Newsdesk Archive
By cooking up a faux comet, scientists have produced the first formation of a key sugar required for life as we know it. By creating ices similar to those detected by the European Space Agency's Rosetta mission, which made the first landing on a comet, scientists were able to produce ribose, a sugar that serves as an important ingredient in RNA, an essential ingredient for life.
A Russian billionaire and his renegade scientists are launching the most advanced search for extraterrestrials in history
Related: What is this bizarre structure found in the Egyptian desert? UFO hunters speculate after strange building is spotted on Google Earth
Related: NASA asked to explain 'Millennium Falcon' UFO that appeared in live feed
Related: Military Called to Deal With Another UFO at Indian Airport
Related: Little Green Men: A Look at the Official Soviet X-Files Investigation
The bombardment of Mars some 4 billion years ago by comets and asteroids as large as West Virginia likely enhanced climate conditions enough to make the planet more conducive to life, at least for a time, says a new study.
A Technicolor scientist surrounded by the latest virtual reality technology inspects a vial containing a few droplets of water -- and one million copies of an old movie encoded into DNA.
The company has come a long way since the Hollywood golden age, when the world gazed in awe at the lush palette of "The Wizard of Oz" and "Gone with the Wind" provided by its three-strip cameras.
For the last 10 years, a facility at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, has housed baboons with pig hearts beating in their abdomens. They’re part of an experiment that researchers there hope will help develop pig organs safe for transplant into people, about 22 of whom die each day in the United States alone while waiting for human organs that are in short supply.
In the future, we could all be wearing smart contact lenses, like the ones secret agents use in movies.
Samsung has been granted a patent in South Korea for contact lenses with a display that projects images directly into wearer's eyes, according to the Samsung-focused blog SamMobile. A built-in camera and sensors are controlled by blinking.
Abuse of prescription opioid medicines used to treat chronic pain has reached epidemic proportions, so much that the White House has announced new efforts to combat addiction and prevent the thousands of overdose-related deaths reported in the U.S. each year.
Researchers discover that touching the areas where a robot’s genitals or buttocks would be provokes a physiological response in humans
Type an email on your computer. Raise a glass to your lips. Feel for the light switch in a dark room. Simple, everyday tasks can demand subtle interactions between our hands and our surroundings, but, surprisingly, much remains unknown about the mechanics of the sense of touch.
We all know someone who just seems to thrive on drama, whether they’re directly involved in it or are gleefully spectating from the sidelines with a bag of popcorn in hand.
When words fail us, we curse. At least this is what the “poverty-of-vocabulary” (POV) hypothesis would have us believe. On this account, swearing is the “sign of a weak vocabulary”, a result of a lack of education, laziness or impulsiveness. In line with this idea, we tend to judge vulgarians quite harshly, rating them as lower on socio-intellectual status, less effective at their jobs and less friendly.
Do you care more for rules and order, or do you prefer thoughts and emotions? Depending on how you answer this, a group of psychologists at the University of Cambridge will tell you that this is linked to your taste in music.
Researchers are again exploring the therapeutic possibilities of psychedelics.
In 1970, Congress dropped psychedelics into the war on drugs. After a decade of Timothy Leary, “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” and news reports of gruesome murders, the federal government declared that the drugs had no medical use — and high potential for abuse. The chairman of New Jersey’s Narcotic Drug Study Commission called LSD “the greatest threat facing the country today .?.?. more dangerous than the Vietnam War.”
Why do we sometimes decide to take risks and other times choose to play it safe? In a new study, researchers explored the neural mechanisms of one possible explanation: a contagion effect.
Women who smoke while pregnant may alter the DNA of their developing foetus, according to an international study of more than 6,000 women and children.
Researchers have found that 13 out of 29 UV filters used in sunscreens in the US and Europe can disrupt the function of human sperm cells - with some even mimicking the effect of the female hormone progesterone, and messing with sperm mobility.
How can modern medicine include traditional bush healers whose spirits fly around at night diagnosing people’s problems?
The stifling outback heat of the early evening feels just ripe for trouble.
It’s Friday night and still over 35°C in the town of Alice Springs in Australia’s Northern Territory. It is market night, and the pubs and streets are full of people.
