Newsdesk Archive
A new type of ichthyosaur, an extinct marine reptile alive at the same time as the dinosaurs, has been identified by a palaeontologist from a fossil found in an old quarry in Nottinghamshire.
Eight captive dolphins just earned an early retirement: the National Aquarium, in Baltimore, Maryland, announced Tuesday that it plans by 2020 to move the Atlantic bottlenose dolphins to an ocean refuge. The sanctuary would be the first of its kind in North America, according to the aquarium.
If sharks at the Pacific atoll of Palmyra used Google Maps, they'd see a lot of red between 7 p.m. and 8 p.m. every evening.
Shark traffic in and out of the the lagoon at Palmyra Atoll, halfway between Hawaii and American Samoa, peaks during this hour, according to new research published in the Journal of Experimental Marine Biology and Ecology.
Nordic folklore speaks of a massive creature that haunted the icy seas of the North Sea, where it attacked passing vessels with gigantic tentacles.
And a conspiracy theorists claims to have spotted this mythical Kraken swimming off the coast of Deception Island near Antarctica.
Related: Has Nessie FINALLY been caught on video? Bizarre footage shows mysterious humps on the waters of Loch Ness
Despite the unprecedented extent of coral bleaching around the world, a major new study has also found "bright spots" where corals are doing significantly better than anyone expected. And the reason for the improvement is simple: it comes down to how much the coral reefs are fished by people.
A farming technique practised for centuries by villagers in West Africa, which converts nutrient-poor rainforest soil into fertile farmland, could be the answer to mitigating climate change and revolutionising farming across Africa.
Fossil fuels are holding on, but end of their reign is nigh, says a new report from Bloomberg New Energy Finance, which predicts that wind and solar will be cheaper than coal and gas generators by 2027, and electric vehicles could make up 25 percent of the global car fleet by 2040.
We’re officially living in a new world.
Carbon dioxide has been steadily rising since the start of the Industrial Revolution, setting a new high year after year. There’s a notable new entry to the record books. The last station on Earth without a 400 parts per million (ppm) reading has reached it.
Related: It Just Snowed On Hawaii’s Big Island
Earth’s plate tectonics could be a passing phase. After simulating rock and heat flow throughout a planet’s lifetime, researchers have proposed that plate tectonics is just one stage of a planet’s life cycle.
A few months ago, when European Space Agency director general Johann-Dietrich Woerner laid out a vision for his agency to lead the way in establishing an international Moon Village, I had a feeling of déjà vu. In January 2004 President George W. Bush announced his own Vision for Space Exploration, in which the U.S. would lead the world back to the moon. Once we had gone there, and humans had learned to live and work successfully on another world, we would head on to Mars as the ultimate destination.
Member states of the European Space Agency have reaffirmed their commitment to launch a rover to Mars in 2020.
Meeting in Paris, delegations agreed to put the project, which has experienced serial delays, on to a fresh schedule.
The search could be on. A new study suggests that Hubble’s successor, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), has the potential to search three freshly discovered planets to see if anyone lives there.
The planets, which orbit a star just 40 light years from Earth, were discovered last month. Researchers suggest the JWST could probe their atmospheres for signs of life after it launches in 2018.
First postulated more than 230 years ago, black holes have been extensively researched, frequently depicted, even featured in sci-fi films.
We've all seen the artists' impressions and read of their ravenous star-gobbling feasts.
Chiral molecules -- compounds that come in otherwise identical mirror image variations, like a pair of human hands -- are crucial to life as we know it.
Now, Caltech researchers have detected, for the first time, a chiral molecule outside of our solar system, bringing them one step closer to understanding one of the most puzzling mysteries of the early origins of life.
Alt: 'Twisty' Molecule Essential to Life Spotted in Deep Space For 1st Time
A large team of researchers from across the U.S. studying data sent back from Mars by the Curiosity rover has found evidence of tridymite, a type of mineral associated with explosive volcanoes here on Earth. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team describes how the rover found the sample, the testing it underwent, and why it might lead to rethinking the early history of the Red planet.
A long-lost sibling to one of Earth’s most common kinds of meteorite has finally been found. The discovery could help scientists piece together a half-billion-year-old hit-and-run, the researchers propose online June 14 in Nature Communications.
