Newsdesk Archive
Researchers have achieved a new milestone in quantum physics: they were able to entangle three particles of light in a high-dimensional quantum property related to the 'twist' of their wavefront structure.
Evidence for a never-before-seen particle containing four types of quark has shown up in data from the Tevatron collider at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Illinois. The new particle, a class of "tetraquark," is made of a bottom quark, a strange quark, an up quark and a down quark. The discovery could help elucidate the complex rules that govern quarks — the tiny fundamental particles that make up the protons and neutrons inside all the atoms in the universe.
Huge cosmic voids, giant empty regions of the universe which take up space around galaxies, might not be as empty as previously thought, scientists have claimed.
In fact, these voids could contain as much as 20 per cent of the 'normal' matter in the universe, according to a team of astronomers from the University of Innsbruck in Austria.
The world owes Nikola Tesla many thanks for his amazing work and inventions that we, in the modern era, think little about. His development of alternating current (AC) generators and motors are still in use today, over 70 years after his death. However, Tesla had a different side that not many people might have known about. Tesla believed he may have had contact with extraterrestrial beings.
Related: ‘Alien craft’: Elated conspiracy theorists identified ‘UFO’ near Jupiter’s mysterious moon Europa
Related: Aliens visiting earth? Retired US naval officer claims seeing 'evidence' of UFO sightings
Related: UFO 'caught on camera' flying in the skies above London by stunned policemen
Every now and again, we all indulge in dreams about travelling in time. Wouldn't it be wonderful to return to that specific point in the past to change a bad decision or relive an experience – those halcyon days of childhood, that night you won an Oscar – or to zip ahead to see how things turn out in the far future.
Bucking modern manufacturing trends, Mercedes-Benz has been forced to trade in some of its assembly line robots for more capable humans.
The robots cannot handle the pace of change and the complexity of the key customisation options available for the company’s S-Class saloon at the 101-year-old Sindelfingen plant, which produces 400, 000 vehicles a year from 1,500 tons of steel a day.
Vanna Belton from Baltimore has been blind for more than five years, but after undergoing surgery where stem cells extracted from her bone marrow were injected into her right eye's retina and left eye's optic nerve, she has regained some of her sight.
Mechanical engineer Asegun Henry is figuring out the unique 'musical' signatures of every element on the period table to give scientists a new way of analysing their constantly shifting molecular structure - as well as science nerds like us the chance to actually hear how different arrangements of molecules and chemical bonds can behave.
Scientists estimate that there are about 8.7 million species of animals on Earth – give or take 1.3 million. But in the beginning there could be only one.
Alt: First Animal on Earth Was Likely the Sea Sponge
For most animals, symmetry is only skin deep, and new research could help us understand why.
In a study published Thursday in Current Biology, scientists identified the gene responsible for asymmetrical development in frogs and pond snails. In doing so, they hope to further understand how – and why – asymmetry arose as a preferred body plan in the animal world.
A breakthrough in understanding human skin cells offers a pathway for new anti-ageing treatments.
For the first time, scientists at Newcastle University, UK, have identified that the activity of a key metabolic enzyme found in the batteries of human skin cells declines with age.
A cure for dementia could be found within five years, the leader of the global council on the disease has said.
Dr Dennis Gillings, outgoing chairman of the World Dementia Council, said recent scientific progress had surpassed his expectations, with two potential breakthroughs now on the horizon.
The cause of a fire that destroyed a prehistoric settlement dubbed Britain's "Pompeii" was unlikely ever to be known, a forensic archaeologist said.
A "dramatic" blaze ripped through the roundhouses about 3,000 years ago at Must Farm quarry in Cambridgeshire.
You want to hold your breath, as you do when you’re underwater, when gazing upon the splendid objects that archaeologists have dragged up from the deep. Ancient vases, Classical era jars, bronze figurines, Ottoman clay pipes from the 17th century, Byzantine coins and, most surprising of all, the contents of an amphora from Sinope in the Pontus region, found off the coast of the eastern Aegean island of Fournoi: 2,000-year-old shells of shrimps that were meant to feed a ship’s crew and which are now stored in a plastic food container.
