Newsdesk Archive

Scientists have discovered slime mould — a single-cell organism at the bottom of the food chain — can learn. The finding has important implications for understanding the evolution of intelligence, as well as how many organisms can be "smart" and successful without a brain.

Plants have an incredible knack for greening and flowering in sync with the seasons. We’ve been trying to figure out how they do it for years, and now, scientists have uncovered evidence that memory is involved. Of course, we aren’t talking about memories stored in neurons. It’s something much stranger. Alt: Prions, the misfolded proteins that are known for causing degenerative illnesses in animals and humans, may have been spotted for the first time in plants.

Insects are conscious, egocentric beings, argue Australian scientists in a new paper that suggests basic consciousness may have first evolved in insects in the Cambrian Period. Recent neuroimaging suggests insects are fully hardwired for both consciousness and egocentric behaviour, providing strong evidence that organisms from flies to fleas exhibit both.

Chinese manufacturers and Internet giants are in hot pursuit of their US counterparts in the race to design driverless cars, but the route to market is still littered with potholes. While Google has been working on autonomous vehicles for at least six years, with the likes of BMW, Volvo and Toyota in its wake, more recently Chinese businesses have entered the race, from Internet search giant Baidu to manufacturer Changan.

Building off the powerful gene-editing technology known as CRISPR, researchers have created a new tool that can target and change a single letter in a sequence of DNA. The new technique, known as base editing, can be programmed to turn the DNA base cytosine (known in the DNA alphabet as C) into the base uracil, which acts like a thymine (known as T).

An international team of astronomers led by Dr. Andrea Kunder of the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP) in Germany has discovered that the central 2000 light years within the Milky Way Galaxy hosts an ancient population of stars. These stars are more than 10 billion years old and their orbits in space preserve the early history of the formation of the Milky Way.

On Sept. 14, waves of energy traveling for more than a billion years gently rattled space-time in the vicinity of Earth. The disturbance, produced by a pair of merging black holes, was captured by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) facilities in Hanford, Washington, and Livingston, Louisiana. This event marked the first-ever detection of gravitational waves and opens a new scientific window on how the universe works.

Small objects like electrons and atoms behave according to quantum mechanics, with quantum effects like superposition, entanglement and teleportation. One of the most intriguing questions in modern science is if large objects – like a coffee cup - could also show this behavior. Scientists at the TU Delft have taken the next step towards observing quantum effects at everyday temperatures in large objects.

All light sources work by absorbing energy – for example, from an electric current – and emit energy as light. But the energy can also be lost as heat and it is therefore important that the light sources emit the light as quickly as possible, before the energy is lost as heat. Superfast light sources can be used, for example, in laser lights, LED lights and in single-photon light sources for quantum technology.

It’s the ultimate light show that happens above clouds during thunderstorms. Weird lights up to a dozen kilometres long called blue jets, mysterious blue blobs called glimpses and upward slithers of red light called C-sprites have all been recorded from the International Space Station.

For the first time ever, scientists have captured images of the flash of light that sparks at the very moment a human sperm cell makes contact with an egg. The phenomenon has been observed in animals before, but no one’s ever seen the spark of human conception. And what’s even more incredible is the fact that some eggs burn brighter than others, which is a direct indication of their ability to develop into a healthy embryo, a team from Northwestern University found.

The intensity of artificial lighting has been shown to have a range of effects on our mood and our ability to concentrate. New research explores the color of lighting and its effect on our cognitive performance. The study, published in in the journal Optics Express, from The Optical Society (OSA), was conducted by Kyungah Choi and Hyeon-Jeong Suk, associate professor of industrial design at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) in South Korea and head of the Institute's "color laboratory."

Psychedelic drugs may help curb domestic violence committed by men with substance abuse problems, according to a new study. The study found that 42 percent of US adult male inmates who did not take psychedelic drugs were arrested within six years for domestic battery after their release, compared to a rate of 27 percent for those who had taken drugs such as LSD, psilocybin (commonly known as magic mushrooms) and MDMA (ecstasy).

For the first time in history, researchers have isolated the parts of the human genome that could explain the differences in how humans experience happiness. These are the findings of a large-scale international study in over 298,000 people.

