Newsdesk Archive
Scientists usually order laboratory mice online, but immunologist David Masopust went to more trouble. While doing research years ago at Emory University, he drove to a barn several hours away to trap the rodents himself.
Dolphins, lizards and hyenas may not be on Facebook or Twitter, but, as social species, their social networks influence every pivotal aspect of their lives: finding a mate, reproducing, becoming ill or surviving.
Species across the world are rapidly going extinct due to human activities, but humans are also causing rapid evolution and the emergence of new species. A new study summarizes the causes of humanmade speciation, and discusses why newly evolved species cannot simply replace extinct wild species.
Our ancestors evolved three times faster in the 10 million years after the extinction of the dinosaurs than in the previous 80 million years, according to UCL researchers.
Two tiny wings locked in amber 99 million years ago suggest that in the middle of the Cretaceous period — when dinosaurs still walked the planet — bird feathers already looked a lot like they do today.
A new study of the 37,000-year old remains of the "Deep Skull" - the oldest modern human discovered in island South-East Asia - has revealed this ancient person was not related to Indigenous Australians, as had been originally thought.
Alt: Could this skull rewrite human history? 37,000-year-old cranium found in Borneo may be evidence that ancient Aborigines were not the first to settle in Pacific island
A mysterious collection of nearly 100 manuscripts have been discovered in an Afghan Cave. An analysis of the texts revealed that they were owned by a Jewish family that lived along the ancient Silk Road about 1,000 years ago. The manuscripts had been written in a plethora of languages , including Aramaic, Hebrew, Persian, Judeo-Arabic, and Judeo Persian.
They could be fossilised dinosaur eggs, evidence of a long-lost civilisation, objects from outer space or simply lumps of natural cement that form over millions of years.
Scientists have been left puzzled by the origins of a set of giant ball-shaped lumps of stone found in a coal-mine in Siberia.
A new approach to gas exploration has discovered a huge helium gas field, which could address the increasingly critical shortage of this vital yet rare element.
Helium doesn't just make your voice squeaky - it is critical to many things we take for granted, including MRI scanners in medicine, welding, industrial leak detection and nuclear energy. However, known reserves are quickly running out.
Related: Water windfall' discovered beneath California's Central Valley
Researchers believe untapped consumer markets exist for ancient foods such as einkorn, emmer, and spelt, which fed large swaths of the world's population for thousands of years but disappeared almost completely during the rise of industrial farming and the green revolution.
An effort in Ecuador might point the way to a more sustainable future for the rainforest and people
Related: Tree planting at 'an all time low'
During mating season, humans might stress female bears out, but male bears stress them out more
Martin Leclerc and a colleague were only out of the vehicle for a few minutes when they heard a crash in the trees somewhere up the gravel road. They knew the bear was nearby since they had a GPS tracking collar on the animal, but getting a reading more precise than a few dozen yards away was difficult, particularly if the bear was moving as fast as this one.
Rats care about their rat buddies — unless they’re on anti-anxiety medication, it would seem.
A 2011 study found that when a free rat came in contact with a rat trapped in a container, the free rat was empathically motivated to release the distressed rat from its cell. But a new study, published in Frontiers in Psychology, noted that a rat put in a similar scenario but given an anti-anxiety medication, was less likely to free its trapped peer.
Fun-loving moneys who get drunk on alcohol have been discovered in West Africa. The group of boozy chimps come together to socialise and down some fermented sap from raffia palms.
And the smart apes have even come up with an ingenious way of sourcing the drink - through a 'leaf sponge' tool.
Related: Chimps filmed grieving for dead friend
Monkeys' social circles tend to grow smaller as they grow older, according to a recent study that researchers say could also shed some light on human behavior.
People who meditate are more aware of their unconscious brain activity – or so a new take on a classic “free will” experiment suggests.
The results hint that the feeling of conscious control over our actions can vary – and provide more clues to understanding the complex nature of free will.
Research shows that a student’s genetic makeup can have a strong influence on their academic performance.
Some interpret this to mean there is little that can be done to help those who struggle academically—and that spending extra money on these students to help them succeed is pointless. But is this the case?
Attention parents: If you’d like to see your kids do better in school, have them close their books, set down their pencils and go outside to play.
That’s the latest advice from an international group of experts who studied the value of exercise in school-age kids.
Brazil's microcephaly epidemic continues to pose a mystery -- if Zika is the culprit, why are there no similar epidemics in other countries also hit hard by the virus? In Brazil, the microcephaly rate soared with more than 1,500 confirmed cases. But in Colombia, a recent study of nearly 12,000 pregnant women infected with Zika found zero microcephaly cases. If Zika is to blame for microcephaly, where are the missing cases?
