Newsdesk Archive
At one time or another, we’ve all heard bits of romantic advice like “nice guys finish last” or “treat em’ mean, keep em’ keen,” which suggest that being too “nice” will leave you disadvantaged in the world of mating.
New research into chimpanzees suggests that, when it comes to altruistically helping a fellow chimpanzee, they are 'indifferent'.
A monkey picks up a potato-sized rock in his tiny hands, raises it above his head and smashes it down with all his might on another stone embedded in the ground. As the creature enthusiastically bashes away, over and over, flakes fly off the rock he is wielding.
A machine learning algorithm helped decode the squeaks Egyptian fruit bats make in their roost, revealing that they "speak" to one another as individuals
The sleek, speedy cheetah is rapidly heading towards extinction according to a new study into declining numbers.
The report estimates that there are just 7,100 of the world's fastest mammals now left in the wild.
Unleash the long-gone beasts. We won’t see a woolly mammoth in 2017, but a host of schemes to bring animals back from the brink of extinction will kick in next year.
Genetic and stem cell technologies are on the cusp of letting us clone even infertile endangered animals when intact DNA is available. And some extinct species could be brought back by tweaking the genome of a living close relative. It should also be possible to engineer lost traits into a population.
The Anthropocene—a proposed new geological era defined by human domination of the planet—will be marked by the loss of two-thirds of wildlife on Earth. Just let that settle in a minute.
Scientists are hailing a pioneering stem cell technique that promises “off-the-shelf” treatment for people with damaged muscles without the existing risks.
Researchers have for the first time successfully implanted “synthetic” cardiac stem cells which successfully repaired muscle tissue that had been weakened by a heart attack.
One morning in spring 2000, Michael Levin flopped in his chair and clicked on his desktop computer. A newly minted assistant professor at Harvard, Levin, then 30, was looking to solve a riddle that had baffled science for centuries: How do our dividing embryonic cells know on which side of our bodies to grow our hearts, our livers, our gall bladders?
Related: How to grow an arm
Good news, fellow humans: The United Nations has decided to take on killer robots.
At the international Convention on Conventional Weapons in Geneva, 123 participating nations voted to initiate official discussions on the danger of lethal autonomous weapons systems.
For more than 70 years, we have depended on antibiotics to protect us from disease-causing bacteria. But over time these drugs are developing (or have already developed) a resistance to the antibiotics used to treat them.
To that end, the United Nations (UN), has—for the fourth time in history—elevated a health issue to crisis level. UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon called antibiotic resistance a “fundamental, long-term threat to human health, sustainable food production and development.”
Think twice before blowing your nose — bacteria living there could save your life someday.
According to a July paper in Nature, researchers found a new antibiotic produced by nose-dwelling bacteria that kill drug-resistant superbugs, including MRSA.
Giant piles of black manure towering over cornfields, while rancid-smelling effluent from thousands of cows spills onto the land—this is the price of a glass of milk in China today.
Large-scale dairy farms have boomed in the Asian giant, as its near 1.4 billion consumers overcame centuries of cultural reluctance to embrace the white fluid.
Related: Despite Pledges To Cut Back, Farms Are Still Using Antibiotics
Related: Consumers fuelling demand for high-protein products unlikely to see any benefits as people already eat more protein than they need, say dietitians
China has passed a landmark environmental protection law that will hit land, water, and air polluters with penalty taxes when it comes into effect in January 2018.
The renewable energy future will arrive when installing new solar panels is cheaper than a comparable investment in coal, natural gas or other options. If you ask the World Economic Forum (WEF), the day has arrived.
Solar and wind is now the same price or cheaper than new fossil fuel capacity in more than 30 countries
China vowed Tuesday to speed up the development of its space industry as it set out its plans to become the first country to soft land a probe on the far side of the moon, around 2018, and launch its first Mars probe by 2020.
In an attempt to marry gravity with quantum theory, physicists came up with a hypothetical particle—the graviton, which is said to be a massless particle that travels at the speed of light.
According to physicists, it will be a long time before gravitons are considered part of the established subatomic pantheon.