The teenagers who were hooked on Pac-Man in the arcades and amusement parks of the early 1970s are getting ready for retirement, but many of them have never stopped playing video games. In fact, it doesn't look like they are going to stop gaming anytime soon.

Something unusual happened at the Pembroke College Chapel in Cambridge, England, over the weekend: A trio of musicians performed songs that hadn't been heard in over 1,000 years. But playing the music, which came from the Roman philosopher Boethius’ influential work The Consolation of Philosophy, was not just a matter of just reading its notation.

Several Native American tribes have passed down legends of a race of white giants who were wiped out. We’ll take a look at a few such legends, including those among the Choctaw and the Comanches of the United States down to the Manta of Peru.

A solid-gold cross depicting Jesus with his arms outstretched may be Denmark's oldest crucifix, dating back more than 1,100 years. The gorgeous pendant was unearthed in March by a hobbyist with a metal detector. Found in a field on the island of Funen, Denmark, the Viking jewelry piece may have been worn by a Viking woman, according to the Viking Museum at Ladby, where the pendant was on display.

One of the things that the Vikings are renowned for is their seafaring abilities. As a result of their expertise in this field, the Vikings were able to travel around Europe (and beyond) via various waterways such as seas and rivers. Archaeological traces of the Vikings have been found in many of the places where they travelled to and settled on. Such traces include runestones, burials (including grave goods), and even ships. One of the lesser known traces left by the Vikings is perhaps their graffiti.

It's rare for skeletons to put you at ease, let alone offer advice. But archaeologists in Turkey have unearthed a mosaic depicting a happy skeleton including the uplifting and wise words: 'Be cheerful, enjoy your life'.

Thirty years after the Chernobyl nuclear accident, there's still a significant threat of radiation from the crumbling remains of Reactor 4. But an innovative, €1.5 billion super-structure is being built to prevent further releases, giving an elegant engineering solution to one of the ugliest disasters known to man.

We slice them on pizza, toss them in salad and sauté them in stirfry. But have you ever thought about using mushrooms as furniture? According to the work of a team of researchers, the humble fungus is ready to leave the kitchen and take up a role as a building material.

Smartphones, tablets, and most other electronics rely on rechargeable batteries, but after a few thousand uses the batteries start to lose their ability to hold a charge. The batteries of today are mainly lithium, and over time that lithium corrodes inside the battery.

The team that's attempting to make the first solar-powered flight around the world completed another milestone Sunday, when its craft landed at Moffett Airfield in California's San Francisco Bay area. Having taken off from Hawaii, this was the ninth leg of the trip and represented the team's first return to the air since last July, after weather and repairs to its plane led to a delay in the project. Related: Boaty McBoatface may not be name of new polar research vessel

In the first study of its kind, scientists have been able to measure the climatic effect of a wind farm on the local environment. The team said its experiment showed that there was a very slight warming at ground level and that it was localised to within a wind farm's perimeter.

Clear-cutting loosens up carbon stored in forest soils, increasing the chances it will return to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide and contribute to climate change, a Dartmouth College study shows. Related: Scientists uncover what makes plants 'clot'

Carbon dioxide emissions from industrial society have driven a huge growth in trees and other plants. A new study says that if the extra green leaves prompted by rising CO2 levels were laid in a carpet, it would cover twice the continental USA.

Last year, NASA researchers looked at water in the Red Planet's atmosphere and compared it to water trapped in ancient meteorites from Mars. The research suggested that roughly 87 percent of the water escaped to space. But there's ample evidence out there that Mars was once soaked in water. For example: All three rovers that landed on the surface have found evidence of it in various forms — minerals formed in water, or ancient streambeds.

Most of the cosmic rays arriving at Earth from our galaxy come from nearby clusters of massive stars, according to new observations from the Cosmic Ray Isotope Spectrometer (CRIS), an instrument aboard NASA's Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE) spacecraft.

In 2011, astronomers announced that our galaxy is likely teeming with free-floating planets. In fact, these lonely worlds, which sit quietly in the darkness of space without any companion planets or even a host sun, might outnumber stars in our Milky Way galaxy. The surprising discovery begged the question: Where did these objects come from? Are they planets that were ejected from solar systems, or are they actually light-weight stars called brown dwarfs that formed alone in space like stars?

