Newsdesk Archive
This past summer anthrax killed a 12-year-old boy in a remote part of Siberia. At least 20 other people, also from the Yamal Peninsula, were diagnosed with the potentially deadly disease after approximately 100 suspected cases were hospitalized. Additionally, more than 2,300 reindeer in the area died from the infection. The likely cause? Thawing permafrost.
Fusion energy researchers have discovered that they can rapidly extinguish and cool a magnetically confined fusion plasma hotter than the center of the sun by injecting a large quantity of neon gas to prevent damage to fusion-energy devices when there is a loss of plasma equilibrium.
Related: Is Supercooling the Body an Effective Therapy?
A solar panel on your roof could soon capture drinkable water for your faucet. Called Source, this solar panel system developed by Zero Mass Water, a startup with a mission to “democratize drinking water,” turns water vapor in the air into clean, drinkable water.
An international team of physicists has developed a pioneering approach to using Ultrahigh Energy Cosmic Rays (UHECRs)—the highest energy particles in nature since the Big Bang—to study particle interactions far beyond the reach of human-made accelerators.
A US space-weather satellite that is supposed to alert Earth to incoming solar storms has temporarily dropped offline five times in the year since it became operational. Its onboard computer may be experiencing hiccups caused unexpectedly by galactic cosmic rays.
An international team of researchers has found that Saturn’s largest moon Titan has deep canyons filled with liquid hydrocarbons, making the alien moon look a lot like Earth, but with rivers of methane instead of water.
A team of researchers have presented a new model for the origin of Saturn's rings based on results of computer simulations. The results of the simulations are also applicable to rings of other giant planets and explain the compositional differences between the rings of Saturn and Uranus. The findings were published on October 6 in the online version of Icarus.
One of the biggest impact craters on the moon is mysteriously shaped like a three-ringed bull's-eye. After decades of deliberation, scientists said they may have finally figured out how those rings came to be.
The mysterious tilt of the moon's orbit might come from an angled, giant impact that vaporized most of the early Earth, creating the moon in the process, a new study finds.
New craters are forming on the surface of the moon more frequently than scientists had predicted, a new study has found. The discovery raises concerns about future moon missions, which may face an increased risk of being hit by falling space rocks.
The number of discovered near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) now tops 15,000, with an average of 30 new discoveries added each week. The number of discovered near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) now tops 15,000, with an average of 30 new discoveries added each week. This milestone marks a 50 percent increase in the number of known NEAs since 2013, when discoveries reached 10,000 in August of that year.
A large space rock is going to come fairly close to Earth later tonight. Fortunately, it's not going to hit Earth, something astronomers are sure of thanks in part to a new tool NASA is developing for detecting potentially dangerous asteroids.
Though it might be the first place you think to look, jewelry is not the only place where diamonds can be found. They are used in industrial drills and in medical equipment, and soon diamonds could be found inside computers as well.
Stanford engineers have developed a low-cost, plastic-based textile that, if woven into clothing, could cool your body far more efficiently than is possible with the natural or synthetic fabrics in clothes we wear today.
Scientists have found a way to produce realistic sensations of touch in two human amputees by directly stimulating the nervous system.
Both men in the study lost an arm after traumatic injuries. Researchers implanted neural devices embedded with electrodes that were attached to the median, ulnar, and radial nerves of the arm.
Using a head-up display and a cap that reads brain activity, for the first time three people with spinal injury have controlled a robot and seen what it sees
Computers are keeping secrets. A team from Google Brain, Google’s deep learning project, has shown that machines can learn how to protect their messages from prying eyes.
Related: Researchers create a new type of computer that can solve problems that are a challenge for traditional computers
"Movies & TV shows will be like the opera and the novel."
You’ve no doubt heard of “Netflix and chill,” but Netflix imagines a future that’s a little more like “Netflix and…pill”?
There is at least one CCTV camera for every ten people in Britain, the official in charge of curbing the country’s surveillance warned last night.
