Newsdesk Archive
Earth’s innards are cooling off surprisingly fast.
The thickness of new volcanic crust forming on the seafloor has gotten thinner over the last 170 million years. That suggests that the underlying mantle is cooling about twice as fast as previously thought, researchers reported December 13 at the American Geophysical Union’s fall meeting.
Once 2016 comes to a close, the Arctic will have experienced its hottest year on record, and researchers have found that it’s now warming twice as fast as any other place on Earth.
Antarctica might be one of the most inhospitable regions on the planet, but it is a mecca for astronomers. Its cold, dry air enables observations that can't be done elsewhere on Earth. The South Pole has hosted telescopes for decades. Now, researchers are eyeing a new location - Dome A, which offers a unique opportunity to study the universe at little-explored terahertz radio frequencies.
A controversial approach to gravity that challenges Albert Einstein and suggests dark matter doesn’t exist has passed its first test.
The vast majority of physicists agree that gravity acts according to rules laid down in Isaac Newton’s law of gravitation and Einstein’s theory of general relativity.
In a paper published in the physics journal, Classical and Quantum Gravity, Dr. Diego Rubiera-Garcia from the University of Lisbon in Portugal, and his team, posited that a physical object, such as a person or spacecraft, could survive the gravitational forces of wormhole travel. To make the theory and math work, they do have to play fast and loose with Einstein, but that’s not a big deal apparently.
Of all the potential doomsday scenarios put forward by scientists, one of the most mysterious is the dark matter disk theory. As scientists began collecting data about the movements of other galaxies, it became clear that there was some unknown, invisible type of matter causing gravitational fluctuations throughout the observable universe.
Dimitra Atri, an astrobiologist with the Blue Marble Institute of Space Science, has published a paper in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society outlining his work running simulations of planet Proxima b, an exoplanet circling the star Proxima Centauri, which could possibly support life.
It’s several hundred years in the future. You live in a cold climate, but thick clothing keeps you warm. You eat food from the community greenhouse. Sometimes you even go boating, spending tranquil days under the orange sky. Life is similar in some ways to how it is now. In other ways, it’s very different.
For one thing, you can fly. Also — your body is now permanently incapable of adapting to Earth’s atmosphere, and you can never return.
This is life on Titan, the largest of Saturn’s more than 50 moons.
Parts of Mars were capable of supporting life as we know it for lengthy stretches in the ancient past—perhaps hundreds of millions of years at a time, new observations by NASA's Mars rover Curiosity suggest.
Alt: Long Window for Life on Mars: Hundreds of Millions of Years?
New analysis from NASA's Mars Curiosity rover shows that the red planet is likely flush with organics.
"I am convinced that organics are all over Mars," said Jennifer Eigenbrode, a biogeochemist and geologist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
Alt: First signs of boron on Mars hint at past groundwater, habitability
An ocean within Jupiter's icy moon Europa may be intermittently venting plumes of water vapor into outer space, according to a new study in the Astrophysical Journal. The finding suggests the ocean, thought to lie underneath perhaps 100 kilometers of ice, may be more amenable to life—and more accessible to curious astrobiologists—than previously thought.
Self healing chips—healing after radiation damage—could have an impact on interstellar spacecraft, according to reports. The news involves scientists at NASA and the Korean Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST); they have been developing new technologies in the interstellar realm.
Social scientists bear glad tidings for the holiday season. After extensively observing how people respond to gifts, they have advice for shoppers: You don’t have to try so hard.
The older we get, the fewer risks we take. But what lies behind people’s more cautious behaviour in their older years has been one of the unsolved puzzles of human behaviour.
A Japanese city has introduced a novel way to keep track of senior citizens with dementia who are prone to getting lost: tagging their fingers and toes with scan-able barcodes.
Men should avoid rock music when playing board games, say scientists
Mozart may enhance a man's performance in board games - while AC/DC may hinder their chances, according to new research.
Is man-flu a quirk of viral evolution? Some viruses might cause weaker symptoms in women than in men because it makes them more likely to spread.
Many infections cause more severe illness in men than women. Men infected with tuberculosis are 1.5 times more likely to die than women; men infected with human papillomavirus are five times more likely to develop cancer than women.