Our galaxy is teeming with planets. Over the last 25 years, astronomers have cataloged about 2,000 worlds in 1,300 systems scattered around our stellar neighborhood. While most of these exoplanets look nothing like Earth (and in some cases, like nothing that orbits our sun), the bonanza of alien worlds implies a tantalizing possibility: There is a lot of real estate out there suitable for life.

Our Solar System sure seems like an orderly place. The orbits of the planets are predictable enough that we can send spacecraft on multi-year journeys to them and they will reliably reach their destinations. But we’ve only been looking at the Solar System for the blink of an eye, cosmically speaking.

Earth may have a new neighbour, in the form of an Earth-like planet in a solar system only 16 light years away. The planet orbits a star named Gliese 832, and that solar system already hosts two other known exoplanets: Gliese 832B and Gliese 832C. The findings were reported in a new paper by Suman Satyal at the University of Texas, and colleagues J. Gri?th, and Z. E. Musielak.

Researches at Stockholm University are getting closer to light dark-matter particle models. Observations rule out some axion-like particles in the quest for the content of dark matter. The article is now published in the Physical Review Letters.

You don’t usually think of churches as going out of business, but it happens. In March, driven by parishioner deaths and lack of interest, the U.K. Mennonites held their last collective service. It might seem easy to predict that plain-dressing Anabaptists—who follow a faith related to the Amish—would become irrelevant in the age of smartphones, but this is part of a larger trend. Around the world, when asked about their feelings on religion, more and more people are responding with a meh.

To a medical researcher, the word addiction has a specific biological meaning. But in common vernacular, it means approximately this: the state of being enslaved to a habit or practice or to something that is psychologically or physically habit-forming, such as narcotics, to such an extent that its cessation causes severe trauma.

As numbers slump at modern music festivals, traditional gatherings such as Beltane are more popular than ever, says Victoria Lambert. Last year, with friends and family, in a sloping field just off the busy A3 from London to Portsmouth, I experienced my first Beltain (more widely known as Beltane) – the ancient festival which marks the end of winter and the start of summer.

There is perhaps nothing more universal than the drive to move our bodies in sync with music. Studies show that dancing at parties and in groups encourages social bonding, whether it is a traditional stomp, a tango or even the hokeypokey. Many researchers have argued that people experience a blurring of the self into their groups thanks to the synchronization that occurs while dancing. Yet it is also possible that the exertion inherent to dancing releases hormones—like any other form of physical exercise—and these molecules are behind the bonding effect. A new study suggests both views may be correct.

The subtle impact of genetics on the age at which people lose their virginity has been teased apart by scientists and shown to have an effect on how well people fare at school. Though mostly driven by upbringing and peer behaviour, a person’s age when they first have sex is also shaped by biological factors where genes have a role to play.

Around half of all heterosexual men and women potentially carry so-called homosexuality genes that are passed on from one generation to the next. This has helped homosexuality to be present among humans throughout history and in all cultures, even though homosexual men normally do not have many descendants who can directly inherit their genes.

New research examining the DNA of North American mammoths challenges the way we categorize a species. Several species of mammoth are thought to have roamed across the North American continent. The new study results show that while mammoths clearly evolved differences in their physical appearance to deal with different environments, it did not prohibit them from cross-breeding and producing healthy offspring.

When the dinosaurs became extinct, plenty of small bird-like dinosaurs disappeared along with giants like Tyrannosaurus and Triceratops. Why only some of them survived to become modern-day birds remains a mystery. Related: Giant dinosaurs hatched with adult-like proportions

Chimpanzees use manipulative dexterity to evaluate and select figs, a vital resource when preferred foods are scarce, according to a new Dartmouth-led study just published by Interface Focus. The action resembles that of humans shopping for fruits, and the study demonstrates the foraging advantages of opposable fingers and careful manual prehension, or the act of grasping an object with precision.

Scattered on the floor of a cramped, claustrophobic cave chamber, they lay undisturbed for up to two million years in the pitch black before being discovered by a group of anthropologists. Now the fossilised remains of a mysterious early human species called Homo naledi are causing a controversy over whether they had been deliberately placed within the cave.

