Newsdesk Archive
The sun fired off its strongest solar flare of 2016 during an active weekend that saw three eruptions from the star's surface.
The uptick in solar activity occurred overnight on Friday and Saturday (July 22 and 23) when the sun unleashed three relatively moderate solar flares, all of which were captured on video by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory.
Jupiter's Great Red Spot - a hurricane three times bigger than Earth - is blasting the planet's upper atmosphere with heat, astronomers have found.
Using measurements from an infrared telescope in Hawaii, a UK and US team found evidence for temperatures as high as 1,500C - hundreds of degrees warmer than anywhere else on the planet.
Jupiter, the fifth planet from the Sun, gas giant, and subject of the Juno mission, is huge. Huge.
It's so huge, in fact, that it doesn't actually orbit the Sun. Not exactly. With 2.5 times the mass of all the other planets in the Solar System combined, it's big enough that the centre of gravity between Jupiter and the Sun doesn't actually reside inside the Sun – rather, at a point in space just above the Sun's surface.
There are two things that are important to understand: there’s the far side of the Moon and then there’s the dark side of the Moon. They are two different things.
The sky is just awash with stars when you’re on the far side of the Moon, and you don’t have any sunlight to cut down on the lower intensity, dimmer stars. You see them all, and it’s all just a sheet of white.
The Pacific Ocean was born from a geological spasm that started 190 million years ago, when Earth’s crust ripped apart and fresh lava welled up from below. Now, a new analysis suggests that this seafloor birth was a lot more complex than researchers had thought.
Study of natural-occurring 100,000 year-old CO2 reservoirs shows no significant corroding of 'cap rock', suggesting the greenhouse gas hasn't leaked back out - one of the main concerns with greenhouse gas reduction proposal of carbon capture and storage.
Evolution has slowed to a crawl a few times in four billion years. And an eon or so has passed before more complex life forms, such as simple animals, could arise.
Related: How oxygen may have jumpstarted the rise of animals
Scientists have used high-power X-rays to "see inside" an exquisite and complete dinosaur specimen.
The skeleton belongs to a small, plant-eating dinosaur which lived 200 million years ago - at the beginning of the Jurassic Period.
A previously undiscovered flesh-eating marsupial has been identified from a fossilised tooth discovered in Queensland, Australia.
The creature, which has been named Whollydooleya tomnpatrichorum, would have been around 20-25 kilograms, much larger than its only living cousin the Tasmanian Devil, which comes in at a measly 10 kilos.
Dinosaurs didn't have email or text messages to keep in touch, but scientists are quite certain the beasts engaged in dialogue. Those communications likely included hoots and hollers, cracking sounds, dance and song, and even symbolic love calls made with showy plumage.
Who’s your daddy? An unknown hominin species that bred with early human ancestors when they migrated from Africa to Australasia has been identified through genome mapping of living humans.
Alt: Scientists Say A Mystery Species Bred with Ancient Humans in Distant Past
Johannesburg, South Africa - An international team of researchers led by scientists from the University of the Witwatersrand’s Evolutionary Studies Institute and the South African Centre for Excellence in PalaeoSciences today announced in two papers, published in the South African Journal of Science, the discovery of the most ancient evidence for cancer and bony tumours yet described in the human fossil record.
Rice, or Oryza sativa as its scientifically known, feeds more than a third of the globe. Yet the majority of rice crops that supply 90 percent of the world come from just two domesticated varieties, japonica and indica.
The expedition leader reports that he finds the smell of the 340-year-old cheese "quite pleasant."
Divers searching the wreck of an 17th-century Swedish warship on the bed of the Baltic say they have found de Brie.
Sifting through the ancient timbers of the Kronan, a ship that sank in 1676 off the Swedish coast, they found not diamonds as they had hoped... but a cheese.
In the dead-flat desert of northwestern Utah, archaeologists have uncovered a scene from a distant, and more verdant, time.