Tony Porter said there are at least six million cameras recording almost every aspect of our lives.
A new report from The University of New Mexico Institute for Social Research (ISR) could help change the way cities, counties and states deal with homelessness. The study, which researchers say is one of the most comprehensive looks at the economic impact of homelessness to-date, shows it actually costs less to house chronically homeless people than to leave them on the streets.
Related: Rich people really do ignore you when you walk past
The family of a 16-year-old Georgia boy is describing how he woke from a coma speaking Spanish instead of English.
Extraordinary green flashes of light have been spotted in the sky above Siberia, baffling experts and residents as they question whether it was a meteor, a missile, or even aliens.
Related: 'Leaked' security footage shows UFO flying over ocean before 'splitting in two'
Related: WikiLeaks Documents Reveal United Nations Interest In UFOs
Related: British UFO investigator found dead after 'vomiting black liquid,' sending chilling text message to mother
Related: Mass UFO Sighting Over Arizona Sparks Phoenix Lights Rumors- Expert Says Mysterious'Craft' May Have Been Of Extraterrestrial Origin
Hexagonal clouds creating terrifying air bombs with winds of 170mph could be behind the mystery of the Bermuda Triangle.
Scientists have claimed the stormy blasts can flip ships into the sea and bring planes crashing down into the sea.
A study of some old data from a 1990s-era particle-accelerator experiment could be a hint at new physics. Or it could be a fluke.
From 1989 to 2000, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) operated an atom smasher called the Large Electron-Positron Collider (LEP), in which particles were sent crashing into one another at near light speed.
The likelihood of seeing quantum systems violating the second law of thermodynamics has been calculated by UCL scientists.
"The vast majority of the time, the second law of thermodynamics is obeyed."
Physicists have discovered a surprising consequence of a widely supported model of the early universe: according to the model, tiny cosmological perturbations produced shocks in the radiation fluid just a fraction of a second after the big bang. These shocks would have collided with each other to generate gravitational waves that are large enough to be detected by today's gravitational wave detectors.
Related: The oldest star cluster in Tarantula Nebula even older than previously thought, study finds
Related: Young stellar system caught in act of forming close multiples
Researchers have created a 3D printed cosmic microwave background - a map of the oldest light in the universe - and provided the files for download.
Famous Cambridge physicist Stephen Hawking is leading a team of scientists investigating a possible 'alien megastructure' orbiting a distant star.
Prof Hawking is spearheading an £81million project to find out whether aliens are responsible for the mysterious behaviour of a star called KIC8462852, or Tabby’s Star.
Alt: Dish to listen for ET around strange star
Strange pulses of cosmic light might be signals from hundreds of different alien civilizations — or just the latest false alarm in the tortuous search for ET.
This month, astrophysicists Ermanno Borra and Eric Trottier, both from Laval University in Quebec, announced that they had spotted mysterious light signals coming from 234 different stars in our Milky Way galaxy.
A group of scientists is launching what they say will be a new pacifist nation-state in space.
Asgardia "will become a place in orbit which is truly 'no man's land'," its website says.
Astronauts gain a couple of inches in height during long-term space flight, but lose vital muscle mass, according some of the most detailed observations yet of how the body is altered by living in low gravity.
A poor soul adrift in the void could bring the genesis on a place like Mars
Alt: Could a DEAD astronaut seed life across the universe? Researchers say dumping bodies into space could trigger new forms of life
Scattered across our solar system are small celestial bodies packed with water ice. Yes, our planet is covered in the stuff, but water is heavy and therefore expensive to launch into space. Therefore, to supply humans in space, where you have to bring everything you need with you, it makes sense to not use a terrestrial supply and utilize the water that's already out there.
The largest metallic asteroid in the solar system may have water on its surface, astronomers have found.