Paleontologists in Argentina have announced the discovery of a major Jurassic-era fossil site four years after it was first discovered.
The site, which spans 23,000 square miles (60,000 square kilometers) in Patagonia, southern Argentina, came to light this week with the publication of a report in the journal Ameghiniana.
Did life begin in the freezer? Early Earth may not have been as hot and hellish as we thought. In fact, it may have become a snowball around the time life first emerged.
This is according to a fresh analysis of rocks from South Africa that formed about 3.5 billion years ago, during the Archaean period. Previous research suggested that the ocean in which these rocks formed was warm – perhaps around 85°C.
Alt: 3.5 billion years ago, oceans were cool, not hot
After seemingly being put to rest last year, the controversy over a supposed “hiatus” has resurfaced, but this time with a key change in terminology that could temper the pitch of the discussion.
Monarch butterflies have made a big comeback in their wintering grounds in Mexico, after suffering serious declines, experts said Friday.
The area covered by the orange-and-black insects in the mountains west of Mexico City this season was more than three and a half times greater than last winter.
The birds and the bees need help. Also, the butterflies, moths, wasps, beetles and bats. Without an international effort, a new report warns, increasing numbers of species that promote the growth of hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of food each year face extinction.
Related: Honeybee hive collapse mystery rooted in hive size
Japanese restaurants might be serving up less whale meat next year: Iceland’s lone fin whaling company, Hvalur, just announced plans to cancel its summer hunt of endangered fin whales.
The Icelandic company’s main market for fin whale meat is Japan, but because of “endless obstacles” relating to Japan’s regulatory standards, its director, Kristjan Loftsson, decided to call the whole thing off, reports the Icelandic Monitor.
A predator's bark may indeed be worse than its bite, new research suggests.
Simply hearing a recording of wild dogs barking can keep wild raccoons from foraging along a shoreline of several small islands, according a new study.
Gorillas sing and hum when eating, a discovery that could help shed light on how language evolved in early humans.
Singing seems to be a way for gorillas to express contentment with their meal, as well as for the head of the family to communicate to others that it is dinner time.
When it comes to warfare, chimps are a bit like the ancient Greeks. They like to head into battle with a close friend at their side – a tactic that seems to lower their stress.
Many primate species, including macaques and baboons, form strong, long-lasting social bonds with particular individuals that resemble human friendship.
We've known for a long time that people will do terrible things under orders—like hurt strangers. But why are we so easily persuaded to do things we wouldn't otherwise choose, even when nobody is holding guns to our heads? A new scientific experiment sheds light on this ancient ethical question.
University College London neuroscientist Patrick Haggard and his colleagues wanted to measure what's happening in the human brain when ordered to do something, versus choosing to do something.
Almost a year ago, National Geographic told the story of Aixa, now eight years old, who lives in Avia Terai, a town in Argentina surrounded by soybeans and other crops treated with pesticides. Included was a photograph by Marco Vernaschi that showed tumors and blotches covering Aixa’s face and body.
Related: UK air pollution 'linked to 40,000 early deaths a year'
High-tech photography in the Amazon reveals that young leaves grow in at the same times as older ones perish, in strong contrast to temperate forests in North America or Europe, resulting in seasonal increases in photosynthesis that must be taken into account to build more accurate climate models.
Researchers at the University of Georgia, working with the International Peanut Genome Initiative, have discovered that a wild plant from Bolivia is a "living relic" of the prehistoric origins of the cultivated peanut species.
Alt: Tracing the birthplace of the peanut: 'Living relic' plant reveals the popular snack originated in ancient Bolivia
Champaign, IL Dr. Thomas E. Emerson and Dr. Kristin M. Hedman from the Illinois State Archaeological Survey-Prairie Research Institute at the University of Illinois present a new case for Cahokia's demise. The new theory was published in Southern Illinois University Press' volume, Beyond Collapse: Archaeological Perspectives on Resilience, Revitalization, and Transformation in Complex Societies.
