Newsdesk Archive
Outgoing US President Barack Obama has permanently banned offshore oil and gas drilling in the "vast majority" of US-owned northern waters.
Mr Obama designated areas in the Arctic and Atlantic oceans as "indefinitely off limits" to future leasing.
It’s not normal, and it’s happening again.
For the second year in a row in late December and for the second time in as many months, temperatures in the high Arctic will be freakishly high compared to normal.
This might not be the first place you'd expect to find a festive snowy scene, but incredible images show the Sahara desert looking particularly chilly.
It is just the second time in living memory that snow has fallen, with the last occasion being in February 1979.
Odin, the high god of Norse mythology, rode his eight-legged horse Sleipnir through the nine worlds dispensing ecstasy to all those who invoked him. Now an image of a man with a horse depicted on a gold pendant from the 6 th century AD has been found by an amateur with a metal detector on a Danish island. Experts speculate it depicts Odin in part because it has the text “The High One,” one of Odin’s titles.
A bronze penny minted by the Greek tyrant from the Hanukkah story was recently stumbled upon by archaeologists amid the ruins of Jerusalem’s Tower of David during routine cleaning of the site, the museum said in a statement Tuesday ahead of the commencement of the eight-day festival on Saturday night.
One of the most famous recurring miracles — even if one not quite sanctioned by the Catholic Church — is the liquefaction of the dried blood of San Gennaro, or St. Januarius, a bishop of Naples martyred around 305 A.D. and the city's patron saint. Starting in 1389, the vial of San Gennaro's blood typically turns liquid three times a year
"This is the loud trumpet/howling noises in Spokane Valley, WA that I have been hearing All night. Started around 11pm and have been non-stop up until this morning, about 6am."
That’s just one of countless social media posts that appeared throughout the night of December 13th and early December 14th
Two weeks ago, a Dutch expedition preparing a 75th anniversary commemoration of the Battle of the Java Sea found only holes on the seafloor where the ships used to be. The Dutch ships HMNLS De Ruyter and HMNLS Java are “completely missing” and a large section of HMNLS Kortenaer has been stripped away. The same has been confirmed for HMS Exeter and HMS Encounter, as well as sections missing from HMS Electra. The US submarine Perch is also completely gone. While the Perch sank without its crew on board, the other vessels are war graves.
The quest to find King Arthur’s Camelot has puzzled and intrigued scholars and fans for a thousand years. Now, the search may finally be over.
Peter Field, Emeritus Professor in English Literature at Bangor University, has uncovered what he believes to be the location of Arthur’s Camelot.
Alt: Camelot location REVEALED? Historian claim King Arthur was a Yorkshireman
Related: Stunning medieval ring found in Robin Hood's Sherwood Forest could bag an amateur treasure hunter £70,000
Anne Frank may not have been betrayed to Nazi occupiers, but captured by chance.
A new study published Friday by the Anne Frank House museum in Amsterdam says that despite decades of research there is no conclusive evidence that the Jewish diarist and her family were betrayed to the Netherlands' German occupiers during World War II, leading to their arrest and deportation.
More than 400 texts, dating between the middle ages and modern times, have been saved at the Mar Behnam monastery, a place that the Islamic State group (also known as ISIS, ISIL or Daesh) had occupied for more than two years, until November.
Before the very first time I was going to excavate in Iraq, back in 2012, I have to admit I was a little apprehensive; I mean who wouldn’t be? Thankfully the university running the project completely allayed my fears by sending me on a chemical, biological and nuclear weapons training-day, followed up with a course on unexploded ordnance and not stepping on landmines.
Turkey’s Neolithic city of Çatalhöyük may have been an orderly society built on tolerance and equality — until it fell apart.
Ancient Rome indeed feels like modern history compared with the finds for which this arid, dusty site in rural central Turkey is most renowned.
Prehistoric America was not a disease-free utopia. Tuberculosis, treponemal disease, Chagas disease, and many other pathogens were endemic to populations in different regions of the continent. But the “Columbian Exchange” beginning in 1492 introduced new pathogens to American populations, including smallpox, measles, influenza, and yellow fever.