The asteroid, called 16 Psyche, is one of the most massive in the asteroid belt. Researchers think the 186-mile-wide (300 kilometers) body, made of almost pure nickel-iron, might be the core of a world whose outer layers were blasted off by impacts billions of years ago.
Dozens of shipwrecks, the first of their kind seen from bygone empires, have been a "complete bonus" discovery for researchers mapping the Black Sea.
The international team of scientists came across more than 40 wrecks while surveying the seabed near Bulgaria to understand how quickly land in the area was inundated following the last ice age 20,000 years ago.
The wreck of a World War I German submarine has been discovered off the coast of Scotland by marine engineers surveying the route of an undersea power cable.
In the 16th century, the so-called “sea monk” became the talk of Europe. Drawings of the half-man, half-fish “monster” appeared in naturalists’ tomes and were circulated among naturalists and members of royal courts across the continent. It was the end of the Renaissance, when Europeans were enamoured with art, science, philosophy and exploring the natural world.
Related: 'Very strange' thing found in Yarmouth County lake
In 1760, Scottish poet James Macpherson published a volume of poems he claimed to have translated from the Gaelic works of a third-century Scottish bard named Ossian. The poems were an enormous hit and a major inspiration to the nascent Romantic period in literature and art.
The social networks behind one of the most famous literary controversies of all time have been uncovered using modern networks science.
Since James Macpherson published what he claimed were translations of ancient Scottish Gaelic poetry by a third-century bard named Ossian, scholars have questioned the authenticity of the works and whether they were misappropriated from Irish mythology or, as heralded at the time, authored by a Scottish equivalent to Homer.
Prehistoric stone tombs used to store the ashes of loved ones are being built in Britain for the first time in thousands of years.
The ancient resting places could help to tackle the problem of a lack of burial space.
Neanderthals in cold regions probably ate a lot more vegetable food than was previously thought. This is what archaeologist Robert Power has discovered based on new research on ancient Neanderthal dental plaque.
Cave lions might have been hunted to extinction by humans, according to researchers who say they have found evidence that the creatures were skinned for their pelts 16,000 years ago.
Alt: Ancient interior decorators: Did early humans line caves with lion pelts?
Three bison populations colonized Western Europe via three successive waves, the first between 57,000 and 34,000 years ago when the climate was temperate. During the glaciation period, this first population of ancient wisent was replaced by the steppe bison, the ancestor of the present-day American bison.
Ice ages on Earth used to occur at intervals of every 40,000 years. But at a point about a million years ago, ice age intervals switched to every 100,000 years.
New research published in the journal Geology suggests the oceans may be responsible for this change, specifically in the way they suck carbon dioxide (CO2) out of the atmosphere.
Alt: The 100,000 year problem
An Israeli firm says a super-efficient engine it has created could drastically reduce fuel consumption and help power an auto industry revolution as manufacturers search for environmentally sound alternatives.
Uber just published a massive white paper detailing its plan to launch an “on demand aviation” service called Uber Elevate. Yes, that’s right. Uber is working on a flying car project.
Related: Tesla unveils residential ‘solar roof’ with updated battery storage system
In increasingly urbanised environments, there’s some evidence to suggest that dedicated greenspace might have a beneficial impact on childhood aggression and depression
This week, San Francisco became the first U.S. city to require that certain new buildings be built with a green roof—an eco-friendly design technique that sows plants above a roofline. This latest action builds on a growing trend that has taken root around the world, and which boosters say offers significant benefits for the planet.
New research shows that the drug makes cells in the retina more sensitive to light
25 years ago, pharmacologist M. E. West of the University of the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica, noted that local fisherman who smoke cannabis or drink rum made with the leaves and stems of the plant had “an uncanny ability to see in the dark,” which enabled them to navigate their boats through coral reefs.
Most people do not associate autism with visual problems. It’s not obvious how atypical vision might be related to core features of autism such as social and language difficulties and repetitive behaviors.
