Newsdesk Archive
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.
“Spirits” can refer to an eclectic mix of terms--a human soul, a disposition, a member of the Holy Trinity, or even a distilled alcoholic beverage. So how did some alcohols start being called spirits? That depends on how the origin of the word “alcohol” is traced.
It's one thing to appreciate a 20-year-old fine wine. It is something else to brew up a 2,500-year-old alcoholic beverage.
While sifting through the remains of an Iron Age burial plot dating from 400 to 450 B.C. in what is today Germany, Bettina Arnold, an archaeologist and anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and others uncovered a cauldron that contained remnants of an alcohol brewed and buried with the deceased.
There is significant variation in how different cultures over time have dealt with the dead. Yet, at a very basic level, funerals in the Sonoran Desert thousands of years ago were similar to what they are today. Bodies of the deceased were buried respectfully, while families and mourners followed certain customs to honor lives lost.
At least, most of the time.
Archaeologists working in Spain have uncovered a trove of cave etchings that has the potential to revolutionize our understanding of human history in Europe. The cave art was found near the resort town of Lekeitio on Spain’s northwestern coast.
A find-of-the-year by Novosibirsk archeologists is a toy that entertained prehistoric babies. The remarkable discovery of one of the oldest toys in the world came from excavations at a Bronze Age settlement in Siberia.
Gas halos around distant galaxies are colder and more common than previously believed, a new study suggests. The finding could force astronomers to rethink some of their theories about galaxy formation.
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, said archaeologist Mark D. McCoy, Southern Methodist University, Dallas. McCoy led the discovery team.
Islanders in the Pacific Ocean may be may be carrying traces of a long lost human species locked up in their DNA.
Today, modern humans inherit a small chunk of our genes from Neanderthals, with evidence that some of us carry the genetic remnants of a lesser known sister group, called the Denisovans.
Ever wondered what would become of humanity if the power grid were to collapse, nulling every technological advancement man has ever made? Long before ego tricked humans into thinking they were the center of the universe, ancient civilizations used to turn to nature for wisdom and knowledge that is core to survival.
An asteroid mining concept could quickly deliver satellites to high orbit on the cheap.
There are hundreds of satellites in geostationary orbit, meaning that they orbit the Earth at roughly the same pace that our planet spins. It's a long way from where humans currently roam in space; while the International Space Station is about 250 miles above Earth, geostationary orbit is about 10 times higher — at 27,000 miles.
Imagine if our first Mars astronauts fell over and had trouble orienting themselves as soon as they landed on Mars. That could be the troubling reality according to a new bed rest study.
A group of citizen scientists and professional astronomers joined forces to discover an unusual hunting ground for exoplanets. They found a star surrounded by the oldest known circumstellar disk -- a primordial ring of gas and dust that orbits around a young star and from which planets can form as the material collides and aggregates.
Back in 2011, three astronomers were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery that the Universe wasn’t just expanding - it was expanding at an accelerating rate.
Related: Astrophysicists create most detailed map of the Milky Way
A very rare gravitational lensing event, set to occur in 2028, has been predicted by a team of French astronomers led by Pierre Kervella of the CNRS/Universidad de Chile. It will provide an ideal opportunity to look for evidence of a planet around a nearby star.
For the first time, a team including scientists from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have used neutron beams to create holograms of large solid objects, revealing details about their interiors in ways that ordinary laser light-based visual holograms cannot.
For more than a century and a half of physics, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that entropy always increases, has been as close to inviolable as any law we know. In this universe, chaos reigns supreme.
But researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE's) Argonne National Laboratory announced recently that they may have discovered a little loophole in this famous maxim.
Artificial intelligence software that can find patterns in highly complex decisions is being used to predict our taste in films, TV shows and music with ever-increasing accuracy. And now, after a breakthrough study by a group of British scientists, it could be used to predict the outcome of trials.
University of Leeds researchers analyzed the body language, facial expressions and voice of sitcom character to create a digital avatar and, eventually, a chatbot
Related: MIT scientists are foolishly training AI to scare people
Outfit missing that final touch? Try Rovables: pocket-sized robots that live on your clothes.
