Newsdesk Archive
The first in a line of birds that would culminate with the world’s biggest bird ever has been discovered in Australia.
Researchers from Flinders University and the University of New South Wales have just published a study in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology detailing their findings on the flightless, 551-pound Dromornis murrayi, now the earliest known species in the genus Dromornis -- prehistoric birds that stood up to 10 feet tall and could weigh more than half a ton.
An extinct group of giant, armoured animals with spiky, club-shaped tails belongs firmly within the family tree of modern armadillos, according to a study of 12,000-year-old DNA.
The glyptodonts roamed South America for millions of years until the last Ice Age, and some grew as big as cars.
Few stone monuments are as recognizable as the moai of Rapa Nui (Easter Island), and few cautionary tales are as widely repeated as the sorry fate of the Polynesian society that crafted the monumental stone sentinels. The drive to create these enigmatic and enormous monuments resulted in widespread deforestation, the story goes, which in turn led to systematic warfare over increasingly scarce resources and, ultimately, complete societal and economic collapse before the arrival of the first Europeans in 1722.
He met a bloody and violent end 5,300 years ago in the Austrian Alps, but the voice of Ötzi the Iceman could soon be heard from beyond the grave.
Scientists have been analysing scans of the Bronze Age man's corpse, which was found poking out of a glacier in South Tyrol, Austria in 1991, to build up a picture of what his voice was like.
The macabre discovery of a ring of children’s skulls buried in the earth around lakes in Germany and Switzerland has revealed an age-old tradition of making offerings and sacrifices to the water gods.
Archaeologists from Basel University, Switzerland found the skulls of children forming a protective ring around the settlements in what they believe was a sacrifice to the water gods to prevent disastrous flooding.
It has long been suspected that Hitler's conquest of Europe was an attempt to compensate for a lack of potency elsewhere.
But the notorious playground rhyme about his testicles appears to have only told half the story, as a book claims the leader of the Third Reich had a micropenis.
We do not always say what we think: we like to hide certain prejudices, sometimes even from ourselves. But unconscious prejudices become visible with tests, because we need a longer time if we must associate unpleasant things with positive terms. Researchers now show that additional processes in the brain are not responsible for this, but some of them simply take longer.
Men who carry their mobile phone in a trouser pocket or talk on it for just an hour a day risk suffering with fertility problems, scientists warn.
Research shows that sperm count can also be reduced by talking on a phone that is charging, or even keeping it close by on a bedside table at night.
As diagnostic tests rely on ever-tinier amounts of blood, some scientists are striking a note of caution. As it turns out, not all drops of blood are identical.
Bioengineers at Rice University recently found that different drops from single fingerpricks on multiple subjects varied substantially on results for basic health measures like hemoglobin, white blood cell counts and platelet counts.
A small team of researchers with Australian National University Canberra, has found evidence that suggests that plants are able to reset a memory that has not been proven to be useful, in essence, forgetting things after they have been stored. In their paper published in the journal Science Advances, the team describes genetic studies they undertook with plants and what they found as a result.
The genome of eelgrass (Zostera marina) has now been unveiled. It turns out that the plant, once land-living but now only found in the marine environment, has lost the genes required to survive out of the water.
If you wanted to travel from Japan to California, you could do worse than to hitch a ride on a barnacle-covered buoy. Or maybe a barnacle-covered refrigerator or chunk of foam. Barnacles are turning all kinds of ocean trash into cozy habitats for animals at sea. They might even help some of those animals reach distant shores and become dangerous invasive species.
Mayor Denis Coderre has announced the city is banning single-use plastic bags as of Jan. 1, 2018.
"You will understand that our plan is the result of extensive analysis and thoughtful reflection," Coderre said.
