespeare or Einstein — as creativity and high intelligence are often associated with such disorders.
Two decades after the "earmouse," researchers have mastered a powerful technique for growing ears from fat-derived stem cells
Sleepwalking can be a problem, but sleepflying? That’s a nifty adaptation, confirmed in August for the first time in birds.
The idea that birds snooze during multiday flights has been floating around for decades, but only recently could researchers prove it.