A significant assemblage of medieval pottery, metal, bone, antler, leather and wooden artefacts recovered from rich midden deposits, floor surfaces, occupation deposits, structural timbers, pits and hearths sheds new light upon life in the heart of the medieval burgh of Perth.

The discovery of dairy fats on ancient pottery may indicate dairying high in the Alps occurred as early as the Iron Age over 3000 years ago, according to a study published April 21, 2016 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Francesco Carrer from the University of York, UK, and colleagues.

A clinic, a morgue, and burial chambers are being excavated in the ancient city of Philadelphia in central Turkey, where archaeologists have found surgical instruments and two moon symbols on statues thought to depict Men, an ancient god of the moon and healing. The dig is being conducted in Karaman Province near Gokceseki village, and Hurriyet Daily News is calling Philadelphia an ancient health center of the Taseli region. The ruins of the city are 20 km (12 miles) north of Gokceseki.

These remains may be from the last survivors of a great pre-Incan, moon-worshipping civilisation crushed by their rivals. The bodies of members of the Chimu culture have been discovered within 15 tombs in the ancient coastal town of Huanchaco in the Trujillo region of Peru.

Least known is the kingdom of Mar Zutra, that rose to brief prominence in the period after the redaction and editing of the Talmud. Although Bar Kokhba was the last leader of a sovereign Jewish state in the Land of Israel, almost 1,900 years before the founding of the State of Israel in 1948, there are a few examples of Jewish kingdoms that existed in the Diaspora long before the modern Jewish state arose.

A rare amulet more than 3,200 years old bearing the name of the Egyptian ruler Thutmose III, Pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty (who reigned from 1479 – 1425 BC) has been discovered at the Temple Mount Sifting Project located in Jerusalem’s Tzurim Valley National Park within earth discarded from the Temple Mount.

An ancient song will be heard for the first time in 1,000 years this week, after a 20 year project to reconstruct it. 'Songs of Consolation', will be performed at Pembroke College Chapel, Cambridge on April 23, and is reconstructed from neumes, symbols representing musical notation commonly used in the Middle Ages.

Thousands of years ago, people of the Norte Chico civilization (also known as Caral/ Caral-Supe) lived near the coast of Peru, apparently never making war but rather spending much of their time making music, studying the night sky, practicing religion, and living in harmony with nature. Alt: Discovery of 4,500-year-old female mummy sheds light on ancient Peru

New analyses indicate that early migrants to the Western Hemisphere were descendants of the modern humans who originated in Africa and were part of the global dispersal of modern humans around the world, according to an analysis that includes a University of Kansas anthropological geneticist.

Human occupants of two caves in Northern Spain put some thought into where they placed their hand stencils on cave walls as much as 37,000 years ago, during Palaeolithic times. The topography and physical characteristics of the walls in the low light conditions of the caves seem to have mattered to them, suggest a team of researchers.

When the distinguished marine biologist threw his message in a bottle into the sea, asking whoever found it to contact him, he wasn’t expecting a speedy response. Which is just as well, because it took just over 108 years – now officially confirmed by Guinness World Records as the oldest such message in the world.

Mothers' milk guides the development of neonates' gut microbiota, nourishing a very specific bacterial population that protects the child. Now a team of researchers has identified the compound in the milk that supplies this nourishment, and has shown that it can be obtained from cow's milk, which could result in using cow's milk as a prebiotic for infants.

Our gut microbes are key to our health, but they may also shape our evolution, according to a new hypothesis. Expanding on the concept of the hologenome -- the host genome together with the genomes of its microbiota -- he argues that the host's microbiota participate in the host's evolution and at times may save a host faced with sudden environmental change by employing rarely used genes to help it adapt and survive. Related: Temporal cues help keep humans looking human

Used to be you knew which city you were in from the food, the sports team, the historic sites, even the local brew. Now a team of microbiologists discovered they can tell cities apart by their unique bacterial fingerprints.

