Newsdesk Archive
Hundreds of black holes could be lurking inside a cluster of stars that orbits the Milky Way galaxy, a new study shows.
NGC 6101 is a globular cluster (a dense, spherical collection of ancient stars) orbiting the center of the Milky Way.
A black hole destroying a star, an event astronomers call 'stellar tidal disruption,' releases an enormous amount of energy, brightening the surroundings in an event called a flare.
Crave chicken soup when you have a cold? There may be a good reason for that. Research in mice has found that changing eating habits could be crucial for surviving the body’s own immune responses to different types of infection.
Related: Eating your greens could enhance sport performance
As nutrition debates raged in the 1960s, prominent Harvard nutritionists published two reviews in a top medical journal downplaying the role of sugar in coronary heart disease.
This week was a revolutionary week in the sciences - not because we discovered a new fundamental particle or had a new breakthrough in quantum computing - but because some of the most prominent world leaders announced an initiative which asserts that European scientific papers should be made freely available to all by 2020.
More than one-third of the spontaneous mutations linked to autism crop up in genomic segments that do not code for genes. That’s the upshot from the largest study to date of genomes from children with autism.
By coating tiny gel beads with lung-derived stem cells and then allowing them to self-assemble into the shapes of the air sacs found in human lungs, researchers have succeeded in creating three-dimensional lung "organoids." The laboratory-grown lung-like tissue can be used to study diseases including idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, which has traditionally been difficult to study using conventional methods.
Researchers with the Harold C. Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center successfully developed a synthetic polymer that can transport a drug into lung cancer cells without going inside of normal lung cells. Since conventional chemo drugs indiscriminately kill all rapidly dividing cells to halt the growth of cancer, these selective nanoparticles could decrease side effects by reducing drug accumulation in normal cells.
Related: Ginger and chili peppers could work together to lower cancer risk
Related: Study shows how Chinese medicine kills cancer cells
Cancer is often viewed as a fundamentally modern and monolithic disease. Many people think its rise and spread has been driven almost exclusively by the developed world’s toxins and poisons; by our bad eating habits, lifestyles, and the very air we breathe.
Using ancient protein and DNA analysis to uncover a watershed moment in the origin of modern humans, a study* finds support for a Neanderthal provenance of Châtelperronian stone tools and bone artifacts at the Grotte du Renne archeological site in north-central France.
Tunisian and British researchers have unearthed Stone Age tools showing humans lived in southern Tunisia nearly 100,000 years ago, they said Thursday.
The discovery could help explain the spread of Homo sapiens who appeared in eastern Africa 100,000 years earlier and emerged out of the continent around 65,000 years ago.
The British Museum in London is rewriting history to appear in a better light and defend itself against demands to return objects to their countries of origin. This is the conclusion of a new PhD thesis in archaeology from the University of Gothenburg
The Indus civilisation seems to have flourished for 700 years without armour, weapons, inequality or royalty. Here’s how to build a paradise on Earth
Alt: The forgotten utopia: The Indus people may have lived for 700 years without war, weapons or inequality
Related: Utopia is unobtainable, but worth pursuing for all our sakes
Research has shown city dwellers are more likely to suffer from anxiety and depression – but could individual buildings have a negative impact on wellbeing?
It acts on opioid receptors, hence the panic. But since some heroin users take it to ease withdrawal, its prohibition could have some very harmful effects indeed
Related: All-party group calls for legalisation of cannabis for medicinal uses
Related: Daily Marijuana Use Linked to Lower BMI
New research published in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology shows LSD alters the processing of emotional facial information while increasing prosocial behavior.
Training the brain to treat itself is a promising therapy for traumatic stress. The training uses an auditory or visual signal that corresponds to the activity of a particular brain region, called neurofeedback, which can guide people to regulate their own brain activity, say scientists.
People who can "see" their brain activity can change it, after just one or two neurofeedback sessions, new research shows.
People in the study were able to quiet activity in the amygdala — an almond-shaped brain region that processes emotions such as fear — after seeing simple visual or auditory cues that corresponded to the activity level there
At last, we’ve seen what might be the primary building blocks of memories lighting up in the brains of mice.
We have cells in our brains – and so do rodents – that keep track of our location and the distances we’ve travelled.
Our online worlds are full of colors, words and sounds but lack something major – scents. Could that ever change?
Compared to our real world interactions, our online lives are devoid of scent – an underrated but powerful part of our sensual world.
Bats are adapting to human noise by changing their hunting strategies, according to a new study. That’s good news for bats, since the number of city-dwellers in the world is expected to increase to 6.5 billion in 2050, from nearly 4 billion today.