Astronomers first suspected that there was a large proportion of "hidden mass" in the Universe back in the 1930s, when Fritz Zwicky discovered "peculiarities" in a cluster of galaxies in the constellation Coma Berenices - the galaxies moved as if they were under the effect of gravity from an unseen source. This hidden mass that does not manifest itself in any way, except for a gravitational effect, was given the name dark matter.
Related: Vera Rubin, Who Confirmed Existence Of Dark Matter, Dies At 88
Researchers at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh have built their own "black hole" in the laboratory.
The team has done it to prove a theory that huge amounts of energy can be harvested from a spinning black hole.
Scientists, including several from the University of California, Riverside, have developed a transparent, self-healing, highly stretchable conductive material that can be electrically activated to power artificial muscles and could be used to improve batteries, electronic devices, and robots.
Since 2010 deep learning systems demonstrated unprecedented results in image, voice and text recognition, in many cases surpassing human accuracy and enabling autonomous driving, automated creation of pleasant art and even composition of pleasant music.
3D bioprinting technology can be used to custom-build organs, tissues, bones, and more using a patient's own cells, decreasing the chances of rejection.
An average of 22 people lose their life each year while waiting for compatible donor organs, a number that could be cut drastically by the adoption and advancement of 3D bioprinting.
Northwestern Medicine scientists have discovered for the first time that the rhythm of breathing creates electrical activity in the human brain that enhances emotional judgments and memory recall.
These effects on behavior depend critically on whether you inhale or exhale and whether you breathe through the nose or mouth.
Babies' ability to soak up language makes them the envy of adult learners everywhere. Still, some grown-ups can acquire new tongues with surprising ease. Now some studies suggest it is possible to predict a person's language-learning abilities from his or her brain structure or activity—results that may eventually be used to help even the most linguistically challenged succeed.
It's the time of year when seemingly innocent jingles tunnel into my brain. Right now I'm haunted by Ariana Grande's "Santa Tell Me," which I heard for the first time while researching this article. Help me.
There may be good reasons why a song like that becomes an earworm, according to Elizabeth Margulis, director of the music cognition lab at the University of Arkansas.
An international team of researchers in India may have discovered a simple-yet-effective way to combat Alzheimer’s disease, a healthcare burden reaching epidemic proportions globally: eating a handful of walnuts each day.
It’s well established that people with low economic status are the hardest hit by the current obesity pandemic, as well as related health problems such as diabetes. Poor healthcare, stress, unhealthy lifestyles, and a cornucopia of cheap junk food are all thought to play a role. But a new study suggests there’s a subconscious component, too.
When political beliefs are challenged, a person’s brain becomes active in areas that govern personal identity and emotional responses to threats
Alt: Hard-wired: The brain's circuitry for political belief
Canada's telecom regulator yesterday declared that broadband Internet must be considered "a basic telecommunications service for all Canadians" and created a fund to connect rural and remote communities. With this decision, high-speed broadband is now treated as an essential technology similar to voice service.
With automation poised to take over an estimated 57 percent of jobs, many are turning to universal basic income (UBI) as a possible solution to widespread unemployment.
UBI systems are already being tested in countries such as Canada, Finland, and the Netherlands, so hard data on the practicality of such systems should be forthcoming.
Deep inside Bridgewater Associates LP, the world’s largest hedge-fund firm, software engineers are at work on a secret project that founder Ray Dalio has sometimes called “The Book of the Future.”
The goal is technology that would automate most of the firm’s management.
Alt: Is this the future of business? World's biggest hedge fund is building a robot based on its founder's brain that will tell its employees what to do
Alt: The World’s Largest Hedge Fund Is Building an Algorithmic Model From its Employees’ Brains
By scouring the remains of early loos and sewers, archaeologists are finding clues to what life was like in the Roman world and in other civilizations.
Inuit who live in Greenland experience average temperatures below freezing for at least half of the year. For those who live in the north, subzero temperatures are normal during the coldest months.
The Neanderthals disappeared about 30,000 years ago, but little pieces of them live on in the form of DNA sequences scattered through the modern human genome.
A new study by geneticists at the University of California, Davis, shows why these traces of our closest relatives are slowly being removed by natural selection.
