Newsdesk Archive
Archeologists with the University of Western Australia have discovered a mysterious set of stone structures not far from the Dampier Archipelago in northwestern Australia. If current theories about the structures are confirmed, they could potentially rewrite much of Western Australia’s early history, not to mention human history.
Archaeologists in Peru have found more than a dozen tombs suggesting human sacrifice at sprawling ruins on the northern coast, a seat of power for three ancient cultures and the possible center of a pre-Inca legend.
Archaeologists believe they have found the location of the battle between David and Goliath, narrated in the Book of Samuel, in a mysterious two-gated city from the early 10th century.
A Catholic organisation tainted by a child abuse scandal owns a site now found to be Mary Magdalene’s home town. It has become the latest stop for Christian pilgrimage
Related: Searching for Truth in Bones: The Mysterious Relics of Mary Magdalene
On the surface, Oppenheim looks like your typical German town resting along the banks of the Rhine River. But there's more to Oppenheim than beer halls and a Gothic-style cathedral from the Middle Ages. Beneath its narrow cobblestone streets lies something deeper—an entire labyrinth of tunnels and cellars.
Turkish authorities have shut down a major dig early due to international tensions
As easy as it can be to imagine that archaeological discoveries are above the political fray, in reality that is often far from the case.
Clusters of hunter-gatherers spent much of the late Stone Age working out the basics of farming on the fertile lands of what is now Turkey before taking this knowledge to Europe.
Domestic dogs and cats were introduced to Tasmania two centuries ago, but bandicoots still fail to recognize these introduced predators as threats, according a study published September 7, 2016 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Anke Frank from University of Tasmania, Australia, and colleagues.
In the striped and hairy history of the Tasmanian tiger, those who believe the extinct animal has quietly survived have offered up all kinds of evidence.Related: Is this a LIVE Tasmanian tiger? Man claims to have captured thylacine extinct since 1936 on camera in his South Australian backyard
Related: A company that searches for Bigfoot is trying to raise $15 million
Related: What Was The Mysterious, Massive Bird Seen Over Southern Alaska?
Related: Is this the mysterious Beast of Ossett? Dad films jet black 'big cat' skulking through field outside his hotel room in Yorkshire
The skin’s placement could be a hoax—or evidence of “Wessie,” a supposedly massive snake that recently has grown into a local legend.
Related: Is this proof that Nessie's found herself a friend? Council officer snaps photo of TWO 30-foot monsters swimming across Loch Ness together
Related: Stay Out of the Water: Does a Prehistoric Shark Still Live in the Ocean?
The discovery of fairy circles in Australia earlier this year has hardly put to rest the controversy over how these mysterious structures form.
"Fairy circles" are regular, repeating patches of dirt in remote grasslands that, when viewed from above, look like whimsical rings that were scattered across a landscape.
A pair of researchers with Ulm University has found that a type of African desert ant has two navigational systems for helping it find its way back to the nest. In their paper published in the journal Science, Sarah Pfeffer and Matthias Wittlinger describe experiments they conducted with the ants and what they learned in doing so.
The world's best-selling insecticide may impair the ability of a queen honey bee and her subjects to maintain a healthy colony, says new research led by a University of Nebraska-Lincoln entomologist.
Species may have evolved their wide array of sounds to fill unused parts of the frequency spectrum. This could also reveal the degree of biodiversity in an ecosystem
One of the most iconic animals in Africa has a secret. A genetic analysis suggests that the giraffe is not one species, but 4 separate ones — a finding that could alter how conservationists protect these animals.
If you’ve watched enough reruns of shows like CSI, Bones, and Law and Order, you probably know by now that when forensic specialists find DNA evidence, the suspect is often identified within the next couple of minutes—as soon as the team sticks the results of DNA analysis into a computer program.
Volunteers who started an experiment feeling neutral about certain faces ended up unknowingly adopting the feelings that scientists induced via an MRI feedback technique, say researchers.
Our brains have a detailed picture of our hands and fingers, and that persists even decades after an amputation, Oxford University researchers have found. The finding could have implications for the control of next generation prosthetics.