On the outskirts of the ancient Roman city of Nimes in southern France, archaeologists have discovered the graves of three Muslim men that date back to the 8th century.
The finding, reported Wednesday in PLOS One, suggests the early medieval presence of Muslims north of the Pyrenees was more complicated, and perhaps more welcome, than previously thought.
Ancient records tell us that the intrepid Viking seafarers who discovered Iceland, Greenland and eventually North America navigated using landmarks, birds and whales, and little else. There’s little doubt that Viking sailors would also have used the positions of stars at night and the sun during the daytime, and archaeologists have discovered what appears to be a kind of Viking navigational sundial. But without magnetic compasses, like all ancient sailors they would have struggled to find their way once the clouds came over.
Laguna de los Condores is one of the country’s most important Inca sites – but only 150 people trek to this remote spot each year.
High in the remote northwestern Andes is a stunning mountain lake that’s held a secret for more than 500 years.
The 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill significantly altered microbial communities thriving near shipwrecks in the Gulf of Mexico, potentially changing these diverse ecosystems and degrading the historically and culturally significant ships they live on, according to new research.
Last summer, a team from Endurance Exploration Group used a remotely operated vehicle—or ROV—to recover a glass bottle, a chamber pot fragment, and a piece of china that had been sitting on the seabed some 1,000 feet below the Atlantic Ocean's surface for more than 150 years.
An 11,000 year old engraved shale pendant discovered by archaeologists during excavations at the Early Mesolithic site at Star Carr in North Yorkshire is unique in the UK, according to new research.
Australia, Papua New Guinea, and Tasmania made up one of the first regions modern humans reached after leaving Africa some 50,000 years ago. But, before Europeans arrived in the colonial era, did others follow?
Alt: Genetics reveal 50,000 years of independent history of aboriginal Australian people
University of Leicester researchers compare human male – and female- line genealogies with those of our closest animal relatives.
Chimpanzees have an ancient common ancestor – or genetic ‘Adam’ – that lived over one million years ago, according to University of Leicester geneticists.
A paper in the latest issue of the journal Nature suggests a common ancestor of apes and humans, Chororapithecus abyssinicus, evolved in Africa, not Eurasia, two million years earlier than previously thought.
Wisdom teeth may have shrunk during human evolution as part of changes that started with human tool use, according to a new study.
The research behind this finding could lead to a new way of figuring out how closely related fossil species are to modern humans, scientists added.
Ring-shaped, five-dimensional black holes could break Einstein's theory of general relativity, new research suggests.
There's a catch, of course. These 5D "black rings" don't exist, as far as anyone can tell. Instead, the new theoretical model may point out one reason why we live in a four-dimensional universe: Any other option could be a hot mess.
Evidence for a never-before-seen particle containing four types of quark has shown up in data from the Tevatron collider at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Illinois. The new particle, a class of “tetraquark,” is made of a bottom quark, a strange quark, an up quark and a down quark. The discovery could help elucidate the complex rules that govern quarks—the tiny fundamental particles that make up the protons and neutrons inside all the atoms in the universe.
We live in a universe dominated by unseen matter, and on the largest scales, galaxies and everything they contain are concentrated into filaments that stretch around the edge of enormous voids. Thought to be almost empty until now, a group of astronomers based in Austria, Germany and the United States now believe these dark holes could contain as much as 20% of the mass of the cosmos and that galaxies make up only 1/500th of the volume of the universe.
Saturn’s Cassini probe is nearing the end of its mission, but that doesn’t mean it’s no longer useful. In fact, astronomers have found a totally new purpose for the plucky little space probe and its vast trove of data: searching for the elusive Planet 9.
Related: Alien Megastructures and Dark Matter: How Imagination Fuels Science
More people than ever are hoping they have “The Right Stuff,” and more people than ever will be disappointed that they do not.