Italian researchers have discovered what might be the oldest nativity scene ever found — 5,000-year-old rock art that depicts a star in the east, a newborn between parents and two animals.
The scene, painted in reddish-brown ochre, was found on the ceiling of a small cavity in the Egyptian Sahara desert, during an expedition to sites between the Nile valley and the Gilf Kebir Plateau.
The world's oldest mummies have just had an unusual check-up.
More than 7,000 years after they were embalmed by the Chinchorro people, an ancient civilization in modern-day Chile and Peru, 15 mummies were taken to a Santiago clinic last week to undergo DNA analysis and computerized tomography scans.
Archaeologists from the University of Birmingham have found “compelling evidence” of new pharaonic tombs at Qubbet el-Hawa in Aswan, Egypt’s Ministry of Antiquities has revealed.
Washington State University archaeologists are at the helm of new research using sophisticated computer technology to learn how past societies responded to climate change.
Minority Report-style crime prediction has edged closer to reality with a new AI software launched in Dubai.
Space Imaging Middle East announced that the Dubai Police force has deployed its Crime Prediction software, which analyzes patterns from police databases and attempts to spot when and where an event is likely to occur next.
France on Thursday inaugurated the world's first "solar highway", a road paved with solar panels providing enough energy to power the street lights of the small Normandy town of Tourouvre.
The one-kilometre (half-mile) "Wattway" covered with 2,800 square metres (30,000 square feet) of resin-coated solar panels was hooked up to the local power grid as Environment Minister Segolene Royal looked on.
If you've ever struggled to walk across the deck of a boat as it rolls in a choppy sea, or tried to stand up against breaking waves at the beach, you'll have felt the might of the ocean.
A tiny organism at the base of the food chain, but vital for life to exist on Earth, is under threat, according to data collected by a NASA satellite that has been firing a laser into the ocean for a decade.
A sonic boom is heard when the shock waves created by an aircraft, a meteor or some other object traveling through the air at a speed faster than the speed of sound reach a human ear or some other listening device. A new study has found that there are sonic booms being generated on the Moon right now. Lots of them.
It may be three billion light-years away from Earth, but this distant constellation could be trying to contact us.
Six bursts of radio waves have been detected from the constellation Auriga, each lasting just a few milliseconds.
Alt: Six more radio signals from deep space deepen mystery: Are we being hailed by intelligent beings?
Think of an asteroid, and a dry, rocky body may spring to mind. But Ceres, king of the asteroid belt, is helping to throw cold water on that stereotype. Whether frozen in the permanent shadows of its polar craters or mixed into its icy surface layers, water appears to abound on the dwarf planet.
Alt: Dawn spacecraft maps water beneath the surface of Ceres
Every minute, 400 pounds (181kg) of hydrogen and almost 7 pounds (3kg) of helium escapes from Earth's atmosphere into outer space.
It is this process, known as atmospheric escape, that could one day lead to the death of life on our planet, according to one expert.
Tens of thousands of “smog refugees” have reportedly fled China’s pollution-stricken north after the country was hit by its latest “airpocalyse” forcing almost half a billion people to live under a blanket of toxic fumes.
In an unexpected first, researchers have discovered ammonia in Earth's lowest atmospheric layer, a new study said.
The detected ammonia was most concentrated in the upper layer of the troposphere above India and China
The Italian name for the caldera — Campi Flegrei, or “burning fields”— is apt. The 7.5-mile-wide cauldron is the collapsed top of an ancient volcano, formed when the magma within finally blew. Though half of it is obscured beneath the crystal blue waters of the Mediterranean, the other half is studded with cinder cones and calderas from smaller eruptions.
Alt: Rumblings of Europe's supervolcano: Will the sleeping giant awaken?
Two new studies refute the hypothesis that one or more comets/bolides struck North America approximately 12,900 years ago triggering rapid climate change and the start of the Younger Dryas period.
Last week, humans around the world looked up to see dazzling streaks of light fall across the sky during the annual Geminid meteor shower. For most, such celestial shows offer a beautiful and sobering reminder of our tiny place on Earth amidst the magnitude of our galaxy. For Joseph Nuth, an astrophysicist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, they portend a bleaker possibility.