Related: Air pollution a risk factor for diabetes, say researchers
Could learning to write with both hands make your brain sharper and more speedy? Could training schoolchildren to use their non-dominant hands improve their exam results? Such claims have been popular for more than a century.
In a case which threatens to cause turmoil for thousands if not millions of websites, the Court of Justice of the European Union decided today that a website that merely links to material that infringes copyright, can itself be found guilty of copyright infringement, provided only that the operator knew or could reasonably have known that the material was infringing. Worse, they will be presumed to know of this if the links are provided for "the pursuit of financial gain".
Text-to-speech programs are increasingly important for computing, as people begin to rely on bots and AI personal assistants like Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, Amazon’s Alexa, and the Google Assistant. If you ask Siri or Cortana a question, though, they’ll reply with actual recordings of a human voice, rearranged and combined in small pieces.
The mysterious origin of an ‘impossibly bright,’ blinking celestial object has long baffled astrophysicists.
While it’s been thought that Ultra Luminous X-ray sources are powered by black holes, this explanation does not account for the pulsed emissions observed in an entity named M82 X-2.
They say that love makes the world go around and that may well be true. But when you look at things on a much larger scale — say the size of galaxies — love just isn't enough. And, for that matter, neither are the stars of the galaxies themselves.
Although the Large Hadron Collider's enormous 13 TeV energy is more than sufficient to detect many particles that theorists have predicted to exist, no new particles have been discovered since the Higgs boson in 2012. While the absence of new particles is informative in itself, many physicists are still yearning for some hint of "new physics," or physics beyond the standard model.
Are time crystals just a mathematical curiosity, or could they actually physically exist? Physicists have been debating this question since 2012, when Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek first proposed the idea of time crystals.
Mini-lightning may flash in the coldest craters on the moon, melting and vapourising soil. All that sparking could have altered the surface as much as impacts from incoming rocks and dust.
When we travel to Earth-like worlds, contamination may be inevitable
Mars has been withstanding human invasion for decades. So far, we've successfully sent six spacecraft to land and take data from the surface and four rovers to drive around, with another orbiter and lander en route.
The funny thing about the discovery of Proxima b - the closest planet to our Solar System, which is also rocky, Earth-sized, and potentially habitable - is that nobody has actually seen it.
A one-two punch of dark matter may have knocked holes in a stream of stars out past the edge of the Milky Way. If confirmed, these would be the smallest clumps of dark matter we have ever detected.
“Potentially, this stream could allow us to probe for the first time how dark matter behaves on a small scale,” says Sergey Koposov at the University of Cambridge.
It is nearly impossible to get every last drop of liquid foods out of their containers. Ketchup and syrup are among the worst offenders. In fact, up to 15% of liquid foods can be wasted due to such inefficient packaging.
Related: American Heart Association: Children Should Consume Less Than 25 Grams of Added Sugars Daily
Related: New material to revolutionize water proofing
A 22-year-old British student has invented a mobile fridge that could save millions of lives across the world.
Will Broadway's "Isobar" has been designed to keep vaccines at the ideal temperature while in transit in developing countries.
Physicists in India have created a battery-free generator out of fish scales. The clear, flexible generator can harvest the energy from small movements such as body motions, sound vibrations and wind flow, then convert it into electrical power.
Studies suggest that regenerating soil by turning our backs on industrial farming holds the key to tackling climate change
The US government has stepped into a dispute over an oil pipeline in North Dakota, blocking its construction on federal tribal lands.
It also asked the company behind it to "pause" action on a wider stretch held sacred by a Native American tribe.
Ecuador began pumping oil Wednesday from a massive field located partly on a protected nature reserve in the Amazon rainforest, drawing criticism from environmentalists and indigenous-rights groups.
Meeting in the Galápagos, the presidents of Ecuador, Costa Rica, and Colombia announce historic protections to safeguard sea turtles, sharks, and a variety of other creatures off their coasts.
New research found that China's reforestation program, the world's largest, overwhelmingly leads to the planting of monoculture forests that fall short of restoring the biodiversity of native forests -- and can even harm existing wildlife. The researchers found, however, that multi-species forests could be planted without detracting from the economic benefits China's poor and rural citizens receive for replanting forests.