Wearing a low-cut dress in a job application photograph dramatically increases a woman’s chances of receiving an interview, new research suggests.
A French study showed female applicants were 19 times more successful in securing job interviews when pictured in revealing clothing rather than more conservative attire.
Animal magnetism may be a more literal concept than it's given credit for, according to a new study that finds that people are more attracted to their romantic partners after playing with magnets.
Birds do it. Bees do it. But the human subject, standing here in a hoodie—can he do it? Joe Kirschvink is determined to find out. For decades, he has shown how critters across the animal kingdom navigate using magnetoreception, or a sense of Earth’s magnetic field. Now, the geophysicist at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena is testing humans to see if they too have this subconscious sixth sense. Kirschvink is pretty sure they do.
Alt: Possible evidence of human ability to detect Earth's magnetic field found
New research suggests for the first time that wild boars and wart hogs have an internal magnetic compass that helps them orient themselves as they forage for food and inhabit new areas.
Dutch scientists said Thursday crops of four vegetables and cereals grown on soil similar to that on Mars have been found safe to eat, amid plans for the first manned mission to the planet.
Abundant harvests of radishes, peas, rye and tomatoes all grown on the soil were found to contain "no dangerous levels" of heavy metals, said the team from Wageningen University in the Netherlands.
New images obtained on May 16, 2016, by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope confirm the presence of a dark vortex in the atmosphere of Neptune. Though similar features were seen during the Voyager 2 flyby of Neptune in 1989 and by the Hubble Space Telescope in 1994, this vortex is the first one observed on Neptune in the 21st century.
A gem of a meteorite found in Antarctica is studded with pieces of opal, a crystal that is associated with water. The discovery lends greater strength to the idea that meteorites brought water to asteroids and may also have seeded the Earth with the liquid necessary for life to evolve.
Scientists are getting closer to directly observing how and why water is essential to life as we know it.
A study in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences provides the strongest evidence yet that proteins—the large and complex molecules that fold into particular shapes to enable biological reactions—can't fold themselves.
The way the ocean transported heat, nutrients and carbon dioxide at the peak of the last ice age, about 20,000 years ago, is significantly different than what has previously been suggested, according to two new studies. The findings suggest that the colder ocean circulated at a very slow rate, which enabled it to store much more carbon for much longer than the modern ocean.
The Siberian permafrost regions include those areas of the Earth, which heat up very quickly in the course of climate change. Nevertheless, biologists are currently observing only a minimal response in forest composition.
The amount of electricity generated using solar panels stands to expand as much as sixfold by 2030 as the cost of production falls below competing natural gas and coal-fired plants, according to the International Renewable Energy Agency.
Believe it or not, we use more of this natural resource than any other except water and air. Sand is the thing modern cities are made of. Pretty much every apartment block, office tower and shopping mall from Beijing to Lagos, Nigeria, is made at least partly with concrete, which is basically just sand and gravel stuck together with cement.
The cities of today are built with concrete and steel – but some Cambridge researchers think that the cities of the future need to go back to nature if they are to support an ever-expanding population, while keeping carbon emissions under control.
Related: How to Regrow Your Own Bones
The next time you catch your robot watching sitcoms, don’t assume it’s slacking off. It may be hard at work.
TV shows and video clips can help artificially intelligent systems learn about and anticipate human interactions, according to MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
Death is inevitable - but is it predictable? Some researchers think it might be.
They say that experiments with fruit flies have revealed a new and distinct phase of life that heralds the approach of death. It’s a stage of life they call the death spiral - and they think humans might experience it too.
A vast, largely unexplored world is being opened by hobbyists piloting robotic submarines capable of traveling hundreds of feet below the surface of lakes, rivers and oceans.
"Everybody was eating something on their way to work," says Peesapaty, who was working as a sustainable farming researcher for a nonprofit organization at the time. But it wasn't his fellow bus riders' snacking habits that troubled him. It was their plastic cutlery.
Scientists at the University of Bristol have developed a new kind of bio-ink, which could eventually allow the production of complex tissues for surgical implants.
The new stem cell-containing bio ink allows 3D printing of living tissue, known as bio-printing.
Across 163 different countries, 1,000 natural and cultural historic places constitute our most precious human heritage. UNESCO calls them World Heritage Sites, and they range from the Democratic Republic of the Congo's endangered Virunga National Park to Syria's ancient city of Palmyra to Mount Rushmore in the U.S.