Stone Age humans populated the Scottish islands with red deer transported "considerable distances" by boat, said researchers Wednesday who admitted surprise at our prehistoric ancestors' seafaring prowess.
DNA analysis revealed that deer on Scotland's northermost islands were unlikely to have come from the closest and seemingly most obvious places—mainland Scotland, Ireland or Norway, said a study in the Royal Society journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
Dogs and people have been traveling the world together for possibly 30,000 years, with one exception: Australia. Archaeological evidence, from bones to rock art paintings, suggests that Australia’s native dog, the dingo, didn’t arrive down under until at least 4000 years ago. So who brought them? Two archaeologists think they’ve now identified the likely suspects in the long-running mystery.
Here’s the dirty secret about tigers: as many as 5,000 of the big cats live in the U.S. in peoples’ backyards, roadside zoos and private breeding facilities. That’s significantly more than the estimated 3,200 tigers that remain in the wild in scattered, fragmented habitats in Asia.
A rare Sumatran rhinoceros has died in Indonesia, less than a month after its discovery and capture were hailed as an enormous conservation success for a species long believed to be extinct in the region.
Aurochs roamed much of Asia and Europe for 250,000 years and were recorded by cave men in striking paintings at Lascaux, France, 17,000 years ago.
But the extinct heavy cattle could soon graze European plains again, as scientists are trying to 'resurrect' them from genes found in modern cattle.
An extraordinary vessel—part ship and part drilling rig —is being equipped in the port of Progreso, Mexico, to drill into Earth’s past. This spring and summer it will attempt to recover a thin cylinder of rock, 3 ¼ inches wide by 3,300 feet long, starting in the Eocene world about 50 million years ago, drilling all the way back into rocks created and contorted by an asteroid impact, 66 million years ago, when the dinosaurs disappeared.
A 430 million-year-old sea creature apparently dragged its offspring around on strings like kites - a baffling habit not seen anywhere else in the animal kingdom.
Scientists who discovered the fossil have dubbed it the "kite runner".
Striking evidence has emerged that an ancient virus previously known only from fossil evidence has persistently infected some humans at very low levels for hundreds of thousands or even millions of years. This ancient retrovirus is a kind of living fossil, and the discovery of an intact copy of it within the human genome poses questions as to how it has survived, and suggests others from the distant evolutionary past may lie dormant in the DNA of many species.
As a warming climate melts some of the permafrost that covers much of Siberia, ancient treasures are emerging.
Five years ago, hunters were searching there for some woolly mammoth tusks, which can sell for big money. What they happened upon, though, was priceless: The tiny snout of a puppy that had been frozen in ice since the Pleistocene era.
It may look like the boulder that chased Indiana Jones out of a lost temple, but an archaeologist claims a bizarre natural sphere found in Bosnia is far from a film prop.
In fact, he believes it is the world's oldest man-made sphere and claims it proves Europe has an advanced lost civilisation that used impressive technology more than 1,500 years ago.
The first runic inscription was discovered in 1964 on a parapet on the top floor of the southern gallery, the inscription is worn down so only -alftan, which is the Norse name Halfdan, is legible.
An ancient burial site, including an oddly shaped quartz stone covering the face of one of the newly uncovered human skeletons, has been discovered at the mysterious Plain of Jars, an archaeological site in remote central Laos littered with thousands of stone vessels.
2000-year-old bronze artifacts in the form of a can and a shovel have been discovered in Magdala, situated North West of Tiberias on the Sea of Galilee.
A team of archaeologists from the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) digging in the Galilee region have discovered temple vestiges dating to the second temple period in Magdala, situated on the western banks of the Sea of Gennesaret, the IAA said in a press release on Tuesday.
Archaeologists have called for the preservation of an ancient church unearthed on a Gaza construction site, with different ministries in the Hamas-run Palestinian enclave seemingly at loggerheads over its fate.
The site is believed to be a church or cathedral dating back to at least the 7th century.
On the wall of a monastery in Syria’s desert, jihadists from the Islamic State group left a grim warning: “The lions of the caliphate are here to devour you.”
The Syrian army on Sunday drove out the jihadists, but the damage they have caused in a place that was once a symbol of religious tolerance seems almost irreparable.