Bacteria found everywhere from the lower atmosphere to the Amazon rainforest may help form ice by manipulating the forces between water molecules, new research suggests. The bacteria, Pseudomonas syringae, use special proteins to alternatingly repel and attract water molecules, squishing the H20 molecules into high- and low-density patches.

A team of researchers in Florida recently set out to record the “acoustic behaviour” of bottlenose dolphins while they completed a difficult maneuver. The scientists designed a container with two lids and loops of rope at each end, and placed it in the water. Inside were treats like fish and gelatin cubes.

The most characteristic feature of Darwin's finches is the diversification of beak morphology that has allowed these species to expand their utilization of food resources in the Galapagos archipelago. A team of scientists has now identified a gene that explains variation in beak size within and among species. The gene contributed to a rapid shift in beak size of the medium ground finch following a severe drought.

Researchers have developed a behavioral model that explains the complexity and diversity of social hierarchies in ants, and which scientists believe may help us understand the nature of other animal societies -- from primates to dolphins.

Not a high bar, admittedly, but they're still pretty amazing creatures...or...whatever Meet the amazing slime mold. It is not an animal, a fungus or a plant. It's not even entirely solid or liquid. Yet it pulses, moves, dances and works out mazes.

Wearing black headsets with tentacle-like sensors stretched over their foreheads, the competitors stare at cubes floating on computer screens as their small white drones prepare for takeoff. "Three, two, one ... GO!" the announcer hollers, and as the racers fix their thoughts on pushing the cubes, the drones suddenly whir, rise and buzz through the air. Some struggle to move even a few feet, while others zip confidently across the finish line.

Two sophomores at the University of Washington have been recognized for an invention that could break down communication barriers for the deaf. Their invention, the SignAloud, is a pair of sensor-filled gloves that interpret the hand movements American Sign Language users use to communicate, and converts them into speech or text that the rest of us can understand.

In September 2015, then 44 year-old CEO of BioViva USA Inc. Elizabeth Parrish received two of her own company's experimental gene therapies: one to protect against loss of muscle mass with age, another to battle stem cell depletion responsible for diverse age-related diseases and infirmities. The treatment was originally intended to demonstrate the safety of the latest generation of the therapies. But if early data is accurate, it is already the world's first successful example of telomere lengthening via gene therapy in a human individual. Gene therapy has been used to lengthen telomeres before in cultured cells and in mice, but never in a human patient.

Researchers have discovered that an injection of a protein called IL-33 can reverse Alzheimer's-like symptoms and cognitive decline in mice, restoring their memory and cognitive function to the same levels as healthy mice in the space of one week.

Lab mice that spent just two weeks in orbit showed early signs of liver damage upon returning to Earth, raising concern about what long-duration spaceflight might do to humans, researchers said Wednesday. The findings could interest the US space agency, which plans to send people to deep space destinations such as an asteroid or Mars by the 2030s — missions that will require long stays in space.

When you sleep in unfamiliar surroundings, only half your brain is getting a good night's rest. "The left side seems to be more awake than the right side," says Yuka Sasaki, an associate professor of cognitive, linguistic and psychological sciences at Brown University.

How a glimpse of the other side changes those who make it back On a sunny April afternoon in 2013, while my dad was driving home after work, a 26-year-old man in a Toyota Camry broadsided him. The impact sent my dad’s Cadillac careening into a brick retaining wall. Paramedics had to saw off the door to extract him from the vehicle.

There’s a little too much wishful thinking about mindfulness, and it is skewing how researchers report their studies of the technique. Researchers at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, analysed 124 published trials of mindfulness as a mental-health treatment, and found that scientists reported positive findings 60% more often than is statistically likely.

A British billionaire, three former presidents and a renowned Aids researcher have called for all drugs to be decriminalized at a press conference that was sharply critical of the United Nations’ latest drug policy agreement, adopted this week. Related: Legal opioid drugs have proven far more dangerous than illegal ones Related: Canada to introduce pot legalization legislation in 2017 Related: Mexico proposes raising limit on marijuana for personal use

One New York City neighborhood’s efforts to pool local renewable energy sources reflects a larger push toward decentralized power production and consumption

Neutron scattering and computational modeling have revealed unique and unexpected behavior of water molecules under extreme confinement that is unmatched by any known gas, liquid or solid states. In a paper published in Physical Review Letters, researchers at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory describe a new tunneling state of water molecules confined in hexagonal ultra-small channels - 5 angstrom across - of the mineral beryl. An angstrom is 1/10-billionth of a meter, and individual atoms are typically about 1 angstrom in diameter.