Sea levels rose faster last century than during any time since Rome was founded around 2,800 years ago. Reconstructing past rises and falls in global sea level, researchers estimate that more than half of the 13.8 centimeters of sea level rise recorded in the 1900s resulted from global warming effects, such as glacial melt. The new work will appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
In the category of why-didn’t-I think-of-that ideas, Dr. Geoffrey Evatt and colleagues from the University of Manchester struck upon a brilliant hypothesis: that a layer of iron meteories might lurk just below the surface of the Antarctic ice. He’s the lead author of a recent paper on the topic published in the open-access journal, Nature Communications.
Approximately 790,000 years ago there were multiple cosmic impacts on Earth with global consequences. Geoscientists have reached this conclusion after dating so-called tektites from various parts of the world.
If your astronomical curiosity was piqued when NASA put out the call for astronauts to join its illustrious ranks, it seems like you weren't the only one.
The space agency announced this week that it's received a record number of applications from the US public for its upcoming 2017 astronaut class, with more than 18,300 would-be space cadets signing up for a chance to walk among the stars – almost three times the number it handled for its last intake back in 2012.
A frozen subsurface ocean may have caused Pluto's largest moon, Charon, to begin bursting at the seams, much like Marvel's green superhero the Hulk.
A newly released image of Charon from NASA's New Horizons spacecraft suggests that some of the fractures on that moon's surface may be the result of a once-liquid ocean beneath the surface freezing over time
A group of scientists, researchers and traditional owners is on the cusp of reshaping Australian history, with experts hoping that Aboriginal rock art in Western Australia may prove to be up to 50,000 years old, putting it among the oldest cultural expressions in the world.
Three-thousand-year-old fingerprints have been found on the lid of an Egyptian coffin by researchers.
The prints are most likely to have belonged to craftsmen handling it before the varnish dried, according to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.
Last October, two artists entered the Neues Museum in Berlin, where they clandestinely scanned the bust of Queen Nefertiti, the state museum’s prized gem. Three months later, they released the collected 3D dataset online as a torrent, providing completely free access under public domain to the one object in the museum’s collection off-limits to photographers.
Despite how far we've come in space exploration, one thing still holding us back from interstellar travel is our slow spacecraft. While we're able to propel particles to close to the speed of light in the lab, we're struggling to even accelerate spacecraft to beyond 3 percent of that. With our current technology, it's estimated it'll take humans around five months to reach Mars.
Water has left its mark in a variety of ways in this martian scene captured by ESA’s Mars Express.
The region lies on the western rim of an ancient large impact basin, as seen in the context map. The image shows the western part of the Arda Valles, a dendritic drainage system 260 km north of Holden Crater and close to Ladon Valles.
There are believed to be 700 million trillion terrestrial planets in the known universe.
Scientists have long believed that among them are worlds similar to our own.
This is known as the 'Copernican principle', which states that our planet doesn't hold a privileged position in the cosmos.
New research published today in the journal JAMA Psychiatry found that using marijuana as an adult is not associated with a variety of mood and anxiety disorders, including depression and bipolar disorder.
This is a challenge to some previous research which has shown that marijuana use is associated with depression and anxiety.
The organs in our body may have a sexual identity of their own, new research suggests. The idea that our organs could be "male" or "female" raises the possibility that women and men may need different treatments as a result. The findings could also shed light on why it is that some cancers are more common in women, and others in men.
People who fear spiders tend to perceive these creepy-crawlies as larger than they actually are, a new study finds.
The research, though hair-raising for some, could be useful in treating phobias, the scientists said.
The legendary abilities of goats and sheep to digest a wide range of inedible materials could help scientists produce cheaper biofuels.
Researchers say fungi from the stomachs of these animals produce flexible enzymes that can break down a wide variety of plant materials.
When Fido's legs twitch in his sleep, is he really dreaming of chasing rabbits?
Probably, researchers say. The "rabbits" part is up for debate, but the scientific evidence strongly suggests that not only do dogs dream, but they likely dream about waking activities, much like humans do.