At this week's American Geophysical Union meeting, a team of researchers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) presented their latest research findings on the long-range predictions of rainfall on land. Their method is based on ocean salinity rather than sea surface temperatures, which has been the standard for decades.
Earth may have been a water world for much of its history, a new proposal contends. Just like in the Kevin Costner movie, the continents would have been mostly submerged below sea level. Previous proposals have suggested that Earth’s land area has remained comparatively unchanged throughout much of geologic time.
Archaeologists from the University of Birmingham and the Egypt Exploration Society (EES) Qubbet el-Hawa Research Project (QHRP) yesterday announced the discovery of a 6.5-foot (2 m) high ancient encroachment wall in the northern part of the West Aswan cemetery at Qubbet el-Hawa, Aswan.
Related: 3,000-year-old stone found in Egypt meat shop
Archaeologists have discovered what they say could be the remains of a doctor’s surgery complete with a kit of seven surgical instruments during excavations at Nea Paphos, the capital of Cyprus during the Hellenistic and Roman periods.
The archaeologists from the Institute of Archaeology, Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland, also found a human skeleton at the bottom of a well, the antiquities department revealed on Monday.
A new study of U.S. adolescents provides some of the best evidence to date of how violence spreads like a contagious disease.
Researchers found that adolescents were up to 183 percent more likely to carry out some acts of violence if one of their friends had also committed the same act.
Defects in the body's regulatory T cells (T reg cells) cause inflammation and autoimmune disease by altering the type of bacteria living in the gut, researchers from The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston have discovered.
Cells in the amniotic fluid that surrounds a developing baby can revive ageing and weak bones, say UK scientists.
The findings in mice, published in Scientific Reports, showed cells in the fluid strengthened bone and cut fractures by 80%.
Related: Plastics compound, BPS, often substituted for BPA, alters mouse moms' behavior and brain regions
It’s time to turn back the biological clock. Next year could see the first post-menopausal woman give birth to a baby made using her own eggs.
Earlier this year, a fertility clinic in Athens, Greece, claimed it had reversed the menopause in a group of their patients. The team injected the women’s ovaries with platelet-rich plasma from their own blood.
Nestlé has figured out a way to reduce the amount of sugar used in its products without changing the taste—by reshaping the structure of sugar crystals.
Related: Sugar guidelines unreliable says study funded by sugar industry
What if a Florida tomato could be left on the vine long enough to turn red and fully develop its flavor — and still be ripe and juicy when it arrived at a grocery store in New York days later?
That is precisely the promise of a start-up here in Southern California, Apeel Sciences, that aims to make obsolete the gas, wax and other tricks growers use to keep fruits and vegetables fresh over time.
A team of scientists engineered a nanoparticle to help remove the toxins found in a wide variety of snake bites.
This could impact the estimated 4.5 million people who are bitten by snakes each year, and the 100,000 who die from the venom.
An artificial leaf that can act as a mini-factory for producing drugs has been developed by scientists.
It mimics nature's efficiency at harvesting sunlight by using new materials called luminescent solar concentrators.
Alt: Artificial leaf copies nature to manufacture medicine
For the first time, physicists have shown that atoms of antimatter appear to give off the same kind of light that atoms of regular matter do when illuminated with lasers, a new study finds.
A chatty source of radio waves from deep space has a little more to say. Six more blasts of radio energy, each lasting just a few milliseconds, erupted from some phenomenon outside of our galaxy
A star with a suspicious cocktail of chemicals in its atmosphere has been found and astronomers believe that it's evidence of a planetary murder.
The star, called HIP68468, shares some similarities to our sun and is known to play host to a system of planets.
Going to the Moon is officially hip again, thanks in no small part to Google, which is offering $20 million to the first private company that can land on our nearest neighbor, roll around a bit, and beam images back to Earth.
Japan is a scrapping an experimental reactor which has worked for just 250 days of its 22-year lifespan and cost $9bn (£7.2bn).
Monju will cost at least 375bn yen ($3.2bn; £2.6bn) to decommission and will only be fully dismantled by 2047.