The bots, developed by a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University, look like miniature cars with a custom-designed circuit board for a roof. With the help of magnetic wheels that pinch the fabric, they can roam freely up and down clothing for 45 minutes at a stretch, stopping in place to pose as a brooch or a bracelet.
Harvard University researchers have made the first entirely 3D-printed organ-on-a-chip with integrated sensing. Built by a fully automated, digital manufacturing procedure, the 3D-printed heart-on-a-chip can be quickly fabricated in customized form factors allowing researchers to easily collect reliable data for short-term and long-term studies.
Toyota announced today that it will start selling buses that run on hydrogen fuel-cells in Tokyo next year in advance of the 2020 Summer Olympics.
Related: BMW's Futuristic Motorcycle Balances on Its Own
Scientists and engineers recently made a leap forward in the pursuit of clean energy. The team set a new world record for plasma pressure in an Alcator C-Mod tokamak nuclear fusion reactor. Plasma pressure is the key ingredient to producing energy from nuclear fusion, and MIT's new result achieves over 2 atmospheres of pressure for the first time.
The Communist Party wants to encourage good behaviour by marking all its people using online data. Those who fall short will be denied basic freedoms like loans or travel
Imagine a world where an authoritarian government monitors everything you do, amasses huge amounts of data on almost every interaction you make, and awards you a single score that measures how “trustworthy” you are.
Related: Iceland’s Pirate Party Could Be on Course for an Electoral Victory
Related: NSA Can Access More Phone Data Than Ever
Drilling into hot rocks to tap geothermal energy is one thing. Drilling deep enough to tap the energy from magma oozing into volcanoes is quite another, offering a massive increase in the potential to exploit Earth’s inner heat.
That is the task of a rig now drilling 5 kilometres into the rugged landscape of old lava flows in Reykjanes, at the south-west corner of Iceland. Drilling began on 12 August.
Mount Aso, one of the most active volcanoes in Japan, recently helped to stop a powerful earthquake before it subsided on its own, researchers discovered.
When a 7.1-magnitude quake struck Kumamoto, Japan, on April 16, 2016, it opened surface ruptures in a zone extending 25 miles (40 kilometers) in length.
NASA’s JunoCam, which is currently snapping photos from Jupiter’s orbit, is the first outreach camera to travel beyond the asteroid belt. It's also the first time that the average person has a direct line to the far reaches of our solar system.
Previously, the Kepler space telescope looked straight out from the solar system in a direction almost perpendicular to the ecliptic and the plane of the planets. This way, it could observe the same spot all year long, as the sun, and most of the solar system, were out of its field of view. But since the start of K2 mission, it has been observing parallel to that plane in order to better balance against the radiation pressure of the sun.
As southern winter solstice approaches in the Saturn system, NASA's Cassini spacecraft has been revealing dramatic seasonal changes in the atmospheric temperature and composition of Saturn's largest moon, Titan.
Winter is taking a grip on Titan's southern hemisphere, and a strong, whirling atmospheric circulation pattern—a vortex—has developed in the upper atmosphere over the south pole.
A mysterious object in the outer reaches of the solar system is revolving around the sun in an abnormal way, and scientists currently cannot explain why.
The object has been nicknamed Niku, a Chinese adjective that means "rebellious," by the group of researchers who announced its discovery in August.
Pluto’s icy heart beats with a planetary rhythm.
When NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft whizzed by the dwarf planet in July 2015, it famously spotted a heart-shaped feature just north of the equator. Now, researchers are recognizing how that enormous ice cap drives much of Pluto’s activity, from its frosty surface to its hazy atmosphere.
Experts say that solar activity as low as it currently is has not been seen since the mini-ice age that took place between 1645 and 1715 – a period known as the Maunder Minimum where the entire Thames froze over.
A new model has allowed experts to predict solar activity with more accuracy than ever before and it suggests that magnetic activity will fall by 60 per cent between 2030 and 2040.
The prevailing notion that the African continent has been getting progressively drier over time is being challenged by a new study that finds that drought has actually decreased over the past 1.3 million years and that the continent is on a 100,000-year cycle of wet and dry conditions.