Related: LED-lighting influences the activity of bats
Ground squirrels use information on the position of the sun when hiding their food and reuse this information to find their food stash again. The position of the sun serves as a reference point for the animals, which live in southern Africa, to orient themselves and adjust the direction they are traveling in.
Move over New Caledonian crows, there's a new master tool-user in the corvid family.
When Hawaiian crows are feeling a bit peckish, they too use sticks and other plant matter to retrieve an out-of-reach snack, according to research published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
Pterosaurs didn’t have to be gargantuan to survive in the Late Cretaceous.
Fragmentary fossils of a roughly 77-million-year-old pterosaur found in British Columbia suggest it had a wingspan of just 1.5 meters, close to that of a bald eagle.
Researchers have shown that fossils of the 360 million-year-old tetrapod Acanthostega, one of the iconic transitional forms between fishes and land animals, are not adults but all juveniles.
A beautifully colored dinosaur fossil is the first to show evidence of countershading, a type of camouflage
Surrounded by hungry predators, a little plant-eating dinosaur from the early Cretaceous did the only sensible thing. It donned camouflage.
When a six mile-wide asteroid struck the Earth 66 million years ago, it was one of the worst days in the history of the planet. About 75 percent of the known species were rapidly driven to extinction, including the non-avian dinosaurs like Tyrannosaurus, the flying pterosaurs, the coil-shelled squid cousins called ammonites, and many more.
The town of Lairg looks like a peaceful village on the southern shores of Loch Shin in Scotland, but this area was once the site of an 'apocalyptic' asteroid impact.
Researchers believe this is the location where a 3km wide meteorite struck 8km into the Earth's crust 1.2 billion years ago.
The world is still vulnerable to a potentially catastrophic asteroid strike, according to President Barack Obama's chief science adviser.
NASA has made substantial progress in finding the asteroids that pose the biggest threat to Earth, but there's still a lot of work to do, said John Holdren, director of the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy.
A 30,800-kilogram meteorite has been unearthed in Argentina over the weekend, and experts have declared it to be one of the largest meteorites ever found on Earth.
Sorry, Einstein: It looks like the world is spooky — even when your most famous theory is tossed out.
This finding comes from a close look at quantum entanglement, in which two particles that are "entangled" affect each other even when separated by a large distance.
Scientists can explain why the universe has enough energy to become transparent. The study marks the first quantitative study of how the gas content within galaxies scales with the amount of interstellar dust.
Comma.ai, the self-driving car startup helmed by iPhone hacker George Hotz, has unveiled new details about its first commercial product, the newly named Comma One.
Related: Pittsburgh residents get ready for driverless Uber cars
This year we saw a solar-powered plane circumnavigate the globe and a solar-powered boat gear up to do the same. As of last week, we can add to that list of clean energy marvels the first ever piloted flight of a solar-powered helicopter.
American movie star Leonardo DiCaprio unveiled Thursday a free technology that allows users to spy on global fishing practices, in a bid to curb illegal activity in the oceans and rebuild imperiled fish stocks.
The technology, known as Global Fishing Watch, was officially released to the public during the Our Oceans Conference hosted by US Secretary of State John Kerry in Washington on Thursday and Friday.
The world's population is expected to soar by 2.5 billion people by 2050, bringing a host of global challenges – including how to feed so many hungry mouths.
If projections hold, the global demand for animal protein will double over the next four decades, rising along with pressure to find ecologically sustainable food production practices.
Despite individual animals having their own personality, this gets suppressed when they make decisions together in a group, new research has found.
Related: Pigeon flock members can 'overrule' incompetent leaders, research shows
A new University of Toronto study has found that some freshwater stingrays from the Amazon chew their food in a similar fashion as mammals.
A giant tortoise on the Galapagos Islands who is more than 100 years old has been credited with saving his species from extinction.
Diego, a one-time resident of San Diego Zoo, has fathered an estimated 800 offspring on the Galapagos island of Espanola
Hundreds of horseshoe crabs—known as "living fossils" as they are among the earth's oldest creatures—have washed ashore dead in southern Japan, confounding experts who study the alien-like sidewalkers.
Horseshoe crabs, known for their blue blood, are a regular summer visitor to tidal flats in south and western Japan including one near Kitakyushu city where they lay their eggs.
The “present is the key to the past” is our mantra for all sorts of geological interpretation. We start to understand how the world worked in the past by observing the natural processes happening outside our window.
Evoking visions of mad scientists, French researchers are set to revive a mega-virus dormant for 30,000 years that they discovered in the permafrost of the Russian Arctic.
