Newsdesk Archive
If we could all take a moment to put down Pokémon GO and Tinder and take a look overhead, we’d probably find the skies are full of interesting phenomena. This Halloween season was a rare treat, with UFOs over Phoenix, Arizona, mysterious green fireballs lighting up the skies over Japan, and a near-miss by a massive asteroid. Now, things are about to get a little more interesting thanks to the Taurid meteor shower set to peak throughout the first half of November.
In the 1970s and 1980s, NASA sent twin spacecraft — Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 — on a quest to explore the solar system. Both probes zoomed by Jupiter and Saturn, and Voyager 2 continued on to see Uranus and Neptune.
Back in the 2000s, when Branimir Blagojevic was developing a sensor for the military to detect airborne bio-hazards, he had no idea the technology could later be used in the search for extraterrestrial life.
His original work focused on the novel use of lidar — which stands for Light Detection and Ranging — and is based on similar principles as radar.
Alt: New instrument could search for signatures of life on Mars
Nearly 20 years after its engineers began construction, Nasa began testing this week on the largest space telescope ever built, a 21ft arrangement of mirrors and instruments that is meant to succeed the Hubble telescope and look through 13bn years of space.
Never before have astrophysicists measured light of such high energy from a celestial object so far away. Around 7 billion years ago, a huge explosion occurred at the black hole in the center of a galaxy. This was followed by a burst of high-intensity gamma rays.
New research shows that racial biases affect more than how we treat individual black people. Biases also lead us to devalue black homes and neighborhoods, and to subject them to potential health hazards.
The studies also demonstrate that even people who have positive attitudes toward black people may still undervalue black spaces.
Related: Human brain is predisposed to negative stereotypes, new study suggests
Tens of thousands of years ago, modern humans slept around with Neandertals and swapped some genes. Now, it turns out one of our closest living relatives, chimpanzees, also dallied with another species.
Chimpanzees and bonobos gesture to each other, much as we humans do. Kirsty Graham tells me a bit more about what these gestures can tell us about the evolution of our own language.
When Jane Goodall observed chimpanzees making tools in 1960, humans lost their self-aggrandizing status as the world’s only tool makers. Now scientists are beginning to realise there may be much more ‘intelligent life’ in the universe than previously thought, but it’s just here: on our planet.
Have you ever wondered where the foam in the ocean comes from? Or why the sea can look clear on some days and green, brown, or even pink on others? And how fish get the ingredients to make those omega-fatty acids that we’re told are so good for us? Well, the single word answer to all of these questions is: “plankton”.
Researchers have known for decades that whales create elaborate songs, sometimes projecting their calls for miles underwater. A new study from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), however, has revealed a previously unknown element of whale songs that could aid this mode of communication, and may play a pivotal role in locating other whales in open ocean.
Alt: Whales Can Really Rock With Their Mellow Songs
Related: City dolphins get a boost from better protection and cleaner waters
As the Arctic Ocean melts and the waters stay unfrozen all year round, secrets hidden in the ice are slowly being exposed. One such secret reappeared in August when a Nazi weather station from World War II was rediscovered by Russian scientists on an island just 1,000 km (620 miles) from the North Pole.
American aviator Amelia Earhart became famous in the 1930s for her flying adventures—at one point, she became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean.
One of the most popular tourist destinations in Myanmar is the capital of the Imperial Burmese. In a 3-mile (5km) circuit, usually traveled by horse cart, bicycle, or motorbike, visitors can see the Maha Aungmye Bonzan temple, the “leaning tower” Nanmyint, the collection of stupas known as Yedanasini Paya, and finally the monastery Bagaya Kyaung.
For centuries, it was believed the city of Tanis was nothing more than a legend. Many people had doubts that it ever really existed. But that all changed when researchers who Napoleon Bonaparte brought to Egypt re-discovered the legendary city.
In last week's story about the 'hidden cavities' discovered within the Great Pyramid, I quickly mentioned how some of the scans were targeted at *already known* 'notches' (and one 'cavity') in the pyramid, simply to confirm that their detectors were finding hollow sections. It's worth digging into (no pun intended) these notches a little further though, as they are central to one fairly new theory of how the massive monument was built.