When Paleolithic painters decorated the walls of the caves at Chauvet, in France, they chose stunning motifs of horses and other animals. For them, as for most of us, plants were just there in the background, vegetating away. Sure, a daisy can be cute, a redwood impressive. But compared to a cheetah or an elephant, most plants are, well, boring.
With his new book,The Cabaret of Plants: Forty Thousand Years of Plant Life and the Human Imagination, British author Richard Mabey pushes back against this prejudice to make us see that plants are as thrilling as animals and have been key to our relationship with the world.
It’s pretty well common sense, that is, if a thing appears to be a thing, it probably is that thing. There are exceptions though. Outside of a discussion of the fallibility of our senses, the weirdness of our world quite regularly presents us with items and ideas that defy that ineffable logic above.
Is this the moment a nature photographer accidentally captured footage of a Bigfoot walking through woods in Utah?
Images purporting to show the mythical creature in Payson Canyon have caused quite a stir online after they were shared by The Paranormal Review YouTube channel.
Related: Taxi Drivers Claim Ghost Passengers in Japan
PHOENIX (KPHO/KTVK) - Did you see anything strange in the western skies tonight?
Some folks did, and viewers sent us in pictures of a string of lights in the sky near Buckeye.
Related: Odd Reports Detail Massive “Mystery Blimps” Over SoCal
Related: UFO Agency in Argentina is Being Shut Down
The crew of an Apollo mission to the moon were so startled when they encountered strange music-like radio transmissions coming through their headsets, they didn't know whether or not to report it to NASA, it's been revealed.
It was 1969, two months before Apollo 11's historic first manned landing on the moon, when Apollo 10 entered lunar orbit, which included traversing the far side of the moon when all spacecraft are out of radio contact with Earth for about an hour and nobody on Earth can see or hear them.
The prototype for a new Welsh-made hydrogen-powered car has been unveiled.
Its road-legal prototype does 0-60mph (96kmh) in 10 seconds, with its only output water.
Traffic can be a real grind. For those travelling between work and home by car every day, the seemingly endless cycle of gas-brake-repeat at a snail's pace can wear thin.
But commuters of the very-near future may be granted some respite by taking to the skies in a flying car.
New technology detects and tracks you from the second you arrive at the airport until you’re out of the arrivals hall at your destination. Face recognition is the preferred method to identify people at airports, say researchers, because it is easy for users. It is a means of authentication that does not require contact, and it is not distracting to the user. In actuality, people being identified will not notice anything at all.
More than 70 years ago, Isaac Asimov dreamed up his three laws of robotics, which insisted, above all, that “a robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm”. Now, after Stephen Hawking warned that “the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race”, two academics have come up with a way of teaching ethics to computers: telling them stories.
Sitting on the front steps of her Cockeysville home a year and a half ago, Vanna Belton was startled and thrilled when her eyes focused on a car's license plate. Essentially blind for more than five years, she suddenly could read the numbers and letters.
Researchers have successfully simulated how a ring-shaped black hole could cause general relativity to break down: assuming the universe contains at least five dimensions, that is.
Quantum entanglement—which occurs when two or more particles are correlated in such a way that they can influence each other even across large distances—is not an all-or-nothing phenomenon, but occurs in various degrees.
In a new study that provides clues about how Antarctica's nation-sized Ross Ice Shelf might respond to a warming climate, U.S. and Japanese oceanographers have shown that a 100,000-square-mile section of the ice shelf broke apart within 1,500 years during a warming period after the last ice age.
Evidence of violent storms that destroyed a lost town known as Britain's Atlantis has been uncovered.
The finds were uncovered off the coast of Dunwich, Suffolk - a small village which in the 11th Century was one of the largest towns in England.
Reconstructing the emergence and evolution of life on our planet is tightly linked to the questions as to when and to what extent Earth's atmosphere became oxygenated. New geological studies based on data from Western Greenland indicate that small levels of atmospheric oxygen developed already 3.8 billion years ago, some 0.7-0.8 billion years earlier than previously thought.