By the deadline on Thursday, more than 18,300 people had submitted their résumés in hopes of joining the next group of NASA astronauts. That includes 4,000 procrastinators who applied in the final 48 hours.
Scientist have decoded brain processes associated with the subconscious evaluation of social groups. Humans assess each other within milliseconds, deciding whether someone is likeable or not. Researchers have discovered the subconscious processes in the brain and the order in which they occur that determine how humans process social information such as likability or antipathy.
It’s no secret that when traveling abroad, people often find local residents’ body odor particularly offensive. And mothers tend to believe that other infants smell far less appealing than their own. Now, in a study published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a group of researchers has shown that the degree of disgust people find in others’ sweat may vary with group identification. In other words, disgust may depend on whether one considers the person they smell to be a member of their “in-group” or “out-group.”
A path-breaking new study on how we seek similarity in relationships upends the idea that 'opposites attract,' instead suggesting we're drawn to people who are like-minded. The study could lead to a fundamental change in understanding relationship formation -- and it sounds a warning for the idea that couples can change each other over time.
The Australian parliament passed new national laws today paving the way for the use of medicinal cannabis by people with painful and chronic illness.
Related: State lawmakers reportedly discussing legalizing marijuana
Related: Utah Senate asks Congress to reclassify marijuana
When a mother drinks alcohol during pregnancy, even a small dose, she can increase the chances that the next three generations may develop alcoholism, according to a new study. This, the authors say, was the first to investigate the effects of alcohol consumption during pregnancy on alcohol-related behavior (consumption and sensitivity to the effect of alcohol) on generations that were not directly exposed to alcohol in the uterus during the pregnancy.
Hydrogen peroxide is one of the most common and versatile of household products. In dilute form, it can disinfect wounds and bleach hair, whiten teeth and remove stains from clothing, clean contact lenses and kill mold and algae.
In high concentrations, hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) can be catalytically decomposed into oxygen and steam and used as a propellant or as an explosive itself.
As the planet grows drier, researchers are looking to nature for more effective ways to pull water from air. Now, scientists have drawn inspiration from three organisms to develop a better way to promote and transport condensed water droplets.
Swedish industrial designer Mehrdad Mahdjoubi took inspiration from Nasa to create a filtered sustainable-use shower
Alt: Would you use a shower with recycled water? Technology could save families £1,000 a year in energy bills by reusing water as it drains away
Here’s a tricky task. Pick a photograph from the Web at random. Now try to work out where it was taken using only the image itself. If the image shows a famous building or landmark, such as the Eiffel Tower or Niagara Falls, the task is straightforward. But the job becomes significantly harder when the image lacks specific location cues or is taken indoors or shows a pet or food or some other detail.
The substance that provides energy to all the cells in our bodies, Adenosine triphosphate (ATP), may also be able to power the next generation of supercomputers. The discovery opens doors to the creation of biological supercomputers that are about the size of a book.
Related: World's first parallel computer based on biomolecular motors
Sperm have been made in the laboratory and used to father healthy baby mice in a pioneering move that could lead to infertility treatments.
The Chinese research took a stem cell, converted it into primitive sperm and fertilised an egg to produce healthy pups.
In the Star Wars movies, the droid R2D2 is a heroic rebel. In living animals, a selfish bit of DNA called R2d2 is an outright lawbreaker. It violates laws of both genetic inheritance and Darwinian evolution. R2d2 can sweep through mouse populations by mimicking helpful mutations while actually damaging fertility, researchers report online February 15 in Molecular Biology and Evolution.
Young children will spontaneously invent tool behaviours to solve novel problems, without the help of adults, much as non-human great apes have been observed to do. The findings, from the University of Birmingham, are contrary to the popular belief that basic tool use in humans requires social learning.
Related: Prelinguistic infants can categorize colors
Gorillas, and particularly adult males, frequently sing and hum while they eat, finds new research.
The happy-sounding gorilla singing and humming, described in the latest issue of the journal PLOS ONE, could communicate to others that the diner is content.