A set of broken stones covered with etchings of lines and squares, discovered at a 5,000-year-old sacred site in Denmark, may be some of humankind’s earliest maps, according to archaeologists.
Alt: World’s Oldest Map Used In Ancient Magic Rituals
You can now toast to the Iron Age with a 2,500-year-old brew.
A team of researchers worked with a brewery in Milwaukee to recreate an ancient beer from remnants of the alcoholic beverage that were found at an Iron Age burial site in Germany
Ghostly ‘ectoplasm’ said to have been produced by ‘Britain’s last witch’ during a séance is to go on display at Cambridge University Library as supporters call for her posthumous pardon.
Helen Duncan was sentenced to nine months in jail for witchcraft in 1944 after accurately predicting the sinking of HMS Barham by a German u-boat in the Second World War.
On a secluded hilltop in the Guatemalan jungle, archaeologists have discovered a rural pleasure palace enjoyed by Maya kings more than a thousand years ago.
The lofty site included not only an apparent luxury residence but also two pyramids, one of them more than 30 feet high.
A new study suggests some Los Angeles-area earthquakes in the 1920s and 1930s could have been caused by the oil boom at the time.
The paper, scheduled to be published online Tuesday in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America, presents evidence that drilling around Los Angeles between 1915 and 1932 could have been associated with damaging earthquakes in the area, including the magnitude 6.4 Long Beach quake in 1933 that killed 120 people.
Picture a volcanic eruption: fiery lava and smoke billowing skyward as a towering mountain empties its over-pressurized belly of a hot meal. At least, that’s how most of us think it works. So you can imagine volcanologists’ surprise when they discovered that Mount St. Helens, which was responsible for the deadliest eruption in US history, is actually cold inside.
This flower-like image shows a plant that is not developing quite right. It comes from a study in which scientists at EMBL and the University of Sydney unearthed the molecular feedback loop that creates the spiral pattern of leaves around a stem. The work is published today in Current Biology.
A light-bulb moment? Plants seem to pipe sunlight directly down into underground roots to help them grow.
Light receptors in stems, leaves and flowers have long been known to regulate plant growth. Roots also have these receptors, but it has been unclear how they sense light deep in dark soil.
Related: Project aims to end 'ambiguity' of plant-based medicine
The idea of eating bugs has created a buzz lately in both foodie and international development circles as a more sustainable alternative to consuming meat and fish. Now a report examines how the nutrients -- particularly iron -- provided by grasshoppers, crickets and other insects really measures up to beef. It finds that insects could indeed fill that dietary need.
Related: Spider-eating bug muffles web vibrations to sneak up on prey
Scientists in Brazil are preparing to unleash millions of mosquitoes to have sex with and kill their distant cousins.
British firm Oxitec says its genetically modified insects will target species such as the Aedes aegypti, which carry Zika, dengue, yellow fever and chikungunya.
For the first time, researchers have achieved superconductivity – the phenomenon of electrical conductivity with zero resistance – in a material that’s not a superconductor.
The new technique demonstrates a concept that was first proposed back in the 1970s, but until now had never been proven, and it could lead to ways to make existing superconductors, like the ones used in MRI machines or maglev trains, cheaper and more efficient at higher temperatures.
It's never a good day when you find yourself naked and alone, streaking through an unfamiliar neighbourhood. But that's the reality for a black hole called B3 1715+425, located in a galaxy cluster 2 billion light-years away.
A massive cloud of gas will crash into the Milky Way in about 30 million years, but there's no real danger to our home galaxy, NASA says.
New observations by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope suggest that the gas, called Smith's Cloud, was cast from the Milky Way long ago.
Lithium, the lightest solid element, is created during astrophysical phenomena, but its origin has been elusive. Recently, a group of researchers detected enormous quantities of beryllium-7, an unstable element that decays into lithium in 53.2 days, inside nova Sagittarii 2015 N.2, which suggests that novae are the main source of lithium in the galaxy.
For the first time, a certain type of solar wave was caught surfing from the sun's surface up through the star's atmosphere, lending insight into how the sun's material moves and mixes.
The GRAPES-3 muon telescope, the largest and most sensitive cosmic ray monitor recorded a burst of galactic cosmic rays that indicated a crack in the Earth's magnetic shield. The burst occurred when a giant cloud of plasma ejected from the solar corona struck Earth at a very high speed causing massive compression of the Earth's magnetosphere and triggering a severe geomagnetic storm.