Prehistoric people may have cooked wild grains and plants in pots as early as 10,000 years ago, according to new evidence.
Scientists say the food was "a kind of porridge", acting as the staple diet when there was no meat from hunting.
Researchers at the University of Southampton have published research which shows evidence that a particular cave on the island of Jersey in the English Channel was used as a shelter by Neanderthals. What makes this find fascinating and mysterious is the fact that the same cave was used for over 180,000 years as a shelter as Neanderthals migrated due to shifts in climate.
Bits of wood recovered from a 1.2-million-year-old tooth found at an excavation site in northern Spain indicate that the ancient relatives of man may have use a kind of toothpick. Toothbrushes were not around yet, if the amount of hardened tartar build-up is anything to go by.
Megalodon is the extinct species of giant shark that is considered to be at the top of everyone’s all-time greatest predator list. Its name in ancient Greek means “big tooth” because big tooth fossils are the primary proof of its existence.
Mexican authorities and scientists are trying to save the world's smallest porpoise by capturing illegal "ghost" fishing nets.
They have managed to remove more than 100 dumped or lost nets left floating in the sea from October to December.
When is an orchid not an orchid? When it's a female orchid praying mantis, a Southeast Asian insect that masquerades as a flower to attract prey.
With petal-like legs and a yellow or whitish pink color, females share little resemblance to males, which are about half the size and sport a dull, greenish brown color.
Several clades of spiders whose females evolved giant sizes are known for extreme sexual behaviors such as sexual cannibalism, opportunistic mating, mate-binding, genital mutilation, plugging, and emasculation
A spider bearing an "uncanny" resemblance to the sorting hat in the Harry Potter series has been discovered by scientists in India.
Related: Rainbow Snake, Klingon Newt Among 163 Newfound Species
The song and behaviour of the UK's favourite bird is being affected by light and noise pollution.
That is according to research from Southampton University, which revealed how robins are affected by night-time lighting and road noise in a city park.
Related: Study: There Are Twice as Many Bird Species as Previously Estimated
For decades, scientists have theorized that pumping aerosols into the stratosphere could counteract the warming effects of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. It sounds crazy, right? How could pumping more pollution into the air fix a pollution problem?
The lifetime of a glacier — an enormous slow-moving river of ice — can span many thousands of years. And while glaciers are dynamic, changes to their length and volume happen at an extremely sluggish pace.
With temperatures as cold as -270 °C, space is one hell of a heat sink.
Physicists have achieved record levels of temperature reduction using the process of radiative cooling, by which heat is beamed from Earth’s surface into outer space.
The world's largest digital survey of the visible Universe, mapping billions of stars and galaxies, has been publicly released.
Everyone has a backstory, even our own Milky Way galaxy. And much like social media, the picture is not always as pretty as it appears on the current surface, says Texas A&M University astronomer Casey Papovich.
The intriguing story of Mars' mysterious dark streaks may have a new twist.
The streaks, known as recurring slope lineae (RSL), occur seasonally on steep, relatively warm slopes at many locations on the Red Planet.
Related: Ancient water found in Canada is two billion years old – giving hope to Mars colony dreamers
Located in the area of Terra Meridiani, researchers have spotted three massive ‘Towers’ on the Martian Surface that are so perfectly aligned, that just as the Pyramids of Giza on Earth, these Martian towers seem to mimic the constellation of Orion.
Image here
Planet Earth is effectively defenceless in the face of a “dinosaur-killer” asteroid strike, a Nasa scientist has warned.
And the planet is overdue for an extinction-level event involving a giant space object – such as an asteroid or comet – following a number of close encounters over the last 20 years, Dr Joseph Nuth said.
Scientists say they have identified a remarkable new feature in Earth’s molten outer core.
They describe it as a kind of "jet stream" - a fast-flowing river of liquid iron that is surging westwards under Alaska and Siberia.
The Bloomberg New Energy Finance predicts that, while coal and gas costs will stay low, renewables will do better and will be the cheapest in many countries between now and 2040.
Solar power is now around half the price of coal and gas, making it cheaper than wind energy, and ultimately the cheapest form of new electricity.
