Newsdesk Archive
Seven priceless Mayan artifacts looted decades ago from Guatemala are returning to the land of their creation after a representative for an antiquities collector grew suspicious of their origin and contacted the FBI.
Experts called in by the agency quickly determined the limestone pieces, all more than a thousand years old, were removed illegally from two specific regions of Guatemala and sold to a California collector in the 1970s.
Travellers on the Silk Road, the most famous trade route of the ancient world, were bringing more than the precious fabric with them out of China. Some bamboo sticks with scraps of grimy cloth wound around them have been identified as bottom wipers from a latrine pit in a 2,000-year-old Chinese relay station on the Silk Road. They have also preserved the first solid evidence of disease spread from east to west by travellers.
British archaeologists working on the Must Farm project in England's Cambridgeshire Fens can hardly restrain themselves.
Their online diary effervesces with superlatives -- "truly fantastic pottery," "truly exceptional textiles," "a truly incredible site," "the dig of a lifetime."
The death of King Albert I of Belgium in 1934 -- officially a climbing accident -- still fuels speculation. Forensic geneticists have now compared DNA from blood found on the scene in 1934 to that of two distant relatives. Their analysis confirms that the blood really is that of Albert I. This conclusion is at odds with several conspiracy theories about the king's death.
Archaeologists have discovered one of the largest Viking axes ever found, in the tomb of a 10th-century "power couple" in Denmark.
Kirsten Nellemann Nielsen, an archaeologist at the Silkeborg Museum who is leading excavations at the site near the town of Haarup, said Danish axes like the one found in the tomb were the most feared weapons of the Viking Age.
Archaeologists in Texas thought they’d made an important discovery in the 1990s, when they unearthed a trove of stone tools dating back 13,000 years, revealing traces of the oldest widespread culture on the continent.
But then, years later, they made an even more powerful find in the same place — another layer of artifacts that were older still.
Related: 16,700-Year-Old Tools Found in Texas Change Known History of North America
New findings suggest that the famous cooperation between honeyguide birds and human honey hunters in sub-Saharan Africa is a two-way conversation.
Honeyguides fly ahead of hunters and point out beehives which the hunters raid, leaving wax for the birds to eat.
Scientists have shown for the first time how a species of tropical fish can distinguish between human faces. The archerfish used in experiments could demonstrate the ability to a high degree of accuracy; despite lacking the crucial neocortex part of the brain which other animals use for sophisticated visual recognition.
South Africa’s great white sharks face the threat of extinction after a steep decline in numbers caused by trophy hunting, shark nets and pollution, according to a study.
The six-year research project along the country’s coastline revealed that only between 353 and 522 of the sharks are still alive, half the level previously thought.
What large mammal regularly kills humans in the Eastern United States?
And what other large mammal might significantly reduce those deaths?
The answer to the first question is the white-tailed deer.
They were once considered merely lazy and adorable. But new research into the antics of the slow loris has revealed a wilder side to the docile creatures. Given the chance the innocent-eyed beasts will neck the most alcoholic drinks they can lay their paws on.
Alcohol causes seven forms of cancer, and people consuming even low to moderate amounts are at risk, according to new analysis.
Health experts endorsed the findings and said they showed that ministers should initiate more education campaigns in order to tackle widespread public ignorance about how closely alcohol and cancer are connected.
Inspired by the Tibetan Buddhist meditation practice of "tummo," Dr. Charles Raison has repurposed an antiquated "fever machine" for clinical trials in heat treatments for depression
Toddlers make their fair share of noise. But they also have a lot of noise to contend with — a television blaring, siblings squabbling, a car radio blasting, grownups talking.
Amid all that clatter, toddlers must somehow piece together the meanings of individual words and start to form their own words and sentences.
When Edward Snowden met with reporters in a Hong Kong hotel room to spill the NSA’s secrets, he famously asked them put their phones in the fridge to block any radio signals that might be used to silently activate the devices’ microphones or cameras. So it’s fitting that three years later, he’s returned to that smartphone radio surveillance problem. Now Snowden’s attempting to build a solution that’s far more compact than a hotel mini-bar.
Related: Pentagon preparing for mass civil breakdown
In the medicine world, stitches are the epitome of low-tech. You get cut, and just like a seamstress with a pair of ripped trousers, your doctor simply sews you up. But what if stitches did more than closed wounds? What if they could reveal how the healing was coming along?