It may sound like science fiction, but wastewater treatment plants across the United States may one day turn ordinary sewage into biocrude oil, thanks to new research. The technology, hydrothermal liquefaction, mimics the geological conditions Earth uses to create crude oil, using high pressure and temperature to achieve in minutes something that takes Mother Nature millions of years.
The air smells fruity, slightly alcoholic. Against the strong hum of machinery, 175 cows are eating hay. As their dung drops to the slatted floor, a machine sweeps it through and it runs underneath the barn to a futuristic dome outside.
The Heegs’ 75-hectare family farm in remote Friesland, in the north-west of the Netherlands, where cows outnumber people almost two to one, marks the start of a national experiment to encourage farms to turn their manure into biogas.
At the threshold of the Sahara Desert near Ouarzazate, Morocco, some 500,000 parabolic mirrors run in neat rows across a valley, moving slowly in unison as the Sun sweeps overhead. This US$660-million solar-energy facility opened in February and will soon have company. Morocco has committed to generating 42% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020.
Related: Simulation brings global 100% renewable electricity system alive for the first time
How do you handle nuclear waste that will be radioactive for millions of years, keeping it from harming people and the environment? It isn’t easy, but a researcher has discovered ways to immobilize such waste – the offshoot of decades of nuclear weapons production – in glass and ceramics.
Snap this battery clean in half and like a healing wound it will pull itself back together. Within seconds the battery resumes its delivery of electric current. No harm done.
This fascinating new method to craft autonomously self-healing electronics comes courtesy of a team of engineers led by Amay Bandodkar at the University of California, San Diego.
Street cleaners in Mislata will collect samples of pet feces and take it to a laboratory to be analyzed
Dog owners in a Spanish municipality who don’t clean up after their animal may be traced through the DNA in their pet’s feces, to try and keep the roads clear of unsightly dog mess.
Dogs probably dream about their owners while they sleep, an expert has said.
Dr Deirdre Barrett, a Clinical and Evolutionary Psychologist at Harvard Medical School, has spent years studying sleep behaviour in humans.
Kittens! Who doesn’t love kittens? (Um, nobody!) But who do kittens love? Well, if they are anything like human babies, they love their mommies. And this study indicates that they recognize their mother’s calls and can even distinguish them from the calls of other mommy cats.
To most people, the phrase “I feel your pain” is just an expression of sympathy. But it’s also a real biological phenomenon, a new study in rodents suggests. Healthy mice living in the same room with mice experiencing pain are up to 68% more sensitive to pain themselves, regardless of their stress levels, according to the new study, which found that mice could scent when their fellows were suffering.
It is a well-known fact that fitness and well-being go hand in hand. But being in good shape also protects against the health problems that arise when we feel particularly stressed at work. As reported by sports scientists, it therefore pays to stay physically active, especially during periods of high stress.
A study's participants who were asked to think about their own death before taking to the basketball court scored more points than those in a control group.
Related: How to Slow Age-Related Muscle Loss
Related: Stimulating the brain makes exercising the legs feel easier
“What is the difference between yesterday and tomorrow?”
The Yupno man we were interviewing, Danda, paused to consider his answer. A group of us sat on a hillside in the Yupno Valley, a remote nook high in the mountains of Papua New Guinea.
Almost all of us get songs stuck in our heads from time to time but why do certain tunes have the 'stick factor'?
The first large-scale study, led by Dr Kelly Jakubowski at Durham University, may have some answers to this musical stickiness.
Why did human beings invent art? Why do we make it, look at it, revere it and want to possess it?
Mona (the Museum of Old and New Art) in Tasmania offers some bold and provocative answers.
A recreated Hittite village, which is set to be built in the Central Anatolian province of Çorum, home to the ancient site of Hattusha, will revive the life of the Hittite kingdom 3,500 years ago.
In a stunning discovery, a team of archaeologists in Australia has found extensive remains of a sophisticated human community living 50,000 years ago.