Reporter Sarah G. Miller notes in “1 in 6 Americans Takes a Psychiatric Drug” that prescriptions for mental illness keep surging. As of 2013, almost 17 percent of Americans were taking at least one psychiatric drug, up from 10 percent in 2011, according to a new study.
Related: This type of psychotherapy treats irritable bowels
Researchers removed the jellylike tissue behind the lens of the eye and replaced it with a saline solution in 20 patients who had Terson syndrome.
One month after the surgery, patients' vision improved to an average of 20/40 from an average of 20/1290 and, within a few months, almost all patients had 20/20 vision.
In so many ways, the gadgets seen in Star Trek remind us that the show is science fiction—a fantasy world inspired by the one we live in. And at times, the show can act as a glimpse into the future. The medical tricorder—that all-in-one portable device that can accurately diagnose anything—sits somewhere in the middle of that spectrum.
Behind every great painting, and inside every rare relic, are “hidden doors” that state-of-the-art non-invasive X-rays can now open, revealing pathways of information without laying a finger on valuable and fragile antiquities.
The hidden secrets of Egyptian mummies up to 3,000 years old have been virtually unwrapped and reconstructed for the first time using cutting-edge scanning technology in a joint British-Australian exhibition.
Prehistoric human ancestors that created hand stencils in caves 40,000 years ago can now be identified as male or female with more than 90% accuracy.
A stone slab found off the coast of Israel has finally revealed the name of the ruler during one of the most iconic moments in Jewish history: the Bar Kokhba revolt.
Cahokia was North America's biggest city—then it was completely abandoned. I went there to find out why
A thousand years ago, huge pyramids and earthen mounds stood where East St. Louis sprawls today in Southern Illinois. This majestic urban architecture towered over the swampy Mississippi River floodplains, blotting out the region's tiny villages.
Archaeologists have discovered a 2,500-year-old lost city in Greece.
Researchers from the University of Gothenburg and the University of Bournemouth have begun exploring the ruins at a village called Vlochos, around 300km (190 miles) north of Athens.
Alt: Archaeologists Find Previously Unknown Ancient City in Greece
Archaeologists are unearthing an ancient city that was wiped out by floods, according to Chinese media.
Bairen, located in central China, dates back more than 2,600 years to China's Spring and Autumn period.
Despite our fascination with this enormous, extinct relative of today’s great white shark, though, there’s still a great deal we don’t know about the life and death of the biggest shark that ever lived. For starters, we still don’t know why the last of the megatooths died over 2.5 million years ago.
A team of researchers from China and the U.S. has found evidence of ancient weathering in a glacial deposit in China's Hunan province. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team outlines their findings and why they believe ancient weathering offers evidence of acid rain that might have played a role in the development of more advanced life forms on our planet.
For decades scientists have speculated that rising global temperatures might alter the ability of soils to store carbon, potentially releasing huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere and triggering runaway climate change. Yet thousands of studies worldwide have produced mixed signals on whether this storage capacity will actually decrease — or even increase — as the planet warms.
It turns out scientists might have been looking in the wrong places.
Related: Losing tropical forest might raise risks of human skin ulcers, deformed bones
The idea of geoengineering a solution to climate change has been discussed for decades, and now a new study proposes a plan that would cool the planet while repairing a hole in the ozone layer at the same time.
The trick: using calcite particles injected high into the stratosphere to reflect sunlight back into space
Scientists suspect that Jupiter probably was not always in its current orbit, but the timing of the planet’s formation and migration has been a mystery. That’s where meteorites known as CB chondrites come in.
A small team of researchers from the U.S. and Italy has found evidence of a naturally formed quasicrystal in a sample obtained from the Khatyrka meteorite. In their paper published in the journal Scientific Reports, the team describes how they found the quasicrystal and offer some possible explanations on how it was formed.
Related: Quest to Reveal Asteroid's Mysteries Before Japanese Spacecraft's Visit
The search for the universe’s missing particles, supposedly taking up as much as 80% of the total mass of the universe, hasn’t really yielded definitive results. Different theories have been put forward to understand dark matter — with some even saying may not really exist. Physicists from Cornell University offer an explanation that changes the way we understand dark matter, and could explain why all the search so far has been for naught.
Belfast-based astronomers have helped to discover a very rare celestial event - a star being "swallowed" after it passed too close to a black hole.