The Rapa Nui people, who have lived on Easter Island since before Europeans arrived, accomplished incredible feats of engineering. But some centuries ago, their numbers dwindled. What kickstarted the collapse of this civilization?
For the first time in almost a century, the burial chambers of a royal pyramid at Meroe have been re-opened for documentation and archaeological research.
The subterranean tomb, constructed sometime in the early 4th century BC for Queen Khennuwa, is situated about 6 metres below its pyramid
Eternal rest could last a surprisingly short time in ancient Egypt.
Surprising research, revealed for the first time in an exhibition opening next week at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, exposes that many were buried in new and decorated coffins, patched together from pieces of older coffins; some made only a few generations earlier.
I was looking at Romer’s Gap the other day. No this isn’t a dirty confession, although I did come back with sand in my hiking boots. Just before Christmas I found myself digging into the fine shingle of a beach opposite Bass Rock, near Edinburgh, in the pouring rain.
Long before the dinosaurs, hefty herbivores called pareiasaurs ruled Earth. Now, for the first time, a detailed investigation of all Chinese specimens of these creatures -- often described as the 'ugliest fossil reptiles' -- has been published by a palaeontologist.
Pluto's largest moon may have gotten too big for its own skin.
Images from NASA's New Horizons mission suggest that Charon once had a subsurface ocean that has long since frozen and expanded, pushing out on the moon's surface and causing it to stretch and fracture on a massive scale.
A little less than four billion years ago, as the theory goes, the inner solar system was pummeled by space rocks. It caused craters on the moon and likely left a few marks on the skin of our own planet, which erased over time due to erosion. Called the Late Heavy Bombardment (LHB), a leading theory for why it happened was the outer planets (such as Jupiter and Saturn) adjusting their orbits.
The spacecraft engine that will help take humans to Mars may be based on a University of Michigan prototype.
NASA gave this dream new credibility by funding a spaceflight propulsion system to be built around a tabletop-sized thruster developed by Alec Gallimore, the Richard F. and Eleanor A. Towner Professor of Engineering and an Arthur F. Thurnau Professor in the U-M Department of Aerospace Engineering.
Do Peru's potatoes have the right stuff?
That's the question scientists will be asking in Lima next month, when a selection of tubers will begin undergoing tests to determine whether they're fit to grow on Mars.
A complete Bronze Age wheel believed to be the largest and earliest of its kind found in the UK has been unearthed.
The 3,000-year-old artefact was found at a site dubbed "Britain's Pompeii", at Must Farm in Cambridgeshire.
A new map of an ancient wall that extended 93 miles (150 kilometers) in Jordan has left archaeologists with a series of mysteries, including questions over when the wall was built, who built it and what its purpose was.
Archaeology is a puzzle. For Sarah Parcak, trying to find ancient treasures is made exponentially easier by satellite imagery.
Archaeologists have many tools at their disposal: shovels, trowels, satellites. If you are scratching your head at that final entry, check out how TED Prize winner Sarah Parcak uses satellite imagery to locate long-lost ancient sites, and to solve some of archaeology’s most enduring mysteries.
David García Cueto, Arts History professor at the University of Granada, affirms that these two marble heads are not a representation of a Christian soul's personification enjoying the pleasures of the Heaven or tormented by the punishment received in Hell (as believed until now), but they really are a nymph and a satyr, respectively.
The discovery of claw marks in a bone-filled cave in Australia suggests an extinct, "anatomically bizarre" predator was able to climb trees and rocks, meaning it would have been a threat to humans, writes Myles Gough.
Australia's extinct marsupial lion, Thylacoleo carnifex, was the continent's top predator at the time of human arrival 50,000 years ago.
Bigger is not always better when it comes to brains, finds a surprising new study that links brain size to endangerment status in mammals.
The findings, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, completely reverse a trend seen over millions of years.