Alt: Man searching for toilet stumbles across 49,000 year-old evidence of earliest human settlement in Australia
Alt: First Australians ate megafauna and used nets for hunting
With its rust and sand-coloured pigments, ochre was used at cave sites for thousands of years to paint pictures of animals and hand prints of our long-gone ancestors.
Now, the remains of stone tools left by a community of cave dwellers in East Africa 40,000 years suggests they were carefully grinding it to paint themselves are create prehistoric art.
Alt: Middle Stone Age ochre processing tools reveal cultural and behavioural complexity
The discarded bone of a chicken leg, still etched with teeth marks from a dinner thousands of years ago, provides some of the oldest known physical evidence for the introduction of domesticated chickens to the continent of Africa, research from Washington University in St. Louis has confirmed.
Human hunters may be making birds smarter by inadvertently shooting those with smaller brains. That’s the conclusion of a new study, which finds that hunting may be exerting a powerful evolutionary force on bird populations in Denmark, and likely wherever birds are hunted.
Related: Why Yellow Birds Mysteriously Turn Red
Global wildlife populations have fallen by 58% since 1970, a report says. The Living Planet assessment, by the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) and WWF, suggests that if the trend continues that decline could reach two-thirds among vertebrates by 2020.
Related: Why the world's last few snow leopards are dying at the hands of humans
Related: A New Report Says We're Hunting the World's Mammals to Death. What Can Be Done?
Are the icy waters of an Alaska river home to a Loch Ness monster-like creature?
Bureau of Land Management staffer Craig McCaa was recording video of the Chena River Oct 18 when he saw a 12-to-15-foot-long object swirling back and forth in the current for several minutes
Alt: Alaskan 'Ice Monster' Sparks Imaginations Online
Related: Nessie: A Paranormal Monster
Related: What is this creepy jungle giant? Film shot deep in Indonesian forest shows a huge creature walking upright under a waterfall
Two-headed sharks may sound like a figment of the big screen, but they exist—and more are turning up worldwide, scientists say.
Related: Biologists discover a two-headed shark fetus growing in their lab
Being a snack-sized animal in the open ocean is tough. Some have it easier than others. Creatures on the bottom can blend in with stones and sand. Stands of kelp and coral provide hiding places in other ocean habitats.
Related: Strange purple sea creatures found in deep ocean trenches
The ocean is a big place, but one small fish finds its way back to the same nest to tend to its eggs year after year.
This behaviour is reminiscent of migratory birds such as white storks or swallows.
Related: Eels Consume Their Own Bones to Survive Migration
Those new glasses make you look completely different – especially to face recognition software.
A team of researchers from Carnegie Mellon University has fooled face recognition algorithms using the oldest trick in the book: a pair of fake glasses.
A new wearable aid for the blind and visually impaired people uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to better analyze fed data from cameras and sensors
It could be the last kitchen gadget you will ever need.
Moley Robotics has designed a fully-automated and integrated smart robotic chef that cooks over 100 meals from world top chefs without human intervention.
"In the future, robots like this could be released into the ocean to collect garbage."
That’s the seemingly harmless justification given by one of the developers of a robot that gets all of the energy it needs to function by consuming living organisms. Sure, it only eats microbes in the lab, but what happens when they run out?
There is a curious absence of legal constraints on U.S. government agencies undertaking potentially risky scientific research. Some of these activities may present a risk of killing millions or even destroying the planet. Current law leaves it to agencies to decide for themselves whether their activities fall within the bounds of acceptable risk.
Long thought to be the smallest building blocks of all matter, we now know atoms are themselves composed of electrons spinning around a nucleus made of protons and neutrons.
But where do nuclei come from? How are they forged? Which forces govern their behaviour?
The search for elusive dark matter may have just gotten a big boost.
Scientists have calculated the predicted mass of the axion, a hypothetical particle that some astronomers think may be the main constituent of dark matter. The new finding should greatly aid the hunt for axions, and could therefore help solve the longstanding dark-matter mystery, study team members said.
We humans may be more aligned with the universe than we realize. According to research published in the journal Physical Review C, neutron stars and cell cytoplasm have something in common: structures that resemble multistory parking garages.
Huber thought these "parking garages" were unique to soft matter (like the interior of cells) until he happened upon the work of nuclear physicist Charles Horowitz at Indiana University. Using computer simulations, Horowitz and his team had found the same shapes deep in the crust of neutron stars.