A super-hard metal has been made in the laboratory by melting together titanium and gold.
The alloy is the hardest known metallic substance compatible with living tissues, say US physicists.
While we joke plenty here about the coming robot revolution/Skynet becoming self-aware, it's also important to note that advances in robotic technology do not necessarily mean a malevolent future.
A new way of deriving hydrogen from grass has now been developed using just sunlight and a cheap catalyst. Garden grass could become a source of cheap and clean renewable energy, scientists have claimed in a new report.
Its artificial intelligence division, DeepMind, has cut Google's data centres' energy consumption by 15%, using a machine-learning algorithm.
Data centres run the equipment that processes the data consumed by internet users, and it takes a lot of energy to keep their servers cool.
Data storage is rapidly becoming a major pain point in the technology industry, especially as our apps and media start to reach higher and higher sizes. Some modern day iPhone applications measure in gigabytes now, while a single 4K movie can easily take up hundreds of gigabytes of space. But new research published in the Nature Nanotechnology scientific journal could solve all this.
Until recently, scientists didn’t think it could be done. They thought the fundamental laws of physics would forbid it.
But a persistent group of scientists at the University of Warsaw have now accomplished the impossible: They created a hologram of a solitary particle of light.
Today, the team behind one of the most sensitive dark matter detectors announced its full experimental run had failed to turn up any of the particles it was looking for. The LUX detector (Large Underground Xenon) is designed to pick up signs of weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs, when they engage in one of their rare interactions with normal matter. The null result doesn't rule out the existence of dark matter, but it limits its potential properties.
What’s the most popular explanation for things that can’t be explained? Aliens! It’s turns out scientists may finally being agreeing with that assessment, at least in mysterious instances where stars vanish for no apparent reason.
A DNA sequencer that was just delivered to the International Space Station can test not just known Earthly organisms. Turns out, the little device may also be able to analyze samples taken from alien life, NASA said.
Researchers at Case Western Reserve University have combined tissues from a sea slug with flexible 3-D printed components to build "biohybrid" robots that crawl like sea turtles on the beach.
Soft robots do a lot of things well but they're not exactly known for their speed. The artificial muscles that move soft robots, called actuators, tend to rely on hydraulics or pneumatics, which are slow to respond and difficult to store.
Despite being partially crippled by a series of malfunctions, the Kepler space telescope is still going strong. NASA’s premier planet hunter has found at least 104 worlds orbiting other stars during the first year since its resurrection.
TRAPPIST-1 may well be one of the closest stars to look for life in our own backyard, thanks to three planets in its habitable zone.
Now, we’re one step closer to understanding if those planets could hold life, thanks to a new study published today in Nature.
Tightly spaced planets inside an alien solar system known as Kepler-80 boast a rare orbital configuration.
The study was led by Mariah MacDonald as an undergraduate with Darin Ragozzine, an assistant professor of physics and space sciences, both at Florida Institute of Technology.
Two recent studies have shown that the existence of a mysterious, hypothetical Planet Nine could explain why the planets in our Solar System don't fully line up with the Sun.
Related: Newly discovered solar system objects resonate with Neptune
A groundbreaking radio telescope has discovered 1,300 galaxies in a tiny corner of the sky where just 70 had been spotted before - despite operating at just a quarter of its eventual capacity.
South Africa's MeerKAT radio telescope showed off its phenomenal power yesterday, revealing 1,300 galaxies in a tiny corner of the universe where only 70 had previously known to exist.
A rare type of meteorite found on Earth may have been a critical ingredient in the geologic recipe that shaped the surface of Mercury, new research shows.
An amazing variety of features cover the surface of Mercury, which likely formed when material in the planet's mantle (the layer just below the surface crust) melted and came to the surface through volcanoes.
The mountains in Venus' Aphrodite Terra region may prompt the strange weather patterns observed in the thick cloud layer near the top of the planet's insufferable atmosphere, new research shows.
A new NASA-led study finds that almost one-fifth of the global warming that has occurred in the past 150 years has been missed by historical records due to quirks in how global temperatures were recorded. The study explains why projections of future climate based solely on historical records estimate lower rates of warming than predictions from climate models.