Alt: Spinning black hole swallowing star explains superluminous event
For the first time ever, a team of astronomers from Rice University have mapped gases in three dark rings surrounding a young star almost 400 light years away, known as HD 163296. The rings are spaces in the star’s protoplanetary disk that are devoid of dust particles. This implies that planets are forming. However, while the two outer rings are consistent with having been cleared up by revolving new planets, the innermost ring holds a mystery.
It’s cloudy with a chance of gemstones. A super-sized planet 1000 light years from Earth has clouds that may contain the building blocks of rubies and sapphires, according to the first exoplanet meteorology report.
The planets in our solar system experience a wide variety of weather, from Jupiter’s famous Great Red Spot through Mars’s dust devils to Saturn’s hexagonal north polar storm. But planets around other stars are too distant for us to directly discern their short-term weather, such as changes in clouds or wind.
A good fossil cephalopod is hard to find. Sure, there are belemnite guards, ammonite shells, and other hard parts in uncountable abundance, but rarely do paleontologists get to see the characteristic soft tissue anatomy of these many-armed swimmers. That makes a fossil found in the 165 million year old rock of France all the more wonderful.
An ancient mammal the size of a badger may have used its bone-crushing canines and powerful bite to take down little dinosaurs, researchers have found. In fact, the little guy could chomp down with more force, pound for pound, than any other mammal on record.
The first post-apocalypse tenants of ground zero of the dinosaur extinction didn’t waste much time moving in.
Drilling into the crater left by the dino-devastating Chicxulub impact in Mexico, researchers uncovered the fossilized remains of pioneering microbes. These “disaster species” colonized the harsh waters above the crater within hundreds of years of the impact
Scientists say they have a clue that may enable them to find traces of the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs in the very crater it made on impact.
This pointer takes the form of a nickel signature in the rocks of the crater that is now buried under ocean sediments in the Gulf of Mexico.
Humans are woefully unprepared for a surprise asteroid or comet, a Nasa scientist warned on Monday, at a presentation with nuclear scientists into how humans might deflect cosmic dangers hurtling toward Earth.
“The biggest problem, basically, is there’s not a hell of a lot we can do about it at the moment,” said Dr Joseph Nuth, a researcher with Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
The recent discovery of a planet around the star closest to Earth's sun has raised hopes that life might exist around the sun's nearest neighbor, but researchers now find that this world might frequently experience extinction-level "superflares" from its star.
A new study has revealed similarities and relationships between certain types of chemicals found on 30 different comets, which vary widely in their overall composition compared to one another. The research is part of ongoing investigations into these primordial bodies, which contain material largely unchanged from the birth of the solar system some 4.6 billion years ago.
Over the last two and a half million years the Earth has undergone more than 50 major ice ages, each having a profound effect on our planet's climate. But what causes them and how do we predict when the next big ice age will hit?
About 40 years ago, scientists realised that ice ages were driven by changes in the Earth's orbit. But, as I recently argued in Nature, it's not that simple.
The planet is warming at an unprecedented rate and reducing emissions of greenhouse gasses alone is not enough to remove the risk.
Last year's historic Paris climate agreement set the goal of keeping global temperatures no higher than 1.5 degrees Celsius above the preindustrial levels. Emission reductions will be central to achieving that goal, but supplemental efforts can further reduce risks
An international team of researchers has found that the Antarctic Ice Sheet plays a major role in regional and global climate variability - a discovery that may also help explain why sea ice in the Southern Hemisphere has been increasing despite the warming of the rest of the Earth.
Related: Ice loss spreads up Antarctic glaciers
Wind power plays a key role in curbing greenhouse emissions from other energy sources such as coal and gas, a new study has shown.
Energy from windfarms in the UK prevented almost 36m tonnes of harmful carbon emissions in six years, equivalent to taking 2.3m cars off the road, the analysis found.
Related: Lightning Strikes Are a Big Problem for Wind Turbines
Natural gas and wind are the lowest-cost technology options for new electricity generation across much of the U.S. when cost, public health impacts and environmental effects are considered, according to new research.
Related: Investment Funds Worth Trillions Are Dropping Fossil Fuel Stocks
The best news about climate change that we’ve heard lately is that for three years straight, the world’s energy-related emissions of carbon dioxide, the most important greenhouse gas, have been flat. The gas has continued to accumulate in the atmosphere, but emissions haven’t gone up, even as economies have continued to grow.
