Newsdesk Archive
It’s supposed to be the most fundamental constant in physics, but the speed of light may not always have been the same. This twist on a controversial idea could overturn our standard cosmological wisdom.
In 1998, Joao Magueijo at Imperial College London, proposed that the speed of light might vary, to solve what cosmologists call the horizon problem.
Levels of highly toxic mercury contamination in Atlantic bluefin tuna are rapidly declining, according to a new study. That trend does not affect recommended limits on consumption of canned tuna, which comes mainly from other tuna species. Nor does it reflect trends in other ocean basins. But it does represent a major break in the long-standing, scary connection between tuna and mercury, a source of public concern since 1970
Alt: US Shift Away from Coal Is Saving Tuna From Mercury Contamination, Study Finds
Finland could become the first country to ditch coal for good. As part of a new energy and climate strategy due to be announced tomorrow, the government is considering banning the burning of coal for energy by 2030.
The island of Ta'u originally depended on diesel generators for electricity which, on average, consumed more than 100,000 gallons of fuel every year.
Now, the island is powered by a 1.4-megawatt solar array, coupled with a six-megawatt hour energy storage system of 60 Tesla Powerpacks.
As the world's leading superpowers struggle to make the transition from fossil-based energy systems to more sustainable options, 47 of the world’s poorest nations have pledged to skip fossil fuels altogether and jump straight to using 100 percent renewable energy instead.
New research shows that sewage contains a source of energy that can be harvested by using hungry bacteria.
Domestic sewage contains various organic substances, mainly from toilets and kitchens. These are harmful to the environment, but also contain energy.
JULES VERNE’s idea of an ocean deep below the surface in Journey to the Centre of the Earth may not have been too far off. Earth’s mantle may contain many oceans’ worth of water – with the deepest 1000 kilometres down.
“If it wasn’t down there, we would all be submerged,” says Steve Jacobsen at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, whose team made the discovery. “This implies a bigger reservoir of water on the planet than previously thought.”
Microscopic pigment structures and proteins that graced the feathers of a Cretaceous-age bird are still present in its 130-million-year-old fossil, a new study finds.
Alt: This ancient Chinese bird kept its feathers, and colors, for 130 million years
When the asteroid believed to have killed off the dinosaurs smashed into Earth some 66 million years ago, its sheer force made the planet's surface momentarily act like a liquid.
The massive underwater crater left by the asteroid that exterminated the dinosaurs has provided new evidence that sea levels were much lower during the last Ice Age, researchers said Wednesday.
Heroes of Antarctic exploration have played a crucial role in research that suggests the area of sea ice around Antarctica has barely changed in size in 100 years.
The melting Antarctic glacier that now contributes more to sea-level rise than any other ice stream on the planet began its big decline in the 1940s.
This is when warm ocean water likely first got under Pine Island Glacier (PIG) to loosen the secure footing it had enjoyed up until that point.
Egypt has unearthed a city more than 7,000 years old and a cemetery dating back to its first dynasty in the southern province of Sohag, the antiquities ministry has said.
Alt: Egypt ancient city unearthed by archaeologists
Commuting to work can be a real pain, and it was no different in ancient Egypt. About 3500 years ago, the artisans who dug out and decorated the rock-cut royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings—the burial ground of Egypt's New Kingdom pharaohs—had to walk about 2 kilometers from their homes, over the Theban hills, to the royal necropolis for work.
During my travels in Egypt for my studies I meet in the Nubian Museum in Aswan, an absolutely unknown artifact, not recognized for its importance. The first time I saw it in 2008, I understood immediately to find myself in front of an "astronomical-mythological" object of enormous value.
Ancient Mesopotamians have traditionally been credited with inventing glassmaking around 3,600 years ago. But Mesopotamians may have created second-rate knock-offs of glass objects from Egypt, where this complex craft actually originated, researchers reported November 19 at the annual meeting of the American Schools of Oriental Research.
Archaeologist who unearthed 3,800-year-old ceramic statue in Yehud says nothing like it has ever been discovered
He sits pensively, his hand on his chin, like a Middle Bronze Age predecessor to Rodin’s famous sculpture “The Thinker.” His eyes stare blankly as he sits atop a pot that was shattered sometime after it was buried some 3,800 years ago.