Related: Autism study finds early intervention has lasting effects
Study suggests that telling small lies makes changes to the brain’s response to lying, rather than being a case of one lie necessitating another to maintain a story. The study suggests telling small, insignificant lies desensitises the brain to dishonesty, meaning that lying gradually feels more comfortable over time.
Alt: Little white lies are NOT as innocent as you think: Over time, small fibs may desensitise our brains to dishonesty
Placebos can't cure diseases, but research suggests that they seem to bring some people relief from subjective symptoms, such as pain, nausea, anxiety and fatigue.
Related: Scientists at the Northwestern Medicine and the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago (RIC) have identified for the first time the region of the brain that's responsible for the "placebo effect" in pain relief
About 17 million adults and more than 850,000 adolescents had some problems with alcohol in the United States in 2012. Long-term alcohol misuse could harm your liver, stomach, cardiovascular system and bones, as well as your brain.
An army of mosquitoes will be infected with bacteria and released into Brazil and Columbia to combat the Zika outbreak.
Scientists are hoping that the millions of modified insects will mate with the local insects and spread the Wolbachia bug throughout wild populations.
Swifts already hold the title of the fastest fliers on Earth and now the small soot-brown birds have been revealed as one of nature’s greatest endurance athletes, after scientists discovered they spend ten months of the year entirely airborne.
About 120 million years ago, a bird dunked its beak into the water, caught a fish and, after digesting the meal, coughed up a pellet full of fish bones. The bird died moments later, but now its fossils are the oldest evidence of a bird pellet on record, a new study reported.
Flying dinosaurs took off from the ground — no leap from the trees required.
Ancient birds and some nonavian dinosaurs used their wings and powerful legs to launch themselves into the air, a new analysis of 51 winged dinos suggests.
About 75 million years ago, a mosasaur — a dolphin-like, predatory, marine reptile that lived during the dinosaur age — bit another mosasaur so hard that it left its tooth behind, embedded in its foe's face, new research finds.
The outback region around Winton in central Queensland is arguably Australia’s ground zero for giant dinosaur fossils. Here, graziers occasionally stumble across petrified bones on their paddocks, amid the stubbly grass and cow dung.
An unassuming lump found on a Sussex beach in 2004 contains the first known fossilized brain tissue from a dinosaur.The 133-million-year-old fossil belongs to a relative of Iguanodon
Alt: Archaeologists have found the first ever fossilised dinosaur brain, and it's surprisingly complex
A parrot fossil has been unearthed in Siberia - the furthest north one of these birds has ever been found, a study reports.
A single parrot bone was discovered in the Baikal region and dates to between 16 and 18 million years ago.
It’s a sleepy summer Friday at Lawrence Berkeley Lab’s Advanced Light Source. The particle accelerator operates at a constant, gentle hum—quieter than you’d expect for a synchrotron that whirls electrons to just short of the speed of light. Most of the 40 experimental beam line stations lie empty.
The colonization of far-flung Remote Oceania some 3,400 years ago was one of the most ambitious and expansive population dispersals in human history.
Controversy surrounds the knowledge the Portuguese had about Brazil before they entered into the Treaty of Tordesillas. The Treaty of Tordesillas, signed in 1494, was a treaty between Castile (Spain) and Portugal, which divided the lands discovered in the New World.
A non-virulent variant of the deadly Vibrio cholerae O1 strain has likely been present in Haitian bodies of water for several hundred years.
In addition, the bacteria have the potential to become virulent through gene transfer with the toxigenic strain introduced by UN peacekeepers, say the researchers.
In parts of Guatemala without indigenous roots, Mayan medicine is often written off as backwards, superstitious, and unscientific, says Alejandro Cerón, a researcher at the University of Denver who has studied indigenous health in Guatemala.
It’s been a big year for Mayan archaeology. An undecipherable Mayan codex was confirmed to be the oldest-known written text found in the Americas, while a new set of unexplained secret water tunnels was found hidden beneath a pyramid in Mexico’s Mayan ruin site of Palenque.