Engineers in South Korea have pushed the boundaries of nuclear fusion by setting a new record for maintaining plasma.
Alt: Another nuclear fusion record just got broken in South Korea
Related: New EU Wood Energy Rules Threaten Climate, Forests
The European Union has ruled that the “general and and indiscriminate” collection of computer data by governments is only permitted when used to fight serious crime. The decision, handed down today by the European Court of Justice, directly challenges the UK’s recently passed surveillance legislation
Alt: European court deals blow to controversial UK surveillance law
States that enacted medical marijuana laws, on average, experienced reductions in traffic fatalities, according to a study by researchers at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. Overall, states that passed medical marijuana laws saw an 11 percent reduction in traffic fatalities, on average, after enacting the laws, and had 26 percent lower rates of traffic fatalities compared with states without the laws.
A cannabidiol hemp oil that Leafly says is used by "hundreds of thousands of patients" in the US for a variety of medical purposes, including to help relieve seizures, has been designated a Schedule 1 drug by the DEA
A centuries-old herbal medicine, discovered by Chinese scientists and used to effectively treat malaria, may help treat tuberculosis and slow the evolution of drug resistance.
A new study shows the ancient remedy artemisinin stopped the ability of TB-causing bacteria, known as Mycobacterium tuberculosis, to become dormant. This stage of the disease often makes the use of antibiotics ineffective.
“We are about to reach the point where more antibiotics will be consumed by farm animals worldwide than by humans,” says Mark Woolhouse, at the University of Edinburgh, UK.
This will mean more resistant bacteria, which could be a big threat
Related: Antibiotic cream could prevent Lyme disease: research
Why does sex exist when organisms that clone themselves use less time and energy, and do not need a mate to produce offspring? Researchers at the University of Stirling aiming to answer this age-old question have discovered that sex can help the next generation resist infection.
Following up on their earlier revelation that blobs of slime mold possess previously unsuspected learning capacities, a group of French scientists now go on to show how readily blobs share what they learn with one another.
As a species we're so brain-proud it doesn't occur to most of us to ask whether a big brain has disadvantages as well as cognitive benefits.
"We can think of tons of benefits to a larger brain, but the other side of that is brain tissue is incredibly 'expensive' and increasing brain size comes at a heavy cost," said Kimberley V. Sukhum, a graduate student in biology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.
The human brain reaches its adult volume by age 10, but the neurons that make it up continue to change for years after that. The connections between neighboring neurons get pruned back, as new links emerge between more widely separated areas of the brain.
Alt: You may think you're grown up at 18, but our brains don't fully mature until after we hit 30
Direct recordings have revealed what is happening in our brains as we make sense of speech in a noisy room.
Focusing on one conversation in a loud, distracting environment is called "the cocktail party effect".
Today, 19 December, marks the 141th anniversary of the birth of Mileva Mari? Einstein. But who remembers this brilliant scientist? While her husband, Albert Einstein is celebrated as perhaps the best physicist of the 20th century, one question about his career remains: How much did his first wife contribute to his groundbreaking science?
This time of year, Newgrange takes on a special significance when the Irish Neolithic site mysteriously aligns with the rising sun at winter solstice.
Related: Newgrange sun trap may be only 50 years old, says archaeologist
A now-submerged Stone Age settlement has been mapped in the Baltic Sea, revealing how its ancient inhabitants lived along what was once a lagoon on the coast of Sweden some 9,000 years ago.
Archaeologists have discovered the earliest known garden in the Pacific Northwest—and it was underwater. The site, about 30 kilometers east of Vancouver, Canada, on land belonging to the Native American group Katzie First Nation, was once part of an ecologically rich wetland.
In the conservation center for the Grand Egyptian Museum, a man hunches over an ancient piece of papyrus, patiently cleaning each fiber in an attempt to restore it to some semblance of its former glory. Nearby, another painstakingly pieces together a set of sandals—nearly ruined, but believed to have been worn by King Tutankhamun—that now resemble something of a jigsaw puzzle, pieces of black material scattered within the golden filigree that binds each shoe together.
When researchers looked at the genome of a Neanderthal from Siberia, they saw DNA that did not belong.
