Newsdesk Archive
Salty oceans actually have an impact on the Earth's protective magnetic field. It's tiny and hard to measure. But this has now been done with great precision by the European Swarm Satellites.
The looming threat of earthquakes is nothing new for Californians. But a new discovery in the heart of the San Francisco bay has upped the risk of a historically disastrous quake.
A surge in volcanic eruptions between 320,000 and 170,000 years ago appears to have changed the course of human evolution. Scientists say this pulse of activity along the East African Rift System would have drastically altered the landscape and environment for the Homo sapiens arriving in Ethiopia 200,000 years ago.
Alt: Early humans were plagued by Supervolcanoes: Huge eruptions closed off migration routes for our ancestors
Volcanic activity on Venus took place in the recent past, geologically speaking, and may still be happening on the planet today. New research takes a deeper look at one recent eruption on Venus' surface.
Often referred to as Earth’s evil twin, Venus is the solar system’s hottest planet. But research suggests that Venus may have had vast oceans and a balmy climate
Scientists may have spotted more than a half dozen clouds in Pluto's hazy atmosphere, researchers announced today
Alt: Nasa findings hint of clouds on Pluto during New Horizons mission
Comet outbursts are likely caused by landslides rather than pressure-based eruptions from the icy bodies' interiors, a new study suggests.
Outbursts of cometary dust — such as those observed at Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko by Europe's Rosetta spacecraft — produce plumes that look like those generated by geyser eruptions on Earth. But this resemblance is misleading, according to the authors of the new study.
It’s hard being a comet sometimes. Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko is developing stress fractures and might break apart in the next several hundred years.
Comet 67P is famous for its oddball shape.
Four light years away from Earth is a rocky planet that may harbour life, called Proxima B.
While astronomers are eager to reach the planet, one of the biggest challenges to overcome in their quest is the propulsion system needed to enable both accelerating and decelerating to this distance.
The EM Drive hasn’t even been fully tested in actual space conditions, yet the physics-defying engine is already making waves throughout the aerospace and science news worlds. When the news first broke that NASA engineers might have invented a kind of “warp drive,” some social media sites lost their minds. Since then, several other similar engines have been developed and the science behind the seemingly impossible electromagnetic engine has been thoroughly examined.
Two Chinese astronauts have arrived at the Tiangong 2 space laboratory, in a mission aimed at developing China's capabilities as a space power.
Alt: China launches longest manned space mission
In addition to the constant emission of warmth and light, our sun sends out occasional bursts of solar radiation that propel high-energy particles toward Earth. These solar energetic particles, or SEPs, can impact astronauts or satellites. To fully understand these particles, scientists must look to their source: the bursts of solar radiation. NASA has revealed new information regarding these particles, and how they travel, revealing a pattern that is much wider and farther than previous models predicted—explaining how SEPs find their way to even the far side of the sun.
I saw my first hologram display this past summer from a company called Looking Glass. Now another company is working on a similar product called the Holovect
Related: Using light to move electrons and protons
Related: How quantum effects could improve artificial intelligence
Chemists at Oregon State University have discovered that one or more organic compounds in a family that traditionally has been known as pollutants could offer an important advance to make cheap, reliable batteries.
Civilization as we know it wouldn’t exist without rare earth elements. No smartphones, LEDs, wind turbines, or even car batteries. REEs, such as cerium and scandium, are scattered throughout the earth’s crust.
Nasa has all but declared this year to be the hottest yet recorded, after September narrowly turned out the warmest in modern temperature monitoring.
Related: Now the Met Office can predict a big freeze a YEAR ahead after unlocking the mysteries of a weather system that controls Britain's climate
A fleet of robots, trolling the oceans and measuring their heat content, has revolutionized scientists’ ability to study how climate change is affecting the seas.
Related: Researchers use ‘robomussels’ to monitor climate change
Scientists at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee have discovered a chemical reaction to turn CO2 into ethanol, potentially creating a new technology to help avert climate change. Their findings were published in the journal ChemistrySelect.
A nuclear fusion world record has been set in the US, marking another step on the long road towards the unlocking of limitless clean energy.