The dramatic melting of Arctic ice is already driving extreme weather that affects hundreds of millions of people across North America, Europe and Asia, leading climate scientists have told the Guardian.
Evan Smith wanted to get his hands on the world's biggest diamonds — the kind that sit atop royal scepters, and the ones that are always the target of elaborate movie heists. But this wasn't for some nefarious get-rich-quick scheme. It was for science.
Alt: Strange giant diamonds give hints to the inner Earth's composition
Scientists have discovered that "doping" graphene with nitrogen allows it to be an efficient electrocatalyst which can convert environmentally harmful CO2 into useful fuels.
The technology is far from being ready for large scale application, yet the research is useful in the development of new catalysts that could provide a variety of useful applications in the future.
Pregnancy appears to trigger long-term changes in brain structure, researchers have revealed, suggesting that the transformations could boost a mother’s ability to care for her newborn baby.
Elderly patients are less likely to die or to be readmitted to to the hospital when they’re treated by a female physician than by a male physician, according to new research.
Surgeons have described a new treatment for early stage prostate cancer as "truly transformative".
The approach, tested across Europe, uses lasers and a drug made from deep sea bacteria to eliminate tumours, but without causing severe side effects.
Hydrogen’s antimatter counterpart has shown its true colours, and they are just what physicists ordered.
Alt: Laser helps unlock antimatter secrets
Scientists are a little bit closer to unlocking the mystery of how the rules of the quantum realm translate to the rules of the classical physics of the observable world.
Experts predict that the materials used in this research, topological insulators, will play a key role in furthering this development.
Erik Verlinde's emergent gravity theory makes sense of the behavior of gravity without the need for the existence of a dark matter particle.
Researchers from the Leiden Observatory have studied more than 33,000 galaxies to see if Verlinde’s theory checks out.
Alt: Verlinde's new theory of gravity passes first test
Although the sun is our nearest star, it still hides many secrets. But it seems that one solar conundrum may have been solved and a theory originally proposed in 1905 by Albert Einstein could be at the root of it all.
Twenty years ago, solar astronomers realized that the uppermost layer of the sun rotates slower than the rest of the sun's interior. This is odd.
Astronomers have spotted transient, transit-like dimming events of a young star named RIK-210 located some 472 light years away in the Upper Scorpius OB association. However, what puzzles the scientists is the mystery behind this dimming as it can not be caused by an eclipsing stellar or brown dwarf companion. They describe their search for plausible explanations in a paper published Dec. 12 on the arXiv pre-print server.
Just like the moon and Mercury, the largest asteroid in Earth's solar system, Ceres, has cold pockets of perpetual darkness on its surface where researchers have now detected ice, a new study finds.
Alt: Solar System’s biggest asteroid is an ancient ocean world
Future moon colonies could be totally tubular.
Slight variations in the moon’s gravitational tug have hinted that kilometers-wide caverns lurk beneath the lunar surface.
Researchers from the University of Waterloo have developed a method that will detect roughly 10 black holes per year, doubling the number currently known within two years, and it will likely unlock the history of black holes in a little more than a decade.
Eight small satellites, designed to improve hurricane forecasts by detecting the wind speeds within storms, blasted off on Thursday aboard an air-launched Pegasus rocket, a NASA TV broadcast showed.
Imagine strapping on a harness and dangling yourself over the side of a bridge, 100 feet in the air—the wind whipping past you, the earth far below. It might sound like a scene from a spy movie, or a fun idea for a vacation activity. For a bridge inspector, however, it's just another day on the job.
Retail giant Amazon has made its first commercial delivery using a drone, in the UK.
The package arrived safely at its destination in Cambridge, 13 minutes after being ordered.
Related: Amazon just launched a cashier-free convenience store
In an experimental new treatment, a 32-electrode stimulator was implanted near the C-5 vertebrae in the middle of a patient's neck, below the site of his spinal injury.
This procedure was first used on two cervical spinal-cord injury patients who displayed a 300% increase in finger mobility and grip strength.