Researchers from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona have revealed the latest archaeological discoveries on the origins and consolidation of the first farming societies in Upper Mesopotamia, in Iraqi Kurdistan.
Bottoms up, from the distant past. Thanks to a new method of analyzing the chemicals in liquids absorbed by clay containers, researchers have uncorked the oldest solid evidence of grape-based wine making in Europe, and possibly the world, at a site in northern Greece.
Chew on this: rice farming is a far older practice than we knew. In fact, the oldest evidence of domesticated rice has just been found in China, and it's about 9,000 years old.
Researchers from the University of Oxford have revealed that the genetic ancestries of many of sub-Saharan Africa's populations are the result of historical DNA mixing events, known as admixture, within the last 4000 years.
Beginning in the 1926, a handful of ancient burial sites began to be excavated in parts of New Mexico, suggesting that a very interesting clue to the past lay hidden beneath the unturned earth. The site, located near the Blackwater Draw in eastern New Mexico, was among the earliest of its kind, but over the course of the next decade, similar discoveries at nearby Clovis, New Mexico, would begin detailing the settlement of a distinctive culture that appeared between 11,000 and 13,000 years ago.
Archaeologists have found pottery pieces that could have been part of a jar belonging to a medicine maker of the Roanoke voyages, and even a member of the lost colony.
An international team of astronomers has reported the discovery of a new giant extrasolar planet orbiting a subgiant star so closely that it should be destroyed due to tidal interactions. However, against all odds, the planet has survived and is the shortest-period alien world orbiting a subgiant star known to date.
Astronomers scanning the sky for distant worlds have discovered two of the youngest exoplanets ever found. The two worlds, born around separate stars, are each just a few million years old – mere infants compared to the planets in our roughly 4.6-billion-year-old solar system.
Lightning flashes in the huge cloud of primeval dust and gas from which the planets in the solar system condensed may have caused formation of the puzzling objects known as chondrules ... the tiny, rounded granules about the size of poppy seeds found in stony meteorites
Colin Snodgrass is unwrapping a series of nested plastic bags with the care you would normally reserve for bomb disposal. With the first layer off, I already understand why, as a sharp, unpleasant scent invades my nostrils.
I’m getting my first whiff of eau de comète, a perfume crafted to mimic the aroma of 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko as sniffed by the European Space Agency’s Philae lander, which touched down on the comet’s surface in 2014. It really is like nothing I’ve ever smelled.
Related: What a Smell Looks Like
The world is approaching a water crisis. According to the International Water Management Institute, 33 per cent of the world's population will experience water scarcity by 2025.
One main cause is leaks. Twenty to 30 per cent of treated water is lost in systems because of this simple and fixable problem.
Microbes sampled from the Earth’s highest known geothermal vents suggest that when it comes to life in the universe, it’s not just water that counts.
“Water is necessary, but to what level?” says Adam Solon of the University of Colorado at Boulder. “If you find liquid water on another planet, to what extent is that important, or are other factors crucial?”
Ball lightning has been blamed for more UFO sightings than weather balloons and for more ghost sightings than reflections. Part of the problem is that, like UFOs and ghosts, no one can really explain ball lightning either.
Scientists say good bacteria could be the key to keeping coral healthy, able to withstand the impacts of global warming and to secure the long-term survival of reefs worldwide.
Two massive blob-like structures lie deep within the Earth, roughly on opposite sides of the planet. The two structures, each the size of a continent and 100 times taller than Mount Everest, sit on the core, 1,800 miles deep, and about halfway to the center of the Earth. Researchers suggest these blobs are made of something different from the rest of Earth's mantle, and are determined to figure out what that is.
New work from Carnegie’s Peter Driscoll suggests Earth’s ancient magnetic field was significantly different than the present day field, originating from several poles rather than the familiar two.
The American military has been perfecting the art of disguise for more than a hundred years, employing a variety of materials and mimicking natural patterns to make soldiers invisible to enemy eyes. But don’t be too impressed: insects, it turns out, have been doing the same thing for a hundred million years.
An international team of paleontologists has discovered the oldest known examples of ‘fungus gardens’ within 25 million-year-old fossilized termite nests from southwestern Tanzania. The results were published this week in the journal PLoS ONE.
People who visit parks for 30 minutes or more each week are much less likely to have high blood pressure or poor mental health than those who don’t, according to new research by Australian and UK environmental scientists.
A University of Exeter scientist has helped develop an innovative mathematical model for exploring why some individuals evolve to be genetically programmed to be nice, while others stay nasty.