A team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) created the highest plasma pressure ever recorded, using its Alcator C-Mod tokamak reactor.
In a new study researchers at the Swedish Institute of Space Physics have used measurements from NASA's MMS (Magnetospheric MultiScale) satellites to reveal that there are ripples, or surface waves, moving along the surface of shocks in space. Such ripples in shocks can affect how plasma is heated and are potential sites of particle acceleration.
U.S. President Barack Obama has called for preparations to be made for “extreme space weather events,” such as solar flares capable of causing catastrophic damage to Earth’s critical infrastructure.
Almost three weeks after it crash-landed the Rosetta orbiter on a comet, the European Space Agency (ESA) is gearing up to land another spacecraft—this time on Mars.
Alt: European Mars Lander Separates From Mothership, Takes Aim at Red Planet
Starting with skin cells rather than egg cells, Japanese researchers say they have generated eggs that led to healthy mouse pups capable of living normal lives and reproducing.
Alt: Eggs made from skin cells in lab could herald end of infertility
Devil's milk has proved to be an unlikely weapon in the increasingly desperate global fight against superbugs. Australian researchers have discovered that peptides contained in the milk of Tasmanian devils can kill some of the most deadly bacterial and fungal infections, including golden staph.
When the body’s internal sense of time doesn’t match up with outside cues, people can suffer, and not just from a lack of sleep.
Such ailments are similar in a way to motion sickness — the queasiness caused when body sensations of movement don’t match the external world.
For widemouthed, musical midshipman fish, melatonin is not a sleep hormone — it’s a serenade starter.
In breeding season, male plainfin midshipman fish (Porichthys notatus) spend their nights singing — if that’s the word for hours of sustained foghorn hums. Males dig trysting nests under rocks along much of North America’s Pacific coast, then await females drawn in by the crooning.
Remember dropping your milk teeth? After a lot of wiggling the tooth finally dropped out. But in your hand was only the enamel-covered crown: the entire root of the tooth had somehow disappeared. In a paper published in Nature, a team of researchers from Uppsala University and the ESRF in France apply synchrotron x-ray tomography to a tiny jawbone of a 424 million year old fossil fish in order to illuminate the origin of this strange system of tooth replacement.
Fossil hunters in the Michigan have unearthed the bones of a mastodon which they claim is the most complete skeleton recovered in the region since the 1940s.
The enormous Ice Age beast would have roamed the region almost 13,000 years ago, and may have been taken down by a group prehistoric human hunters, before laying undisturbed in the soil for millennia.
New research suggests that Western explorers reached China more than 1,500 years before Marco Polo’s historic trip to the East, making it the first documented contact between Western and Chinese civilizations ever recorded. Now experts believe ancient Greeks may have inspired and helped build China’s famous Terracotta Army.
To the untrained eye, this tiny piece of volcanic rock vaguely resembling a female figurine looks natural, but under the microscope, the grooves around the neck and on the sides show signs of deliberate modifications that closely resemble marks made in similar material by sharp-edged tools. The rock did naturally have a “human-like” shape, to begin with, that was accentuated by carving with a stone-wedge.
With recent studies proving that almost everyone has a little bit of Neanderthal DNA in them----up to 5 percent of the human genome--- it's become clear our ancestors not only had some serious hominid 'hanky panky' going on, but with it, a potential downside: the spread of sexually transmitted infections, or STIs.
Alt: Today’s genital warts came from trysts between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens
When thrown properly, boomerangs can be lethal weapons. In fact, cave paintings in Australia show that they've been used as such for thousands of years, during hunting and war.
Now, scientists think they might have the remains of a boomerang-attack victim, with the discovery of an 800-year-old skeleton that has a long gash in its skull.
The Vu?edol culture is a prehistoric Indo-European culture located in an area covering part of the Pannonian Plain stretching down south into several modern Western Balkans countries. The name of this culture is derived from a place called Vu?edol (meaning ‘Wolf’s Valley’), which is located on the western border of present day Croatia, close to its border with Serbia. This site has been identified by archaeologists as one of the major settlements of the Vu?edol culture.