If Santa is recruiting helpers to haul Christmas presents around the world this year he had better take a few extra, said researchers Monday who warned that reindeer are shrinking.
Over the past 16 years, the weight of adult reindeer in Svalbard in the Norwegian Arctic has dropped by 12 percent
Research Fellow Monamie RINGHOFER and Associate Professor Shinya YAMAMOTO (Kobe University Graduate School of Intercultural Studies) have proved that when horses face unsolvable problems they use visual and tactile signals to get human attention and ask for help. The study also suggests that horses alter their communicative behavior based on humans' knowledge of the situation.
Tibetan mastiffs thrive where most dogs and people can’t: in the thin, frigid mountain air above 4000 meters. A new study suggests they acquired this talent by interbreeding with gray wolves that already ranged to such heights more than 20,000 years ago. Intriguingly, Tibetan people received their high-altitude fitness via the same mechanism—by interbreeding with now extinct humans known as Denisovans.
Any pet owner will tell you that their animal companions comfort and sustain them when life gets rough. This may be especially true for people with serious mental illness, a study finds. When people with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder were asked who or what helped them manage the condition, many said it was pets that helped the most.
Do rats feel joy? It can be hard to tell, since they can’t exactly greet us with a grin.
But now, for the first time, scientists have spotted the rat equivalent of a smile—and it’s all in the ears.
Alt: Study suggests rats smile with their ears
Joyful Brits underestimate the nation's happiness by 45 per cent, according to a new poll on public perception.
Despite their gloomy estimations, nine in 10 British people consider themselves to be "very or rather happy."
Fewer teenagers in the United States used drugs in 2016 than in previous decades. The positive news comes from an annual survey of almost 45,500 U.S. students in grades eight, 10 and 12.
Later high school start times are associated with positive outcomes among teens, including longer weekday sleep durations and reduced vehicular accident rates, research suggests.
Sleeping less than five hours a night and then getting behind the wheel is as dangerous as driving while drunk, a major study has found.
Related: Jet lag increases risk of liver cancer, new study suggests
Related: Australian researchers make major breakthrough in understanding cot death
New research suggests it is possible to slow or even reverse aging, at least in mice, by undoing changes in gene activity—the same kinds of changes that are caused by decades of life in humans.
Alt: Scientists Say the Clock of Aging May Be Reversible
A sound in the Mariana Trench notable for its complexity and wide frequency range likely represents the discovery of a new baleen whale call, according to the researchers who recorded and analyzed it.
Killer whales off Australia have been seen killing and eating rare beaked whales – a behaviour never observed before.
Since 2014, a small team including Rebecca Wellard of Curtin University in Perth has been going out with commercial whale-watching boats to study killer whales off Australia’s south coast.
Dive deep deep down into the ocean, long past the point where the sun’s rays can penetrate, and you will enter the realm of the ghost sharks.
Also called chimaeras, ghost sharks are dead-eyed, wing-finned fish rarely seen by people.
Six new animal species have been identified at deep-sea vents beneath the Indian Ocean.
The remote area is home to life not seen elsewhere in the world's oceans, yet has been earmarked for future mineral exploration.
Atmospheric rivers - narrow corridors of concentrated moisture suspended in the atmosphere - were responsible for the mysterious mass die-off of wild Olympia oysters in San Francisco Bay in 2011, scientists have found.
This is the first documented case of these 'rivers in the sky' - which can hold 15 times more water than the Mississippi River - directly harming an entire population
The highest-ever wave detected by a buoy has been recorded in the North Atlantic ocean, the World Meteorological Organization has said.
The 19-metre (62.3ft) wave happened between Iceland and the United Kingdom, off the Outer Hebrides.
Statistical analysis of mini-spiral galaxies shows an unexpected interaction between dark matter and ordinary matter. According to the SISSA study recently published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, where the relationship is obvious and cannot be explained in a trivial way within the context of the Standard Model, these objects may serve as "portals" to a completely new form of Physics which can explain phenomena like matter and dark energy.
Related: Astrophysicist: Soon, We Will Solve the Mystery of Dark Matter
Scientists have made the rare discovery of a planetary system with a host star similar to Earth's sun. Especially intriguing is the star's unusual composition, which indicates it ingested some of its planets.