Just a few centimeters below the sun-baked surface, researchers have discovered a campsite used by prehistoric hunter-gatherers 12,300 years ago — when Utah’s West Desert was lush wetland.
After decades of searching, archeologists have located the long-lost Spanish stronghold Fort San Marcos, finding it under a golf course on South Carolina's Parris Island.
For the first time, scientists report using transcranial alternating current stimulation, or tACS, to target a specific kind of brain activity during sleep and strengthen memory in healthy people.
Most children who learn more than one language gain valuable skills, and researchers say this may also be true for children with autism.
Related: Are Gifted Kids More Sensitive to Screen Violence?
Many studies have shown that people with university educations and high socio-economic positions live longer on average, mainly because they tend to lead healthier lives.
But a Swedish study of a large population has now detected one surprising exception.
‘Behavioural Activation’ is a simple form of therapy which encourages positive activities, such as waking up early, getting outdoors and re-engaging with the world, while stopping negative behaviours such as staying in bed all day, drinking too much or taking drugs.
Alt: Behavioral activation as effective as CBT for depression, at lower cost
People who feel more connected to nature also tend to feel less anxious, according to new psychology research from Australia.
The preliminary study, conducted by Patricia Martyn and Eric Brymer, found that feeling connected to nature was directly related to small reductions in anxiety.
Biologists separate life into three phases: development, aging and late life. But a growing body of research now suggests that there is a fourth phase immediately preceding death that scientists have dubbed the "death spiral."
How new species are created is at the very core of the theory of evolution. The reigning theory is that physically separated populations of one species drift apart gradually.
But changes in chromosomes, particularly sex chromosomes, can interpose drastic barriers to reproduction. Mammals may be a good example.
The first large study of North American wolf genomes has found that there is only one species on the continent: the gray wolf. Two other purported species, the Eastern wolf and the red wolf, are mixes of gray wolf and coyote DNA, the scientists behind the study concluded.
The finding, announced Wednesday, highlights the shortcomings of laws intended to protect endangered species, as such laws lag far behind scientific research into the evolution of species.
Related: Inbreeding has destroyed the English bulldog’s genetic diversity
The rapid growth in the illegal killing of African elephants seen since 2006 seems to have stabilised and may be decreasing.
Two new reports indicate that across the continent, the numbers of elephants being killed for ivory has slowed.
The race is on to bring lab grown meat to the masses. In 2013, Dutch scientists created a lab-grown burger costing $330,000 (£251,000) and in May, an American company grew a meatball in the lab for $18,000 (£13,700) per pound.
Now, there’s a new player in town and he has pretty wild ambitions.
Alt: Feel like chicken tonight? New 'supermeat' can be grown in the lab without an animal in sight
New Caledonian crows have figured out how to move two things in one fell swoop. The adept tool users have been filmed inserting sticks into objects to transport both items at once – a feat that has never been seen in non-humans.
Ivo Jacobs of Lund University in Sweden and his team recorded the unique behaviour in a group of captive crows (Corvus moneduloides). They saw how one crafty individual slipped a wooden stick into a metal nut and flew off, carrying away both the tool and the object.
An orangutan has shown an ability to emulate human speech for the first time — a feat that gets us closer to understanding how human speech first evolved from the communications of ancestral great apes.
‘Rocky’ the ginger ape has astonished experts by producing sounds similar to words in a “conversational context”.
When a male bonobo harasses a young female, he’d better look out. A coalition of protective older females might be headed his way.
Researchers observing wild bonobos over four years in the Democratic Republic of Congo found that whenever females formed coalitions, they would invariably attack males. This was typically in response to a male displaying aggressive behavior towards another female.
Whatever South Korean women are eating, pass it around!
Women in South Korea have gained 8 inches in height, on average, in the past century — a jump bigger than any other population in the world, researchers reported Tuesday.
Believe it or not, some of us are carrying drug-resistant bacteria around in our noses; these colonies make infection more likely. But scientists have discovered a new weapon to use against these bugs — and it also lives in your nose.