Scientists who mapped where land and water have shifted were surprised to find that Earth has gained more land than it has lost since 1985
With sea level rising and ice caps melting, it’s easy to believe that more of Earth’s land is covered by water every year. While this is certainly true in some places, a new study found that there is actually slightly more land surface exposed than there was 30 years ago.
The asteroid-sample-return mission that launched into space yesterday (Sept. 8) may help protect Earth from future life-threatening impacts by rogue space rocks.
NASA sent a robotic spacecraft from Florida out to an asteroid Thursday, but that's not the only asteroid mission the space agency has in the works.
Officials also want to study a different asteroid with the help of astronauts. And it looks like the next president, plus Congress, will have to decide whether this human mission to a flying rock should ever get off the ground.
A NASA spacecraft is about to launch toward an asteroid whose cousins may have sparked the rise of life on Earth long ago.
The OSIRIS-REx probe is scheduled to lift off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station here at 7:05 p.m. EDT (2305 GMT) Thursday (Sept. 8), kicking off a two-year journey to a 1,640-foot-wide (500 meters) asteroid named Bennu.
Astronomers have discovered a new asteroid—just in time to catch it as it hurtled past us at less than a tenth of the distance between us and the moon. It’s the second time that’s happened in two weeks. What have we done to anger you, space gods?
Cypriot officials are baffled by reports that a meteor streaking across the nighttime sky may have exploded overhead with a thunderous bang that some said made the ground shake.
Advanced civilizations (such as our own) will develop faster and faster computers, capable of producing better and better simulations. You know, how the Sims 2 was a little better than the Sims 1? The Sims 3 was sort of crappy and really felt like a money grab, but the Sims 4 was a huge improvement. Well… imagine the Sims, version 20, or 400, or 4 million.
UK researchers have launched a new effort to source photos of threatened or destroyed cultural landmarks and compile them into 3D reconstructions.
Their aim is to create an interactive resource that places the sites onto a navigable, online map.
James Watson at the University of Queensland, Australia, and his colleagues recently assessed the state of global wildernesses using a “human footprint index” that incorporated measures such as road, building, farm and population density. The team found that the world’s wilderness has shrunk from 33 to 23 per cent of land since the early 1990s.
Researchers analyzing the genomes of microorganisms living in shale oil and gas wells have found evidence of sustainable ecosystems taking hold there—populated in part by a never-before-seen genus of bacteria they have dubbed "Frackibacter."
Each year, around 6,000 birds are incinerated after chasing bugs within the Ivanpah concentrated solar thermal plant in the California Mojave Desert. Officials at the facility are enacting all sorts of measures to prevent this ongoing avian massacre—but it’s not clear if anything’s working.
The destructive power of the typhoons that wreak havoc across China, Japan, Korea and the Philippines has intensified by 50% in the past 40 years due to warming seas, a new study has found.
Call him the tip of the iceberg. Six years ago, on 11 August 2010, whale researchers working in the western North Pacific encountered something very unusual: a white male killer whale, or orca. Two days later the white whale, nicknamed Iceberg, reappeared in a large group of orcas – a group that included a second white whale.
Let's take a moment to savour a major ecological win: most of the world's humpback whale populations are now no longer endangered.
Once hunted to the brink of extinction because of their oil and meat, humpback whales have benefitted from recent international efforts to restore their numbers, according to a new population survey.
It’s boom time for large whales in the Arctic – an unexpected benefit of the unprecedented sea ice reduction seen in the region over the past 30 years.
Sue Moore at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Seattle has analysed 30 years of whale survey information gathered in the Chukchi Sea – which separates Russia and Alaska – and the surrounding area.
Nutrient pollution emptying into seas from cities, towns and agricultural land is changing the sounds made by marine life – and potentially upsetting navigational cues for fish and other sea creatures, a new University of Adelaide study has found.