A trio of researchers working off the coast of the Caribbean island of Dominica, has found evidence that suggests whales living in the Caribbean Sea have a different 'accent' than whales living in other oceans. In their paper published in Royal Society Open Science, Shane Gero, with the University of Aarhus in Denmark, Hal Whitehead, with Dalhousie University in Canada and Luke Rendell with the University of St Andrews in the U.K., describe their multiyear study of sperm whale communities living in the Caribbean Sea and why they believe their findings support the social complexity hypothesis.
Many K-12 school efforts to reduce bullying have proven not very effective, leading educators to wonder what bullying prevention approach works best. A new study finds one anti-bullying program works extremely well. The study of more than 7,000 students in 77 elementary schools in Finland found that one program greatly benefited the mental health of sixth graders who were bullied the most, significantly improving their self-esteem and reducing their depression.
More than 50 years after a controversial psychologist shocked the world with studies that revealed people’s willingness to harm others on order, a team of cognitive scientists has carried out an updated version of the iconic ‘Milgram experiments’.
Can you hear my voice in my written words? How old do I sound? Researchers at Nottingham Trent University have found surprising parity between the judgments people make from hearing a spoken voice and the judgments they make from seeing a face.
It seems so obvious when you hear it, yet it could have shaped society for centuries without our knowing. According to research presented by Dr Daniel Casasanto to the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual conference in Washington DC, people just prefer things that are in front of their favourite hand. It could be products on a shelf, or applicants for a job.
Being born in Asia protects Australian schoolchildren from nut allergies triggered by the local environment, the first and largest population study of its kind finds.
The study of 57,000 Australian schoolchildren in Victoria comes as Australia struggles with a growing epidemic of food allergies.
A group of modern humans that arrived in Eurasia far earlier than previously thought also had sex with Neanderthals, according to a study that redraws the migratory timeline for our species.
Archaeologists may have unearthed the remains of a woman whose execution had a lasting impact on the writer Thomas Hardy, inspiring the fate of one of his most beloved creations – Tess of the d’Urbervilles.
New groundbreaking research shows that a celebrated collection of prehistoric Venus figurines are - in fact - a fashion show of ordinary people of all ages from some 20,000 years ago.
Close microscopic inspection reveals them as being far from idealised female forms. Rather, many are male, and others are children, the new research shows.
Alt: Oops! Naked female 'Venus figurines' made from ancient Siberian mammoth tusks turn out to be MEN - and most are clothed
New tests show that a linen dress found in an Egyptian tomb dates back more than 5,000 years, making it the oldest woven garment yet found. Beautifully stitched and pleated, it signals the complexity and wealth of the ancient society that produced it.
Archaeologists excavating the Nahal Ein Gev II site in the Jordan Valley, Israel, have discovered the remains of an ancient settlement of the Natufian culture — a culture that existed from 12,500 to 9,500 BC in the Levant.
Vincent Van Gogh described his now-famous bedroom paintings from Arles, France, to his brother as having lilac and purple walls. Weirdly, the walls in his three paintings currently look more blue than purple.
Conservators at the Art Institute of Chicago analyzed the paint recently and they think they have figured out why.
Researchers have figured out how to reverse the symptoms of autism in mice, simply by turning on a gene like a light switch. Although the technique is a long way off being trialled in humans, the results provide hope that a similar approach could eliminate some of the most frustrating symptoms for people with autism, regardless of their age.
Mouse fathers under psychological stress were more likely to have offspring with high blood sugar compared to their unstressed counterparts. In a study appearing February 18 in Cell Metabolism, researchers link this difference to an epigenetic change in the stressed dad's sperm—a change that they could prevent by blocking the father's stress hormones. The study adds to growing evidence that a male's life experience can be passed down through more than his genetic code alone.
Newborns whose mothers ate fish more than three times a week during pregnancy grew faster in their first two years of life and were more likely to be overweight or obese at 4 and 6 years old than were babies born to mothers who ate little to no fish during pregnancy, a new study says.