The researchers, from the French National Center for Scientific Research, say they will take precautions to revive the specimen under safe laboratory conditions.
Archaeologists are set to undertake an investigation of a hidden fourth circle identified by geophysics at an ancient megalithic site in Cornwall known as ‘The Hurlers’.
The Plymouth Herald reports that the mystery circle was first identified in the early 1990s but only recently has funding been acquired to undertake an investigation in a project known as ‘Reading the Hurlers’.
Take a good look at the piece of cloth pictured at the top of this story. That was made 6,000 years ago by people living on the coast of Peru.
Now check out those faint blue lines running through it. Yes, they’re washed out, but you can still see them.
A team of North Carolina-based researchers helped unearth more clues this summer about the ancient Nabatean city of Petra in Jordan.
Alt: Archaeologists Unearth Two Marble Statues of Aphrodite in Petra
Archaeologists at Turkey's neolithic site of Çatalhöyük in central Anatolia have unearthed a "unique" complete female figurine, The Ministry of Culture and Tourism said on Tuesday.
The “most important Neolithic cup and ring marked rock art panel in Europe” is being unearthed for the first time in 50 years on the edge of a housing estate in Clydebank near Glasgow.??
With dozens of grooved spirals, carved indentations, geometric shapes, and mysterious patterns of many kinds, the Cochno Stone, located in West Dunbartonshire, Scotland, is considered to have the finest example of Bronze Age cup and ring carvings in the whole of Europe.
A team of archaeologists is about to resume work at the Bronze Age stone circles known as The Hurlers on Bodmin Moor. The excavation, part of the Heritage Lottery Fund-supported Reading the Hurlers project, aims to learn more about a site that was identified by geo-physics in the early 1990s.
Between 43 and 410 AD, the Roman army created 2,000 miles (3,200km) of surfaced roads across the UK.
Now a snapshot of this part of history has been discovered, in the form of a pristine section of Roman road dating back almost 2,000 years.
In a rare reversal, archaeologists have determined that a Maya book written almost 900 years ago is genuine—after decades of believing it was fake. The Grolier Codex was so named because it was first displayed in 1971 at the book lovers' Grolier Club in New York City. Archaeologist Michael Coe, who arranged the 1971 showing, later described its rather questionable history in a book.
Archaeologists have discovered a 5-000-year-old seal that seems to indicate marks of a common sign language used to communicate in ancient times as excavations near Burdur's Hac?lar village continue.
As is required of all women in their 30s, I am in a book club. At the first meeting of this group, one poor unsuspecting woman mentioned that she had listened to that month’s selection instead of reading it.
Sifting through two-thirds of the world’s languages, scientists have discovered a strange pattern: Words with the same meanings in different languages often seem to share the same sounds — even when those two languages are completely unrelated.
Alt: Humans may speak a universal language, say scientists
In spring, the young, delicate shoots in the forest light up, bright and May green. The buds and shoots are the future of the forests as they allow young trees to grow. The problem for the trees is: Roe deer like to eat them, and especially their buds.
Related: How trees use the Wood Wide Web
Scientists have developed the first complete and compact design for an artificial photosynthesis facility. This is a decisive step towards applying the technology. The concept is flexible both with respect to the materials used and also the size of the system.
Researchers have developed a new design for harvesting body heat and converting it into electricity for use in wearable electronics. The experimental prototypes are lightweight, conform to the shape of the body, and can generate far more electricity than previous lightweight heat harvesting technologies.
Fabrics that can generate electricity from physical movement have been in the works for a few years. Now researchers have taken the next step, developing a fabric that can simultaneously harvest energy from both sunshine and motion.
About 90 percent of the world's goods are carried by sea, with more than 70 percent in shipping containers carrying everything from TVs to sportswear from Asia to the rest of the world. But the global imbalance in trade means most of these containers are empty on the return journey.
Robots are poised to replace interns as the unrewarded and unpaid worker ants of industry. A study by Forrester Research has projected that by 2021, artificial intelligence will be sophisticated enough to push many out of the job market as we know it.
Monkeys can now type at a rate of 12 words per minute on a computer using only their minds, according to new research from Stanford University. The scientists hope that this technology might one day help severely paralyzed patients communicate — and they’re currently recruiting patients for a clinical trial to test it out.
Alt: Brain-sensing technology allows typing at 12 words per minute
If you've ever wanted to watch a superbug evolve before your very eyes, you're in luck. Researchers filmed an experiment that created bacteria a thousand times more drug-resistant than their ancestors. In the time-lapse video, a white bacterial colony creeps across an enormous black petri dish plated with vertical bands of successively higher doses of antibiotic.