Dr. Gerald Pollack discusses his research into The Fourth Phase of Water [responsive-youtube id="TljIdPPGoLw"]

Earth is old. The sun is old. But do you know what may be even older than both? Water. It’s a mystery how the world became awash in it. But one prevailing theory says that water originated on our planet from ice specks floating in a cosmic cloud before our sun was set ablaze, more than 4.6 billion years ago. Related: Am I drinking enough? Yes, no, and maybe

The EU's Sentinel satellite system has begun monitoring six mighty polar glaciers in near real-time. The sextet - Pine Island and Thwaites in Antarctica; and Jakobshavn, Nioghalvfjerdsfjorden, Zacharae Isstrom and Petermann in Greenland - are major contributors to ongoing sea-level rise.

Antarctica may be hiding a large lake under its ice – second only to Lake Vostok in size ­– according to data presented at the European Geosciences Union meeting in Vienna this week. Such subglacial lakes are of great interest because of the possibility that they could harbour unique life forms that may have existed in isolation, locked under ice for millions of years.

Enough food can be produced to feed the world population until at least 2050 without the need to further clear forests for farmland, according to new research. Alt: Envisioning a Vegans-Only World

For hundreds of millions of years, Earth's climate has remained on a fairly even keel, with some dramatic exceptions: Around 80 million years ago, the planet's temperature plummeted, along with carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. The Earth eventually recovered, only to swing back into the present-day ice age 50 million years ago.

A new study reveals that volcanic activity associated with the plate-tectonic movement of continents may be responsible for climatic shifts from hot to cold over tens and hundreds of millions of years throughout much of Earth's history. Related: Boiling River Near Yellowstone National Park Heats Worries - "A river near Yellowstone National Park suddenly changed colors and began to boil and emit yellowish noxious gases. Some witnesses wondered if “we’re all about to die.” Is this just another volcanic vent or a sign of bad things to come?"

An international team of researchers has discovered a 1,000-km (600-mile) long coral reef sitting at the murky, muddy mouth of the Amazon river, according to new reports. The incredible discovery proves that no matter how well we think we've mapped the surface of our planet, there are still secrets left for us to discover.

As owner of some of the largest and most lucrative gold mines in the world, Newmont Mining Corporation is used to getting its own way. Not in Peru though. In a David-and-Goliath battle, community activists have, so far, succeeded in seeing off the creation of a $5bn (£3.8bn) open-caste mine next to a pristine lake.

Jesus didn’t go to church. Scholars of early Christianity have long known this. The earliest gospels that recount his life never describe him attending church. In fact, churches didn’t exist in his lifetime; rather, churches are social institutions that emerged among his followers after his death. Jesus himself appears to have gone to local synagogues (as in Matthew 4:23, 9:35; Mark 1:21, 6:2; Luke 4:16), just like other Jewish people of his day.

The geraniums grew in an oblong stone vessel, and no one ever thought much about it. But when Luke Irwin, a rug designer in the county of Wiltshire, England, hired workmen to lay electric cables under his yard, so that his son could have light in a barn when the family played table tennis, they uncovered an intricate mosaic floor of red, blue and white tiles only 18 inches down.

‘Rarely, if ever, has such a big discovery been made in a maritime context’, says Maarten van Bommel, Professor of Conservation Science and chair of the section Restoration and Conservation of Cultural Heritage at the UvA. Related: Watch Archaeologists Reveal the Vasco da Gama Shipwreck

It’s well chronicled that wave after wave of Vikings from Scandinavia terrorised western Europe for 250 years from the end of the eighth century AD and wreaked particular havoc across vast areas of northern England.

Archaeologists are speculating that 36 skeletons bound in irons and buried ignominiously in a mass grave were comrades of Cylon, who tried but failed to become the tyrant of Athens in a 632 BC coup. The mass grave dates to between 650 and 625 BC, according to the style of two small vases found among the 80 skeletons in the grave in a large, ancient cemetery near Athens.