The Azores archipelago is about 1,000 miles off the coast of Europe, about a third of the way to North America across the Atlantic. The islands belong to Portugal, and the official historical record has long held that they were uninhabited until Portuguese expeditions colonized them in the 15th century. But a controversial alternative theory is gaining ground.
The Great Pyramid at Giza, Egypt, has long been rumored to contain hidden passageways leading to secret chambers. Now a team of researchers has confirmed the 4,500-year-old pharaonic mausoleum contains two unknown cavities, possibly hiding a corridor-like structure and more mysterious features.
Fossils of ancient animals have fascinated humanity through most of our history, from sometimes being considered 'dragon bones' in ancient China, through to modern scientific analyses of them opening up new understanding of evolution and the ancient Earth.
Armenia is a country full of archeological surprises. It is a country where mysterious stories appear at every corner, and most of them still wait to be solved. However, one of the greatest stories of prehistoric Armenia relates to the Army Stones, a riddle hidden between a marvelous construction of megaliths.
Stonehenge gets all of the publicity and the seasonal festivals, but does it deserve its reputation as possibly the world’s oldest astronomical observatory? Australia’s indigenous people may disagree now that researchers have confirmed that a mysterious stone circle was used by ancient Australians for that purpose 7,000 years before Stonehenge.
The Filippeios Krini (Philip’s Fountain) is a 2,300-year-old fountain that was commissioned by King Philip II of Macedonia. It has miraculous survived in working order to the present day, making it the oldest still-in-use hydraulic work in the world.
Aficionados of cigars and rum are celebrating new U.S. rules that allow visitors to Cuba to carry home as much as these fine commodities as they can cram into their luggage. But the regulations, unveiled today and set to take effect on 17 October, are sure to please another constituency: researchers in biomedicine and public health.
Researchers have identified a key factor in the aging process they say could one day lead to longer lives.
In a new study on mice and roundworms, researchers found that adding a chemical known as coenzyme NAD+ postponed physical aging and extend the subjects’ lives.
In a new twist to waste-to-fuel technology, scientists at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory have developed an electrochemical process that uses tiny spikes of carbon and copper to turn carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, into ethanol. Their finding, which involves nanofabrication and catalysis science, was serendipitous.
Scientists have found a way to significantly improve computer performance. They propose the use of the so-called T-waves, or terahertz radiation as a means of resetting computer memory cells. This process is several thousand times faster than magnetic-field-induced switching.
Related: Diamonds aren't forever: Team create first quantum computer bridge
When we use our muscles, they produce heat as a byproduct. When we use them a lot, we need to actively cool them, which is why we sweat. By sweating, we pump water out of our bodies, and as that water evaporates, it cools us down. Robots, especially dynamic robots like humanoids that place near-constant high torque demands on their motors, generate enough heat that it regularly becomes a major constraint on their performance.
“Hyperelastic bones” don’t impart Stretch Armstrong abilities, but they could give surgeons a quick, inexpensive way to repair bone breaks.
Robert Langer’s trailblazing research in nanotechnology, which ranges from haircare to cancer treatments, has already improved the lives of at least 2 billion people
A device that was implanted in a man's brain has restored his feelings of touch, according to a new study. This is the first time such a device has been used to restore a sense of touch in a person with a spinal cord injury, the researchers said.
An experimental police surveillance program funded by Texas philanthropists John and Laura Arnold worries observers of private influence in the public sphere
Related: New York is adding facial recognition and license plate readers to its river crossings
Related: Yahoo may have let the government spy on emails. Now will we embrace encryption?
Relatively little attention was paid last year when President Obama called for creation of a database containing the DNA of a million volunteers as part of moves toward “precision medicine,” or tailoring healthcare to people’s individual needs.
Women's brains may change slightly every month, in sync with their menstrual cycles, a new study finds.
Women experience monthly hormone fluctuations that influence the switching that takes place between their infertile and fertile days
Wild chimpanzee mothers have been filmed teaching their children to use tools – toothbrush-style probes to fish for termites – for the first time.