Merely touching money has the power to alter our behavior. Money makes us more selfish, less helpful, and less generous towards others. One experiment, for example, had a pedestrian drop a bus pass in front of people who had just gotten money out of a cash machine or merely walked past the machine.
Government study puts the state’s high school cannabis use below the national average
Marijuana consumption by Colorado high school students has dipped slightly since the state first permitted recreational cannabis use by adults, a new survey showed on Monday, contrary to concerns that legalization would increase pot use by teens.
In a review of research on the effect of meal patterns on health, the few studies available suggest that eating irregularly is linked to a higher risk of metabolic syndrome (high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes and obesity). The limited evidence highlights the need for larger scale studies to better understand the impact of chrono-nutrition on public health, argue the authors of two new papers.
Related: Americans Are Eating a Bit Healthier, Study Says
Obese male mice and normal weight female mice produce female pups that are overweight at birth through childhood, and have delayed development of their breast tissue as well as increased rates of breast cancer. The findings come from one of the first animal studies to examine the impact of paternal obesity on future generations' cancer risk.
Bees pollinate plants more frequently in the city than in the country even though they are more often infected with parasites, a factor which can shorten their lifespans.
Related: Neonicotinoid pesticides cause harm to honeybees
Related: Sunflower pollen protects bees from parasites
A University of Toronto-led team has reported the discovery of a new lizard in the middle of the most- visited island in the Caribbean, strengthening a long-held theory that communities of lizards can evolve almost identically on separate islands.
Fish have evolved the ability to live on land many times, challenging the perception that this extreme lifestyle shift was likely to have been a rare occurrence in ancient times, new UNSW Australia research shows.
Primatologist creates ‘humankind evolution bed’, which apes key features of a treetop lair to provide a good night’s sleep
A bird's feathers, a reptile's scales, and a mammal's hairs may seem like very distinct features, but these skin appendages may come from common origins, say scientists.
Three weeks ago, scientists announced a controversial plan to create synthetic human genomes from scratch. The paper — which they published following reports about a private, off-the-record meeting — outlined an ambitious plan to build human genomes with various, medically relevant properties, like ones that are immune to cancer.
Whenever people go from one place to another, they don’t think much about the roads and sidewalks that pass beneath them. But this infrastructure, known as the public right-of-way, doesn’t work by magic. It is managed and regulated by specific laws. People don’t own the roads they travel on, but streets and sidewalks provide an easement—a right of use or passage separate from that of ownership.
Thanks to high-tech scanning, 2,000-year-old inscriptions on the Antikythera mechanism, an ancient Greek "computer," can be read more clearly than ever before, revealing more information about the device and its possible uses.
Using genetic markers, researchers have for the first time shown how cultivating a specific crop led to the expansion of a pollinator species. In this case, the researchers found that the spread of a bee species in pre-Columbian Central and North America was tied to the spread of squash agriculture.
An ancient variety of squash that was all but lost to history is now being rediscovered. Native Americans in the Great Lakes region have cultivated this squash for centuries, and now tribes are sharing the seeds with each other and with small farmers to bring the plant back.
Washington, D.C.-- When dormant volcanoes are about to erupt, they show some predictive characteristics--seismic activity beneath the volcano starts to increase, gas escapes through the vent, or the surrounding ground starts to deform.
China’s capital is known for its horrendous smog and occasional sandstorms. Yet one of its major environmental threats lies underground: Beijing is sinking.
Excessive pumping of groundwater is causing the geology under the city to collapse, according to a new study using satellite imagery that reveals parts of Beijing – particularly its central business district – are subsiding each year by as much as 11 centimetres, or more than four inches.
The first direct detection of gravitational waves—the echoes of a collision between two black holes more than a billion years ago—was the astronomer’s equivalent of coming across a spectacular, never-before-seen fossil.
Now, a new simulation of the universe aims to reconstruct that fossil by unraveling how the black holes formed in the first place.
A sleeping giant at the center of a galaxy has awoken: A normally dormant, monster black hole has been found shredding a star that ventured too close to the cosmic beast.
In February, scientists at the LIGO observatory made history when they announced the first ever detection of gravitational waves. These ripples in the fabric of space-time came from two black holes that spun around each other several times per second before merging in a violent, energetic explosion.
Astronomers have presented one of the most complete models of matter in the universe and predict hundreds of massive black hole mergers each year observable with the second generation of gravitational wave detectors.
A gravity wave passing by Earth may have left a clue to solving a major mystery: the nature of the unseen “dark matter” that makes up most of the mass of the universe.