The more egalitarian a society, the smaller the chance its citizens being ritually burned, bludgeoned or crushed to death under a new canoe, research shows
Alt: Thanks to math, we can calculate the benefits of human sacrifice
For the last 14 years, twenty archaeologists, Egyptologists, and Spanish specialists have been working on the southern foot of the hill of Dra Abu el-Naga with a team of over a hundred Egyptian workers. During this time, they have united their efforts and been studying every part of the area, and scrutinizing every centimeter of a vast necropolis which is overflowing with burials from different eras.
Dr. Mahmoud Afify, Head of Ancient Egyptian Antiquities has announced the discovery of a group of 18th Dynasty tombs and a small chapel on the East Bank within Gebel el- Silsila, Aswan.
One of the best preserved ancient theatres, the Ancient Theatre of Larissa, Greece, dated back to the 3rd century BC, opened its doors to the public.
Some animals have been observed performing the same rituals over and over, leading scientists to speculate that they might have a sense of the sacred.
New research shows attaching LED lights to fishing nets can keep turtles from becoming accidentally entangled
One of the many threats facing sea turtles, all species of which are categorized as threatened, is net fishing. Turtles can unwittingly become scooped up in fishing nets as bycatch.
Hormonally active substances may contribute to global amphibian decline. Some compounds, for example from pharmaceuticals, occur in biologically relevant concentrations in freshwater ecosystems, and thus can affect the hormonal system and the sexual development of animals.
Over millennia, bacteria have evolved a variety of specialized mechanisms to move themselves through their particular environments. In two recent studies researchers used a state-of-the-art imaging technique to capture, for the first time, three-dimensional views of this tiny complicated machinery in bacteria.
A cactus doesn't need much water to live. But the quality of water can be considerably improved if you throw some cactus into it. Or precisely, the gooey stuff inside a cactus can act like a filter that purifies water that's contaminated with heavy metals or bacteria. This cleansing property of cacti is the focus of Norma Alcantar's research.
Related: Desert Cactus Purifies Water for Aquaculture and More
Whether it’s because of a treatment like chemotherapy, a result of age, or for other reasons, women's bodies can stop producing the eggs that, when fertilized, can become babies. Now researchers have developed a 3D-printed scaffolding that could restore that function. When they implanted it in female mice that had their ovaries removed, the moms gave birth to healthy pups. The scientists presented their research last week at the annual meeting of the Endocrine Society in Boston.
Researchers at the University of Copenhagen have discovered a natural process they describe as "reverse photosynthesis," by which the energy in solar rays breaks down plant biomass rather than building it, as is the case with photosynthesis. The sunlight is collected by chlorophyll, the same molecule used in photosynthesis. Combined with a specific enzyme, the energy of sunlight breaks down plant biomass, with possible applications in chemicals, biofuels or other products that take a long time to produce.
On 25 April it will be the first anniversary of Nepal’s Gorkha earthquake – the country’s worst natural disaster since the 1934 Nepal-Bihar earthquake. The magnitude 7.8 quake killed over 9,000 people and injured over 23,000. With prior warning many of those lives could have been saved. Most seismologists believe that predicting earthquakes is impossible. However, Friedemann Freund, a researcher at NASA believes he has found a subtle signal emitted in the hours before the tremors start.
The salt levels of oceans on distant Earth-like planets could have a major effect on their climates. A new study reveals that the circulation in extremely salty or fresh water extra-terrestrial seas would influence their temperatures -- and could in fact make for more habitable conditions for alien life.
New observations of a jet-emitting black hole show astonishing temperatures inside the jets of 10 trillion degrees Kelvin — a toasty 18 trillion degrees Fahrenheit. This new measurement shows that quasars can blow far past the theoretical temperature limit of 100 billion degrees Kelvin (179 billion degrees Fahrenheit), which has scientists puzzled.
One of the biggest new mysteries in our Solar System is the purported presence of a large and distant “Planet Nine,” traveling around the Sun in a twenty-thousand-year orbit far beyond Pluto. Although this far-flung world’s existence has yet to actually be confirmed (or even detected) some scientists are suggesting it might have originally been an exoplanet around a neighboring star, pilfered by our Sun during its impudent adolescence.
On Mars, formerly water-filled craters transformed to dry mile-high mounds with the help of wind, according to new research.