A Greek archaeologist believes he has found a fragment of the lost throne of the rulers of Mycenae, famous from ancient myth and the story of the Trojan War.
Christofilis Maggidis, who heads excavations at the site in southern Greece, said Tuesday that the chunk of worked limestone was found two years ago, in a streambed under the imposing citadel.
Georgian-Italian archaeological expedition of Ca’ Foscari University of Venice in collaboration with the Georgian Museum of Tbilisi has discovered vine pollen in a zoomorphic vessel used in ritual ceremonies by the Kura-Araxes population.
A larger glass of wine — not the amount in the glass, but the size of the glassware itself — might make you drink more.
In a new study, researchers found there was a 9.4 percent increase in wine sales (and presumably, wine consumption) when a bar switched to using larger wine glasses.
Drinking very hot drinks "probably" causes cancer of the oesophagus, a UN agency said Wednesday, lifting suspicion from coffee consumed at "normal serving temperatures".
The childhood insult “Four eyes!” may one day apply to most of us. By 2050, according to a new report from the Brien Holden Vision Institute in Australia, almost half the world will be nearsighted and require some form of corrective lens, up from a quarter of the global population in 2000.
When Mats Brännström first dreamed of performing uterus transplants, he envisioned helping women who were born without the organ or had to have hysterectomies. He wanted to give them a chance at birthing their own children, especially in countries like his native Sweden where surrogacy is illegal.
Diamonds have long been considered extraordinarily valuable, and have been traded as a commodity for thousands of years. According to the Gemological Institute of America, the stones first gained commercial popularity in India, where diamond trading began as early as the 4th century BC. During the Middle Ages, caravans that unearthed diamonds in India's rivers traded them with Western Europe, where they became coveted by the upper class.
Scientists have just come up with an explanation for how one of the rarest structures on Earth came to be, and it’s got heads spinning.
Natural quasicrystals are exceptionally scarce, and have only been found in one place since their existence was first proposed back in 1982.
Some planets around other stars – and even some moons in our solar system – could have life hidden under layers of weird high-pressure ice, in oceans far deeper than Earth’s.
Just when you were finally getting used to the idea of the existence of a massive and remote Planet Nine, astronomers have looked over the calculations, made some adjustments and now believe that there may be at least two more far-flung planets in our solar system – Planet Ten and Planet Eleven. Does this mean we should be preparing for three apocalyptic events instead of just one?
An extraterrestrial civilization could alter a planet’s orbital signal to capture the attention of off-world astronomers
What’s the best way to make sure that somebody notices you in an enormous crowd? Simple: Do something weird at the exact moment they look directly at you.
The Fermi paradox has puzzled scientists and philosophers since it was first posited more than 50 years ago by Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, who essentially asked: “Where are all the aliens?”
The sheer scale of the cosmos is hard to imagine, and even harder to put an accurate figure on. But thanks to some ingenious physics we now have a good idea of just how big it is
An astronomical calculator dating back to 60BC Ancient Greece may have also been used to predict the future, researchers have revealed.
The Antikythera Mechanism, described as "the world’s first analogue computer" was created 2,000 years ago and discovered in 1901 in a shipwreck off the Greek island of the same name.
Japan's most famous novelist is set to return to his alma mater and teach -100 years after his death.
Soseki Natsume is being recreated as an android by Nishogakusha University Graduate School, and will be programmed to read material out loud and give lectures.
Alt: Android version of literary giant Natsume Soseki to return to alma mater to lecture
In 100 years, many of the world's 7,000 languages could be extinct. Hundreds of years of oral storytelling will disappear in the space of a couple of generations.
The knowledge and beauty locked up in these languages is irreplaceable.
Few people have heard of the Bramble Cay melomys, but its name could go down in history as the first mammal species to be wiped out through human-induced climate change.
As recently as 1978, hundreds of these rodents (Melomys rubicola) inhabited Bramble Cay, a tiny island that forms part of the Great Barrier Reef. But there have been no sightings of the animal since 2009, and a comprehensive survey of the island has now confirmed the worst.