Archaeologists working near the Stonehenge World Heritage Site have discovered important new sites that rewrite the Stonehenge landscape. Some sites predate the construction of Stonehenge itself. The remains, found at Larkhill and Bulford, were unearthed during excavations ahead of the construction of new Army Service Family Accommodation.
The shattered ruins of Nimrud say different things to different people. To Sheikh Abdullah Saleh, a custodian of the ancient site until he was chased away by Islamic State extremists two years ago, they represent nothing but destruction and loss.
To Iraqi archaeologist Layla Salih the hulking piles of rock are a big jigsaw puzzle, from which one of the world’s most significant ancient sites might be slowly rebuilt.
Incredible medieval church murals not seen the 16th century have been restored as part of painstaking preservation project.
The murals were covered after William Shakespeare's father was ordered to paint over them more than 450 years ago.
Japanese businesses are finding they need to deal with increasing numbers of foreign visitors to Japan, and Panasonic thinks it has the answer: a megaphone that translates the user’s voices into multiple languages.
Vocoders just got a serious upgrade. A new speech synthesiser can translate mouth movements directly into intelligible speech, completely bypassing a person’s voicebox.
Although the synthesiser might not be immediately useful, it’s a first step towards building a brain-computer interface that could allow paralysed people to talk by monitoring their thought patterns.
Organisations including the Food Standards Agency and the Department for Work and Pensions will be able to see UK citizens’ entire internet browsing history within weeks.
Related: UK to censor online videos of 'non-conventional' sex acts
Related: New UK surveillance law may see mass data shared with Trump’s US
Your dog remembers more than you might think. A new study that tested the memory of man’s best friend found that dogs exhibit something akin to episodic memory — a process that’s been well documented in humans, but difficult to prove in other animals.
When Dr. Rachel Dubroff and her family chose their apartment at Riverside Boulevard and 63rd Street in Manhattan, they were thrilled by its picturesque views of the Hudson River. But they did not expect to have a front-row seat to an annual whale-watching event.
Related: Female Panther Crosses Florida River; Humans Applaud
This microscopic diplonemid doesn’t look like much, but it’s one of the most abundant single-celled hunters in the ocean. Researchers from the University of British Columbia have become the first to identify and photograph this surprisingly elusive—but ecologically important—sea creature.
Predatory bacteria - that eat others of their kind - could be a new weapon in the fight against superbugs, say UK researchers.
Experiments showed a dose of Bdellovibrio bacteriovorus acted like a "living antibiotic" to help clear an otherwise lethal infection.
High in the trees on the Fiji islands, ants in the species Philidris nagasau are doing something extraordinary. They've brought in seeds from several species of a large, lumpy fruit from a plant known as Squamellaria and carefully planted them in the nooks and crannies of the tree bark. Once the plant takes root in the tree and begins to grow, the ants climb inside its young stalks and fertilize it. But then the real action starts.
Alt: Who Invented Agriculture First? It Sure Wasn't Humans
Thousands of inscriptions and petroglyphs dating back around 2,000 years have been discovered in the Jebel Qurma region of Jordan's Black Desert. They tell of a time when the now-desolate landscape was teeming with life.
Cancer is widespread today, but it doesn't appear to have been in the ancient world. Why not?
Researchers are learning more about the history of cancer and how civilizations have treated it.
Researchers from Caltech and UCLA have developed a new approach to removing cellular damage that accumulates with age. The technique can potentially help slow or reverse an important cause of aging.
Alt: A cure for ageing? Scientists discover breakthrough procedure to replace specific parts of ageing cells
Artificial intelligence is getting its teeth into lip reading. A project by Google’s DeepMind and the University of Oxford applied deep learning to a huge data set of BBC programmes to create a lip-reading system that leaves professionals in the dust.
The AI system was trained using some 5000 hours from six different TV programmes, including Newsnight, BBC Breakfast and Question Time. In total, the videos contained 118,000 sentences.
You’re the first police officer to arrive at the scene: a suspected ecstasy lab. There’s drug paraphernalia everywhere, but which piece of evidence could be most helpful for your investigation? Then, a massive virtual arrow appears, pointing out a bottle of chemicals, accompanied by a note saying: “Bag this please”.
Gut tissue that is almost exactly like the real thing has been grown in the lab and successfully grafted into mice for the first time. The achievement brings us closer to growing gut tissue transplants, an advance that would benefit people with inflammatory bowel disease, Crohn’s disease and chronic constipation.