The banana is the world’s most popular fruit crop, with over 100 million metric tons produced annually in over 130 tropical and subtropical countries. Edible bananas are the result of a genetic accident in nature that created the seedless fruit we enjoy today.
Sneaky parasitic weeds may be able to steal genes from the plants they are attacking and then use those genes against the host plant, according to a team of scientists.
In a study, researchers detected 52 incidences of the nonsexual transfer of DNA—known as horizontal gene transfer, or HGT—from a host plant that later became functional into members of a parasitic plant family known as the broomrapes, said Claude dePamphilis, professor of biology, Penn State.
Purdue scientists got a glimpse into more than 450 million years of evolution by tracing the function of a hormone pathway that has been passed along and co-opted by new species since the first plants came onto land.
Flowering plants today, known as angiosperms, use the phytohormone abscisic acid (ABA) to keep seeds dormant until ready for germination and to open and close stomates, tiny openings on leaves used to control gas exchange.
Sixty-eight million years ago in what is now Antarctica, there were no ice floes groaning or collapsing into an ice-covered sea. Instead the region had a moderate climate, temperate waters and a silence occasionally broken by the “hoink hoink” calls of prehistoric birds.
In the paleontology popularity contest, studying the social life of dinosaurs is on the rise.
A new publication on the bird-like dinosaur Avimimus, from the late-Cretaceous suggests they were gregarious, social animals--evidence that flies in the face of the long-held mysticism surrounding dinosaurs as solo creatures.
New fossils have improved the family tree for long-necked dinosaurs, revealing an ancient voyage across an ice-free Antarctica.
Alt: Giant dinosaurs 'crossed continents'
The gouge in the ground likely made by Europe's Schiaparelli probe as it hit the surface of Mars on Wednesday has been imaged by an American satellite.
Related: Mars lander lost signal one minute before landing, ESA confirms
New analysis of the most famous Martian meteorite ever recovered has changed our understanding of the early volcanic history and evolution of the Red Planet. The findings continue an ongoing debate as to whether insights into the planet’s ancient volcanism can be used to make the case for a habitable, oxygen-rich ancient Martian atmosphere.
We all want there to be aliens. Green ones, pink ones, brown ones, Greys. Or maybe Vulcans, Klingons, even a being of pure energy. Any type will do.
That's why whenever a mysterious signal or energetic fluctuation arrives from somewhere in the cosmos and hits one of our many telescopes, headlines erupt across the media: "Have We Finally Detected An Alien Signal?" or "Have Astronomers Discovered An Alien Megastructure?" But science-minded people know that we're probably getting ahead of ourselves.
Five years ago, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to three astronomers for their discovery, in the late 1990s, that the universe is expanding at an accelerating pace.
Planet Nine's days of lurking unseen in the dark depths of the outer solar system may be numbered.
The hypothetical giant planet, which is thought to be about 10 times more massive than Earth, will be discovered within 16 months or so, astronomer Mike Brown predicted.
In 1976, two Viking landers became the first US spacecraft from Earth to touch down on Mars. They took the first high-resolution images of the planet, surveyed the planet's geographical features, and analyzed the geological composition of the atmosphere and surface. Perhaps most intriguingly, they also performed experiments that searched for signs of microbial life in Martian soil.
A piece of aluminum found in Romania that looks like a purpose built component has reportedly been dated as 250,000 years old. Speculation is that it belongs to aliens, as aluminum wasn't produced by mankind until 200 years ago. Others disagree, however.
Related: Why UFO Conspiracists Have So Many Opinions About 'Angel Hair’
Related: ‘Completely crazy’: Freaky UFO lights up Geneva, stuns onlookers (VIDEO)
Related: UFO expert Max Spiers' death prompts conspiracy theories
Related: Does this medieval painting show HUGE UFO visited Dracula's homeland 100s of years ago?
Related: British UFO files returned to National Archives for extra censorship
Floods were once the greatest threat to Venice. That danger has not receded, but the tsunami of tourists pouring into the city could cause greater harm, argues Salvatore Settis in his new book, If Venice Dies. Venetians are being driven out of the city by skyrocketing rent while giant cruise ships dwarf the skyline, risking a disaster like the Costa Concordia, the boat that sank off the Tuscan coast. There’s even talk of building a Venice theme park just outside the city.