Taj Ma-help. Pollution from open rubbish fires is turning India’s iconic white marble monument brown, leading to calls for better waste management.
Door-to-door waste collection in Agra, the city where the Taj Mahal is located, often bypasses poor neighbourhoods. As a result, many households burn food scraps, paper and other rubbish in the street.
Our planet does some weird stuff that escapes our notice simply because of scale. The Earth spins faster during an El Niño year—or after some earthquakes—but we’re never going to miss a millisecond here or there.
Low-frequency vibrations of the Ross Ice Shelf are likely causing ripples and undulations in the air above Antarctica, a new study finds. Using mathematical models of the ice shelf, the study's authors show how vibrations in the ice match those seen in the atmosphere, and are likely causing these mysterious atmospheric waves.
An indirect effect of climate change may be causing intensely cold winters in the UK and US, a study suggests.
Warming in the Arctic is thought to be influencing the jet stream, a high-altitude corridor of fast-moving air, leading to severe cold snaps.
After years of negotiations, nations have reached an agreement to establish the world's largest marine sanctuary in Antarctica's Ross Sea.
Twenty-four countries and the European Union reached the unanimous deal at an international meeting of the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources in Hobart, Australia on Friday.
As nations with nuclear weapons modernize their arsenals, and in some cases increase their size, non-nuclear countries overwhelmingly embraced a proposed ban on nuclear weapons in a United Nations committee meeting Thursday.
The earliest known complete stone inscription of the Ten Commandments has been put up for sale for £500,000 ($611,275).
The square tablet, that weighs 200lbs (91kgs), is believed to date back to the fourth century BC and adorned an ancient synagogue in Israel that was destroyed by the Romans between 400 AD and 600 AD.
Flying over Ireland is always a magical experience. But over the past few weeks, travelers speeding over County Donegal have been treated to a particularly mystical sight: a 300-foot-long Celtic cross, made of thousands of trees.
Related: Halloween Owes Its Tricks and Treats to the Ancient Celtic New Year's Eve
Jerusalem, Israel- For the first time in centuries, scientists have exposed the original surface of what is traditionally considered the tomb of Jesus Christ. Located in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the Old City of Jerusalem, the tomb has been covered by marble cladding since at least 1555 A.D., and most likely centuries earlier.
Israel presented an ancient fragment of text in Hebrew referencing Jerusalem and recalled its ambassador to UNESCO in a gesture of protest against a resolution which criticized Israel for restricting Muslims’ access to a holy site in the city.
The text, written on a 11cm by 2.5cm papyrus, was dated by the Israel Antiquities Authority to the 7th century BCE and was said to be the earliest Hebrew reference to Jerusalem outside of the Bible.
Descending the side of the Roccamonfina Volcano in northern Italy, sets of humanoid footprints had long been considered the imprint of the Devil, for the footprints were most certainly made when the slope of the volcano was molten. And who but the Devil could walk on flowing lava without burning his feet?
A baby boy conceived using a controversial technique that mixes DNA from three people seems to be healthy, according to a hotly anticipated talk by the leader of the team that created the child.
Time and again, Martin Moore’s children get sick with a cold. He hauls them to their doctor, who then informs him that there’s nothing to be done aside from taking them home and waiting it out.
One small hover for man, one giant levitation for mankind. It was only a quarter of an inch, but a team from the University of Cincinnati got their sizable Hyperloop pod prototype to hover above the tracks in front of a cheering crowd.
Scientists have designed a new prototype battery that mimics the structure of the human intestines.
It's a type of battery called lithium-sulphur, which - in theory - could have five times the energy density of the lithium-ion forms in wide use today.
In 2006, Cheryl Nickerson sent a culture of salmonella bacteria for a ride on the space shuttle Atlantis. Eleven days later, she watched anxiously from the Kennedy Space Center in the dead of night as her bacteria returned safely.