Related: Raising a child has a bigger effect on the immune system than gastroenteritis
In a study of patients entering the hospital for acute stroke, researchers have increased their understanding of an association between certain types of stroke and the presence of the oral bacteria (cnm-positive Streptococcus mutans).
Related: Red meat metabolite levels high in acute heart failure patients, research shows
Related: Sweet discovery in leafy greens holds key to gut health
A specialised white blood cell found in birds can destroy an infection thought to cause hundreds of thousands of human deaths a year, scientists claim.
Cryptococcus neoformans is a fungus that can cause a fatal infection in people with weakened immune systems - particularly those with advanced HIV.
More than 50 million years ago, a giant flightless bird that weighed several hundred pounds lived in the Arctic.
Based on a single toe bone first found in the 1970s, researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and the University of Colorado Boulder determined that the bird, named Gastornis, lived in the Arctic Circle on Ellesmere Island.
Related: World's oldest wild bird, an albatross, just hatched 40th chick – at age 65
With all the focus on how we can reduce our carbon footprint in our lifetime, most of us forget that we continue to have a significant impact on the environment long after we die, thanks to our toxin-riddled funeral industry. But a team of designers has come up with a more eco-friendly option - a jumpsuit woven from mushroom-spore-infused thread called the Infinity Burial Suit.
A recent claim that there will be more plastic than fish in the sea by 2050 was intended to highlight a pollution crisis in the oceans. The problem really does exist, but do the figures hold water, or is there something fishy going on?
Food banks may soon be able to boost the nutritional value of the food they distribute to the hungry, thanks to a new harvesting model created by a team of Cornell economists and their Boston College collaborators.
Do the same rules that govern human attraction also apply to our choices of fruit and vegetables? Plenty of evidence suggests we do look for similar traits in both people and produce, and our perceptions of food are clearly affected by what it looks like.
It's often a split-second decision. You're in the produce aisle, and those organic apples on display look nice. You like the idea of organic — but they're a few bucks extra. Ditto for the organic milk and meat. Do you splurge? Or do you ask yourself: What am I really getting from organic?
Scientists have been trying to answer this question. And the results of a huge new meta-analysis published this week in the British Journal of Nutrition adds to the evidence that organic production can boost key nutrients in foods.
Global improvements in grassland management could see grasslands taking on a significantly more important role in food production. Better management would increase the production of meat and milk and prevent the need for additional feed for grazing livestock – feed in the form of grain crops that could otherwise be available for human consumption
A new study of humans on Sanak Island, Alaska and their historical relationships with local species suggests that despite being super-generalist predators, the food gathering behaviors of the local Aleut people were stabilizing for the ecosystem.
Members of our species had sex with Neandertals much earlier—and more often—than previously believed, according to a new study of ancient DNA. As some of the first bands of modern humans moved out of Africa, they met and mated with Neandertals about 100,000 years ago—perhaps in the fertile Nile Valley, along the coastal hills of the Middle East, or in the once-verdant Arabian Peninsula. This pushes back the earliest encounter between the two groups by tens of thousands of years and suggests that our ancestors were shaped in significant ways by swapping genes with other types of humans.
Alt: Human DNA found in a Neandertal woman
Cutting-edge science is an exploration of the unknown; an intellectual step into the frontier of human knowledge. Such studies provide great excitement for those of us passionate about understanding the world around us, but some are apprehensive of the unknown and wonder if new and powerful science, and the facilities where it is explored, could be dangerous.
Black holes have long been a source of much excitement and intrigue. And interest regarding black holes will surely grow now that gravitational waves have been discovered.
Many of the questions I am asked regard how “true” science fiction concerning black holes might be, and whether worm holes, such as those featured in Stargate, are real or not.