Marco Polo himself may have recognised this medieval trading ship. It’s one of the 40 or so shipwrecks newly discovered on the bed of the Black Sea north of Turkey.
Some of these vessels sank when the Byzantine Empire was in its heyday 1000 years ago, and some during more recent Ottoman times. Others sank in the 13th century, when Marco Polo was plying his trade across the globe.
Archaeologists say they've found evidence of a battlefield from the Roman emperor Titus' siege of Jerusalem in A.D. 70.
Recent excavations revealed a section of the so-called "Third Wall" of Jerusalem that Titus' army breached on its way to conquering the city, according to the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA).
Israeli archaeologists have found evidence of where Titus’s Roman legions may have breached the outer walls of Jerusalem in 70AD on their way to conquering the city and destroying the Second Temple – one of Judaism’s most historically and religiously resonant events.
When ancient hunter-gatherers first began to give up their nomadic life, they weren’t just chasing the grain. Rather than looking for big payoffs from harvesting cereal grains, it seems at least some groups may have been playing it safe.
If so, the transition to sedentary life — the first big step toward agriculture — may have been more complex, and more varied, than archaeologists thought.
Early humans living in southern Africa in the Middle Stone Age after 65,000 years ago used advanced heating techniques to produce silcrete blades, according to a new study.
The 2,400-year-old Ust-Taseyevsky idol 'underwent racial realignment early in Middle Ages', losing his European looks. But why this medieval plastic surgery? And the next puzzle: how come he had Caucasian features almost two millennia before the Russian conquest of Siberia?
Two gene-expression studies could explain why people of African descent respond more strongly to infection, and are more prone to autoimmune diseases.
Alt: Yes, humans and Neanderthals had sex. And they gave us an STD. To be fair, we may have given them diseases that ultimately led to their extinction.
In an emerging model of evolution, widely supported by scientists, different types of early humans, including Neanderthals, interbred and left their genetic traces with many of us today. It is a theory known in the scientific literature as “admixture between archaic and anatomically modern humans.”
Scientists have discovered the earliest known evidence of right-handedness in the fossil record, thanks to markings on an ancient set of teeth that once belonged to a Tanzanian primate.
A fossil fish found in Yunnan, China, has filled in a gaping hole in how researchers thought the vertebrate jaw evolved.
The 423-million-year-old specimen, dubbed Qilinyu rostrata, is part of an ancient group of armoured fish called placoderms.
Wolves in Canada, lions in the Serengeti or fishermen in the Southern Ocean, either hunt alone keeping the spoils to themselves or in packs sharing the bounty with others. Deciding whether to tell fellow predators about some tasty prey is not an easy decision and requires the predator to weigh up many pros and cons.
New research reveals Asian elephant societies to be less hierarchical than their African relatives.
In Africa, elephant societies are characterized by matriarchal leadership and a clear pecking order. Many scientists believed Asian elephants organized and interacted in similar ways.
What hurts one mouse, hurts every mouse.
That’s the conclusion of a new study examining the social transfer of pain in mice. When one group of mice was exposed to a painful stimulus, a completely unaffected group displayed the same kind of heightened sensitivity as the first. Given that mice are mammals like us, the effect could also exist in humans, as well as informing future pain research.
Mouse squeaks may have more in common with human speech than we realised. Tinkering with a gene associated with language in humans has been found to mess up mice’s mating calls.
The gene, called FOXP2, is one of the most-studied genes involved in human brain evolution. It was discovered in the 1990s in a study of a British family that had 16 relatives who had difficulty making certain mouth movements and complex sounds.
Whether it's jet lag, a new work schedule, daylight saving time or just a Monday morning, shifting sleep schedules takes a toll. But scientists think they might have found a way to reset our internal timers that's more than hot air.
Alt: Blast of thin air can reset circadian clocks
Northwestern Medicine scientists have discovered circadian clocks in muscle tissue that control the muscle's metabolic response and energy efficiency depending on the time of day.