Related: Could Ancient Remedies Hold the Answer to the Looming Antibiotics Crisis?
Related: In First, UN Will Consider Antibiotic Resistance
Tiny, star-shaped molecules are effective at killing bacteria that can no longer be killed by current antibiotics, new research shows.
The study, published today in Nature Microbiology, holds promise for a new treatment method against antibiotic-resistant bacteria (commonly known as superbugs).
Using high-tech human heart models and mouse experiments, scientists have shown that beams of light could replace electric shocks in patients reeling from a deadly heart rhythm disorder.
After lab-grown meat, get ready for animal-free cow’s milk. A San-Francisco startup believes it has found a solution for the guilty conscience of consumers who love eating dairy ice-cream, cheese and yoghurt, but oppose factory-style farming and its environmental footprint.
Related: Cooked Medium Rare? This 'Bloody' Burger Is Actually Vegan
Related: Serotonin seems to drive hungry flies toward protein
Researchers from the UK and Spain have shown that spiders are capable of tuning their webs, allowing these eight-legged critters to receive specific information about their environment, including the presence of prey, potential mates, and the structural condition of the web.
Related: This fish has a love song and it sounds like a windshield wiper
After a long struggle, Sri Lanka, the large island nation southeast of India, was declared free of malaria last week by the World Health Organization. It has been more than three years since the last case.
Related: Government suggests euthanizing 45,000 wild horses - The horses were taken from their habitat to make room for cattle
Entire flocks of dead birds falling from the sky is a somewhat regularly occurring, yet still mysterious phenomenon. In 2015, a flock of 2000 dead birds was found on an Idaho highway, and in 2011 a large portion of the town of Beebe, Arkansas was littered with thousands of fallen bird corpses. The phenomenon is so widespread that entire conspiracy theories and fields of semi-scientific research have sprung up around it.
A team of scientists has discovered an unexpected disruption in one of the most repeatable atmospheric patterns.
The normal flow of air high up in the atmosphere over the equator, known as the quasi-biennial oscillation, was seen to break down earlier this year.
One of Japan's most active volcanoes is due for a major eruption within the next 30 years, say scientists who have studied a build-up of magma there.
The Sakurajima volcano on Japan's Kyushu island poses a "growing threat", researchers at the University of Bristol say.
The costs of tackling climate change can be slashed if a network of pipes is built to store waste carbon dioxide under the North Sea, a report says.
The technology - carbon capture and storage (CCS) – involves pumping CO2 emissions from power stations into rock formations.
There is no easy explanation for why some people commit crimes and others don't.
But at the same time, the population of people who end up in prison do share some traits. And scientists have now traced one common criminal trait to specific genes.
Intelligence -- and not just relentless practice -- plays a significant role in determining chess skill, indicates a comprehensive new study. The research provides some of the most conclusive evidence to date that cognitive ability is linked to skilled performance -- a hotly debated issue in psychology for decades -- and refutes theories that expertise is based solely on intensive training.
The way people walk can give clues to how aggressive they are, a new exploratory study has found. The work found that the exaggerated movement of both the upper and lower body indicated aggression.
Household dust harbours a cocktail of toxic chemicals that have been linked to an increased risk of a range of health hazards, from cancer to problems with fertility, researchers in the US have found.
Scientists have shown for the first time that embryos can be made from non-egg cells, a discovery that challenges two centuries of received wisdom.
Is this the first lab-grown human sperm? A French team claiming the achievement has moved a stage closer to convincing sceptics by having the work published in a peer-reviewed journal. But some researchers say the evidence offered still falls short of what’s required to make such a large and historic claim.
In 2014, the incorporation of two artificial letters of genetic code into the DNA of Escherichia coli gave the bacteria the distinction of becoming the world's first stable semisynthetic organism.
Making a splash? Engineers have created metallic nanofish that are inspired by the swimming style of real fish, and could be used to carry drugs to specific sites of the body.
High-resolution aerial Photographs provides information that is both up-to-date and tailored for the task at hand--information that could previously only be obtained by observations in the field and only for a limited spatial area.
Related: Drones get first anti-laser lasers to stop being shot down
RoboCop, Chappie, the Terminator movies and i,Robot - there have been many films where we have been encouraged to respect, love but also fear robots – and I for one can say I will never be trusting them!
Machines that can use facts to present a convincing case could transform the way we make decisions – and help us understand our own rhetoric
IN DOUGLAS ADAMS’S novel Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, a computer program called Reason can retroactively justify any decision, providing an incontrovertible argument that whatever was decided was the right thing to do.