Researchers have determined that certain facial features, not the expression, influence whether people think someone is trustworthy. Two studies have determined that people often make judgments of trustworthiness based solely on the face.
Peak oil, if it even exists, is very much a moving target. But so, it turns out, is measuring how much oil is already above ground, sitting in the holds of ships and in storage facilities around the world.
It’s not that humanity is fundamentally incapable of measuring how much oil we are extracting—it’s that many countries don’t report their inventories.
Related: Why We Pretend to Clean Up Oil Spills
Scientists have developed a dandelion strain with natural rubber in its roots. The summer weed that invades suburban lawns could be the next rubber tree.
Researchers are working to improve the weed so that it can be produced fast and efficiently enough to be a sustainable source of rubber.
A self-powered waste water treatment plant using microbes has just passed its biggest test, bringing household-level water recycling a step closer
THEY’RE miraculous in their own way, even if they don’t quite turn water into wine. Personal water treatment plants could soon be recycling our waste water and producing energy on the side.
The world’s most widely used insecticide is an inadvertent contraceptive for bees, cutting live sperm in males by almost 40%, according to research. The study also showed the neonicotinoid pesticides cut the lifespan of the drones by a third.
Related: Increasing ocean acidity could impact fish spawning
Related: Washington scientist launches effort to digitize all fish
For decades, Japanese fishermen have told stories about the existence of a dark, rare beaked whale that they called karasu — the "raven."
But now, scientists say they have genetic proof to back up these tales. Long mistaken for its relative, the Baird's beaked whale, scientists say it represents an entirely new species.
On August 27, 1883, the Earth let out a noise louder than any it has made since.
It was 10:02 a.m. local time when the sound emerged from the island of Krakatoa, which sits between Java and Sumatra in Indonesia. It was heard 1,300 miles away in the Andaman and Nicobar islands; 2,000 miles away in New Guinea and Western Australia; and even 3,000 miles away in the Indian Ocean island of Rodrigues, near Mauritius.
Since February 15th, 2016, residents of Alhambra, California, like Susan Saunders have been reporting mysterious loud booms to police, government officials, seismic experts and anyone else who will listen. Since February 15th, 2016, no one has been able to explain them.
A military commander killed in battle with the arrowhead still lodged in his thorax is one of the interesting finds by archaeologists at the largest prehistoric settlement discovered in the South Caucasus. The site dates back at least 3,300 years and has been yielding interesting burials, artifacts and architectural features, including a huge wall and waterworks.
A brightly coloured sphere filmed in the night sky near Christchurch this week joins a tradition, of mysterious objects seen in Kiwi skies, stretching back at least a century.
Related: Huge ‘alien city’ is spotted under the sea – near UFO sighting hotspot
Related: Strange Object Filmed Over Manchester Resembles Flying “Torpedo”
Related: NASA Under Fire After Cutting ISS Stream Video Allegedly Showing UFO
Related: Mysterious footage showing a black UFO hovering over a Scottish harbour for fifteen minutes leaves residents baffled
While studying the ocean floor off California's Channel Islands, researchers found this mysterious species.
Alt: Has a new form of life been discovered at the bottom of the ocean? Mysterious glowing purple orb has scientists and the internet stumped
A map drawn on papyrus more than 3,000 years ago helped spur the search for mineral wealth in modern Egypt.
More than 3,000 years ago, a government official took a roll of papyrus and sketched out the features of a valley in the Eastern Desert with such detail and accuracy that the document is considered to be the earliest geologic map in history.
The 2,200-year-old mummy of an Egyptian man who spent a lot of time sitting and eating carbs went on display at 3the Israel Museum in Jerusalem on Tuesday and will be open to the public beginning Wednesday.