Tool-use was once seen as a distinct feature of humans but it has since been discovered in a number of animals from great apes to birds.
Alt: Wild chimpanzee mothers teach young to use tools
For wild chimpanzees, social status is more than just a matter of pride. High-ranking chimpanzees of both sexes usually have better access to food and mates, boosting chances of survival for themselves and their offspring.
Suppose I take the candy from the cabinet where you left it and put it someplace else. Where will you look for it when you get home?
Children younger than 5 will rarely get this right. When questioned, they will say, mistakenly, that you will look for the candy at its new location.
Related: Curious orangutan attempts to copy magician's amazing card trick
Humans were long thought to have a monopoly on metacognition, which is the ability to contemplate one's own mental states. Captive apes have recently shown this skill by demonstrating that they are aware of the extent of their knowledge—they know when they are missing crucial information to solve puzzles or find food. Now a study in semiwild rhesus monkeys provides important evidence that metacognition is not the province of humans, apes or trained animals alone.
The first elephant sanctuary in Latin America has opened in Brazil to provide a home for an estimated 50 circus animals from across the region.
Guida and Maia, both over 40 years old, are the first residents.
Related: New report confirms grim outlook for elephants
A bottlenose dolphin has been pictured flipping a porpoise into the air in a deadly attack.
Dolphin attacks on porpoises accounted for about one death a year on average
Here’s a comforting thought. When you arrive home and open the front door or enter your bedroom, the spiders can hear you.
It has long been known that spiders can hear sounds via leg hairs that bend in response to vibrations arriving through the air or through solid objects such as floors or walls. But until now, we thought they could only hear airborne vibrations a few centimetres or “spider lengths” away at most.
When something frightens grazing deer, they all suddenly bound away together in an apparently organized fashion. How does a stressed-out, possibly panicked group of animals manage to coordinate such a getaway without crashing into one another?
A new species of plant has been discovered on the subtropical Japanese island of Kuroshima (located off the southern coast of Kyushu in Kagoshima prefecture) and named it Gastrodia kuroshimensis.
The world’s first farm to use seawater and sunlight to grow food in the middle of a desert just opened.
Using coconut husks, 23,000 mirrors to reflect solar power, and desalinated water, Sundrop Farms situated in Port Augusta – a desert area in Australian – works agricultural voodoo.
Last week, the Paris climate agreement cleared its final hurdle, when the European Union formally signed on. With the support of 73 nations accounting for 57 percent of global carbon emissions, the deal enters legal force on November 4th. So what does that mean, and how soon do we kick our addiction to fossil fuels?
At first glance there's nothing out of the ordinary about the regional airport in George, a town of just 150,000 residents on South Africa's south coast.
In fact though, the small site is Africa's first "green" airport to be powered by the sun.
A meteorite may have hit the surface of the Earth about 56 million years ago, raining debris for hundreds of miles across the Atlantic Ocean and what is now the East Coast of the U.S.
In the northern hemisphere of Mars, between the planet’s southern highlands and the northern lowlands, is a hilly region known as Colles Nilli. This boundary-marker is a very most prominent feature on Mars, as it is several kilometers in height and surrounded by the remains of ancient glaciers.
In August, we learned that the nearest star to our solar system is likely to have a rocky, Earth-sized planet orbiting it – and now the star, too, turns out to be more like the sun than we thought.
Related: Astronomers Find Evidence for 7-Year Stellar Cycle in Proxima Centauri
Colonel Charles Halt, one of the key US military witnesses during the perplexing incident, claims important details were missing when the MoD released formerly classified files on the case which dates back to 1980.
Related: Did Fidel Castro spot a UFO? Cuban rebel saw ‘round and enormous’ object among the stars
Related: Flying Dorito UFO Spotted Again, This Time With a Plane
Related: British UFO sighting? Retired policeman spots 'neon green UFO' in Yorkshire
It’s a bold claim. Two astronomers think they have spotted messages from not just one extraterrestrial civilisation, but 234 of them. The news has sparked a lively debate in the field as other astronomers think the claim is premature and are working fast to get to the bottom of the signals.