Climate change can have mixed consequences: It would appear that the warming of the Mediterranean region, which has brought greater heat and drought to the countries there for around 20 years, is behind an increase in rainfall in the Sahel region.
For millennia, the Eye of the Sahara was hiding in plain sight. That's because this huge and mysterious geologic formation is hard to spot from ground level, walking around on Earth.
It turns out we only really discovered this incredible bullseye in the sand when we began sending humans into space, but even now we've found it, scientists still don't fully understand it.
One of the Moon's biggest craters was created by an asteroid more than 250km (150 miles) across, a study suggests.
It smashed into the lunar surface about 3.8 billion years ago, forming Mare Imbrium - the feature also known as the right eye of the "Man in the Moon".
Research shows that traits associated with political engagement are heritable.
It sounds like science fiction: A citizenry genetically engineered to be democratic. It’s not implausible. Last month, the National Academy of Sciences issued a report touting the promise of a biological engineering technique called gene drive—particularly for dealing with public health problems such as the Zika virus, malaria, and dengue fever.
American and Russian engineers are getting closer to a new plan for cooperating in space, one that would go beyond low Earth orbit and preserve the multinational alliance forged at the dawn of the International Space Station program in 1993. Organizations on both sides are quietly toying with the idea of going back to the moon together. That is, if politics don't get in the way.
A real-time, hand-held chemical scanner with stand-off detection capabilities has been unveiled by a team of researchers and engineers from nine European countries.
The device can scan from a distance of up to 100 feet (30 m) and is capable of instantaneous, real-time, unambiguous detection.
The end of the jet age could be in sight. Innovative new electric aircraft are starting to find their way off the drawing board and onto runways, funded by startups, government agencies and the world’s biggest jet makers. They promise flights that are cleaner, quieter and safer than today’s jets, and with a fraction of their carbon footprint.
Getting clean water to communities in parched areas of the planet remains an ongoing challenge. Recent developments that harvest water from air have been proposed as a solution. However, the technology to do so consumes a lot of energy.
Rocks formed beneath the ocean floor by fast-spreading tectonic plates may be a large and previously overlooked source of free hydrogen gas (H2), a new Duke University study suggests.
The finding could have far-ranging implications since scientists believe H2 might be the fuel source responsible for triggering life on Earth.
At the foot of a giant sequoia in California's Sierra Nevada, two arborists stepped into harnesses then inched up ropes more than 20 stories into the dizzying canopy of a tree that survived thousands of years, enduring drought, wildfire and disease.
There, the arborists clipped off tips of young branches to be hand-delivered across the country, cloned in a lab and eventually planted in a forest in some other part of the world.
There seem to be as many proposed solutions to the problems caused by climate change as there are reasons given to deny its existence. One new proposal to stave off the melting of Arctic permafrost – and possible stop the proliferation of Siberian craters – is to bring back the woolly mammoth from extinction. Wait, what?
Scientists have shed light on why life on Earth took millions of years to recover from the greatest mass extinction of all time.
The study provides fresh insight into how Earth's oceans became starved of oxygen in the wake of the event 252 million years ago, delaying the recovery of life by five million years.
A new study of nearly 22,000 fossils finds that ancient plankton communities began changing in important ways as much as 400,000 years before massive die-offs ensued during the first of Earth's five great extinctions. The research suggests that the effects of environmental degradation can be subtle until they reach a tipping point, at which dramatic declines in population begin.
Want to find some awesome dinosaur species new to science? Head south. South America is clearly the place to be these days, with Patagonian predator Murusraptor barrosaensis the latest intriguingly odd animal to stomp onto the paleoscene. Like fellow Argentine Gualicho shinyae, announced last week, Murusraptor is known from the partial skeleton of a single specimen.
A group of South American ants has farmed fungi since shortly after the dinosaurs died out, according to an international research team including Smithsonian scientists. The genes of the ant farmers and their fungal crops reveal a surprisingly ancient history of mutual adaptations. This evolutionary give-and-take has led to some species--the leafcutter ants--developing industrial-scale farming that surpasses human agriculture in its efficiency.
Archaeologists have uncovered the 2,000-year-old remains of five dogs, which had been carefully buried in a pit near the Arctic Circle in Siberia. It is believed that the dogs served as pets, workers and sources of meat, but may also have been sacrificial offerings in religious ceremonies. According to LiveScience, the graveyard reveals the close relationship between the region's people and their animal "best friends" two millennia ago.