A new artificial intelligence system can take still images and generate short videos that simulate what happens next similar to how humans can visually imagine how a scene will evolve, according to a new study.
The success of cloning mammals through laboratory procedures has been bleak. Less than 10 percent of cloned mammal embryos make it to birth, with most attempts ending in embryonic death, defective placenta, or implantation failure.
The myth of the Holy Grail is embedded in our culture - the sacred Christian treasure, and the mystery of where it disappeared to (or even if it existed in the first place, as many historians believe it is simply a legend), has fascinated us for so long that it has now even become a turn of phrase signifying the greatest search.
The first river polluted by humanity may have been discovered in Jordan, contaminated by copper about 7,000 years ago, a new study finds.
Scientists examined a now-dry riverbed in the Wadi Faynan region of southern Jordan.
A Syrian community 11,000 years ago began a practice which would change man’s relationship with his surroundings forever: the initiation of cereal domestication and, with it, the commencement of agriculture, a process which lasted several millennia. The discoveries, made at the Tell Qarassa North archaeological site, situated near the city of Sweida in Syria, are the oldest evidence of the domestication of three species of cereal: one of barley and two of wheat (spelt and farrow).
New research led by the University of Southampton shows Neanderthals kept coming back to a coastal cave site in Jersey from at least 180,000 years ago until around 40,000 years ago.
Neanderthals built complex structures, captured birds to ornament themselves with feathers, and successfully hunted mammoth and other formidable megafauna with tools.
But does any of the evidence suggest that they were religious? It's notably tricky to infer religious behavior from material culture, as I've written about here before regarding Gobekli Tepe, a possible 11,000-year-old modern-human temple.
Upward Sun River is the name of an archeological site found in the Tanana River Valley in the interior of Alaska. The site was made famous in 2010 with the discovery of the remains of a young girl and then in 2013 with the discovery of two infant remains, buried perhaps 11,500 years ago.
Freshly harvested data from NASA's Cassini mission reveals that the ringed planet's moons may be younger than previously thought.
"All of these Cassini mission measurements are changing our view of the Saturnian system, as it turns our old theories upside down,"
right stars top Christmas trees in Christian homes around much of the world. The faithful sing about the “Star of Wonder” that guided the wise men to a manger in the little town of Bethlehem, where Jesus was born. They’re commemorating the Star of Bethlehem described by the Evangelist Matthew in the New Testament. Is the star’s biblical description a pious fiction, or does it contain some astronomical truth?
There’s a fascinating sight just about 10 billion light years away from Earth, and an international team of astronomers have their eyes set on it. Because of its distance, what astronomers see is a cluster of still-forming protogalaxies as they were when the universe was just 3 billion years old — called the Spiderweb Galaxy. The surprising thing about it is that it’s not growing how other galaxy clusters have.
Since 2015, a star that can be seen mysteriously brightening and dimming has captured the imagination of scientists and conspiracy theorists alike. Now a new paper suggests the star gives off jets that could be a source of energy for an alien civilisation.
Related: Mysterious video shows 'shapeshifting UFO' hovering in the skies over Texas
Related: Are aliens harvesting energy from the sun? UFO hunters claim to have found evidence for star lifting in Nasa images
Related: Area 51 revealed: Aerial timelapse of America's mysterious government base shows how it has grown
Related: Key Witness for Rendlesham Alien Mystery Finally Speaks Out, Confirms Object was a UFO
A MYSTERIOUS cloud which looks like the Death Star from Star Wars has appeared in the sky in Japan.
Related: Unusual 'fog dome' spotted
For several decades now, scientists from around the world have been pursuing a ridiculously ambitious goal: They hope to develop a nuclear fusion reactor that would generate energy in the same manner as the sun and other stars, but down here on Earth.
Robotics researchers at Cornell University made a hand that has something close to a human touch — it can not only touch delicate items but also sense the shape and texture of what it comes into contact with.
You might think your memories are unique, but a study involving a Sherlock Holmes drama suggests the opposite. When people describe the episode, their brain activity patterns are almost exactly the same as each other’s, for each scene. And there’s also evidence that, when a person tells someone else about it, they implant that same activity into their brain as well.