Conservationists in Massachusetts plan to establish a population of native venomous timber rattlesnakes on an uninhabited island, according to the state’s Division of Fisheries and Wildlife.
Locals are so alarmed by the idea that officials are holding a public meeting on Tuesday to present their case and address concerns.
In an ancient settlement on the banks of the Tigris River in Turkey, archaeologists have made a strange discovery: 17 butchered soft-shelled turtles in the grave of a woman and child.
These river turtles were not a typical Mesopotamian menu offering 2,500 years ago, but the researchers think that, in this case, the animals may have been eaten in a funeral ritual before being buried with the dead.
Impressions of cockroach egg cases from 4,300 year old Japanese potsherds have been found in southern Japan. X-ray, computed tomography (CT) and scanning electron microscopy were used to image the impressions and reveal aspects about ancient Japanese life in this latest archaeological survey from Kumamoto University.
Sarah Parcek, an archaeologist who uses satellite imagery to track archaeological looting, wants everyone to get involved in archaeological protection through a worldwide campaign.
The wild wheat seed had travelled from Aleppo to the Arctic circle in northern Norway. It has now come almost full circle to Lebanon’s Bekaa valley, where an effort is under way to save the world’s agricultural inheritance from the ravages of the Syrian civil war.
Death Valley, one of the hottest places on Earth, is currently a riot of color: More than 20 different kinds of desert wildflowers are in bloom there after record-breaking rains last October.
It’s the best bloom there since 2005, according to Abby Wines, a spokeswoman for Death Valley National Park, and “it just keeps getting better and better.”
In the early Miocene Epoch, temperatures were 10 degrees warmer and ocean levels were 50 feet higher -- well above the ground level of modern-day New York, Tokyo and Berlin. Now a geochemist reports finding striking similarities between climate change patterns today and millions of years ago.
Vast communities of migrating deep-sea marine life are the culprits behind a mysterious, low-frequency humming sound in the ocean, made as the creatures swim to and from the surface at feeding time.
The discovery, made by University of California, San Diego assistant research biologist Simone Baumann-Pickering, answers a long-standing question.
An international team of scientists using a combination of radio and optical telescopes has for the first time managed to identify the location of a fast radio burst, allowing them to confirm the current cosmological model of the distribution of matter in the universe.
A mysterious deep space radio burst reveals where half the atoms in the universe have been hiding: in clouds between the galaxies
If a fireball hits Earth, and nobody notices, is it still a news event?
The answer is yes, because scientists are increasingly tracking the space rocks and debris that enter Earth's atmosphere. The largest meteor since the 2013 impact in Chelyabinsk, Russia, hit Earth on Feb. 6, and NASA's meticulous Fireballs and Bolides Report has ensured the news went public eventually.
More than 65 million years ago, a six-mile wide asteroid smashed into Mexico's Yucatán peninsula, triggering earthquakes, tsunamis and an explosion of debris that blanketed the Earth in layers of dust and sediment.
A mysterious religious artifact has surfaced during renovations at Bethlehem’s famous Church of the Nativity, officials say.
According to the Times of Israel, the artifact is made of brass, silver, shells and stones. It was covered in plaster and found near a window in the church that reportedly was built by Emperor Constantine and his mother Helena in the fourth century. Although officials confirmed that the artifact has been cleaned up, it is not on display, and there are no images of it as yet.
The Spanish conquest of the Americas was devastating for native peoples. Many native men died in conflicts with the invaders. Male Spanish colonists often came without their wives and took native women as partners. A new genetic analysis of Panamanian men by a team including a Smithsonian scientist shows this historical legacy: only 22 percent had Y-chromosomes of native origin, even though most Panamanians are of female indigenous ancestry.
After more than a century of speculation, an international group of geneticists has conclusively proven that the Aztecs, Incas, and Iroquois are closely related to the peoples of Altai, the Siberian region that borders China and Mongolia.