Many species of owl are able to hunt in effective silence by suppressing their noise at sound frequencies above 1.6 kilohertz (kHz) - over the range that can be heard by humans.
Paint these days is becoming much more than it used to be. Already researchers have developed photovoltaic paint, which can be used to make "paint-on solar cells" that capture the sun's energy and turn it into electricity. Now in a new study, researchers have created thermoelectric paint, which captures the waste heat from hot painted surfaces and converts it into electrical energy.
An international team of scientists is providing new insight into the process by which plants use light to split water and create oxygen. In experiments, ultrafast X-ray lasers were able to capture atomic-scale images of a protein complex found in plants, algae, and cyanobacteria at room temperature.
A recent experiment shows it may be possible to "twist" light waves, cram in more information than ever before, and send the signal over a practical distance.
Related: World's smallest magnifying glass makes it possible to see chemical bonds between atoms
The mantis shrimp is famous among researchers for its extraordinary vision. It needs such exceptional vision to have pinpoint accuracy when it uses its world-record-setting speed to smash or spear prey. So what makes this shrimp's vision so special?
Related: Worms Without Eyes Can Sense Light 100 Times Better Than Humans
A new study involving the University of East Anglia (UEA) shows that cement structures are a substantial but overlooked absorber of carbon emissions - offsetting some of those emitted during cement production itself.
It’s an internet sensation. An alarming graph showing the global area of sea ice falling to unprecedented lows for this time of year has gone viral.
Related: The Arctic Is a Staggering 36 Degrees Hotter Than What It Should Be
Some comets like to play "chicken" with the sun, but a small number of these sungrazers may not be comets at all.
"We found it kind of looks like an asteroid and it kinds of looks like a comet," Battams told Seeker. "There's a weird hybrid thing going on. The results were indeterminate, so we're not sure if this is something that was once a comet... or maybe an asteroid that got stuck. There's no definitive conclusion there."
It has just become harder for surprise meteor showers to escape our attention.
On October 1, the third station of a new 48-camera, video-surveillance network in the United Arab Emirates has come online to help map meteor showers. The network complements the existing 80-camera Cameras for Allsky Meteor Surveillance (CAMS) network twelve time zones later in California.
The human race faces a one in 500 chance of extinction in the next year, an expert mathematician has claimed.
Dr Fergus Simpson, a mathematician at the University of Barcelona's Institute of Cosmos Sciences, said there was a 0.2 per cent chance of a "global catastrophe" occurring in any given year over the course of the 21st Century.
A dash of hydrogen or methane in the atmosphere could have kept Mars warm enough for water to flow.
Ever since the 1970s, we’ve known that chilly Mars must have once been warm enough for rivers. But we’ve struggled to explain how a world much farther from the sun than Earth is could get so warm – especially at a time when the sun was dimmer.
During its wheeled treks on the Red Planet, NASA's Spirit rover may have encountered a potential signature of past life on Mars, report scientists at Arizona State University (ASU).
Landing humans on Mars would be a momentous event in human history. To live beyond Earth's biosphere is a dream to many, but establishing a sustainable presence on the Red Planet will require mastering its environment. We would need to devise ways of producing food where none exists, because depending on supplies from Earth would neither be sustainable or practical.
Researchers have discovered a way to remove specific fears from the brain, using a combination of artificial intelligence and brain scanning technology. Their technique, published in the inaugural edition of Nature Human Behaviour, could lead to a new way of treating patients with conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and phobias.
Alt: Unconscious brain training beats phobias without the stress
The island nation of Kiribati has established a large shark sanctuary that will help ensure the creatures are protected across much of the central Pacific.
Vice President Kourabi Nenem said at the sanctuary's launch on Friday that the nation was committed to protecting sharks from exploitation and overfishing.
Related: Philippines to Declare Marine Sanctuary in South China Sea
Taking music lessons increases brain fiber connections in children and may be useful in treating autism and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), according to a new study.
Mice that receive gut bacteria transplants from overweight humans are known to gain more weight than mice transplanted with gut bacteria from normal weight subjects, even when the mice are fed the same diet. A new study confirms this finding while seeking new perspectives on the reasons behind this link.
DNA makes up only half of the material inside chromosomes – far less than was previously thought – a study has revealed.
Up to 47 per cent of their structure is a mysterious sheath that surrounds the genetic material, researchers say.