Alex, as he is called by the researchers who study him, was a 5-foot-6-inch Egyptian priest who spent most of his time sitting, according to his osteoporosis-weakened skeleton, which has shrunk to just over 5 feet over the more than two millennia he spent embalmed
Despite apparent episodes of food shortage, disease, violence, and severe weather conditions, it seems that, at least for some people, life in Chile between 500-1500 years ago was not that stressful. Lower than expected cortisol levels found in mummies’ hair have led researchers to suggest that some of the pre-Hispanic natives actually weren’t too anxious.
If you’re intent on keeping dementia at bay, new research suggests you’ll need more than crossword puzzles, aerobic exercise and an active social life. In a study released Sunday, researchers found that older adults who did exercises to shore up the speed at which they processed visual information could cut by nearly half their likelihood of cognitive decline or dementia over a 10-year period.
Can you tell if someone is lying? Our ability to spot a lie is only just better than guessing with the flip of a coin. But, surprisingly, it’s easier to tell whether a person is fibbing if they are wearing a veil, suggests a fresh study.
The experiment was devised by researchers at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology in Canada, and the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands.
As the saying goes, “It’s difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.” The website Metaculus.com aims to make this challenging task easier by harnessing collective wisdom.
Metaculus solicits answers to questions about the future — on topics spanning science, politics and economics — and combines these predictions to infer the likely outcomes.
The surprisingly astute world of do-it-yourself neural stimulation
EARLIER this month, in the journal Annals of Neurology, four neuroscientists published an open letter to practitioners of do-it-yourself brain stimulation. These are people who stimulate their own brains with low levels of electricity, largely for purposes like improved memory or learning ability.
The brain’s reward centers in severely obese women continue to respond to food cues even after they’ve eaten and are no longer hungry, in contrast to their lean counterparts, according to a recent study by a multidisciplinary team at UT Southwestern Medical Center.
By studying the genomes of more than 5,000 Samoans, researchers from the University of Pittsburgh have uncovered a single gene that boosts a person’s obesity risk by upwards of 40 percent. Remarkably, this gene—which appears in a quarter of all Samoans—may have arisen in the population as they colonized the South Pacific.
For the first time in history, New Zealand has announced an ambitious initiative to eliminate rats, stoats, and possums from the country by 2050, in an effort to rid the country of an ecological scourge ravaging its native wildlife.
Related: Extinction Looms for Easter Island’s Only Remaining Native Species
Bears, wolves and other large carnivores are frightening beasts but the fear they inspire in their prey pales in comparison to that caused by the human 'super predator.'
A new study by Western University demonstrates that smaller carnivores, like European badgers, that may be prey to large carnivores, actually perceive humans as far more frightening.
After a century of constant decline, the number of wild tigers is on the rise.
According to a 2016 report, the tiger population, estimated to be 3,200 six years ago, has grown 22%.
Break out the champagne and put away the anti-beast spray, Brits … the mystery of the Beast of Bodmin Moor may have finally been solved. On second thought, maybe you should keep the anti-beast spray around for a while yet.
About four years ago, Kevin Sinclair inherited an army of clones. Very fluffy clones.
"Daisy, Debbie, Denise and Diana," says Sinclair, a developmental biologist at the University of Nottingham in England.
Sex hormones can stimulate production of telomerase, an enzyme naturally found in the human organism, new research shows. The strategy was tested in patients with genetic diseases associated with mutations in the gene that codes for this enzyme, such as aplastic anemia and pulmonary fibrosis. The authors say that the results suggest that the approach can combat the damage caused to the organism by telomerase deficiency.
After more than 25 years of searching, neuroscientists in the UK recently announced that they've discovered a woman who has an extra type of cone cell - the receptor cells that detect colour - in her eyes.
Google's engineers just achieved a milestone in quantum computing: they’ve produced the first completely scalable quantum simulation of a hydrogen molecule.
That’s big news, because it shows similar devices could help us unlock the quantum secrets hidden in the chemistry that surrounds us.
The idea of a space elevator to lift us into orbit is one of the oldest concepts in sci-fi, but thanks to the efforts of scientists in Japan, we might soon be seeing this fantastic feat of engineering become a reality at last.