Uranus may have two small moons that no one has ever seen, orbiting closer to the planet than any of its other satellites and making wavy patterns in the planet’s rings.
The ice giant has 27 known moons, far fewer than the 67 and 62 of its neighbours Jupiter and Saturn, respectively. Uranus is a smaller planet, which may explain the difference.
There are a dizzying 2 trillion galaxies in the universe, up to 20 times more than previously thought, astronomers reported on Thursday. The surprising finding, based on 3D modeling of images collected over 20 years by the Hubble Space Telescope, was published in the Astronomical Journal.
Alt: Observable Universe contains ten times more galaxies than previously thought
Physicists have implemented the first experimental demonstration of everlasting quantum coherence—the phenomenon that occurs when a quantum system exists in a superposition of two or more states at once. Typically, quantum coherence lasts for only a fraction of a second before decoherence destroys the effect due to interactions between the quantum system and its surrounding environment.
We ain't afraid of no ghosts or zombies, according to a new national survey that suggests Americans are most fearful of government corruption.
More specifically, 60 percent of the public fears the corruption of government officials.
The government’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) has found that Cannabidiol (CBD) has a “restoring, correcting or modifying” effect on “physiological functions” when administered to humans, in a potential milestone in the campaign to legalise cannabis and bring about evidence-based laws regarding drugs.
Related: Police arrest more people for marijuana use than for all violent crimes combined
Related: How Marijuana's Medicinal Molecules Helped Me Cope with Serious Chronic Pain
Related: Early marijuana use associated with abnormal brain function, lower IQ
Related: Cannabis excess linked to bone disease and fractures, study finds
The Drug Enforcement Administration is withdrawing its plan to ban the opioid-like herbal drug kratom—at least for now—according to a preliminary withdrawal notice posted today.
Related: The DEA’s Decision to Keep Pot Restrictions Perpetuates Hypocrisy
The ketogenic diet is a particular nutritional regimen that mimics starvation by restricting carbohydrate intake. It was developed 95 years ago in order to treat drug-resistant epilepsy in children. Traditionally, the ketogenic diet is rich in fat and low in carbohydrates
Cooling chemicals that play a key role in refrigeration and air conditioning are likely to be rapidly phased out if delegates can reach agreement in Rwanda this week.
Alt: Nearly 200 nations agree binding deal to cut greenhouse gases
Many scientists have predicted that climate change could cause wildfires to increase in the future. And a new study, just out on Monday, demonstrates just how much it’s already been making them worse.
The pre-industrial atmosphere contained more particles, and so brighter clouds, than we previously thought. This is the latest finding of the CLOUD experiment, a collaboration between around 80 scientists at the CERN particle physics lab near Geneva. It changes our understanding of what was in the atmosphere before humans began adding pollution – and what it might be like again in the future.
New images of the Great Barrier Reef have revealed the extent of the damage climate change has caused to the coral.
The world’s largest reef system, which stretches for over 1,400 miles off the coast of Australia, has been severely affected by rising water temperatures.
Alt: Great Barrier Reef is 'almost dead', say scientists
When astronomers confirmed the discovery of an Earth-sized world orbiting Proxima Centauri just 4.25 light years away, hopes were ignited that there may be more planetary real estate in our cosmic neighborhood. To find out, a team of ex-NASA scientists is now seeking private funding to scour the Alpha Centauri system for habitable planets.
Do not be alarmed by this heavily armed, parasitic wasp that bears no close relationship to any other organism, and is such a badass that it apparently traded flying for leaping like a grasshopper. Mercifully, Aptenoperissus burmanicus went extinct a long time ago.
Related: Can Treating Nightmares Prevent Suicides?
The oldest evidence of a bird’s voice box has been found among the fossilised remains of a duck-like creature that lived more than 66 million years ago.
The discovery suggests that the animal was able to make a variety of sounds similar to those of current day ducks, including quacks.
An impression fossil with the surface of the skin of a dinosaur from the Late Cretaceous, a period right before their extinction, has been discovered in Barcelona, Spain. Its characteristics make it a unique discovery in Europe.