A new study suggests that road rage affects women more than men, and that females are far more likely to lose their cool behind the wheel.
The researchers suggest that women have an instinctive 'early warning system' which dates back to our early female ancestors who had a sense of danger for threats.
Adolescents among humans and non-human animals alike are more inclined to engage in heightened risk-taking behavior, exploration and novelty seeking. Although these attributes provide adaptive value in enabling individuals to gain importance in the world, including independence from parents, if taken too far, this tendency could lead to potentially dangerous behavior
Mind gamers, here’s a strange little test for you. Which of these shapes is a bouba, and which is a kiki? And what does this have to do with the evolution of language?
An international research team says they have identified the physical source of depression in the brain in a new study.
Related: Depressed? Do What You Love
As the death count after Hurricane Matthew approaches 900 and reports of deadly cholera outbreaks begin to surface, Haitians have sent out desperate pleas for help.
Yet accompanying many requests for aid comes a warning – do not give your money to the American Red Cross (ARC).
Related: Lords of Poverty (1989) by Graham Hancock
Spain is about to pass 300 days without a government. But guess what? Few Spaniards seem bothered by that as the country's economy roars ahead.
Spanish cities are boasting of packed cafes and restaurants, thriving fashion shops and art galleries, plenty of tourists. The overall impression is of a bustling, vibrant country. So who needs a government?
Related: The State is Out of Date: We Can Do It Better, an interview with Gregory Sams
If you’re reading this in America, there is a 50/50 chance that your face appears in a police database.
Related: UK admits it spied illegally for 17 years, is sorry, won't stop
Ancient DNA research has revealed that Ice Age cave artists recorded a previously unknown hybrid species of bison and cattle in great detail on cave walls more than 15,000 years ago.
Alt: Mystery beast in ice age cave art revealed as cow-bison hybrid
It's a local news story that Stephen King could take notes from: Five people fell ill and started hallucinating, one after another, following contact with one woman who started seeing things in the dead of night.
Spinal cord injury alters the type of bacteria living in the gut and that these changes can exacerbate the extent of neurological damage and impair recovery of function, new research suggests. The study demonstrates that counteracting these changes with probiotics could aid patients’ recovery from spinal cord injuries.
Migraine sufferers have a different mix of gut bacteria that could make them more sensitive to certain foods, scientists have found.
The study offers a potential explanation for why some people are more susceptible to debilitating headaches and why some foods appear to act as triggers for migraines.
In June, international diabetes organizations endorsed provocative new guidelines suggesting physicians should consider gastric bypass surgery for a greatly expanded number of diabetics—those with a body mass index of 30 and above as opposed to just those with a BMI of 40 or more.
Women who are overweight while pregnant are more likely to have babies who are biologically older than those born to women of a healthy weight. This could put the babies at a higher risk of developing chronic diseases later in life, and may reduce their life expectancy.
A decades-long study of human well-being found that upbringing also affected how the men managed their emotions in midlife
Related: Men who smoke are THREE times more likely to have children with asthma
The basics of genetic inheritance are well known: parents each pass half of their DNA to their offspring during reproduction. This genetic recipe is thought to contain all of the information that a new organism needs to build and operate its body.
But recent research has shown that, in some species, parents' life experiences can alter their offspring.
A small team of researchers with members from Dalhousie University, Aarhus University and the University of St. Andrews, has found that sperm whale clans living off the coast of the Galápagos Islands were replaced by two others over the course of a decade.
Humans might have more in common with fish than previously thought, a new University of Queensland visual illusion study indicates.
UQ School of Biological Sciences and Queensland Brain Institute researchers have found that triggerfish, a common Great Barrier Reef species, are fooled by visual illusions in the same way as humans.
When injected into the body, Tumor Paint lights up cancers. The drug could lead to a new class of therapeutics
Hunter Coffman was barely two years old when he was admitted to Seattle Children’s Hospital for a brain scan. He was vomiting, and having a hard time balancing, sitting and walking.
To many, "biofuels" is just a buzzword, holding more promise than practicality.