The Universe is filled with coincidences. Like the size of the Moon and the Sun in the sky, even though they’re so far apart. Or the shape of the Pac Man Nebula or the Wizard Nebula. Or like the plot of Force Awakens and every other Star Wars movie, the coincidences are everywhere.
Astronomers have used NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory to discover a jet from a very distant supermassive black hole being illuminated by the oldest light in the Universe. This discovery shows that black holes with powerful jets may be more common than previously thought in the first few billion years after the Big Bang.
Groundwater circulation beneath a massive tectonic rift zone located along the flanks of some the Solar System's largest volcanic plateaus resulted in the formation more than 3 billion years ago of some the deepest basins on Mars, according to a new paper by Planetary Science Institute Senior Scientist J. Alexis Palmero Rodriguez.
Related: Ordnance Survey releases digital map of Mars surface
Government UFO-related documents seem to have a habit of disappearing. This time the files belonged to the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).
Related: Whistleblower about to 'lift lid on 1000s of UFO files' is GENUINE, says ex-MoD man
Related: Have UFO Hunters Just Spotted An Alien Ship Orbiting An Asteroid?
Related: Saucer, Orbs and Volcano Visitor in Latest UFO Sightings
China is to relocate more than 9,000 people in the lead-up to the opening of the world’s largest radio telescope later this year – a move that Beijing hopes will boost the global hunt for extraterrestrial life.
Work on the 1.2bn yuan (£127m) Fast (Five-hundred-metre Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope) project began in the south-western province of Guizhou in 2011 and is expected to be completed by September.
Chinese scientists have unveiled three separate projects to investigate gravitational waves, state media said Wednesday, days after earthshaking US discoveries that confirmed Einstein's century-old predictions.
Space officials said such research would give China—which has an ambitious, military-run, multi-billion-dollar space programme that Beijing sees as symbolising the country's progress—an opportunity to become a "world leader" in the field.
For the first time, astronomers have managed a direct measurement of the gases present on a "super-Earth" planet orbiting an alien star.
They found evidence for hydrogen and helium in its atmosphere, but no water.
Despite the accelerated melting of glaciers and ice sheets, sea levels aren’t rising quite as quickly as scientists anticipated. The reason: Continents are absorbing more of the water before it flows into the seas, according to a new study.
Scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory figured this out by measuring changes in Earth’s gravity with twin satellites orbiting the Earth in tandem. Over the past decade, thirsty continents have slowed the rate of sea level rise by about 20%, or about 1 millimeter per year, according to the study published in Science.
New research suggests there could be a layer of iron-rich meteorites hidden just under the Antarctic ice.
The churning of glaciers spews many space rocks out on to the surface in Antarctica, but compared to elsewhere on Earth, few of them are made of iron.
A nearly intact medieval shipwreck has been hauled from the frigid waters of a Dutch river.
The boat was likely deliberately sunk by maritime engineers more than 600 years ago in an effort to alter the flow of the Ijssel River, an offshoot of the mighty Rhine River that flows through six European countries. The trading ship sailed at a time when the Hanseatic League, a group of guilds that fostered trade across Europe, dominated the seas.
A Mesolithic site in Germany has revealed the 7,000-year-old remains of a young man buried there in a strange upright position.
Placed in a vertical pit, the body was fixed upright by filling the grave with sand up to the knees. The upper body was left to decay and was likely picked at by scavengers.
Israeli archaeologists said Wednesday they have unearthed a 7,000-year-old settlement in northern Jerusalem, describing it as the oldest discovery of its kind in the area.
Israel's Antiquities Authority said the excavation exposed two houses with well-preserved remains and floors containing pottery vessels, flint tools and a basalt bowl.
After two years of painstaking work, experts have completed the initial phase of a delicate restoration project at the Church of the Nativity, giving a much-needed face-lift to one of Christianity's holiest sites.
The project, partially funded by the Palestinians and conducted by a team of Palestinian and international experts, is the biggest restoration at the iconic church in some 600 years