Newsdesk Archive
Analysis of artifacts found on the shores of Rapa Nui, Chile (Easter Island) originally thought to be used as spear points reveal that these objects were likely general purpose tools instead, providing evidence contrary to the widely held belief that the ancient civilization was destroyed by warfare.
Alexander the Great rode into the city of Pasargadae with his most elite cavalry in their bronze, muscle-sculpted body armor, carrying long spears. Some of his infantry and archers followed. The small city, in what is today Iran, was lush and green. Alexander had recently conquered India. Greece, Macedonia, Asia Minor and parts of Egypt were all part of his new empire.
People in the ancient world did not always believe in the gods, a new study suggests – casting doubt on the idea that religious belief is a "default setting" for humans.
Despite being written out of large parts of history, atheists thrived in the polytheistic societies of the ancient world – raising considerable doubts about whether humans really are "wired" for religion – a new study suggests.
It’s no secret that therapies that look promising in mice rarely work in people. But too often, experimental treatments that succeed in one mouse population do not even work in other mice, suggesting that many rodent studies may be flawed from the start.
Here's one more benefit of exercise: mice who spent their free time on a running wheel were better able to shrink tumors (a 50 percent reduction in tumor size) compared to their less active counterparts. Researchers found that the surge of adrenaline that comes with a high-intensity workout helped to move cancer-killing immune (NK) cells toward lung, liver, or skin tumors implanted into the mice.
Related: Aerobic fitness may protect liver against chronic alcohol use
Tests of a potentially revolutionary cancer therapy have had "extraordinary" results on terminally ill patients, scientists have revealed.
In one study, more than nine out of ten participants with a severe form of leukaemia saw their symptoms completely vanish.
The rapid pace of artificial intelligence (AI) has raised some fears that robots could act unethically or soon choose to harm humans. Some are calling for bans on robotics research; others are calling for more research to understand how AI might be constrained.
But how can robots learn ethical behavior if there is no “user manual” for being human?
In 2014, the former director of both the CIA and NSA proclaimed that "we kill people based on metadata." Now, a new examination of previously published Snowden documents suggests that many of those people may have been innocent.
Last year, The Intercept published documents detailing the NSA's SKYNET programme.
A program used in many U.S. fisheries to protect the marine environment and maintain healthy fish populations may have an immensely important added benefit: preserving the lives of American fishermen.
That's according to a new study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Beavers are beneficial to the Scottish environment, say academics from The University of Stirling.
A study into the ecology and habitat engineering of beavers reintroduced to a site on Tayside in 2002 has found the creatures can improve biodiversity, minimise pollutants and reduce downstream flooding.
An evolutionary burst 540 million years ago filled the seas with an astonishing diversity of animals. The trigger behind that revolution is finally coming into focus.
Roughly 550 million years ago, Earth’s magnetic fields rapidly flipped their orientations, swapping north and south to trigger the massive extinction that ended the Ediacaran Period, researchers have found.
They claim the 'hyperactivity' of Earth’s magnetic fields may have led to the destruction of the ozone layer, and an influx of UV radiation.
Like people, ants have often fought over food and territory.
"That's a trait of ants," Barden said. "Many ant species do that all the time. They're always warring with either other individuals of the same species from different colonies or with different species."
It began with a man walking along a shallow wash near Abiquiu, New Mexico one afternoon and noticing some flakes of what looked like bone.
He happened to be walking near the property line, maybe on his neighbor’s property. So he went to visit his neighbor, to tell him about the find.
A team of Pakistani researchers claims to have unearthed a 1.1 million-year-old stegodon tusk in the central province of Punjab, potentially shedding new light on the mammal's evolutionary journey.
Stegodonts, distant cousins of modern elephants, are thought to have been present on earth from around 11 million years ago until the late Pleistocene period, which lasted until the end of the last Ice Age around 11,700 years ago.
It is beautiful, deadly and new to science. And if that is not enough, it has been fossilised in amber for perhaps 30 million years.
Strychnos electri, the first ever fossilied member of a plant family called asterids, was unearthed 30 years ago in an amber mine in the Dominican Republic.
Diminutive humans that died out on an Indonesian island some 15,000 years ago were not Homo sapiens but a different species, according to a study published Monday that dives into a fierce anthropological debate.
Fossils of Homo floresiensis—dubbed "the hobbits" due to their tiny stature—were discovered on the island of Flores in 2003.
DEPAUL UNIVERSITY—CHICAGO—The use of unmanned aerial vehicles—drones—to document and monitor a ravaged landscape on the Dead Sea Plain in Jordan for the past three years reveals that looting continues at the site, though at a measurably reduced pace, according to a DePaul University archaeologist.
The details of an underground city unearthed in late 2014 in Turkey’s touristic town of Cappadocia in the Central Anatolian province of Nev?ehir have come to the surface, as excavations at the site continue.
The underground city was discovered by a Turkish Housing Development Administration (TOK?) urban transformation project.
They live several kilometers under the surface of the earth, need no light or oxygen and can only be seen in a microscope. By sequencing genomes of a newly discovered group of microbes, the Hadesarchaea, an international team of researchers have found out how these microorganisms make a living in the deep subsurface biosphere of our planet.