Two captive harbour porpoises called Freja and Sif have helped to reveal that porpoises —and probably all cetaceans — consciously adjust their heart rate to suit the length of a planned dive.
By doing this, the animals optimise the rate at which they consume oxygen beforehand to match the intended depth and length of their dive.
Ants beat us to it. A Fijian ant first started planting fruit crops 3 million years ago, long before human agriculture evolved.
The ant – Philidris nagasau – grows and harvests Squamellaria fruit plants that grow on the branches of various trees.
Related: New dominant ant species discovered in Ethiopia shows potential for global invasion
Archaeologists have unearthed a clutch of domesticated turkey eggs used as a ritual offering 1,500 years ago in Oaxaca, Mexico — some of the earliest evidence of turkey domestication.
Archaeologists excavating a monastery in the Tuscan town of Lucca have unearthed a unique 400-year-old dental prosthesis which appears to predate modern tooth bridges.
The appliance consists of five teeth — three central incisors and two lateral canines aligned in an incorrect anatomical sequence. Belonging to different individuals, the teeth were linked together by a golden band.
Using sophisticated biochemical analyses, a Milwaukee brewery has recreated Iron Age beer from the residue of containers discovered in Germany. The beverage, brewed from barley, honey, mint, and a relative of roses called meadowsweet, is not ready for mass production but was sufficient to inebriate a few archaeologists and brewers.
To grow to a height of 7-foot-2-inches (2.155 meters) is unusual but not unheard of in 2016 … for men. It’s highly unusual for a woman to reach that height. Imagine what it must have been like in the 13th century for a woman to be that tall. A new book attempts to recreate the life of a medieval giantess whose skeleton was found buried in an odd position in a cemetery in Poland.
Related: Fountains Abbey study reveals scale of monks' burial site
Related: An ancient cathedral in England is getting solar panels
Archaeologists are puzzled over the discovery of a Roman-era earthenware pot filled with oil lamps and bronze coins in the commune of Windisch, in the northern Swiss canton of Aargau.
A mysterious terracotta artifact known as the Tecaxic-Calixtlahuaca head was discovered in Mexico, but it looks exactly like well-known Roman artifacts. How did this enigmatic object arrive in Toluca Valley?
The world’s earliest alphabet, inscribed on stone slabs at several Egyptian sites, was an early form of Hebrew, a controversial new analysis concludes.
Israelites living in Egypt transformed that civilization’s hieroglyphics into Hebrew 1.0 more than 3,800 years ago, at a time when the Old Testament describes Jews living in Egypt.
The latest research on archaeological sites of the ancient Indus Civilisation, which stretched across what is now Pakistan and northwest India during the Bronze Age, has revealed that domesticated rice farming in South Asia began far earlier than previously believed, and may have developed in tandem with - rather than as a result of - rice domestication in China.
A joint team of archaeologists have discovered a 7,300-year-old human fingerprint – the earliest in the Near East region – in Subiyya in northern Kuwait. The fingerprint was found on a piece of a broken clay pot dating from the Stone Age (8,700 BC to 2,000 BC) in the Bahrah I Excavation Zone in Subiyya
Polluted city air has now been identified as a possible means of transmission for resistant bacteria. Researchers in Gothenburg have shown that air samples from Beijing contain DNA from genes that make bacteria resistant to the most powerful antibiotics we have.
Related: Pesticide Exposures Can Cause Changes in Oral Microbiome
New UBC research shows that climate change may impede the cooling effect of volcanic eruptions.
When an eruption is powerful enough, volcanoes spew sulfur gasses high into the atmosphere, reaching a layer called the stratosphere, about 10 to 15 kilometres above the Earth’s surface.
Related: Southern Europe Could Be Desert by 2100, Study Says
Related: Something really crazy is happening in the Arctic
A P.E.I. farmer has helped lead to a researcher's discovery of an unlikely weapon in the battle against global warming: a seaweed that nearly eliminates the destructive methane content of cow burps and farts.
The eyes may reveal whether the brain’s internal stopwatch runs fast or slow. Pupil size predicted whether a monkey would over- or underestimate a second, scientists report in the Nov. 2 Journal of Neuroscience.
Scientists knew that pupils get bigger when a person is paying attention. They also knew that paying attention can influence how people perceive the passage of time. Using monkeys, the new study links pupil size and timing directly.
>Medical professionals around the world are monitoring the results of a trial by an Australian hospital in the city of Newcastle with great interest, after the introduction of therapy dogs was found to help reduce the recovery times of seriously ill patients by ‘up to 30%’.