Salmon largely disappeared from our waters due to the construction of water mills, ecologists now conclude. The construction of water mills caused the destruction of the gravel beds in streams, making them unsuitable for salmon to spawn. Whereas it was previously thought that water contamination was the most likely explanation, archival research demonstrates that salmon stocks had already dwindled prior to the invention of the steam engine.
When we talk of the history of computers, most of us will refer to the evolution of the modern digital desktop PC, charting the decades-long developments by the likes of Apple and Microsoft. What many don't consider, however, is that computers have been around much longer. In fact, they date back millennia, to a time when they were analogue creations.
Deep in the limestone bowels of a lone island that lies 41 miles (66 kilometers) west of Puerto Rico, archaeologists have discovered a network of underground galleries full of intriguing art. Created by both indigenous peoples and early European visitors, the images record the first contact between two very different worldviews, as reported today in the journal Antiquity.
In the late 1970s during the construction of an atomic bomb shelter, a shattered pot was found amongst the rubble. Archeologists were baffled by the strange patterns on the vessel, which dates back to 2600 BC until Dr. Aleksandar Durman finally cracked the code: it was a calendar. Yet, unlike the contemporary Egyptian or Sumerian calendars, this European timetable was based not on the sun or the moon but rather on the stars. Central to the charting of the seasons was the constellation named after the noble Greek hunter, Orion.
Lake Huron's Manitoulin Island is the largest lake island in the world. It's so large, in fact, that it has 108 lakes of its own. Three of Manitoulin's largest lakes -- Lake Manitou, Lake Kagawong and Lake Mindemoya -- even have islands of their own, some of which have ponds of their own.
Evidence is mounting that at least part of John White’s lost colony may have ended up in Bertie County.
Archaeologists have excavated 850 square feet of the tract in question and found dozens of artifacts including bale seals used to verify cloth quality; 16th-century nails; firing pans from snaphaunce guns of the day; aglets used to form tips on shirt lace strings; tenterhooks used to stretch hides; pieces of pottery jars for storing dried and salted fish; and bowl pieces like those found in Jamestown.
The sounds of languages that died thousands of years ago have been brought to life again through technology that uses statistics in a revolutionary new way.
No matter whether you speak English or Urdu, Waloon or Waziri, Portuguese or Persian, the roots of your language are the same.
Scientists from King's College London have used a new genetic scoring technique to predict academic achievement from DNA alone. This is the strongest prediction from DNA of a behavioural measure to date.
It has been a rough year. By now, our violence is down to a pattern, and there is a choreography to our reactions.
Related: Watching violence on screen is just as damaging to children as seeing it in real-life, warns major study
Using data from the largest ever genetic study of schizophrenia, researchers have shed light on the role of the immune system.
Related: Unusual Condition Lets People See Sign Language in Colors
Few things feel worse than not knowing when your next paycheck is coming. Economic insecurity has been shown to have a whole host of negative effects, including low self-esteem and impaired cognitive functioning. It turns out financial stress can also physically hurt, according to a paper published in February in Psychological Science.
People with asthma who live near bigger or larger numbers of active unconventional natural gas wells operated by the fracking industry in Pennsylvania are 1.5 to four times likelier to have asthma attacks than those who live farther away, new research suggests.
The gravitational tug between the sun and moon is not just a dance of high and low tides: It can also trigger a special kind of earthquake on the San Andreas fault.
Alien worlds orbiting within the habitable zones of small red dwarf stars may become truly habitable if their atmospheric circulation balances the temperature extremes.
SpaceX has sent a new-style space station docking port into orbit en route to the International Space Station.
An unmanned Falcon rocket was launched early on Monday in Florida carrying 2,267kg (5,000lbs) of supplies in the Dragon space capsule along with the new docking port.
All of the books ever written, the genetic blueprint for human life and much of the other information that defines us as a species could soon be riding laser beams toward faraway exoplanets.
A new project called "Voices of Humanity" aims to send all of this stuff and more out into the "cosmic cloud," just in case something terrible happens to us here on Earth.
A new "atomic memory" device that encodes data atom by atom can store hundreds of times more data than current hard disks can, a new study finds.