All 36 countries that committed to the Kyoto Protocol on climate change complied with their emission targets, according to a scientific study released today. In addition, the Kyoto process and climate-related policies, represented a low cost for the countries involved -- up to 0.1% of GDP for the European Union and an even lower fraction of Japan's GDP.
When an airplane begins to move faster than the speed of sound, it creates a shockwave that produces a well-known “boom” of sound. Now, researchers at MIT and elsewhere have discovered a similar process in a sheet of graphene, in which a flow of electric current can, under certain circumstances, exceed the speed of slowed-down light and produce a kind of optical “boom”: an intense, focused beam of light.
Yale scientists have found a way to greatly boost the intensity of light waves on a silicon microchip using the power of sound.
Writing in the journal Nature Photonics, a team led by Peter Rakich describes a new waveguide system that harnesses the ability to precisely control the interaction of light and sound waves.
The first study to systematically measure the number of neurons in the brains of birds has found that they have significantly more neurons packed into their small brains than are stuffed into mammalian and even primate brains of the same mass.
Long-tailed macaques (Macaca fascicularis aurea) on Piak Nam Yai, one of Thailand’s coastal islands, have been using stone tools for several decades — and possibly thousands of years — to eat shellfish and nuts, according to a study led by Dr. Michael Haslam from the University of Oxford, UK.
It wasn’t the first time I had looked into the eyes of a gorilla, but it was the first time a gorilla had asked me to sit down so she could check out my nail varnish.
Koko is a 44-year-old Western Lowland gorilla who communicates in sign language. I was in California to make a documentary about her life and, uniquely, Koko had to give final signoff for the film to go ahead. Despite the appalling state of my nails, she agreed.
A new equation, showing how our happiness depends not only on what happens to us but also how this compares to other people, has been developed by UCL researchers funded by Wellcome.
The team developed an equation to predict happiness in 2014, highlighting the importance of expectations, and the new updated equation also takes into account other people's fortunes.
Maybe next time buy the whole-grain spaghetti noodles.
Eating whole grains can help you live longer, according to a new analysis from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health that included results from 12 published studies and health information from more than 786,000 participants.
Millennials, the thoroughbreds of texting, may lag behind previous generations when it comes to old-fashioned hand strength.
In a study of Americans ages 20-34, occupational therapists found that men younger than 30 have significantly weaker hand grips than their counterparts in 1985 did. =
Is beauty only skin deep? Children don't seem to think so, like adults and babies, children think the uglier you are, the less trustworthy you are.
In a study recently published in Frontiers in Psychology, researchers have found that as children, how we perceive someone's trustworthiness is linked to how attractive we find them.
The first encouraging bleeps have been heard in Fr John O’Shea’s back garden in Reading, as a radar team begins the search for underground structures that could reveal the grave of another lost king: Henry I, fourth son of William the Conqueror.
In 2012, jihadists—armed to the teeth with weapons seized in Libya after the fall of Muammar Qaddafi—overran northern Mali and established a brutal, sharia regime in Timbuktu. Once a center of learning and culture, the city housed a priceless collection of manuscripts: volumes of poetry, encyclopedias, and even sexual manuals that invoked the name of Allah. Threatened with destruction, the manuscripts were spirited out of the city to safety in a thrilling, cloak-and-dagger operation.
Nagoya University-based researchers analyze ancient DNA of Neolithic domestic goats to reveal that the goats were introduced into the Southern Caucasus from the Fertile Crescent during the early sixth millennium BC, probably alongside establishment of trade links or population movement.
Some 1,800 years ago, Roman troops used "whistling" sling bullets as a "terror weapon" against their barbarian foes, according to archaeologists who found the cast lead bullets at a site in Scotland.
Weighing about 1 ounce (30 grams), each of the bullets had been drilled with a 0.2-inch (5 millimeters) hole that the researchers think was designed to give the soaring bullets a sharp buzzing or whistling noise in flight.
Nearly 100 mysterious manuscripts thought to be 1,000 years old and written by a Jewish family that lived along the ancient Silk Road have been discovered in an Afghan cave.
Scholars and historians are excited about this new cache of documents, which was purchased by Israeli antiquities dealer Lenny Wolfe six months ago.
The man who gave us Titanic and Avatar is getting aboard a documentary hunt for the mythical city of Atlantis. James Cameron has joined Search for Atlantis as an executive producer.