The microbes that live in your gut may play a surprising role in your blood sugar levels, a small new study from Canada finds.
Related: Childhood obesity linked to irregular sleep and skipping breakfast
You’ve got a spare hour before a big exam. How should you spend it? It seems napping is just as effective as revising, and could even have a longer-lasting impact.
Related: The Mysteries of 'Dreamless Sleep' Come to Light
Big news for big numbers. There’s a new entry in the Largest Known Primes Database, a list of numbers divisible only by one and themselves. At four million digits long, 10223 × 231172165 + 1 comes in at number seven on this list. But it’s special for another reason, too – the discovery brings mathematicians one step closer to solving the 50-year-old Sierpinski problem.
The base pairs found in DNA are key to its ability to store protein-coding information, but they also give the molecule useful structural properties. Getting two complementary strands of DNA to zip up into a double helix can serve as the basis of intricate physical mechanisms that can push and pull molecular-scale devices.
Researchers have developed a combination of software and hardware that will allow them to use unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and insect cyborgs, or biobots, to map large, unfamiliar areas -- such as collapsed buildings after a disaster.
Related: Make mine with extra pepper-droney! Domino's home delivers piping hot pizza using a DRONE in a world-first delivery
The mass of "space junk" orbiting the Earth poses a serious threat to future exploration, a British scientist said on Friday at the launch of a project to raise awareness of the issue.
"Tackling the problem of space debris is one of humankind's greatest environmental challenges, but is also perhaps the one that is the least known," said Hugh Lewis, head of astronautics research at the University of Southampton.
The Tesla CEO, Elon Musk, is planning to put more than 4,000 satellites in orbit in order to blanket the Earth with internet access.
SpaceX, the privateer space company led by Musk, is requesting permission from the US government to operate a massive network of 4,425 satellites - plus “in-orbit spares” - to provide high-speed, global internet coverage.
After months of speculation and leaked documents, NASA's long-awaited EM Drive paper has finally been peer-reviewed and published. And it shows that the 'impossible' propulsion system really does appear to work.
Alt: The Physics Defying EmDrive Just Passed Peer Review. Here’s What You Need to Know
As Rosetta's comet approached its most active period last year, the spacecraft spotted carbon dioxide ice – never before seen on a comet – followed by the emergence of two unusually large patches of water ice.
The carbon dioxide ice layer covered an area comparable to the size of a football pitch, while the two water ice patches were each larger than an Olympic swimming pool and much larger than any signs of water ice previously spotted at the comet.
Human exploration of Mars has been ramping up in the past few decades. In addition to the eight active missions on or around the Red Planet, seven more robotic landers, rovers and orbiters are scheduled to be deployed there by the end of the decade. And by the 2030s and after, several space agencies are planning to mount crewed missions to the surface as well.
The tone at the UN’s annual climate change meeting – taking place this year in Marrakech in Morocco – appears to be one of defiance, both at Trump’s election and, it seems, at coal.
Related: First power drawn from tidal turbines off the coast of Scotland
By tinkering with the process that plants use to breathe in carbon dioxide, a team of German scientists has just discovered a far more efficient way to get rid of it. Biochemists led by Tobias Erb at the Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology in Marburg, Germany, have developed a new, super-efficient method for living organisms to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere.
The UK has just passed a massive expansion in surveillance powers, which critics have called "terrifying" and "dangerous".
The new law, dubbed the "snoopers' charter", was introduced by then-home secretary Theresa May in 2012, and took two attempts to get passed into law following breakdowns in the previous coalition government.
Alt: 'Extreme surveillance' becomes UK law with barely a whimper
With an estimated 285 million people worldwide with visual impairment, many treatments and technological innovations have long been in development. The panacea of restoring sight to the blind is the stuff of sci-fi: the bionic eye.
Gene editing techniques like CRISPR Cas9, while revolutionary and game-changing, have their limitations. One of this is the inability to target stable, non-dividng cells in the eyes, brain, heart, kidneys and liver.
But a new study published in Nature is changing that. Researchers from the Salk Institute have demonstrated the ability to edit the DNA of cells that do not divide or modify their DNA, partially restoring sight in mice born with genetic defects.
Scientists have discovered a new way to edit DNA that could fix “broken genes” in the brain, cure previously incurable diseases and potentially even extend the human lifespan.