The results explain the geography of Gale Crater (the Curiosity rover's landing site) as well as other high-topped places on the Red Planet, and confirm that wind is currently the dominant force in Mars' geology. (Mars has no widespread plate tectonics or liquid water today).
An international team of researchers have found evidence of a mysterious new state of matter, first predicted 40 years ago, in a real material. This state, known as a quantum spin liquid, causes electrons - thought to be indivisible building blocks of nature - to break into pieces.
A system to generate electricity from coal with much greater efficiency has been designed by researchers, possibly reaching as much as twice the fuel-to-electricity efficiency of today's conventional coal plants.
Related: Mutations, DNA damage seen in Fukushima forests: Greenpeace
Related: Low levels of radiation from Fukushima persist in seafood
How much would the world save if people ate less meat?
A recent report from the Oxford Martin Programme on the future of food estimates that changes in diets could save up to $1,000bn per year on healthcare. If the world went vegan, it could save eight million lives by 2050 and trillions of dollars.
More than 640 million people globally now weigh in as obese and the world has more overweight than underweight people, according to an analysis of global trends in body mass index (BMI).
A startling increase in rates of obesity in the past 40 years means the number of people with a BMI of more than 30 has risen from 105 million in 1975 to 641 million in 2014, the study found. More than one in 10 men and one in seven women are obese.
Despite thousands of years of hard work by brilliant scholars, the great enigma of where Hannibal crossed the Alps to invade Italy remained unsolved.
But now it looks like we may just have cracked it – all thanks to modern science and a bit of ancient horse poo. As a microbiologist, I was part of the team that carried out the research.
The University of Pennsylvania and the National Library of Laos have launched the Digital Library of Northern Thai Manuscripts bringing thousands of ancient manuscripts out of monastic temples and making them available as open source material online.
The patent file for the Wright brothers' 'flying machine' - missing since 1980 - has been discovered in a limestone cave.
A cold case team from the US National Archives recently ramped up its efforts to find the missing paperwork.
A bullet fired by Lawrence of Arabia during one of his most famous acts of guerrilla warfare has been discovered in the Arabian desert by a team of archaeologists, led by the University of Bristol, confirming the accuracy of Lawrence’s own account of the attack in his war memoir Seven Pillars of Wisdom.
One of Asia's most mysterious archaeological sites, the Plain of Jars in Laos, was used as an ancient burial ground, Australian researchers say.
The Plain of Jars in central Laos is made up of 90 sites, each containing ancient carved stone jars up to three metres tall.
Five lead tablets that cursed tavern keepers some 2,400 years ago have been discovered in a young woman's grave in Athens, Greece.
Four of the tablets were engraved with curses that invoked the names of "chthonic" (underworld) gods, asking them to target four different husband-and-wife tavern keepers in Athens.
British archaeologists have solved the mystery over some ancient pieces of woven copper-alloy wires that were unearthed at a Medieval monastery.
Found in 2014 at Rufford Abbey, Nottinghamshire, the braided-together length of copper wire, turned to be part of a whip or cat-o-nine-tail used by monks for self-flagellation.
About 9 thousand years ago near today's lake ?widwie (West Pomerania) shamans performed mysterious rituals. Today, archaeologists discovered traces of this unusual activity.
In a comprehensive study, researchers have mapped the spread of indigenous settlers throughout the Americas, from their first steps off of the Bering Land Bridge some 16,000 years ago to their sudden disappearance in the 15th century. That’s when Spanish and Portuguese explorers all but wiped them from the face of the Earth.
In an incredible discovery, archaeologists from India have come across ruins of a ‘Great Forgotten Civilization’ in Mizoram.
A team of archaeologists from Archaeological Survey Of India has excavated structures at Vangchhia, in the Champai district of Mizoram that they believe are from an older civilization which might have once existed there, The North East Today reported.
Chennai - A decade after temple ruins were glimpsed during the 2004 Asian Tsunami, divers have now confirmed the existence of an ancient temple and possibly much more, off the Indian coast.
The ruins are located close to the popular tourist destination and UNESCO World Heritage Site, Mamallapuram, in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu.
Related: Underworld, by Graham Hancock
Last night a team of specialists performed a second round of radar scans inside the tomb of King Tutankhamun, as archaeologists continued investigating the theory that hidden chambers may lie behind the limestone walls.