A 7-Eleven customer’s order for Slurpees, a chicken sandwich, donuts, hot coffee, and candy will forever go down in history.
What makes it remarkable is that the convenience store chain used a drone to deliver the order to a family in Reno, Nev., 7-Eleven said on Friday. The company partnered with drone startup Flirtey for the delivery, which the companies said was the first time a drone has legally delivered a package to a U.S. resident who placed an order from a retailer.
Amazon is partnering with the British government to expand its testing of delivery drones, paving the way for commercial air deliveries for UK residents. The expanded testing, announced today in a press release, involves Amazon working with the UK Civil Aviation Authority to focus on operating drones outside of the line of site of pilots, improving sensors for obstacle detection and avoidance, and having one pilot operate a team of multiple, semi-autonomous drones in unison.
Alt: New trials for delivering goods by drones
In the Australian outback, a cattle ranch called Suppleback Downs is only slightly smaller than the state of Rhode Island. Unsurprisingly, it can be hard to keep track of cows in such a massive area. That's where Swagbot, an Australian cowboy robot, comes in: The robot is designed to herd cattle on sprawling ranches that humans can't easily cover on their own.
Solar Impulse 2 has completed the first round-the-world flight by a solar-powered aeroplane, after touching down in Abu Dhabi early on Tuesday.
The final leg of the feat, aimed at showcasing the potential of renewable energy, was a bumpy one, with turbulence driven by hot desert air leaving the solo pilot, Bertrand Piccard, fighting with the controls.
Take a trip from Beijing's International Airport into the centre of town and you're more than likely to encounter familiar scenes of the capital's smog problems.
However in years to come, the Chinese capital may surprise visitors with its blue skies and clean air.
We humans emitted 35.9 metric gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in 2014, mostly from burning coal and natural gas in power plants, making fertilizer and cement, and other industrial processes. If chemists could capture carbon dioxide and turn it into chemical building blocks for other products, the way plants do, says Cornell University chemical engineer Lynden Archer, “carbon dioxide would not be a nuisance anymore, but a gift.”
“The human species did not evolve to handle today’s complex problems,” says Anthony Leiserowitz, a research scientist who runs the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. Instead, our brains are designed to respond to four kinds of threats, explains Harvard University psychologist Daniel Gilbert: “Ones that are instantaneous, imminent or personalized—or things that repulse us.” What we see and, more importantly, what we directly experience, matters.
The Tent of Casually Observed Phenologies tries to bridge these challenges, using emotion and personal experience to inspire engagement with climate change. In The Tent, participants choose among three tarot decks—the classic Rider-Waite deck, the Tarot of the Boroughs and the Wild Unknown deck—and then pose a question related to climate change.
Depleting fish populations and corals that are still bleaching in the winter paint a bleak picture for parts of the Great Barrier Reef, which is undergoing a “complete ecosystem collapse,” scientists say.
Related: Diving enthusiasts could be used to measure ocean temperatures
The frigid plains of northern Siberia are becoming a hotspot for mysterious geological phenomena. Over the past couple of years, sudden craters have been exploding from the permafrost-laden ground. Last month, we reported on a giant chasm in the Sakha Republic that looms so wide and deep, locals refer to it as a “gateway to the underworld.”
Scientists in the US have discovered that rare volcanic eruptions – so catastrophically powerful that they could potentially devastate the entire planet – might only give up to a year's warning before they unleash fiery hell.
Super-eruptions, which can eject thousands of cubic kilometres of magma to the planet's surface, build up over a massive time frame – but volcanic samples suggest the final stage of decompression before magma release happens much more quickly.
Alt: Super-eruptions may give only a year's warning before they blow
We certainly did not expect to find superflare stars with magnetic fields as weak as the magnetic fields on the Sun. This opens the possibility that the Sun could generate a superflare - a very frightening thought" says Christoffer Karoff a leading expert in the internal structure of the Sun and its activity at Denmark's Aarhus University. "If an eruption of this size was to strike the Earth today, it would have devastating consequences. Not just for all electronic equipment on Earth, but also for our atmosphere and thus our planet's ability to support life."