A comet strike may have triggered the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), a rapid warming of Earth caused by an accumulation of atmospheric carbon dioxide 56 million years ago, which offers analogs to global warming today.
Chinese scientists said yesterday that they have been examining three giant meteorites all from the same parent asteroid at the world’s longest known meteorite-strewn field is at Altay in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.
Archaeologists in Guatemala have unearthed two Maya tombs that “miraculously escaped” looters’ tunnels underneath two Maya pyramids, where researchers hope that jade-inlaid teeth, an inscribed human tibia and a puzzling sun-god pendant could give insight into the rule of ancient “snake kings”.
One of the most fascinating pirate stories is the legend of Samuel Bellamy and his ship the ‘Whydah’. While the wreck of this legendary galley was discovered in 1984, much of its treasure has remained missing.
Cave art as much as 14,500 years old has been pronounced "the most spectacular and impressive" ever discovered on the Iberian peninsula.
About 50 etchings were found in the Basque town of Lekeitio.
Was there once a Universal World Culture? A researcher in Hawaii, Dr. Vomos-Toth Bator argued there was such a culture, and he presented over 1,000,000 place names from around the world to prove his point.
Scientists studying ancient stone arrangement alongside Aboriginal traditional owners in Australia’s Victorian bush say the site could pre-date Stonehenge and even Egypt's Great Pyramids.
But Wurdi Youang, as it's known by the people of the Wada Warrung nation, is apparently not the only mysterious stone circle in Australia — just the most intact.
Humans accumulate knowledge over generations, building vast bodies of expertise—a quality that scientists have long suggested helps make humanity unique. In order to explore how such “cumulative culture” arose, anthropologists examined the way in which hunter-gatherers known as the BaYaka Pygmies, living in the Republic of Congo, exchange information among large pools of people.
We rarely pay attention to the business of swallowing, but it may play a subtle role in controlling our fluid intake, on top of our conscious feelings of thirst. If we are dehydrated, swallowing is effortless; if we are overhydrated, swallowing feels more difficult, putting us off drinking
Related: Why We Get Thirsty at Bedtime
True neuroprosthetic limbs—artificial limbs that feel and behave like the real thing—may be in the distant future. But the results of a new study have brought the technology one step closer to reality.
An augmented-reality helmet that gives cyclists a 360-degree view of the road could help prevent accidents, according to the device's designers.
Unlike cars, bicycles don’t come with rearview mirrors, which is why British product design firm DCA created the Optic helmet.
The United States' largest meat processor is investing money in a company that makes artificial meat products from vegetables. Tyson Foods has announced that it is spending an undisclosed amount to acquire a 5 percent stake in Beyond Meat, the company behind the Beyond Burger — a fully vegan product that supposedly "bleeds" like a real beef burger.
Many say dementia is a scarier prospect than cancer. But there may be new ways to reduce the risk of dementia, hints the first comprehensive review of the influence of environment on its incidence.
Related: Feeling dizzy when standing up linked to increased risk of dementia
A new study has unveiled why a field with a variety of plants seems to attract fewer plant-eating insects than farm land with just one type of crop.
Scientists and farmers have puzzled over this pattern that makes protecting crops from pests a challenge.
Researchers from Princeton University have recently completed analyzing Pleistocene Epoch ice cores from Antarctica and Greenland. From thirty years of data, they have created a record of atmospheric oxygen levels spanning the last 800,000 years.
About 400 light years from our solar system, there is a celestial body that looks like Saturn on steroids.
Its rings are about 200 times larger than its counterpart here, measuring about 75 million miles in diameter. The ring system is so large, in fact, that scientists aren’t sure why it doesn’t get ripped apart by the gravity of the star it orbits.
At first glance, the moon’s mottled face appears vast and permanent – many of its craters have existed for billions of years. But new research suggests that the lunar landscape might be a far more dynamic place.
The moon is bombarded by so much space rock that its surface gets a complete facelift every 81,000 years, according to a study of Nasa data.