It’s a tale of two tails. Mice can be tricked into thinking fake tails are their own, using the same “rubber hand illusion” that works in people. The illusion helps us understand how our brains create a sense of body ownership and awareness. The discovery that mice fall for the same trick could aid the development of prosthetic limbs and treatments for psychiatric disorders.
A snake with the largest venom glands in the world could hold the answer to pain relief, scientists have found.
Dubbed the "killer of killers", the long-glanded blue coral snake is known to prey on the likes of king cobras.
Special chemicals covering the skin of a tiny yellow-striped Amazonian frog provide a protective shield that wards off leaf-cutting ants allowing it to live comfortably among them. The ants do not bite this frog at all, but will quite aggressively attack all other types of frogs or other animals that cross their path.
Related: 10,000 Critically Endangered Frogs Have Suddenly Died In Peru’s Lake Titicaca
Planting trees is a cost-effective way to tackle urban air pollution, which is a growing problem for many cities.
A study by US-based The Nature Conservancy (TNC) reported than the average reduction of particulate matter near a tree was between 7% and 24%.
Related: Two billion children breathe toxic air worldwide, UNICEF says
Related: World’s largest study shows effects of long-term exposure to air pollution and traffic noise on blood pressure
The China Railway Rolling Stock Corporation (CRRC), one of the world’s largest train manufacturers, recently announced that it had begun work on a new type of magnetic levitation train that will able to achieve a top speed of 373 mph (600 km/hr), which is faster than any other train currently in operation.
A mysterious green 'UFO' has been spotted over Japan, leaving a trail of sparks behind it as it travelled across the sky.
Related: ‘UFO’ spotted over Vienna, frightened onlookers call police (PHOTOS, VIDEO)
Related: What is the protocol if aliens make contact?
Since it landed on the surface of the Red Planet in 2012, the Curiosity rover has made some rather surprising finds. In the past, this has included evidence that liquid water once filled the Gale Crater, the presence of methane and organic molecules today, curious sedimentary formations, and even a strange ball-shaped rock.
If you look at one of the points of light in the night sky, chances are good it’s not a star—it’s likely two or more stars, so close together they look like one from far away. These binary, trinary, and more complex star systems formed together out of a single cloud of gas and dust.
One of the world's biggest telescope projects might be forced to move its location to a different continent.
The Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) was due to be built in Hawaii, but ran into opposition with indigenous groups which consider its proposed site sacred.
The world's largest single-dish radio telescope will join the hunt for intelligent aliens that could be building a "megastructure" around the star KIC 8462852 — otherwise known as "Tabby's Star."
Some believe that the era of the greatest archaeological discoveries is over. Many tombs have been excavated and ancient architectural complexes have been discovered. In our time of digital technologies, many mysteries of ancient civilizations have been unraveled. But modern technologies also help us to open new pages in the book that historical science has put on the shelf to gather dust.
The Newgrange (New Grange) tumulus is found in County Meath, Ireland. This ancient site is connected to stories about magic, fairies, and incredible excavations. Newgrange is a part of the impressive Neolithic Bru na Bóine complex – a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
For just 60 hours, researchers had the opportunity to examine the holiest site in Christianity. Here's what they found.
JERUSALEM Researchers have continued their investigation into the site where the body of Jesus Christ is traditionally believed to have been buried, and their preliminary findings appear to confirm that portions of the tomb are still present today
Archaeological remains at wetland sites across the world could be at risk of being degraded and lost to environmental change, say scientists.
University of York researchers carried out experiments demonstrating how changing conditions in wetlands were destroying ancient organic material.
There has to be something missing in our explanation of the murals of Egypt. Why are there so many symbols— snakes, birds with human heads, feathers, buzzards, life symbols, monkeys, scarabs, balances, a young man, two twins, and masked individuals— that only a select few can understand?
More than 120 images of ancient Egyptian boats have been discovered adorning the inside of a building in Abydos, Egypt. The building dates back more than 3,800 years and was built near the tomb of pharaoh Senwosret III, archaeologists reported.