Related: DNA From Earliest Muslim Graves In France Reveals North African Origins
The recent discovery of dozens of remarkably well-preserved footprints in the southern Arizona desert provides new insights into how Native people practiced a complex system of irrigation agriculture in the region between 2,500 and 3,000 years ago. The find also offers new evidence in a long-standing debate over possible migration patterns from Mesoamerica and gives a unique snapshot of daily life at a time when people were transitioning from nomadic hunter–gatherers to more sedentary village dwellers.
In an unassuming cemetery in Estremoz, southern Portugal, archaeologists found over 100 burials dating to the 13th to 15th centuries AD. One middle-aged man, however, had a hole in his head and clear evidence of disease in his left foot. Their diagnosis? A foot fungus that has never been seen in Medieval Europe before.
Some animals are capable of magnetoreception—an added sense that helps them detect magnetic fields. European scientists have now learned that the molecule responsible for this trait is also found in the eyes of dogs and some primates, which suggests they too might be capable of seeing magnetic fields.
The predictive power and galvanizing influence that theoretical models routinely enjoy in physics is only rarely replicated in biology. Lord Raleigh's theory of sound perception, Francis Crick's sequence and adapter hypotheses, and Hodgkin and Huxley's model of the electrical dynamics of neurons are a few notable exceptions that have gone on to spawn entire scientific industries. Although it is hard to find comparable mechanistic drama unfolding in our current century, Luca Turin's vibrational theory of olfaction has been a persistently fertile seed that has now ripened into a contentious fruit.
If you’ve ever trawled the Internet for advice on how to save battery life on your phone, you’ll know that the #1 tip is pretty much always the same: switch to Airplane Mode. Why? That Wi-Fi you’re using might be one of the best things that ever happened to humanity, but it uses a crapload of energy.
Boston Dynamics has a new video showing off the latest version of Atlas—the badass humanoid robot. And it’s pretty incredible. The most striking thing about this new version is the amazing balance Atlas achieves. I’ve never seen a humanoid robot with this kind of agility.
Thanks to several million years of evolutionary R&D, the human hand is one of the most incredibly complex and sensitive tools ever engineered.
So when it comes to robotic hand design, things have traditionally been … hmm, challenging is probably an understatement. For decades, robot hand design has tended to favor function over form, drawing from the world of man-made machines rather than intricate biology.
In hills where Zulu royalty once hunted wildlife, South African conservationists now scan live video from a thermal-imaging camera attached to a drone, looking for heat signatures of poachers stalking through the bush to kill rhinos.
Han Faulkner certainly thinks so, and decided to test his theory by flying a DRONE over Area 51 - the secretive Nevada air base that has been long associated with rumours of alien activity.
It is the place where the U.S. military developed stealth technologies and the U2 spy plane - and its existence was only acknowledged by the CIA in 2013.
US astronomers announced last month they may have found a ninth planet beyond Neptune, but conceded they had no idea where on an estimated 10,000-20,000-year orbit it might be.
On Tuesday, a French science quartet said they have narrowed the search area.
If this were a Sherlock Holmes story, its title would surely be "The Case of the Disappearing Quasar."
In this case, however, the mystery wasn't solved by an aging Victorian-era detective, but by a young American astronomer at Penn State University named Jessie Runnoe and her colleagues. They study quasars, some of the brightest objects in the universe.
NASA increasingly views 3D printing as a key tool for advancing space exploration, and the technology is advancing in several directions.
A startup funded by NASA to create a zero-gravity 3D printer – appropriately called "Made In Space" – already has a prototype device on board the International Space Station (ISS), and the company said Friday that a new model is set for a March 23 launch, Dave Lee reported for the BBC.
Nasa’s Mars 2020 mission may well have company along the way, with teams in China working urgently to ready their first independent mission to the Red Planet.
“We are aiming to use the launch window of 2020,” says Dr Wu Ji, director-general of the National Space Science Centre (NSSC) in Beijing. “If we miss that window, it will be 2022. So it is quite urgent.”
If this were a Sherlock Holmes story, its title would surely be "The Case of the Disappearing Quasar."