If your death-from-above musings focus solely on asteroids , you need to broaden your worried mind.
Comets can also deliver a heaping helping of calamity to Earth, and scientists and policymakers alike should start taking measures to combat the threat, said Joseph Nuth, a researcher at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
Seventy percent of Earth’s surface is covered by water, meaning if we were unfortunate enough to be struck by an enormous asteroid, it’d probably make a big splash. A team of data scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory recently decided to model what would happen if an asteroid struck the sea. Despite the apocalyptic subject matter, the results are quite beautiful.
A long time ago, in a world not so far away, a young man who longed for adventure was swept up in a galactic war. Forced to choose between two sides in the deadly battle, he befriended a group of scrappy fighters who captained… three-headed vultures, giant fleas and space spiders?
Nearly 2,000 years before George Lucas created his epic space opera Star Wars, Lucian of Samosata (a province in modern-day Turkey) wrote the world’s first novel featuring space travel and interplanetary battles. True History was published around 175 CE during the height of the Roman Empire.
The decades-old mystery of what caused a killer fog that claimed the lives of thousands of people here appears to have been solved by a team of international scientists.
A group of wall paintings in Stratford-upon-Avon’s Guild Chapel should have been destroyed in 1563, but John Shakespeare had them covered in limewash instead, preserving them for centuries.
Upon entering the Egyptian Museum as tourists scan the cases of “wonderful things,” one case containing a stunning sarcophagus stands out. It’s eye catching not only because of the beauty of the artifact, but also because the label describing its location says “United States of America.” No, this is not a reproduction—it’s a stolen antiquity that was trafficked out of Egypt, and one of the few looted pieces that has made its way home.
It’s plunder on a mighty scale. An archaeological emergency will be declared in Mali today as ancient sites are destroyed and its heritage flows out of the country.
As the foreman for a cattle ranch in the far reaches of the Brazilian Amazon, Lailson Camelo da Silva was razing trees to convert rain forest into pasture when he stumbled across a bizarre arrangement of towering granite blocks.
“I had no idea that I was discovering the Amazon’s own Stonehenge,”
Alt: The mystery of the 'Amazon Stonehenge': 1,000-year-old Megalithic stone circle in Brazil hints that ancient civilizations were more sophisticated than first thought
Is there anything the Mayans didn’t do? If you said “Build the world’s first superhighways,” give your Magic 8-Ball another shake and try again because a new study has found evidence in Guatemala of a 2,000-year-old network of roads covering over 240 km (150 miles) that was used by the Mayans there for travel and for transporting goods.
The driest desert on Earth may once have had lakes and wetlands, scientists report.
They have found the remnants of freshwater plants and animals buried in the arid plains of Chile's Atacama Desert.
This watery period dates to between 9,000 and 17,000 years ago.
For a period about a million years ago Greenland wasn’t covered in ice. Researchers say the discovery suggests it’s possible the ice sheet could go away again.
Before now, scientists didn’t know whether Greenland’s ice sheet was so stable that it would just weather any climate changes, or if there were ever a period in which Greenland was, if not verdant, at least a bit rocky.
Every meal you eat now costs the planet 10 kilos in lost topsoil.
That's the warning of "Surviving the 21st Century" author Julian Cribb to an international soil science conference in Queenstown, New Zealand on Dec 15, 2016.
"10 kilos of topsoil, 800 litres of water, 1.3 litres of diesel, 0.3g of pesticide and 3.5 kilos of carbon dioxide – that's what it takes to deliver one meal, for just one person," Cribb says.
The world’s most widely used insecticides harm the ability of bees to vibrate flowers and shake out the pollen to fertilise crops, according to preliminary results from a new study.
A crop spray which can boost farmer's wheat yields by one fifth, without the need for genetic modification, has been developed by scientists at Oxford University.
Researchers have found a molecule which helps plants make the best use of the sugary fuel that they generate during photosynthesis. And with more fuel, the plants can produce bigger grains.