Reptiles rapidly invaded the seas soon after a global extinction wiped out most life on Earth, according to a new study led by University of California, Davis, researchers.
An impact calculator helps scientists paint a vivid picture of the immediate aftermath of the deadly asteroid strike.
Imagine sunrise on the last day of the Mesozoic era, 66 million years ago. Shafts of sunlight rake through the swamps and coniferous forests along the coast of what is now Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. The blood-warm seas of the Gulf of Mexico teem with life.
It’s an apocryphal image. The ignorant faces of the dinosaurs, roaring helplessly at their fate, and looking skyward as an asteroid plunged to Earth. And the sneaky, clever little mammals coming out of their hiding holes to take their rightful place. If you grew up reading about this version of things, you’re not alone.
A new study contradicts the claim that LB1, the type specimen of Homo floresiensis, had Down syndrome, and further confirms its status as a valid and distinct species of the genus Homo.
Considering humans' millennia-long struggle with famine, it's surprising anyone spent time or resources cultivating low-calorie celery. But the vegetable's original use had nothing to do with food.
Nanorods have an unusual property -- spontaneously emitting water. After further development, the nanorods could be used for water harvesting and purification, or sweat-gathering fabric.
Alt: Say goodbye to sweaty armpits: New 'wonder material' can automatically pull water away from the body
Following its warmest winter on record, Greenland’s ongoing ice melt could be gaining strength.
A new study published in Nature Communications focuses on the effects that rising temperatures and changing albedo have had on Greenland.
Atmospheric concentrations of CO2 will shatter the symbolic barrier of 400 parts per million (ppm) this year and will not fall below it our in our lifetimes, according to a new Met Office study.
In the race towards the discovery of a ninth planet in our solar system, scientists from around the world strive to calculate its orbit using the tracks left by the small bodies that move well beyond Neptune. Now, astronomers from Spain and Cambridge University have confirmed, with new calculations, that the orbits of the six extreme trans-Neptunian objects that served as a reference to announce the existence of Planet Nine are not as stable as it was thought.
Although astronomers often refer to brown dwarfs as "failed stars," scientists at the University of Delaware have discovered that at least one of these dim celestial objects can emit powerful flashes of light.
A newfound alien world is the biggest ever discovered that has two suns in its sky, like Luke Skywalker's home planet of Tatooine in the "Star Wars" universe.
Whereas the fictional Tatooine is a small and rocky world, however, the real-life Kepler-1647b is a gas giant about the size and mass of Jupiter.
LAST month astronomers from the Kepler spacecraft team announced the discovery of 1,284 new planets, all orbiting stars outside our solar system. The total number of such “exoplanets” confirmed via Kepler and other methods now stands at more than 3,000.
This represents a revolution in planetary knowledge. A decade or so ago the discovery of even a single new exoplanet was big news. Not anymore.
Could dark matter — the elusive substance that composes most of the material universe — be made of black holes? Some astronomers are beginning to think this tantalizing possibility is more and more likely.
Physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have "entangled" or linked together the properties of up to 219 beryllium ions (charged atoms) to create a quantum simulator. The simulator is designed to model and mimic complex physics phenomena in a way that is impossible with conventional machines, even supercomputers. The techniques could also help improve atomic clocks.
Light and matter are typically viewed as distinct entities that follow their own, unique rules. Matter has mass and typically exhibits interactions with other matter, while light is massless and does not interact with itself. Yet, wave-particle duality tells us that matter and light both act sometimes like particles, and sometimes like waves.
The argument is based on two premises, both of which can be disputed but neither of which are unreasonable. The first is that consciousness can be simulated in a computer, with logic gates standing in for the brain’s synapses and neurotransmitters. (If self-awareness can arise in a lump of neurons, it seems likely that it can thrive in silicon, too.) The second is that advanced civilizations will have access to truly stupendous amounts of computing power.
It has inspired astronomers, artists, musicians and poets but the Milky Way could become a distant memory for much of humanity, a new global atlas of light pollution suggests.