Related: How much do perfumes pollute? A pioneering study in the canals of Venice
Related: Deeming Pollution of Earth Sinful, Pope Proposes Climate Action as Sacred Duty
China is accelerating efforts to design and build a manned deep-sea platform to help it hunt for minerals in the South China Sea, one that may also serve a military purpose in the disputed waters, joining an exclusive club of countries that are capable of achieving human access to the deep sea.
A team of researchers with the National University of Singapore has found a way to get around what they describe as 'Rayleigh's curse'—a phenomenon that happens when two light sources appear to coalesce as they grow closer together, limiting the ability to measure the distance between them.
An Atlas V rocket just successfully launched NASA’s OSIRIS-REx vehicle into space from Cape Canaveral, Florida, initiating the spacecraft’s journey to grab a sample from an asteroid and bring it back to Earth.
Related: Asteroid Bennu getting first visitor in billions of years
An asteroid the size of a school bus buzzed by Earth today (Sept. 7) in an exceptionally close — but safe — flyby. Scientists discovered the object on Monday, just two days before its encounter with Earth.
Alt: Newly Discovered Asteroid Has a Close Encounter with Earth
Researchers have verified the authenticity of an ancient Maya text from the 13th century, solving the long-standing riddle of whether the mysterious fragment was actually genuine.
Archaeologists in Jerusalem say that they have reconstructed part of the ancient stone floor of one of the holiest sites in the world, the ancient temple that Jews call Har HaBayit (Temple Mount), and Muslims call Haram al-Sharif (Noble Sanctuary).
DNA testing has for the first time confirmed the identity of the bacteria behind London's Great Plague.
The plague of 1665-1666 was the last major outbreak of bubonic plague in Britain, killing nearly a quarter of London's population.
An Australian expert on Shakespeare claims the bard did not invent many of the words and phrases attributed to him, saying the mistake is due to the Oxford English Dictionary’s “bias” towards citing literary examples of early usages.
For children with autism and a class of genetic disorders, exposure to diagnostic ultrasound in the first trimester of pregnancy is linked to increased autism severity, according to a new study.
Related: Chemical in plastics linked to genital abnormalities in baby boys
Related: Heredity a major factor in ADHD, binge eating and alcohol dependence
Being born a lighter weight than average affects you for the rest of your life. A study tracking almost 3000 people since birth has found that underweight babies are more likely to shun sport at school and exercise as adults.
Related: Babies born by caesarean more likely to be obese as adults, study suggests
Related: Early life exposure to antibiotics is related to increased risk of allergies later in life
A specific group of brain cells appears to drive excessive alcohol drinking, and targeting these cells may reverses alcohol dependence, at least in rats, a new study finds.
Related: Exercise can cut risk from alcohol-related diseases, study suggests
Hitachi Ltd. started trials of its EMIEW3 humanoid robot at Tokyo’s Haneda airport on Friday to aid foreign visitors to Japan.
During the trials through December in the airport’s domestic Terminal 2, the robot will communicate with passengers in Japanese and English at a designated information center as well as display information.
Want to invisibly spy on 10 iPhone owners without their knowledge? Gather their every keystroke, sound, message and location? That will cost you $650,000, plus a $500,000 setup fee with an Israeli outfit called the NSO Group. You can spy on more people if you would like — just check out the company’s price list.
Related: The enigma machine takes a quantum leap
Related: How to profit from your data and beat Facebook at its own game
A fast-growing open hardware movement is creating ingenious versions of all sorts of technologies, and freely sharing them through social media.
CERN is home to some of the largest and most complex scientific equipment on the planet. Yet back in March, scientists gathered there for a conference about DIY laboratory tools.
Computer simulations of a spherical collection of stars known as 'NGC 6101' reveal that it contains hundreds of black holes, until now thought impossible. Recent observations already found black hole candidates in similar systems, with this research enabling astrophysicists to map black holes in other clusters. These systems could be the cradle of gravitational wave emission, 'ripples' in the fabric of space-time.
Rosetta's dust-analysing COSIMA (COmetary Secondary Ion Mass Analyser) instrument has made the first unambiguous detection of solid organic matter in the dust particles ejected by Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, in the form of complex carbon-bearing molecules.