The first British baby made with the DNA of three people could be born next year after the UK’s fertility regulator gave the green light for clinics to seek licences for the procedure.
Alt: U.K. Fertility Clinics Can Now Apply For Licenses To Create 3-Parent Babies
Advances in reproductive technology may radically change the options we have for starting a family. We’re not too far from fundamentally redefining what it means to start a family.
Premature babies who were breastfed exclusively and kept warm through continuous skin-to-skin contact have become young adults with larger brains, higher salaries and less stressful lives than babies who received conventional incubator care, according to a study published this week.
Related: Abortion Is Found to Have Little Effect on Women’s Mental Health
Related: Autism linked to vitamin D deficiency during pregnancy, researchers find
Runners' brains appear to have greater functional connectivity than non-runners' brains, according to new research. MRI scans show that running may affect the structure and function of the brain in ways similar to complex tasks such as playing a musical instrument.
Hearing a foreign language in the background can help you learn it faster, even if you are not paying attention
Baffling grammar, strange vowels, quirky idioms and so many new words—all of this makes learning a new language hard work. Luckily, researchers have discovered a number of helpful tricks, ranging from exposing your ears to a variety of native speakers to going to sleep soon after a practice session.
If you got 13 percent back on your investments every year, you'd be pretty happy, right? Remember, the S&P 500, historically, has averaged about 7 percent when adjusted for inflation.
What if the investment is in children, and the return on investment not only makes economic sense but results in richer, fuller, healthier lives for the entire family?
20% of population uses majority of public services, research shows, indicating long-term importance of early years investment for disadvantaged children
As Ben Franklin noted, some of you have "the Power of changing, by slight means, the smell of another discharge ... our water. A few stems of asparagus eaten, shall give our urine a disagreeable odour." Apparently this is so common a power that the 18th century French botanist Louis Lémery wrote that asparagus causes "a filthy and disagreeable smell in the urine, as everybody knows."
Everybody except me, anyway.
Related: You can taste garlic with your feet
Europe’s earliest humans did not use fire, but had a balanced diet of meat and plants — all eaten raw, according to a team of researchers led by Karen Hardy of the University of York and the Autonomous University of Barcelona.
Three has become five. Laetoli in northern Tanzania is the site of iconic ancient footprints, capturing the moment – 3.66 million years ago – when three members of Lucy’s species (Australopithecus afarensis) strode out across the landscape.
Now something quite unexpected has come to light: the footprints of two other individuals.
Alt: 'Lucy' Species May Have Been Polygynous
Although we call erections “boners,” anyone who has basic familiarity with human anatomy knows our slang deceives us—for unlike most mammals, men have no penis bones. For decades scientists have wondered, “Why? No? Penis Bone?” A new study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society might finally answer the mystery of what killed the penis bone: monogamy.
We aren't sure whether they could speak, let alone intone liturgy over their dead in the light of controlled fires, but a child's burial site in Spain suggests they might well have, say archaeologists.
Samson the Greek? 3,000-year-old archaeological finds at Tel Dan suggest that the Danites were Aegean soldiers hired by Canaan's Egyptian overlords to keep order.
Alt: Only 11 Tribes of Israel? Controversial Findings Reveal Danites Might Not Be Sons of Israel But Sons Of Greece
The world’s oldest water, which is locked deep within the Earth’s crust, just got even older.
The liquid was discovered deep down in a mine in Canada in 2013 and is about 1.5 billion years old.
Until this week, all of the wind power generated in the United States was landlocked.
But in a first for America, the ocean breeze is now generating clean, renewable power offshore — electricity that will supply a small island community off the coast of Rhode Island.
A new report shows that in the third quarter of this year alone, enough solar panels to generate 4,143 MW of electricity were installed in the United States.
This boom in installations contributes to the prediction that coal is a fading industry, and will never return to its former grandeur.
Related: The U.S. Could Generate 25% of Its Energy Needs From Solar Rooftops
Geologists say they are close to creating the hottest borehole in the world. They are drilling into the heart of a volcano in the south-west of Iceland.
The researchers want to bring steam from the deep well back up to the surface to provide an important source of energy.