In the wake of the election, it’s clear American society is fractured. Negative emotions are running amok, and countless words of anger and frustration have been spilled. If you were to analyze this news outlet for the ratio of positive emotional words to negative ones, would you find a dip linked to the events of the past few weeks?
Landmark research says tackling mental health issues more effective than reducing poverty for increasing happiness rates
Related: Finding love makes you happier than a pay rise, study finds
Related: Move over Freud: literary fiction is the best therapy
Related: Depression in Young People Affects the Stomach, Anxiety the Skin
Related: Neuroimaging categorizes four depression subtypes
A number of artifacts with inscriptions survived in the ancient Assyrian city of Nimrud, after the terrorist group ISIL (also known as ISIS or Daesh) destroyed the site.
The Ziggurat of Jiroft, known also as the Konar Sandal Ziggurat, is an ancient monument located in Jiroft in the southern Iranian province of Kerman, a place that some say is Iran’s cradle of civilization. This ziggurat was discovered in 2002, and it has been reported that it is the second ziggurat to be found in Iran, the first being the Chogha Zanbil Ziggurat. According to some sources, the Ziggurat of Jiroft is the largest and oldest structure of its kind in the world.
An Iranian archaeologist has spent years in an almost single-handed quest across the country's hills and desert plains to uncover ancient rock art that could be among the oldest in the world.
Related: Fifty shades of Pompeii: Erotic wall paintings reveal the x-rated services once offered at ancient Italian brothels
In my book, Olmec Language and Literature, I explain how I deciphered the Olmec language. One of the most important documents used in my research was a Bi-lingual Mayan-Olmec text inscribed on a brick.
Support for my decipherment of the Olmec writing comes from a bilingual Mayan-Olmec/Mande inscribed brick from Comalcalco
The world’s oldest known seabird is expecting – again.
Biologists spotted the Laysan albatross called Wisdom at Midway Atoll national wildlife refuge earlier this month after she returned to the island to nest.
The State of New Jersey says you can’t eat the fish or shellfish from the Lower Passaic River and Newark Bay. That’s because they’re living in the Diamond Alkali Superfund Site, where toxic leftovers from the manufacture of chemicals like DDT and the infamous Agent Orange oozed into surrounding waterways to be taken up by the animals that inhabited them.
Alt: Fish rapidly adapt to pollution thousands of times lethal levels
A mysterious sea blob that looks like a psychedelic Slinky has finally been spotted, more than a century after it was first described.
The translucent, sea-dwelling invertebrate, called Bathochordaeus charon, was identified recently off the coast of Monterey, California, by scientists using a remotely operated vehicle (ROV).
The shellfish that was one of the main sources of Tyrian purple – one of the most storied and valuable trading products in the ancient world – has disappeared from the eastern Mediterranean coast, amid warnings of an ongoing multi-species collapse blamed on global rises in sea temperatures.
Alan Wanamaker, working as a postdoctoral researcher from 2007 to 2009, was charged with beginning to compile a 1,000-year record of the marine climate for a spot in the North Atlantic just off the fjords and fishing villages of North Iceland.
Five billion years from now, our sun will die. After running out of hydrogen fuel, it will start burning heavier and heavier elements in its fusion core, causing its body to bloat, shedding huge quantities of material into space via violent stellar winds. During this time, our star will expand around 100 times bigger than it is now, becoming what is known as a "red giant." This dramatic expansion will engulf Mercury and Venus, the two closest planets to the sun.
A British-Dutch company planning to install a community of humans on Mars admitted on Wednesday that it's project will be delayed by several years.
The Mars One consortium said its first manned mission to the Red Planet would now not happen until 2031, having previously targeted 2026.
Russian astronomers have recently observed a giant radio flare from a strong X-ray binary source known as Cygnus X-3 (Cyg X-3 for short). The flare occurred after more than five years of quiescence of this source. The discovery was presented in a paper published Dec. 2 on the arXiv pre-print server.
The peoples of Classic Maya civilization were obsessed with sharks. Images of shark-like monsters appear in Maya cities throughout the regions known today as Mexico, Belize, and Guatemala—even deep in the continent's interior, where people never saw the ocean.
A lead codex discovered in approximately 2005, in a cave in Northern Jordan, that forms part of the collection of ‘Jordan Lead Codices’, was recently tested at the University of Surrey Ion Beam Centre with exciting results.