In this case, however, the mystery wasn't solved by an aging Victorian-era detective, but by a young American astronomer at Penn State University named Jessie Runnoe and her colleagues. They study quasars, some of the brightest objects in the universe.
For all its real-life benefits and future potential for saving our entire civilisation, space travel is still a long-term effort. Current estimates from Nasa put travel time to Mars for humans at five months, at the absolute best. Slowing down once you're there in order to actually land is even harder.
Alt: NASA Thinks There’s a Way to Get to Mars in 3 Days
Researchers are mapping out how to build a human outpost in cislunar space — the region around Earth's moon.
The ongoing work is expected to help plot out other deep-space trips, such as the journey to a near-Earth asteroid and the larger leap to distant Mars.
How acidic is the ocean on Saturn's icy moon Enceladus? It's a fundamental question to understanding if this geyser-spouting moon could support life.
Enceladus is part of a family of icy worlds, including Europa (at Jupiter) and Titan (also at Saturn), populating our outer solar system. These bodies are some of the most promising places for life because they receive tidal energy from the gas giants they orbit and some contain liquid water.
The biggest fireball since the Chelyabinsk explosion has plunged through the atmosphere over the Atlantic Ocean.
The event, which has only just come to light, occurred off the coast of Brazil at 13:55 GMT on 6 February.
The hybrid electric flying car that’s been a dream for so long is finally taking shape. Terrafugia announced that they expect to have a prototype for their computer-controlled electric aerial vehicle called the TF-X released within two years.
The company says a full-sized prototype of the TF-X will be ready by 2018, and a model retailing for around $260,000 should be out before 2028.
Ruthie Weiss’s basketball team seemed to be minutes away from its fourth straight loss. But even as she stood on the sidelines for a brief rest, the nine-year-old had not given up. She convinced the coach to put her back in the game. Then, she charged out onto the court, caught a pass from a teammate and drove straight to the basket.
Researchers at The Ohio State University are working on a new way to treat drug-resistant cancer that the ancient Greeks would approve of--only it's not a Trojan horse, but DNA that hides the invading force.
In this case, the invading force is a common cancer drug.
For the first time, researchers have uncovered a unique ability in bats which allows them to carry but remain unaffected by lethal diseases.
Vaccinating wildlife with genetically-modified viruses could help stop future zoonotic diseases such as Ebola jumping from animals to humans, researchers say.
But proving the safety and effectiveness of such an approach will be a challenge, say other scientists.
Brazil is planning to fight the Zika virus by zapping millions of male mosquitoes with gamma rays to sterilize them and stop the spread of the virus linked to thousands of birth defects.
Called an irradiator, the device has been used to control fruit flies on the Portuguese island of Madeira.
Just three years after crayfish were introduced to a B.C. lake, two species of fish that had existed in the lake for thousands of years were suddenly extinct. But it's what took their place that has scientists fascinated.
New research from UBC shows that when humans speed up the usually slow process of evolution by introducing new species, it can result in a lasting impact on the ecosystem.
A 90-million-year-old fossil fish, currently on display at the Perot Museum of Nature and Science in Dallas, turns out to be a new species. Research reveals the 5.5-foot-long fossil fish to possess a tuna-like body with a unique 'hook-shaped sail' on its back. The fish's new species name, Pentanogmius fritschi, is in honor of local amateur collector Joseph Fritsch.
The first animal to appear on Earth was very likely the simple sea sponge.
New genetic analyses led by MIT researchers confirm that sea sponges are the source of a curious molecule found in rocks that are 640 million years old. These rocks significantly predate the Cambrian explosion—the period in which most animal groups took over the planet, 540 million years ago—suggesting that sea sponges may have been the first animals to inhabit the Earth.
New research suggests that the dodo, an extinct bird whose name has entered popular culture as a symbol of stupidity, was actually fairly smart. The work finds that the overall size of the dodo's brain in relation to its body was on par with its closest living relatives: pigeons -- birds whose ability to be trained implies a moderate level of intelligence. The researchers also discovered that the dodo likely had an enhanced sense of smell.