High-resolution maps of Earth reveal archaeological secrets
Long piles of rubble underneath a canopy of ponderosa pines are all that remain of the walls Native Americans in the Jemez Mountains of New Mexico built, and then left behind, sometime after the Spanish arrived.
The religious architecture of Spanish colonists in the New World was influenced heavily by the Maya, an indigenous civilization wiped out by European colonization.
The age of European expansion into the New World was characterized by the exploitation, subjugation, and assimilation of those who were already inhabiting the lands European powers wished to make their own.
Gone are the days when archaeology was just a whole load of sand, dust and bones. These days the real explorers are all about the robotics.
As technology has progressed, archaeological tools have become more sophisticated, including the potential to undertake scientific investigation with zero disturbances of the surrounding material.
A new study indicates that the thought processes of political conservatives gives greater weight to negative information. Conservatives are significantly more likely to remember images that evoke negative emotions.
Government surveillance of the internet may cause people to self-censor and avoid voicing controversial opinions, a new study has suggested.
The study looks at how knowledge of surveillance can cause a "chilling effect on democratic discourse" online, and paints a worrying picture of the future of free speech on the internet.
Home Office confirms act will not come into effect on 6 April following confusion over definition of psychoactive substance
Related: Support for marijuana legalization has hit an all-time high
Since the advent of the internet, people have been able to discuss their symptoms with others globally. Sometimes people with very unusual symptoms discover others with similar experiences, which they are then able to discuss without fear of ridicule. Discussion forums and support groups are formed and eventually a new medical condition may be recognised. A case in point is “visual snow”, which individuals experience as bright dots persistently floating like snow across their vision. Another is trypophobia.
Mental illness is largely caused by social crises such as unemployment or childhood abuse and too much money is spent researching genetic and biological factors, psychologists have warned.
The sex of human and all mammalian babies may be determined by a simple modification of a virus that insinuated itself into the mammalian genome as recently as 1.5 million years ago, a new Yale University-led study has found.
Disks of dust and gas that surround young stars are the formation sites of planets. New images from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) reveal never-before-seen details in the planet-forming disk around a nearby Sun-like star, including a tantalizing gap at the same distance from the star as the Earth is from the Sun.
A team of researchers working at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics has announced the finding of a triple-star system—one that also as has a stable orbit planet in it. In their paper published in The Astronomical Journal, the team describes how they came to see that a binary system once thought to be a single star, was actually a pair of stars orbiting one another, and how that led to the revelation of the triple-star system.
A newly discovered star is unlike any ever found. With an outermost layer of 99.9 percent pure oxygen, its atmosphere is the most oxygen-rich in the known universe. Heck, it makes Earth's meager 21 percent look downright suffocating.
Decades of searching in the Milky Way's nearby 'twin' galaxy Andromeda have finally paid off, with the discovery of an elusive breed of stellar corpse, a neutron star, by ESA's XMM-Newton space telescope.
Rice University scientists have determined that two-dimensional boron is a natural low-temperature superconductor. In fact, it may be the only 2-D material with such potential.
UK researchers have built a small device that measures tiny fluctuations in gravity, and could be used to monitor volcanoes or search for oil.
Such gravimeters already exist but compared to this postage stamp-sized gadget, they are bulky and pricy.
Good news for sodium aficionados everywhere: The next time you feel like reaching for the salt shaker, you could just pick up your fork instead.
A prototype from the Rekimoto Lab at the University of Tokyo simulates the flavor of salt with an electric current, imbuing food with all of the flavorful goodness without increasing your blood pressure.
One promising approach for scalable quantum computing is to use an all-optical architecture, in which the qubits are represented by photons and manipulated by mirrors and beam splitters. So far, researchers have demonstrated this method, called Linear Optical Quantum Computing, on a very small scale by performing operations using just a few photons.
London: Two pendulum clocks, hung from the same wooden structure, will always oscillate in synchronicity. Called “Huygens synchronisation” after the renowned Dutch physicist Christiaan Huygens, the secret behind this 350-year-old phenomenon has now been solved.
The prescription drug underneath that childproof cap is often the culmination of myriad complex chemical reactions choreographed in huge industrial facilities on several continents, across many months of time. The future, however, could look very different.