ESA's Planck satellite has revealed that the first stars in the Universe started forming later than previous observations of the Cosmic Microwave Background indicated. This new analysis also shows that these stars were the only sources needed to account for reionising atoms in the cosmos, having completed half of this process when the Universe had reached an age of 700 million years.
If two galaxies collide, the merging of their central black holes triggers gravitational waves, which ripple throughout space. An international research team involving the University of Zurich has now calculated that this occurs around 10 million years after the two galaxies merge – much faster than previously assumed.
When in late August this year, the European Southern Observatory (ESO) broke the news, announcing the discovery of Proxima b, the closest exoplanet to us, it fueled hopes of finding an Earth-like planet that could support life. Now, Mikko Tuomi of the University of Hertfordshire, UK, confirms that the newly found alien world could be one of the best currently known extrasolar places to search for microbial organisms.
“Actually, it’s quite possible that the planet has already been in some way imaged,” says Scott Sheppard of the Carnegie Institute. “That happened with Uranus, Neptune and Pluto — they were observed but not understood before they were actually detected. Who knows, proof of Planet X {or Planet 9} may already exist in some observatory archive.”
Our obsessive search for a ninth planet in our solar system — one that can fill the void left by Pluto’s demotion back in 2005 — is finally paying off.
“Objects found far beyond Neptune hold the key to unlocking our Solar System's origins and evolution,”
The blue water of Buzzards Bay glittered as boats bobbed on the gently undulating surface and gulls swooped among their sails. The seaside air at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution was thick with the sweet smell of grass and the tang of saltwater. This was late summer on Cape Cod — our ocean world at its most inviting.
On Aug. 15, the news broke that a Russian radio telescope detected strong signals from outer space.
The signals allegedly originated from a star 95 light-years from Earth. Just to clarify, this means that the signal would have left the star or, potentially, an orbiting planet, 95 years ago.
The site was discovered in 2012 by quarry workers after carrying out a blasting operation. When they spotted the presence of a great many fossil remains in the clay that filled the cave, they halted the works and contacted Prof Alvaro Arrizabalaga of the Department of Geography, Prehistory and Archaeology.
Archaeologists digging in a small village in southern Mexico have unearthed stone carvings that shed fresh light on a lost Mesoamerican city.
The ancient city of Lambityeco, in the valley of Oaxaca, was believed to have been aligned to the regional Zapotec powerhouse of Monte Alban.
A prehistoric stone panel said to be the "most important in Europe" is being unearthed for the first time in more than 50 years in Clydebank.
The Cochno Stone dates to 3000BC and is described as one of the best examples of Neolithic or Bronze Age cup and ring markings in Europe.
Firefighters have long known about fire tornadoes, or fire whirls. These deadly phenomena can occur when fire is carried upwards by clashing air fronts and atmospheric conditions. Fire whirls burn much hotter and faster than traditional fire, making them extra dangerous in the event of wildfires or chemical fires.
Toxic nanoparticles from air pollution have been discovered in human brains in “abundant” quantities, a newly published study reveals.
Related: How we discovered a possible link between car exhausts and Alzheimer's
Related: Vitamin B12 as Protection for the Aging Brain
Whooping cranes are changing migration patterns in response to climate and land use change, and these new patterns are being determined by the older , more experienced, members of the population.
Related: Elderly drivers not more dangerous than younger motorists, study claims
Related: 'He eats everything and has never even been ill': The 145-year-old claiming to be the oldest human in the world's history says he is 'ready to die'
A new drug that “wakes up” the immune system to attack cancer has extended the lives of people with metastatic pancreatic cancer and has no side-effects, raising hopes for a new and powerful tool against the most intractable form of the disease.
Large quantities of fish are consumed in India on a daily basis, which generates a huge amount of fish "biowaste" materials. In an attempt to do something positive with this biowaste, a team of researchers at Jadavpur University in Koltata, India explored recycling the fish byproducts into an energy harvester for self-powered electronics.
Scientists at the University of Rochester have taken a significant step forward in laser fusion research.