A pair of researchers has conducted a phylogenetic analysis on common fairy tales and has found that many of them appear to be much older than has been thought. In their paper published in Royal Society Open Science, Sara Graça da Silva, a social scientist/folklorist with New University of Lisbon and Jamshid Tehrani, an anthropologist with Durham University describe the linguistic study they carried out and why they believe at least one fairy tale had its origins in the Bronze Age.

In a classical world, objects have pre-existing properties, physical influences are local and cannot travel faster than the speed of light, and it is in principle possible to measure the properties of macroscopic systems without altering them. This is referred to as local realism and macroscopic realism, and quantum mechanics is in strong contradiction with both of them. While Bell inequalities have been proven to be an optimal tool for ruling out local realism in quantum experiments, Lucas Clemente and Johannes Kofler from the Theory Division of the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics (MPQ) in Garching, Germany, have now shown that inequalities can never be optimal for tests of macroscopic realism. Their results reveal a hitherto unknown radical difference in the mathematical structures of spatial and temporal correlations in quantum physics, and also provide a better tool for the search of Schrödinger cat-like states.

Hints of a new subatomic particle at the world’s most powerful atom smasher have inspired theoretical physicists to write more than 300 papers in the past four months. Now, a journal has published four of them, forming a condensed guide to what has become a zoo of possible explanations for a mysterious anomaly in the data collected by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Related: Large Hadron Collider can be 'world's biggest rain meter'

After a decades-long search, scientists announced early this year that they had detected gravitational waves probably coming from the merger of two black holes back in September. Now, a team of scientists using NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope say they spotted a brief flash of gamma rays that occurred less than half a second after that long-sought gravitational wave signal.

The search zone is growing smaller. Astronomers have further constrained the likely whereabouts of Planet Nine: the planet that, if it exists, is more massive than the Earth and roams the outer reaches of the solar system. In January, Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown, two planetary scientists at the California Institute of Technology, speculated on the existence of a ninth planet based on an odd alignment of six distant icy bodies. Excitement rippled through the world of astronomers and many immediately joined the hunt.

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is far from done making waves in cosmic discoveries. Up next: Kuiper Belt Object 2014 MU69 a billion miles beyond Pluto. But to understand where New Horizons is going next it's important to know why Pluto was selected for a flyby mission by NASA.

Radioactive iron in moon rocks collected by astronauts on NASA's Apollo missions suggests that a nearby supernova blasted Earth a few million years ago, according to a new study. This finding supports the idea that nearby stellar explosions may have influenced life on Earth, including the evolution of humans, the researchers said.

Some of the final results sent back by ESA's Venus Express before it plummeted down through the planet's atmosphere have revealed it to be rippling with atmospheric waves – and, at an average temperature of -157°C, colder than anywhere on Earth.

Artist’s impression of how Mars may have looked about four billion years ago, with an ocean occupying almost half of the northern hemisphere. Maps of the isotopic composition of water in the atmosphere of Mars have shown just how much of the planet’s water has been lost to space, and indicate an early ocean on Mars with more water than the Atlantic Ocean on Earth.

From ancient times Earth’s place was widely regarded to be the center of everything. As articulated by the Greek philosopher Aristotle, the Earth was the innermost sphere in a universe, or world, surrounded by various other spheres containing the moon, sun, planets and stars. Those heavenly spheres, crystalline and transparent, rotated about the Earthly core comprising four elements: fire, air, water and earth.

On the Northern Plains of Montana and Canada, before the arrival of humans, a demigod known as Napi, or Old Man, once roamed with his friend and rival, Coyote, according to Blackfoot tribal legend. When Napi got tired with his wanderings he would lie down to rest, and when he arose he left behind an outline of his body made of rocks. Those outlines can still be found on the plains today – about 13 of which archaeologists call Napi figures.

The monkeys started it. About 3 million years ago, one of the most epic ecological struggles of all time – between the animals of North and South America – was at its peak. Now a fossil from Panama suggests the opening salvo actually came some 18 million years earlier, courtesy of a monkey invader.