Scientists in Japan have successfully transplanted mice with lab-grown skin that has more of the organ's working parts in place than ever before.
Starting with stem cells made from a mouse's gums, they managed to craft skin with multiple layers - as well as hair follicles and sweat glands.
Fishing gear and an engine cover are just some of the startling contents found inside the stomachs of sperm whales that recently beached themselves on Germany’s North Sea coast.
Scientists have shone a new light into the complexities of ant communication, with the discovery that ants not only pick up information through their antennae, but also use them to convey social signals.
Neuroscientists are studying elephants, parrots, and sea lions to better understand the origins of rhythm.
There are moments when we witness an animal do something so far outside its presumed repertoire of behavior—something so uncannily human—that we can never look at that animal, or ourselves, the same way again.
Maryland is poised to become the first state to ban the use of bee-killing neonicotinoids by consumers, reported the Washington Post.
Gov. Larry Hogan is expected to sign the legislation into law in April, to take effect in 2018. It will put the pesticide in the hands of farmers and pesticide professionals. Doing that is expected to go a long way toward helping bees, who feast on the poisonous topicals in consumers’ gardens.
Modern fungicides that are sprayed on fruit and vegetables have come under fresh scrutiny after scientists found they caused similar genetic changes in mouse neurons to those seen in autism and Alzheimer’s disease.
Researchers exposed dishes of the brain cells to more than 300 different pesticides and fungicides and found that one class of fungicides, the strobilurins, produced patterns of genetic changes often seen in the human conditions.
The heavily studied yet largely unexplained disappearance of ancestral Pueblo people from southwest Colorado is "the most vexing and persistent question in Southwestern archaeology," according to the New York Times.
Parish chiefs threatening to move Buckinghamshire’s most famous traffic obstruction have given in to locals threatening to chain themselves to their revered ancient glacial erractic – but what next for this mysterious little boulder?
Back in June of 2015, the archaeological world was electrified by a paper that suggested hidden rooms lay behind a wall in King Tutankhamen’s’s tomb.
Nick Reeves, the author of the paper, and a respected Egyptologist at Arizona State University, suggested that, based on detailed photographic scans of the tomb, a doorway to an unopened room was hiding in plain sight, covered up by paintings on the wall.
Alexander the Great was lucky to have very supportive women at his side throughout his life. Historical records show that he was well-protected by them and that they were his secret source of power as well
Charlemagne (known also as Charles the Great, as well as Charles I) was a King of the Franks, the first ruler of the Holy Roman Empire (though the term ‘Holy Roman Empire’ would only be coined after Charlemagne’s death), and one of the most important figures in the history of early Medieval Europe.
A team of Japanese researchers (and one from the U.K.) has found evidence in the remains of ancient Japanese people that suggests that people are not necessarily predisposed to living a violent existence or even to engaging in warfare.
Alt: Humans haven't always been violent warmongers: Japanese hunter-gatherers lived peacefully together for 5,000 years
The first large-scale study of ancient DNA from early American people has confirmed the devastating impact of European colonization on the Indigenous American populations of the time.
A new map allows us to trace our ancient human ancestry, revealing how extensively past interbreeding has affected people alive today.
The genetic analysis behind the map's creation strengthens earlier findings that modern humans migrating out of Africa and interbred with the populations they encountered in Europe and Asia. These populations consisted of at least two types of ancient humans: Neanderthals and Denisovans.
The first results of textile and dye analyses of cloth dated between 400-650 AD and recovered from Samdzong 5, in Upper Mustang, Nepal have today been released by Dr Margarita Gleba of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge.
Egypt's new antiquities minister, Khaled El Anany, sounded caution this morning at a press conference in Luxor over the claim that Tutankhamun's tomb holds two hidden chambers.
Alt: Egyptians get more scans of secret rooms behind Tut's tomb
Experts are “cautiously optimistic” that a hearth where people worked iron about 1,000 years ago in Newfoundland, Northeast Canada, was the site of a Viking settlement, says National Geographic.
This site, at Point Rosee, is the second where there is strong evidence of Viking settlements in the New World. The first, at L’Anse aux Meadows , also in Newfoundland but hundreds of miles north of Point Rosee, was discovered in 1960.