Every so often, given the proper conditions, a small and roughly spherical piece of the atmosphere around us will briefly catch fire. As they are best viewed late into the night and have no obvious natural explanation, it’s perhaps no wonder they’ve inspired a rich mythology. Names for balls of fire include ignis fatuus, will-o’-the-wisp, ghost lights, and ball lightning.
Related: Bizarre Cases of People Cursed by Lightning
Testing the limits of predictions, some geologists say long-silent Colli Albani might be starting a new eruption phase
Related: Giant 'megathrust' fault is discovered in the Earth's crust under the most densely populated part of the globe that could wipe out 'tens of millions' in an earthquake
Want to find some ancient fossils? Scratch yourself. Many of the genes in our cells evolved billions of years ago and a few of them can be traced back to the last common ancestor of all life.
Now we have the best picture yet of what that ancestor was like and where it lived, thanks to a study that identified 355 genes that it probably possessed.
A couple of times in four billion years, evolution has slowed to a crawl. And an eon or so has passed before more complex life forms, such as simple animals, could arise.
Evolution may have been waiting for a decent breath of oxygen, said researcher Chris Reinhard. And that was hard to come by. His research team is tracking down O2 concentrations in oceans, where earliest animals evolved.
Whiffs of ancient air trapped in rock salt for hundreds of millions of years are shaking up the history of oxygen and life on Earth.
By carefully crushing rock salt, researchers have measured the chemical makeup of air pockets embedded inside the rock.
A six-week-long field school dig conducted by Simon Fraser University professors in Canada has led to the discovery of around 80 tablets, thought to be 2,000 years old, inscribed with mysterious symbols.
In an interview with the Comox Valley Record, university archaeologist Bob Muir says he’s never seen a find quite like it.
Officials from Beijing's Forbidden City have said an ancient drainage system protected it during recent heavy rains and intense flooding.
Bad weather has killed 37 people in the Chinese capital in the past week while at least seven others are missing.
Archaeologists at the Mayan ruin site of Palenque said Monday they have discovered an underground water tunnel built under the Temple of Inscriptions, which houses the tomb of an ancient ruler named Pakal.
Orange boiler suit? Check. Hard hat and headlamp? Check. Emergency breathing apparatus? Check. Two tally tags? Check…
Ear defenders on, into the airlock; clang, clang go the giant metal doors. Hand in one tally tag and squeeze into a metal cage. The door slides down and our 8-minute descent begins, taking us 1100 metres below ground.
Related: Life on Mars STILL exists beneath the surface, claims top Nasa scientist
We live an average of 71 years—a drop in the bucket compared with some other life-spans.
Humans these days live pretty long lives: The average global life expectancy of someone born in 2015 is 71.4 years. That’s not bad compared with some adult female mayflies, which live for under five minutes—just long enough to mate and lay eggs. Talk about speed dating.
An international team of scientists has just sequenced a protein crystal located in the midgut of cockroaches. The reason?
It’s more than four times as nutritious as cow’s milk and, the researchers think it could be the key to feeding our growing population in the future.
Fire brought warmth and comfort to early humans but may also have triggered the emergence of deadly tuberculosis, Australian researchers suggest.
In the great houses of Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, having an extra toe was one way to garner a lot of respect.
A unique prehistoric Pueblo culture thrived in the high desert of Chaco Canyon about a thousand years ago.
About 5,000 years ago, not far from Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain in England, some people built a stone circle smaller than its more famous counterpart. But for some reason, sometime after they built it, they dismantled the circle of bluestones and removed them.
Related: From Orkney to the Fens, our ancient past is coming alive
Imagine a place to go in times of doubt and uncertainty, where one can find out what to do and what to avoid, straight from a reliable source. A place where all questions have tangible answers and all problems a solution.