Alt: 80 Percent of Americans Can’t See the Milky Way Anymore
A team of researchers working at Philipps-Universität Marburg, in Germany has created a new kind of material that is able to convert a near-infrared laser beam into a visible beam of light. In their paper published in the journal Science, the team describes the material, how it was made and the possible ways it might be used.
The rise of big data and advances in information technology has serious implications for our ability to deliver sufficient bandwidth to meet the growing demand.
Jennifer Molson was 21, juggling a day job and night school to pursue her dream of becoming a cop, when she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. She woke up one morning with pins and needles in her hand, and within a week she couldn't move her left arm.
The turn of the 21st century was an exciting time in the history of genetics.
The first sequencing of the human genome was completed in 2003 and it provided numerous insights to the scientific community and society in general.
Using machine learning, researchers from MIT have developed a system that produces sound effects that are so realistic they even fool human listeners.
The new algorithm, developed by researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, can predict the precise acoustical qualities of a sound, and then simulate it in an extremely realistic way.
In Panama, indigenous tribes are turning to a modern tool to help protect their homes: drones.
Vast rainforests, which once covered more than half of Panama’s land surface, are shrinking – eaten away by development, both official and unofficial.
When you're trying to fathom a mangled relic of very old hi-tech, it helps to have the manufacturer's instructions.
For over a century since its discovery in an ancient shipwreck, the exact function of the Antikythera Mechanism — named after the southern Greek island off which it was found — was a tantalizing puzzle.
Archaeologists working in Trondheim in Norway have unearthed a human skeleton in the bottom of an abandoned castle well. The skeleton provides evidence that confirms dramatic historical events mentioned in the Viking Sagas.
Theories on the fringe of science sometimes slowly work their way into the core as the evidence accumulates.
“A classic example is the continental drift [theory],” said cultural geographer Stephen C. Jett, professor emeritus at the University of California–Davis. “In 1955, if you believed in continental drift, you were laughed at. In 1965, if you didn’t believe in continental drift, you were laughed at.”
That India has many thousands of megaliths is something that deserves to be more widely known. These monuments include Menhirs (tall standing stones), alignments, avenues, stone circles, cysts, dolmens, barrows, rock cut chambers and more. Professor KP Rao, Professor of History at University of Hyderabad is the great authority on these monuments and he estimates there to be several thousand sites, each individual one of these containing 10 to 50 stones and some complexes have as many as 2000 to 3000 stones. All in all, India could well have more of these monuments than those of the whole of Europe.
Archaeologists in Cambodia have found multiple, previously undocumented medieval cities not far from the ancient temple city of Angkor Wat, the Guardian can reveal, in groundbreaking discoveries that promise to upend key assumptions about south-east Asia’s history.
The world’s first archaeology dig of an old world monkey culture has uncovered the tools used by previous generations of wild macaques – a group of primates separated from humans by some 25 million years of evolution.
The discovery means humans aren’t unique in leaving a record of our past culture that can be pried open through archaeology.
For most species in the animal kingdom, reproduction requires both a male and female.
But it appears that for a population of honeybees, this convention does not apply.
Mice are a mainstay of biomedical research laboratories. But the rodents are poor models for studying women’s reproductive health, because they don’t menstruate.
Now researchers at Monash University in Clayton, Australia, say that they have found a rodent that defies this conventional wisdom
The advent of plastics has given humanity a prominent materials footprint on the world. Plastics provide lots of benefits, such as convenience and low cost, but proper recycling or disposal of plastics is an ongoing challenge.
Why do deer in a group, when startled, suddenly bolt away together and never collide with each other? It's because these deer have an inner compass that allows them to follow a certain direction in order to make their escape.
Using the CRISPR gene-editing tool, scientists from Harvard University have developed a technique that permanently records data into living cells. Incredibly, the information imprinted onto these microorganisms can be passed down to the next generation.
Proposals for a large public–private initiative to synthesize an entire human genome from scratch — an effort that could take a decade and require billions of dollars in technological development — were formally unveiled on 2 June, almost a month after they were first aired at a secretive meeting.
China is speeding up efforts to design and build a manned deep-sea platform to help it hunt for minerals in the South China Sea, one that may also serve a military purpose in the disputed waters.
Buckle up, because an autonomous car-sized drone from the Chinese company Ehang is cleared to begin testing in Nevada.