"You would need just the area of a postage stamp to write out all books ever written," said study senior author Sander Otte, a physicist at the Delft University of Technology's Kavli Institute of Nanoscience in the Netherlands.
Scientists have discovered strange quantum effects hold, even over hundreds of miles. In longest test of quantum mechanics, researchers find neutrinos, traveling over 450 miles at close to speed of light, have no single identity.
Your eyes may be more sensitive than you ever thought possible.
In a study published Tuesday in Nature Communications, researchers report that our warm, wet, multicellular eyes have evolved such a high level of sensitivity that they can, on occasion, detect a single photon aimed at the retina.
Human intelligence is being defined and measured for the first time ever. It turns out that the more variable a brain is, and the more its different parts frequently connect with each other, the higher a person's IQ and creativity are.
Spot a tool-using chimpanzee in Uganda’s Budongo Forest, and you could probably say it’s come a long way – in more ways than one. Chimps here are more likely to make use of tools to gather food if they have used up precious energy reserves travelling in the previous week.
Alt: Travel broadens chimps' horizons too
Smart and often sociable, whales forge tight bonds with one another. Now it’s clear that those bonds can be stronger than death itself.
More than six species of the marine mammals have been seen clinging to the body of a dead compatriot, probably a podmate or relative, scientists say in a new study.
Half a dozen African elephants lay strewn on a riverside plain in Malawi, immobilized by darts fired from a helicopter in a massive project to move 500 elephants, by truck and crane, to a sanctuary for the threatened species.
A conservation group has created 3D printed sea turtle eggs containing GPS trackers. The eggs are set to be deployed this fall in Central America during an arribada, or mass nesting event when 90 percent of eggs will be poached from certain beaches.
Scientists have coaxed stem cells to grow new cartilage on a scaffold shaped like the ball of a hip joint. This is a major step toward being able one day to use a patient's own cells to repair a damaged joint, thus avoiding the need for extensive joint-replacement surgery.
Related: Stem Cells Could Replace Hip Replacements
Some people have theorized that self-driving cars and ride-hailing apps will lead to the end of public transport, but really, you still can't beat the efficiency of cramming a load of people into a single bus. Combine that with autonomous driving tech and you might have a whole new sort of public transport.
Delivery drones may still seem a ways off because of new U.S. commercial drone regulations requiring drones to stay within sight of their human operators on the ground. But such rules pose no problem for a U.S. startup that developed a drone capable of launching from delivery trucks and dropping off packages within the driver’s line of sight.
The creators of a drone that can autonomously map, detect, and detonate land mines say their technology could potentially clear the world of these deadly devices in less than 10 years' time. It's an ambitious goal, but one well worth pursuing. Worldwide, there are thought to be some 100 million land mines, many of which are leftover from conflicts long since finished. Every year these mines kill thousands of people, the vast majority of which are innocent civilians. The Mine Kafon Drone (MKD) wants to help change this.
The air was hot and gritty. Shehazvi had to squint to see past the sun into the edge of town, past the cars and motorcycles whizzing by, past the scorched earth, to where old buildings stood beautiful in their own way, muted pinks and oranges still curving and curling in all the right places. No rain again today.
Improving co-operation between nations' farming and forestry sectors will help reduce deforestation and improve food security, a UN report has suggested.
Between 2000 and 2010, tropical nations saw net forest loss of seven million hectares per year and a net gain in farmland of six million hectares.
An international group of scientists have analysed the DNA of 6,000 year old barley finding that it is remarkably similar to modern day varieties.
They say it could also hold the key to introducing successful genetic variation.
Nan Madol is the only ancient city ever built upon a coral reef. It is comprised of a set of almost 100 stone and coral fill platforms atop artificial islands separated by narrow channels and enclosed by an outer seawall and includes the remains of stone palaces, temples, tombs and residential domains. Yet despite the enormity of the undertaking in building the city, no records exist as to when exactly it was built, where the enormous rocks came from, how they were transported there, and for what reason it was constructed on top of a reef.
Dendrochronological and radiocarbon research by an international team led by Cornell archaeologist Sturt Manning has established an absolute timeline for the archaeological, historical and environmental record in Mesopotamia from the early second millennium B.C.