Ever peer into the night sky and wonder whether space is really the same in all directions or whether the cosmos might be whirling about like a vast top? Now, one team of cosmologists has used the oldest radiation there is, the afterglow of the big bang, or the cosmic microwave background (CMB), to show that the universe is “isotropic,” or the same no matter which way you look: There is no spin axis or any other special direction in space.
Is there a better way to get to space? Current traditional methods using expendable rockets launching from the surface of the Earth are terribly inefficient. About 90% of the bulk and mass of what you see on the launch pad is expended in the first few minutes of the mission, just getting the tiny payload above the murk of Earth’s atmosphere and out of the planet’s gravity well.
Quasars are supermassive black holes that sit at the center of enormous galaxies, accreting matter. They shine so brightly that they are often referred to as beacons and are among the most-distant objects in the universe that we can currently study. New work from a team led by Carnegie's Eduardo Bañados has discovered 63 new quasars from when the universe was only a billion years old. (It's about 14 billion years old today.)
New close-up photos of Titan, Saturn's biggest moon, show its mysterious and massive dunes in more detail than ever before.
NASA's Cassini orbiter obtained these images when it flew by Titan for the 122nd time on July 25, 2016. The spacecraft was just 607 miles (976 kilometers) above the alien moon's southern hemisphere, according to NASA officials.
Measurements of an element in Earth and Moon rocks have just disproved the leading hypotheses for the origin of the Moon.
Tiny differences in the segregation of the isotopes of potassium between the Moon and Earth were hidden below the detection limits of analytical techniques until recently.
Chalk another one up for the weird effects of the moon. Full and new moons seem to make earthquakes more likely – at least the largest, most devastating quakes.
Although the effect is too small to make much difference in preparing for earthquakes in the short term, the discovery could some day provide key insights into the ways that they develop and grow.
The moon has long intrigued humanity. Cultures throughout the world have myths and beliefs concerning the moon, many of which ascribe mystical significance to Earth’s natural satellite.
Thousands of Spaniards took to the streets of Madrid on Saturday to demand an end to the centuries-old but controversial tradition of bullfighting.
The protest came after the anti-bullfighting lobby successfully managed to obtain a ban on a famous festival which ended with a bull being speared to death.
Project Chimps sanctuary in Georgia will house 200-plus chimpanzees after they were declared endangered, effectively ending experimentation on the animals
Alt: Hundreds of chimps head from research labs to sanctuaries
The female bonobo apes of the Wamba forest in the Democratic Republic of Congo had just finished breakfast and were preparing for a brief nap in the treetops, bending and crisscrossing leafy branches into comfortable day beds.
Two dolphins have been recorded having a conversation for the first time after scientists developed an underwater microphone which could distinguish the animals' different "voices".
Alt: Dolphins may speak in words and sentences, say researchers
Related: Dolphin language, Two dolphins communicate with each other [YouTube | 01:59]
Related: First dolphins killed in Japan's annual Taiji hunt
Four decades ago, scientists noticed something on the African savannah. Giraffes there were feeding on umbrella thorn acacias, and the trees didn’t like this. It took the acacias mere minutes to start pumping toxic substances into their leaves. The giraffes got the message and moved on to other trees – but they didn’t start nibbling until they were about 100 yards away. The reason for this behaviour is astonishing.
Ash trees—strong, elastic, versatile—have been used to make everything from handles for Neolithic tools to the rim of a wheel found in King Tutankhamun's tomb to modern baseball bats. But now an invasive beetle called the emerald ash borer threatens the existence of the trees that people have been depending upon for thousands of years.
In a bid to stop the killing of elephants for their tusks, world governments voted at a major conservation conference to urge the closure of all domestic ivory markets.
After fierce debate -- including opposition from governments like Namibia and Japan -- the motion was adopted
Construction workers have found 22 small gold plates estimated to date back to the eighth century, in Ringilarik village, Musuk district, Boyolali in Central Java.
The workers were digging as part of activities of a water aquifer project when they hit a box made of stone. The stone box was found among rocks piled up after digging.
A 2,100-year-old marble mother goddess sculpture of Kybele has been unearthed during excavations in the Black Sea province of Ordu’s Kurul Castle, one of the first archaeological digs in the region.
After several years of digging and study, archaeologists are revealing an extraordinary—and enigmatic—mosaic discovered among the ruins of a Roman-era synagogue at a site in Israel known as Huqoq. Nothing like it has come to light in any other building yet known from the ancient world, experts say.
There’s a 42-by-26-foot stone in Scotland that is covered with enough Neolithic circle and cup drawings to make it look like the inspiration for most of the crop circles ever created.