Researchers announced earlier this year that an experiment called LIGO had observed a gravity wave caused by two black holes colliding in deep space.
For the first time, physicists have used a primitive quantum computer to simulate the spontaneous creation of particle-antiparticle pairs.
All life on the planet relies, in one way or another, on a process called carbon fixation: the ability of plants, algae and certain bacteria to "pump" carbon dioxide (CO2) from the environment, add solar or other energy and turn it into the sugars that are the required starting point needed for life processes.
Solar power is totally peaking right now, smashing through cost barriers that previously held the technology back, to the extent that in some parts of the world, surplus energy from sunlight is being given away for free.
There’s a chance it could bring the mood down. Having chosen your shiny new driverless car, only one question remains on the order form: whether your spangly, futuristic vehicle be willing to kill you?
FOR the past few months, a factory in China has been spitting out a new kind of smartphone. Inside each is an antenna that was 3D-printed directly onto the plastic housing.
It doesn’t sound like much, but this ability to print electronic components at the scale and speed required by the smartphone industry is new. It has the potential to usher in a world where sensors and electronics are embedded in everything around us.
A robot in Russia caused an unusual traffic jam last week after it "escaped" from a research lab, and now, the artificially intelligent bot is making headlines again after it reportedly tried to flee a second time, according to news reports.
Scientists have figured out how microbes can suck energy from rocks. Such life-forms might be more widespread than anyone anticipated.
Scientists have discovered an unexpected mineral in a rock sample at Gale Crater on Mars, a finding that may alter our understanding of how the planet evolved.
Pluto probably has a liquid ocean sandwiched between a rocky core and an icy shell.
When NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft flew by the tiny world in July 2015, it captured the sharpest-ever images of the planet’s surface. That close-up helped Noah Hammond of Brown University in Rhode Island and colleagues show that Pluto never formed a bizarre phase of ice that would solidify its ocean for good.
With eruptions of ice and water vapor, and an ocean covered by an ice shell, Saturn's moon Enceladus is one of the most fascinating in the Solar System, especially as interpretations of data provided by the Cassini spacecraft have been contradictory until now.
A bid to clear the Pacific of its plastic debris has moved a step closer with the launch of the biggest prototype clean-up boom yet by the Dutch environment minister at a port in The Hague.
On Thursday the 100 metre-long barrier will be towed 12 miles (20km) out to sea for a year of sensor-monitored tests, before being scaled up for real-life trials off the Japanese coast at the end of next year.
Clouds may have a net warming or cooling effect on climate, depending on their thickness and altitude. Artificially formed clouds called contrails form due to aircraft effluent. In a cloudless sky, contrails are thought to have minimal effect on climate.
Analysis of nearly three decades of air samples from Alaska's North Slope shows little change in long-term methane emissions despite significant Arctic warming over that time period, according to new research published in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.
Climate change, habitat destruction, extinctions — the Earth has seen it all before, thousands of years ago. And humans may have been partly to blame for many of those changes in nature, too.
An international research team has discovered spectacular artifacts during its ongoing excavation of the famous Antikythera Shipwreck (circa 65 B.C.) this month. The shipwreck is located off the Greek island of Antikythera in the Aegean Sea.
Thousands of years ago in a bustling port near Athens, Greece, a massive structure housed hundreds of warships that likely took part in a pivotal Greek victory against the Persian Empire.
The ships, named "triremes" for their three rows of oars, are long gone.
It’s pretty safe to say that a foot-long common fish is not on many people’s lists of go-to party drugs, but the the innocuously named salema porgy was a go-to recreational hallucinogen for folks in the Roman Empire, used in Polynesian rituals and is known in Arabic as “the fish that makes dreams.”
Leave it to scientists to take something as awesome as chocolate and make it even better.
By running liquid chocolate through an electric field, they were able to remove up to 20% of the fat while making the end product tastier.
The development of food allergies in mice can be linked to what their gut bacteria are being fed, reports a study published June 21 in Cell Reports. Rodents that received a diet with average calories, sugar, and fiber content from birth were shown to have more severe peanut allergies than those that received a high-fiber diet.
A pair of researchers with Leiden University in The Netherlands has found via experimentation that at least two types of birds are able to learn the rules that define abstract grammatical structures.
Cognitive biologists studied tool-related decisionmaking in an Indonesian cockatoo. They found that the animals seemed to carefully ponder about their choices: while doing so the animals scrutinized details such as differences in quality between the two food rewards, but also the functionality of the available tool as means to obtain the out-of reach food in the situation at hand.
Related: How Slime Molds Make Decisions