Sometime between 600 and 450 B.C.E., a high-status individual in what is today Germany developed some disturbing symptoms: large bruises, bleeding from the nose and gums, and bloody diarrhea and urine. His fellow villagers, shocked—or perhaps intrigued—by his condition, stored his blood and organs in pottery vessels after he died, and interred them in a burial mound.
Humans may in part owe their big brains to a DNA "typo" in their genetic code, research suggests.
The mutation was also present in our evolutionary "cousins" - the Neanderthals and Denisovans.
If you could change the way a monkey or an ape's brain is wired, that animal would be capable of producing perfectly intelligible speech.
Alt: Monkeys should be able to talk just like us – so why don’t they?
A Sumatran orangutan at Adelaide zoo has fallen pregnant, despite being on contraceptives.
Karta the 34-year-old orangutan is due early in 2017. Jodie Ellen, a senior primate keeper, announced the “exciting but nerve-wracking” news on the zoo’s Facebook page.
A dramatic drop in giraffe populations over the past 30 years has seen the world's tallest land mammal classified as vulnerable to extinction.
Numbers have gone from around 155,000 in 1985 to 97,000 in 2015 according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
With all the environmental problems posed by global phenomena like climate change, it’s easy to forget that other, more directly man-made threats endanger animals. One such problem is the illegal wildlife trade, which is estimated to be a $19 billion business worldwide.
Japan has launched a cargo ship which will use a half mile- (700m)-long tether to remove some of the vast amount of debris from Earth's orbit.
The tether, made of aluminium strands and steel wire, is designed to slow the debris, pulling it out of orbit.
Spoiler alert: The universe is flat. But there's a lot of subtlety packed into that innocent-looking statement. What does it mean for a 3D object to be "flat"? How do we measure the shape of the universe anyway? Since the universe is flat, is that…it? Is there anything else interesting to say?
Oh yes, there is.
By exploiting the exquisite image quality available to the VST at the Paranal site, and using innovative computer software, the team were able to carry out one of the most precise measurements ever made of an effect known as cosmic shear.
Related: Vacuum’s quantum effect on light detected
The next wave of solar cells might be green… literally. Quantum mechanics is helping to make better solar cells – and may give us another perspective on why plants are green in the process.
A big problem in solar power is that sunlight is not constant: because of seasonal changes, night-time and clouds, the amount of sunlight that reaches panels is constantly shifting.
A new study led by The University of Western Australia has demonstrated for the first time that plants can learn about their environment by making links between events, an ability thought to be exclusive to animals.
Although the feat has yet to be certified by Guinness World Records, Indian officials have reported that volunteers planted a whopping 49.3 million tree saplings on July 11, blowing past the previous record for most trees planted in a single day.
Simple solutions can often have dramatic effects.
That’s the case in many parts of rural Africa, where the lack of access to or high cost of electricity prevents many people from basics most of us take for granted, like refrigerators.
Related: Do smoke-free stoves really save lives?
Contract sepsis, and you’re almost as likely to end up six feet under as you are back on your feet again. This often fatal condition also known as “blood poisoning” is usually caused by the body’s overwhelming response to a bacterial infection, and it’s typically treated with antibiotics. Now, researchers from Harvard University, the Empa research group, and Adolphe Merkle Institute have come up with a better way to fight back against sepsis.
Historians have unveiled a digitally-reconstructed image of the face of Robert the Bruce almost 700 years after his death.
The image has been produced using casts from what is believed to be the skull of the famous Scottish king.
A crew of facial reconstruction experts have successfully recreated the face of a male who lived in the Biblical city of Jericho. The project was based on an advanced analysis of the Jericho Skull - the oldest portrait in The British Museum. This innovative plaster model allows you to see the detailed face of a human being who lived 9,500 years ago.
The Song of Seikilos is the oldest complete surviving music composition in the world engraved in a marble stele that served as a flower stand. The beautiful composition, also known as the ‘Seikilos epitaph’, dates from around the first or second century AD, and was inconspicuously being kept in the garden of a Turkish woman prior to its current placement in the National Museum of Denmark.
Singing the right notes gives zebra finches a dopamine hit, new research suggests.
A research team led by Vikram Gadagkar, a neurobiologist at Cornell University in New York, set about matching birdsong performance with dopamine – a brain chemical related to our reward and pleasure centres.