The electric Ehang 184 passenger drone first debuted earlier this year at CES and has the capacity to stay aloft for more than 20 minutes.
Google co-founder Larry Page has been personally funding a pair of startups devoted to creating flying cars, according to Bloomberg Businessweek. Page has reportedly funded one startup, named Zee.Aero, with more than $100 million since its creation in 2010, and putting money into another, named Kitty Hawk, since last year.
Soaring numbers of people are suffering from swiper's thumb due to the overuse of smartphones.
New research claims the overworked digit has become as much as 15 per cent bigger on people's dominant hand.
Whether you are assembling an Ikea wardrobe or trying to fathom a mangled relic of very old technology, it always helps to have the manufacturer's instructions.
But for a century since its discovery in an ancient shipwreck, the exact function of the mysterious 'Antikythera Mechanism' was impossible to decipher because only tiny parts of its text were understood.
Last month, archaeologists found a hint of an amazing discovery while excavating in the Forbidden City in China. While the researchers were somewhat hesitant then to confirm the finding of Kublai Khan’s imperial palace, they now have further evidence supporting the idea that they have found the famous lost domain of the powerful ruler.
Fire arrows are in everything from Gladiator to Braveheart to Game of Thrones. The good guys stretch their bows in unison and rain flaming death en masse onto the opposing army, looking like total badasses the whole time. But like so many things on this terrible planet, fire arrows are too good to be true and almost no Medieval army actually used them in open warfare.
Satellites and drones helped reveal huge ceremonial platform near the ancient city’s center.
They report that the monument is roughly as long as an Olympic-size swimming pool and twice as wide. It sits only about half a mile (800 meters) south of the center of the ancient city.
Satellite images confirm the destruction of the ancient Nabu temple in Iraq, the UN said late on Wednesday, after the Islamic State (IS) group claimed to have blown it up.
The UN training and research agency UNITAR said it had analysed satellite images collected on 3 June over the ancient Assyrian city of Nimrud in northern Iraq.
For millennia, Tasmania’s Nirmena Nala rock shelter has preserved a set of stenciled handprints made by the ancestors of Australia’s Aboriginal people. The delicate ocher handprints have withstood the test of time for thousands of years, yet they likely only took minutes to destroy: in late May, conservationists with the Tasmanian Aboriginal Center (TAC) discovered that the precious artworks had been scratched over by vandals.
Diamond miners recently discovered a ship that went down 500 years ago after draining a man-made lagoon on Namibia’s coast. While shipwrecks are often found along Africa’s Skeleton Coast, this one just so happened to be loaded with $13,000,000 worth of gold coins.
Carbon dioxide has been pumped underground and turned rapidly into stone, demonstrating a radical new way to tackle climate change.
The unique project promises a cheaper and more secure way of burying CO2 from fossil fuel burning underground, where it cannot warm the planet.
Feeding a growing world population is one of the greatest challenges society faces – and fish poo could be the answer, according to a group of students at the University of Sheffield.
A team of second year undergraduates have today (8 June 2016) opened a Resilience Food Farm on campus, combining fish farming and vegetable growing – using waste from the fish as a fertiliser.
What happened to your eating utensils after your last meal? Chances are you probably left them behind, or threw them away in a nearby trash can if they were made of plastic – but now, thanks to a new product from India-based startup Bakeys, you could soon be eating your spoons just as easily as you ate your lunch. Edible Cutlery, as its called, is an upcoming line of plant-based eating utensils that are totally safe to eat.
It's now legal for doctors and other healthcare providers in Canada to help patients die.
The federal government missed its June 6 deadline to implement its assisted death legislation, Bill C-14, so provinces across Canada are taking things into their own hands when it comes to regulating how and when people can end their own lives.
Autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) are characterized by impaired social interactions and repetitive behaviors, often accompanied by abnormal reactions to sensory stimuli. ASD is generally thought to be caused by deficits in brain development, but a study in mice, published June 9 in Cell, now suggests that at least some aspects of the disorder--including how touch is perceived, anxiety, and social abnormalities--are linked to defects in another area of the nervous system, the peripheral nerves found throughout the limbs, digits, and other parts of the body that communicate sensory information to the brain.