Unfortunately, such a place does not exist today. But did it once?
Rope and twine are critical components in the technology of mobile hunters and gatherers. In exceptional cases impressions of string have been found in fired clay and on rare occasions string was depicted in the contexts of Ice Age art, but on the whole almost nothing is known about string, rope and textiles form the Paleolithic.
Great minds grow alike. Evidence from Neanderthals’ skulls suggests that their large brains grew in the same way as ours do. That in turn suggests that Neanderthals were perhaps not so cognitively different from us – although not everyone agrees with this interpretation.
Neanderthals once populated the entire European continent. Around 45,000 years ago, Homo neanderthalensis was the predominant human species in Europe. Archaeological findings show that there were also several settlements in Germany.
The evolutionary history of the bacteria in your guts predates the appearance of humans, and mirrors that of our great ape relatives, according to a genetic study.
The research suggests that microbes in our ancestors’ intestines split into new evolutionary lineages in parallel with splits in the ape family tree.
Long before the advent of social media, human social networks were built around sharing a much more essential commodity: food. Now, researchers reporting on the food sharing networks of two contemporary groups of hunter-gatherers provide new insight into fundamental nature of human social organization.
The elongated skulls of Paracas in Peru caused a stir in 2014 when a geneticist that carried out preliminary DNA testing reported that they have mitochondrial DNA “with mutations unknown in any human, primate, or animal known so far”. Now a second round of DNA testing has been completed and the results are just as controversial – the skulls tested, which date back as far as 2,000 years, were shown to have European and Middle Eastern Origin. These surprising results change the known history about how the Americas were populated.
People who use cocaine or methamphetamine on a regular basis may have differences in those brain regions that are involved in choosing between right and wrong, compared to people who don't use these drugs, according to a new study of prison inmates.
Related: Medical Marijuana States See Big Drop in Drug Prescriptions and Medicare Spending
Related: MDMA needs to be studied, not ‘demonized,’ researchers say
A group of researchers have developed a new map of the cerebral cortex of the human brain, revealing 100 new distinct regions in each hemisphere. Representing the most detailed map of the brain yet, it's an achievement of a longstanding goal
Related: How the Brain Builds Memory Chains
It was a moment that mingled triumph with relief as the UK’s first double hand transplant patient awoke from a painstaking 12-hour operation with two new sets of fingers.
“It’s better than a lottery win because you feel whole again,” said Chris King as he recuperated at the Leeds General Infirmary. “They look absolutely tremendous,” he added. “They’re my hands. They really are my hands.”
Chinese scientists are embarking on what appear to be the first human trials with the Crispr gene editing tool, the latest effort by the country’s researchers to master a technology that might someday be a potent tool in developing therapies worldwide.
Her computer, Karin Strauss says, contains her "digital attic"—a place where she stores that published math paper she wrote in high school, and computer science schoolwork from college.
She'd like to preserve the stuff "as long as I live, at least," says Strauss, 37. But computers must be replaced every few years, and each time she must copy the information over, "which is a little bit of a headache."
MENOPAUSE need not be the end of fertility. A team claims to have found a way to rejuvenate post-menopausal ovaries, enabling them to release fertile eggs, New Scientist can reveal.
The team says its technique has restarted periods in menopausal women, including one who had not menstruated in five years. If the results hold up to wider scrutiny, the technique may boost declining fertility in older women, allow women with early menopause to get pregnant, and help stave off the detrimental health effects of menopause.
The zero-fuel aeroplane, Solar Impulse, has left the Egyptian capital, Cairo, on the last leg of its global tour.
The aircraft should take about 48 hours to reach Abu Dhabi, UEA - the place it began the circumnavigation in March 2015.
A new detailed study of notes and sketches by Leonardo da Vinci has identified a page of scribbles in a tiny notebook as the place where Leonardo first recorded the laws of friction. The research also shows that he went on to apply this knowledge repeatedly to mechanical problems for more than 20 years.