But not to Alexis Belonio, the Philippines-based inventor who developed an innovative, clean-burning cooking stove fueled by rice husks.
Local councils are testing a new tool for protecting their vulnerable koala populations – drones equipped with artificial intelligence (AI) and backed by powerful statistical analysis.
Australian archaeologists announced plans Wednesday to recreate Laos' mysterious Plain of Jars as a three-dimensional virtual reality experience, that could one day see museum visitors walk through remote dig sites.
The eyes of a visiting archaeologist lit up when he was shown the 10 tiny, rusty discs that had sat unnoticed in storage for two and a half years at a dig on a southern Japan island.
He had been to archaeological sites in Italy and Egypt, and recognized the "little round things" as old coins, including a few likely dating to the Roman Empire.
As the only human species left standing, Homo sapiens has clearly done something right.
Modern man has outlived the Neanderthals and other ancient humans, but not, it now emerges, without taking something from them.
Monkeys have been observed producing sharp stone flakes that closely resemble the earliest known tools made by our ancient relatives, proving that this ability is not uniquely human.
Alt: Monkey 'tools' raise questions over human archaeological record
We might imagine cave men crudely making tools out of rocks, but Middle Stone Age man might in fact have been an innovative artisan.
New evidence suggests some early humans placed rocks into hot embers before shaping them into blades in order to make them harder and more precise.
The European palate may not always have been so sophisticated. This week, researchers report the first evidence of ancient Europeans snacking on rodents at least 5,000 years ago.
The discovery suggests that rodents such as mice and voles have not always been mere pests hellbent on annoying humanity throughout its history: They may have been a food source as well.
Three thousand years ago, an ancient middle-Eastern city which linked Asia and Africa was razed to the ground by fire.
As the flames tore through Tel Megiddo, near the city of Haifa in present-day Israel, they levelled the city to smoldering embers and charred mud bricks.
Archaeologists excavating at the site of the ancient Biblical city of Tel Lachish have unearthed a gate-shrine dating to the 8th century BC (First Temple period).
Seven hundred small glass and ceramic bottles containing ancient medicines have been discovered during excavations in Turkey. The medications include 1,300-year-old antidepressant pills and drugs for heart disease.
The final resting place for Egyptian pharaoh Khufu has captivated historians and archaeologists alike for centuries, with longstanding rumors of hidden tombs and secret passageways still surrounding the circa 2550 B.C. structure. Now, researchers studying the Great Pyramid of Giza have uncovered evidence of previously undiscovered cavities beneath the monument, which could contain passageways and other unknown structures.
Alt: Secrets of the Pyramids Being Revealed by Cosmic Particles
Hopes are fading for a European probe that was scheduled to land on Mars on 19 October.
Schiaparelli, a craft operated by the European Space Agency (ESA), was supposed to touch down on red planet at 14:48 UTC, in what would have been a first for the agency.
The first of three 'supermoons' cast a glow across the globe on Sunday and two more will do so again in November and December to send off 2016 in stellar style.
If you observed the night sky on Sunday, a full supermoon looming and lighting the planet was hard to miss.
Astronomers presented new research on the possibility of a gigantic, unseen planet beyond Neptune on Wednesday, saying the hypothetical world may have set the solar system at a tilt.
As the search for a hypothetical, unseen planet far, far beyond Neptune's orbit continues, research by a team of the University of Arizona provides additional support for the possible existence of such a world and narrows the range of its parameters and location.
In 2005, a very strange event was observed. An unknown object, not detectable through visible light, released an intense flare of X-rays. It took about a minute for the flare to reach its full brightness, about 90 times brighter than its resting output and about a million times as bright as the Sun. The flare lasted for about an hour before petering out. Four years later, it flared up again.
NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has helped astronomers to uncover a previously unidentified X-ray point source at the massive black hole in the center of a distant compact starburst galaxy known as Henize 2-10.
After the first direct detection of gravitational waves that was announced last February by the LIGO Scientific Collaboration and made news all over the world, Luciano Rezzolla (Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany) and Cecilia Chirenti (Federal University of ABC in Santo André, Brazil) set out to test whether the observed signal could have been a gravastar or not.