Sixteen hundred years before Sir Thomas More wrote Utopia, describing a near-ideal society, a Hellenistic king attempted to create his own real-life paradise. The monarch? Aristonicus, also known as Eumenes III, Roman-supported ruler of the city of Pergamum/Pergamon in Asia Minor. The utopia he wanted to build? Heliopolis (meaning “Sun City” in Greek).
New dating on the stone buildings of Nan Madol suggests the ancient coral reef capital in the Pacific Ocean was the earliest among the islands to be ruled by a single chief.
The discovery makes Nan Madol a key locale for studying how ancient human societies evolved from simple societies to more complex societies
People from Papua New Guinea and north-east Australia carry small amounts of DNA of an unidentified, extinct human species, a new research analysis has suggested.
Alt: Evidence of Unknown Extinct Human Relative Found in DNA Study of Melanesians
Researchers identify specific areas of DNA sequence that are related with the age at which we have our first child, and the total number of children we have during the course of our life.
The Zika virus is known to affect babies and female reproduction, but fresh evidence suggests that infections may also affect male fertility
Dengue fever is an alarming disease. According to World Health Organization estimates, 390 million dengue infections occur annually, with almost 25 percent of those severe enough to require hospitalization. The global incidence of the disease has rapidly increased in the recent years, and now, roughly half of the people in the world are at risk of catching it.
The controversy over genetically modified crops has long focused on largely unsubstantiated fears that they are unsafe to eat. But an extensive examination by The New York Times indicates that the debate has missed a more basic problem — genetic modification in the United States and Canada has not accelerated increases in crop yields or led to an overall reduction in the use of chemical pesticides.
Hundreds of thousands of people across Kenya will be planting five million trees in one hour on November 11 as part of an ambitious tree planting project that seeks to beat the Guinness World Record.
Researchers from UPM are developing a method to detect forest fires by using a new color index. The index is based on methods for vegetation classification and has been adapted to detect the tonalities of flames and smoke.
Related: How Is A 1,600-Year-Old Tree Weathering California's Drought?
A genetic clone, the Cavendish banana that stocks supermarket shelves could easily be wiped out by disease. Science offers hope of a sustainable approach
Scientists have transformed the humble spinach plant into a bomb detector.
By embedding tiny tubes in the plants' leaves, they can be made to pick up chemicals called nitro-aromatics, which are found in landmines and buried munitions.
It could soon be possible to make a light source out of bacteria.
So says a group of students from Newcastle University in the UK who are attempting to combine electronic engineering and synthetic biology to create “electro-biological” circuits.
DAVID VOGT’S son loves Lego. As they played together one day, the robotics professor had an idea: could he teach a robot to put the blocks together?
“We thought it would be funny to make a robot that could do the same thing I am doing with my son,” says Vogt, who is at the Freiberg University of Mining and Technology in Germany.
Robots are rapidly becoming more and more lifelike and unrecognizable from humans. Eerily human-like robots built by China’s University of Science and Technology stole the show over at the World Robot Conference in Beijing last week.
This New York Supreme Court case’s real name is Stambovsky v. Ackley, but its nickname, “the Ghostbusters ruling,” is way catchier—and way more descriptive. Not to mention accurate, as the most famous part of the decision contains the phrase “as a matter of law, the house is haunted.”
Related: Is South Korea being ruled by a 'shaman and eight fairies'?
The public is being encouraged to help map Britain’s historic obsession with the paranormal by searching for ancient scratchings in old buildings, used as charms against witchcraft and evil spirits.
Beads made from ostrich eggs buried in the Siberian cave around 2,000 generations ago reveal amazing artistic (and drilling) skills of our long-ago ancestors.
A strong earthquake that shook Italy Sunday morning took a heavy toll on historic churches and other landmark buildings, some dating back to the Middle Ages.
New Cornell research suggests an economically viable model to scrub carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to thwart runaway, point-of-no-return global warming.
The researchers propose using a "bioenergy-biochar system" that removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in an environmental pinch, until other removal methods become economically feasible and in regions where other methods are impractical.
A weird phenomenon is happening high above the Tibetan Plateau and the Himalayas that could prove to be an atmospheric nightmare. Pollutants that gather from India and China in the lowlands around the mountains can be boosted as high as 18 kilometers, reaching the stratosphere—the atmospheric layer directly above the troposphere that contains most of Earth’s ozone.