Tabby’s star has provoked so much excitement over the past year, with speculation that it hosts a highly advanced civilization capable of building orbiting megastructures to capture the star’s energy, that UC Berkeley’s Breakthrough Listen project is devoting hours of time on the Green Bank radio telescope to see if it can detect any signals from intelligent extraterrestrials.
Alt: 'Alien Megastructure' Star Targeted by $100 Million SETI Search
The entire surface of Proxima b — the possibly Earth-like planet orbiting the closest star to the sun, Proxima Centauri — may be covered in a liquid ocean, according to a new study.
Liquid water is essential for life as we know it — but too much water could stop the evolution of complex lifeforms in its tracks.
Alt: Preferentially Earth-sized planets with lots of water
Jupiter’s clouds have deep roots. The multicolored bands that wrap around the planet reach hundreds of kilometers down into the atmosphere, NASA’s Juno spacecraft reveals, providing an unprecedented peek into the giant planet’s interior.
Rocky, Mars-size planets may drift between stars with no sun of their own, thanks to their boisterous gas-giant siblings.
New research suggests that if gas giants about the size of Jupiter form with an orbit that is also about the size of Jupiter's current path around the sun, each of those planets could hurl an average of eight small, rocky worlds from their system. That would leave the expelled planets to wander alone through the darkness of space, the researchers said.
A dim binary star is behaving exactly as expected if it is about to explode as a “red nova“. If that happens, in 2022 or so it could shine as brightly as the North Star.
Astronomers are scratching their heads over two mysterious objects in space that are unlike anything scientists have seen before. The objects blast superbright, superfast X-ray flares and could represent a brand new type of astrophysical phenomenon, the researchers said.
An international collaboration of astronomers, led by a group at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, Switzerland, has used the unrivalled observing power of MUSE on the Very Large Telescope (VLT) at ESO's Paranal Observatory to study gas around distant active galaxies, less than two billion years after the Big Bang.
The mysterious hexagon at Saturn's northern pole has changed colour from blue to gold, scientists have said.
The hexagon is essentially a rotating cloud pattern; its shape may originate as the result of large differences in the speeds of Saturn's winds.
The universe may not be expanding at an accelerating rate after all, meaning that mysterious "dark energy" might not actually exist, according to a new study.
This is quite the claim.
It may sound like science fiction, but it’s not: Scientists have created the first time crystal, using a chain of ions. Just as a standard crystal repeats in a regular spatial pattern, a time crystal repeats in time, returning to a similar configuration at regular intervals.
Today, manufacturing strong magnets is no problem from a technical perspective. It is, however, difficult to produce a permanent magnet with a magnetic field of a specific pre-determined shape. That is, until now, thanks to the new solution devised at TU Wien: for the first time ever, permanent magnets can be produced using a 3D printer.
Antarctica's ice has been melting, most likely because of a warming climate. Now, newly published research shows the rate of melting appears to be accelerating.
Related: Dreaded Polar Vortex May Be Shifting
Earth has limits to the amount of carbon dioxide in its atmosphere before the environment as we know it starts to change. Too much CO2 absorbed by the oceans makes the water more acidic. Too much in the atmosphere warms the planet. With emissions from our carbon-based economies rising, scientists at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory are developing way to prevent CO2 produced by power plants and industries from ever entering the atmosphere, and they are exploring ways to take CO2 out of the environment.
Levels of CO2 in the atmosphere have surged past an important threshold and may not dip below it for "many generations".
The 400 parts per million benchmark was broken globally for the first time in recorded history in 2015.
The International Energy Agency says that the world's capacity to generate electricity from renewable sources has now overtaken coal.
The IEA says in a new report that last year, renewables accounted for more than half of the increase in power capacity.
Dutch inventors Tuesday unveiled what they called the world's first giant outside air vacuum cleaner—a large purifying system intended to filter out toxic tiny particles from the atmosphere surrounding the machine.