“No matter how we tried to fix it, it didn’t go away,” says Ilan Gronau, a computational biologist at Israel’s Herzliya Interdisciplinary Center.
In the Arctic, the Inuits have adapted to severe cold and a predominantly seafood diet. After the first population genomic analysis of the Greenland Inuits, a region in the genome containing two genes has now been scrutinized by scientists: TBX15 and WARS2. This region is thought to be central to cold adaptation by generating heat from a specific type of body fat, and was earlier found to be a candidate for adaptation in the Inuits.
Exposing your body to cold water has been promoted as a health tonic since at least the Roman period, so it’s about time we gave this a thorough investigation. In a new paper in PLOS One Geert Buijze and his colleagues report on the health and wellbeing effects of the “cool challenge” – a 30-day event in the Netherlands that involved more than 3000 people taking daily showers that ran cold for at least the last 30 seconds each time.
Frequent sauna bathing can reduce the risk of dementia, according to a recent study carried out at the University of Eastern Finland. In a 20-year follow-up, men taking a sauna 4-7 times a week were 66% less likely to be diagnosed with dementia than those taking a sauna once a week.
Sunlight allows us to make vitamin D, credited with healthier living, but a surprise research finding could reveal another powerful benefit of getting some sun.
New research links the number of social media platforms a person uses with risk of depression and anxiety.
The analysis, published in the journal Computers in Human Behavior, shows that people who report using seven to 11 social media platforms had more than three times the risk of depression and anxiety than their peers who use zero to two platforms, even after adjusting for the total time spent on social media overall.
Imagine a calendar. Chances are you just thought about a rectangular grid, with time progressing from the top-left to the bottom-right. But around one percent of you may have pictured something different—a V, for example, or a hoop encircling your head.
There was the voice recognition software that struggled to understand women, the crime prediction algorithm that targeted black neighbourhoods and the online ad platform which was more likely to show men highly paid executive jobs.
Over 100 nations that are part of the international Convention on Conventional Weapons will debate a ban on so called 'killer robots' next year, it has been announced.
At their five-year review conference in Geneva, the 123 nations that are part of the international Convention on Conventional Weapons, agreed to formalize their efforts next year to deal with the challenges raised by weapons systems that would select and attack targets without meaningful human control.
A drone has been equipped with feathers to increase its precision during flight. The bio-inspired device can spread or close its wings while flying, making it easier to maneuver and more resistant in high winds.
7-Eleven, the world’s largest convenience store chain, shared new numbers from its drone delivery experiment today. Seventy-seven customers in Reno, Nev., have now received items ordered from 7-Eleven delivered to their doorsteps via drone.
Think of a traditional robot and you probably imagine something made from metal and plastic. Such “nuts-and-bolts” robots are made of hard materials. As robots take on more roles beyond the lab, such rigid systems can present safety risks to the people they interact with. For example, if an industrial robot swings into a person, there is the risk of bruises or bone damage.
Related: Kazuo Ishiguro: 'We’re coming close to the point where we can create people who are superior to others'
The first true brain-to-brain communication in people could start next year, thanks to huge recent advances.
Early attempts won’t quite resemble telepathy as we often imagine it. Our brains work in unique ways, and the way each of us thinks about a concept is influenced by our experiences and memories. This results in different patterns of brain activity, but if neuroscientists can learn one individual’s patterns, they may be able to trigger certain thoughts in that person’s brain. In theory, they could then use someone else’s brain activity to trigger these thoughts.
Scientists with the China Academy of Space Technology (CAST) claim NASA’s results ‘re-confirm’ what they’d already achieved, and have plans to implement it in satellites ‘as quickly as possible.’ China claims they’ve created a working prototype of the ‘impossible’ reactionless engine – and they say they’re already testing it in orbit aboard the Tiangong-2 space laboratory.
You would need a super-sensitive, gargantuan tongue to taste it, but Sagittarius B2, a molecular cloud about 100 light years wide near the centre of our galaxy, would taste terrible.
The Environmental Protection Agency has concluded that hydraulic fracturing, the oil and gas extraction technique also known as fracking, has contaminated drinking water in some circumstances, according to the final version of a comprehensive study first issued in 2015.