The breakthrough – described as a “holy grail” of genetics – was used to partially restore the sight of rats blinded by a condition which also affects humans.
Designer bacteria are organisms that have been genetically modified to include a new function to make it do something it does not do previously. Synlogic, a Massachusetts-based start-up, and its co-founder and MIT professor James Collins did this in 2000 when he modified an E. Coli bacteria to have a switch that makes it flip-flop into different states.
The hypodermic syringe needle has been striking fear in patients since the 1850s. But it could be relegated to the history books within a decade by a revolutionary medical device that promises to deliver far more than pain-free medicine.
A pill that releases its medicine for two weeks after being swallowed is being hailed as a potential game-changer in drug treatment.
In future, similar forms of longterm oral drug delivery could put an end to regimens requiring numerous repeat doses, which may be missed or found too inconvenient.
Covering millions of square miles and crossing multiple African borders, the Sahara desert is one of the most unforgiving environments in the world.
But at the edge of the desert, giant nets are catching water droplets from the air, bringing drinking water to the people in an arid mountainous region in Morocco.
In 1952, a mysterious fog swept through London, blanketing the city in a dense layer of pollutants that killed thousands of people and animals and made it difficult to breathe for days.
While the exact cause has long remained unknown, an international team of researchers now says its solved the mystery – and the same air chemistry can be seen today in China and other areas.
In a surprising piece of archaeological news, researchers have discovered that a 2,300-year-old mummy that was once believed to the remains of a hawk is actually a human fetus. If their estimation of the age of the fetus is correct, than the Maidstone Museum holds the youngest mummified human remains found to date.
Sometimes, when poring through history texts, it's easy to start seeing people of ancient times as 'objects' or 'concepts' to be studied from our informed vantage point in the future (relative to them). But sometimes archaeology uncovers evidence that helps us to realise that people back then were very much human.
Related: Archaeologists in Norway discover church and altar of Viking King Olav Haraldsson
Related: Great Ryburgh dig finds 81 'rare' Anglo-Saxon coffins
Related: Archaeologists study earliest recorded human burial site in Ireland
That trend for nose piercing? Turns out it’s so 44,000 BC.
A crafted piece of bone found in Australia looks as if it were designed to be worn in the nasal septum – making it the oldest bone jewellery belonging to Homo sapiens to be identified anywhere in the world.
Archeologists have a new mystery to solve in Kazakhstan, a complex of stone structures reminiscent of Stonehenge but much bigger. The site is the size of 200 American football fields, about 300 acres. It was discovered in 2010 by a man identified as F. Akhmadulin, who was exploring the sagebrush desert area in Altÿnkazgan on the Mangÿshlak Peninsula along the eastern shore of the Caspian Sea with a metal detector.
Alt: Mysterious Ancient Stone Structures Found In Kazakhstan
Nobody knows precisely what the Pilgrims’ first Thanksgiving feast looked like. According to primary sources, there was fowl (likely including wild turkeys), venison and cornmeal for sure. Possible side dishes were cranberries, pumpkin and stuffing made with onions, nuts and herbs.
The vegetarian diet has become very popular around the world over the last decades. However, the history of this lifestyle and its foundation on the respect for animal life and the planet has its roots in the Indus River valley and ancient Greece.
The Scottish Government is considering enshrining a ‘right to food’ in Scots law.
It is one of a number of recommendations being looked at following the publication of a report by the Independent Working Group on Food Poverty earlier this year.
Slovenia has amended its constitution to make access to drinkable water a fundamental right for all citizens and stop it being commercialised.
With 64 votes in favour and none against, the 90-seat parliament added an article to the EU country’s constitution saying “everyone has the right to drinkable water”.
Astronomers have precisely measured the strength of a fundamental force of Nature in a galaxy seen eight billion years in the past. Researchers have confirmed that electromagnetism in a distant galaxy has the same strength as here on Earth.
Fast radio bursts, or FRBs, are mysterious flashes of radio waves originating outside our Milky Way galaxy. A team of scientists has now observed the most luminous FRB to date, called FRB 150807.
Related: Newly Detected 'Sounds' of the Universe --"Rival Supernova in Their Explosive Power"
Electric and hybrid-fuel cars will be required to produce noise when traveling at low speeds under a new rule issued by the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. This is to prevent these vehicles from injuring pedestrians, especially people who are blind or are visually impaired.