An iron ring set in the stone pillar of a 15th-century chapel in the Scottish city of Aberdeen may not look like much, but historians say it could be a direct link to a dark chapter in the city’s past — the trial and execution of 23 women and one man accused of witchcraft during Aberdeen's "Great Witch Hunt" in 1597.
The ornate, pinecone-shaped towers of Angkor Wat in Cambodia float above a vast temple complex of shrines, pools, houses, and a perfectly square moat. Today, only a small number of monks remain within the temple walls. The remaining structures have been reclaimed by trees whose roots wind around the stone like cellulose tentacles. Archaeologists have long wondered what life was like here when Angkor was the cosmopolitan heart of the Khmer Empire in the 12th and 13th centuries. Why did so many people abandon this place in the 15th century, never to return?
Researchers at McMaster University have found a rich new record of vitamin D deficiency, one that resides in the teeth of every person and remains viable for hundreds of years or more.
"Junk DNA" may be an essential part of a worm’s inheritance.
Parts of this not-so-disposable DNA serves as a “watermark” to authenticate a Caenorhabditis elegans roundworm’s own genes and distinguish them from foreign genes that need to be shut down, researchers report in the July 14 Cell.
Researchers are fanning out across the Greenland ice sheet this month to explore a crucial, but overlooked, influence on its future: red, green and brown-coloured algal blooms. These darken the snow and ice, causing it to absorb more sunlight and melt faster.
The notes used in Western music—or, more accurately, the relationships between the notes used in Western music—have a strange power. Bobby McFerrin demonstrated this dramatically by showing that an audience somehow knows what notes to sing when he jumps around the stage. He remarked that “what’s interesting to me about that is, regardless of where I am, anywhere, every audience gets that.”
Low-frequency sonar used for training and testing can injure whales and other marine life, and disrupt their feeding and mating
A federal appeals court ruled on Friday that the US Navy was wrongly allowed to use sonar in the nation’s oceans that could harm whales and other marine life.
It is common knowledge that the modern turtle shell is largely used for protection. No other living vertebrate has so drastically altered its body to form such an impenetrable protective structure as the turtle. However, a new study by an international group of paleontologists suggests that the broad ribbed proto shell on the earliest partially shelled fossil turtles was initially an adaptation, for burrowing underground, not for protection.
A British summer garden is not complete without the gentle sound of bees, buzzing among the flowers.
But up and down the country the insects may be humming a different tune. Scientists at the University of Cardiff are keen to discover if bees have accents, buzzing at a higher or lower pitch depending on their location.
The ability of finches, sparrows, and many other birds to see a visual world hidden to us has just been explained.
Birds can be divided into those that can see ultraviolet (UV) light and those that cannot. Those that can live in a sensory world apart, able to transmit and receive signals between each other in a way that is invisible to many other species.
No need to head to the movie theater or download the video game app: Angry Birds can be found right in your backyard this summer — if you live in the suburbs, that is.
Virginia Tech researchers recently found in Southwest Virginia that birds that live in suburban areas exhibit significantly higher levels of territorial aggression than their country counterparts.
Even for birds, the city life comes with extra temptations -- chiefly, a plethora of potential mates. But new research shows, even in the city, Peregrine falcons remain committed to their partners.
Ten years after a federal agent crashed a pow-wow of a Texas tribe and seized their ceremonial eagle feathers, the tribe has won a settlement that lets members keep the feathers — and get court costs paid, too.
"The fight wasn't for the feathers," said Robert Soto, vice chairman of the Lipan Apache Tribe of Texas. "It was for the religious rights for Native peoples."
They are not particularly clear pieces of amber. Burmite, or Burmese amber, is prized for its clarity. Instead, there are large, dark spots, air bubbles and various bits and pieces floating around. But these two chunks of amber, found in 2015 at the site of Angbamo in the northern province of Kachin in Myanmar, contain something much more valuable (at least, in the eyes of palaeontologists): feathers attached to bones.
An ancient event preserved in a piece of amber reads from left to right like an enigmatic story told in three mysterious emojis: a strand of hair followed by an insect exoskeleton next to a single mushroom.
After analyzing four years of Kepler space telescope observations, astronomers have given us our clearest understanding yet of a class of exoplanets called 'Warm Jupiters,' showing that many have unexpected planetary companions.