Experiments using the OMEGA laser at the University's Laboratory of Laser Energetics (LLE) have created the conditions capable of producing a fusion yield that's five times higher than the current record laser-fusion energy yield, as long as the relative conditions produced at LLE are reproduced and scaled up at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.
Costa Rica ran on 100 percent renewable energy for 76 straight days between June and August this year, according to a new report, demonstrating that life without fossil fuels is possible - for small countries, at least.
More than 400 pieces of Alpine ice have been moved to a giant freezer - a first step in their journey to Antarctica.
The seemingly strange plan to send ice to the coldest place on Earth is part of a scientific mission to "rescue" some of the world's most endangered glacial ice.
A new type of virus has been identified, and it’s so weird, it’s challenging long-held notions of what it takes for a virus to infect and proliferate in an animal host.
Conventional wisdom states that if a single virus manages to insert its genes into a cell, the host becomes infected.
Much of Earth's life-giving carbon could have been delivered in a planetary collision about 4.4 billion years ago, a theory suggests.
Carbon is the key ingredient for all life on our planet.
Europe's comet lander Philae has been found.
The little robot is visible in new images downloaded from the Rosetta probe in orbit around the icy dirt-ball 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.
The giant panda is no longer an endangered species, following decades of work by conservationists to save it.
The official status of the much-loved animal has been changed from "endangered" to "vulnerable" because of a population rebound in China.
Alt: Giant Pandas, Symbol of Conservation, Are No Longer Endangered
The Eastern gorilla -- the largest living primate -- has been listed as Critically Endangered due to illegal hunting, according to the latest update of The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.
Bonobos — chimpanzees’ sister species — don’t get the credit they deserve as tool users.
Bonobos ranging through a sanctuary’s protected forests in the Democratic Republic of Congo crack nuts with stones nearly as well as wild chimps in other parts of Africa do
A study published this month in the Journal of Arid Environments found that lesser salmon catfish in the Ashburton River had been eating Spinifex hopping mice in fairly large portions. Of the fish they sampled, 44 percent were found to have the mice in the stomachs, and of those, mice composed about 95 percent of their stomach content.
Keep calm and carry on building. That’s the motto of 100,000 or so wood ants stranded without food in a nuclear bunker until they starve.
Wood ants (Formica polyctena) typically build a cosy mound nest on the forest floor. They seek out the sugary secretions of aphids living on trees and supplement their diet with insects. Now, scientists have uncovered a population of wood ants that has sustained for years without food and light inside a bunker where temperatures are constantly low.
Paleontologists claim to have found a little armored dinosaur that went carnivore
Ankylosaurs are weird. I'm not just talking about the lavish displays of osteoderms jutting every which way from their bodies. Look inside the skull of an ankylosaur, for example, and you may wonder how these armored dinosaurs fed themselves.
More than 50 years after its discovery on Scotland’s Isle of Skye, scientists have unveiled a monster that would make Nessie blush: a 13-foot-long reptile that ruled the seas 170 million years ago.
Dr. Bryan, in Natural History has noted many sites where PaleoAmericans have left us evidence of human habitation, including the pebble tools at Monte Verde in Chile (c.32,000 Before Present), rock paintings at Pedra Furada in Brazil (c.22,000 BP), and mastodon hunting in Venezuela and Colombia (c.13,000 BP). These discoveries have led some researchers to believe that the Americas were first settled from South America.
Related: First Americans must have arrived by sea, not via Alaska
A 20th century find suggests that the Vikings may have explored North America as far south as New York. Although the reasons for its presence in Charles Point are contested, no one can deny the fact that the spearhead unearthed by Augustus Hoffman in 1929 is of Nordic origin. With precious little evidence about how or why the artifact ended up in the Great Lakes Region, researchers rely on ancient tales and legends to explain the mystery of the spearhead.
Related: 1,000-Year-Old Viking Sword Discovered in Iceland by Men Hunting Geese
Archeologists working on the Dampier archipelago off Australia’s north-west coast have found evidence of stone houses dating back 9,000 years – to the end of the last ice age – building the case for the area to get a world heritage listing.
Related: Lost cities #10: Fordlandia – the failure of Henry Ford's utopian city in the Amazon