It was the moment of truth.
I couldn’t believe I’d actually found it. When John Holliday told me where to look to find the infamous Dictyophora species, I didn’t really believe him—probably because he also claimed this mushroom had some pretty implausible properties.
Languages on the brink of dying out should be preserved in the light of evidence that multilingualism is good for the brain, according to an expert.
Prof Antonella Sorace, the founder of the Bilingualism Matters centre at the University of Edinburgh, is investigating the potential benefits of studying less common languages such as Sardinian and Scottish Gaelic.
Scientists at the University of Southampton have made a major step forward in the development of digital data storage that is capable of surviving for billions of years.
Using nanostructured glass, scientists from the University's Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC) have developed the recording and retrieval processes of five dimensional (5D) digital data by femtosecond laser writing.
Physicians and biomedical engineers from Johns Hopkins report what they believe is the first successful effort to wiggle fingers individually and independently of each other using a mind-controlled artificial "arm" to control the movement.
A piece of music, composed in a fashion like no other before it, will be played later this month at the Peninsula Arts Contemporary Music Festival in the United Kingdom.
The piece, entitled “Activating Memory,” is the result of a decade-long project by researchers at Plymouth University and the Royal Hospital for Neuro-disability.
Researchers in the US have developed tiny, partly functional 'mini-brains' in the laboratory, grown from human cells. These tiny replicas won't only give scientists a better way of testing drugs – they could also help save huge numbers of animals from enduring the hardship of experimental tests.
Custom-made, living body parts have been 3D-printed in a significant advance for regenerative medicine, say scientists.
The sections of bone, muscle and cartilage all functioned normally when implanted into animals.
Nephrologists are making major progress on a first-of-its kind device to free kidney patients from dialysis. He is building an implantable artificial kidney with microchip filters and living kidney cells that will be powered by a patient's own heart.
Researchers at the University of Melbourne are investigating the growth in a new type of technology, inserted under the skin, and set to revolutionise the way we gain access to our homes, our bank accounts and use public transport.
PhD researcher Kayla J. Heffernan from the University's Department of Computing and Information Systems says these 'insertable technologies' are no longer part of science fiction.
True innovation is hard to find, as few things come out of nothing. Take the now ubiquitous selfie, for example. The format may have changed but the concept of making self-portraits is hundreds, if not thousands of years old.
The Steller’s sea cow was almost extinct by the time German naturalist Georg Wilhelm Steller first laid eyes on the plump marine mammal. The species that would bear his name once ranged throughout the North Pacific, but by the time of Steller’s visit in 1741, the last population was sequestered around Russia’s Commander Islands. The species was hunted into extinction before the close of the 18th century.
The ichnites or fossilised footprints of the Manyanet Valley (within the municipality of Sarroca de Bellera) are in two areas that differ in their environments: meandering fluvial systems in one and unconfined waters in the other.
Sometime around the year 1491, the German cartographer Henricus Martellus produced an influential map of the world, which was likely used by Christopher Columbus on his 1492 expedition to the Americas.
Naturally, Martellus made sure to note all the wildest rumors about the locations he had charted out.
Sylvia Plath wrote that “Dying is an art.” For Queen Victoria, the real art was in mourning. After her husband, Prince Albert, died in 1861, she publicly grieved him until her own death 40 years later. Often, Victoria wore a locket of Albert’s hair around her neck.
Archaeologists in Gwynedd have discovered what is thought to be a buried village on Anglesey.
The discovery was made at Rhuddgaer, near Newborough, following a survey using technology to map out buried features without digging holes.
Among the 450 objects related to UWinnipeg’s Hetherington Collection of ancient Egyptian artifacts, UWinnipeg alumnus Luther Sousa was able to identify two wooden artifacts in the collection: one is a miniature hoe, and the other a set of miniature rockers.
Researchers at the University of Winnipeg in Canada claim to have found what they believe are belongings of an ancient Egyptian queen. The artefacts were found among a collection of 450 ancient relics at the university.
A Northwestern University research team has taken CSI to a whole new level: employing sophisticated scientific tools to investigate details of the materials and methods used by Roman-Egyptian artists to paint lifelike mummy portraits more than 2,000 years ago. These visages of the dead are considered to be antecedents of Western portraiture.
At first glance Van Gogh’s twin paintings of ‘Bedroom at Arles’ seem virtually indistinguishable from each other.
Yet scratch beneath the surface and they reveal how the style of the artist changed following his spectacular breakdown which culminated in him taking a razor and slicing off his ear.
A woman in Brazil who had cosmetic surgery ended up with not only a flatter stomach and larger breasts, she also developed kleptomania for a few weeks, a new case report reveals.
A materials scientist has discovered a way to grow a crystal ball in a lab. Not the kind that soothsayers use to predict the future, but a microscopic version that could be used to encapsulate medication in a way that would allow it to deliver its curative payload more effectively inside the body.
Researchers say they have developed tiny 'mini-brains' made up of many of the neurons and cells of the human brain -- and even some of its functionality -- and which can be replicated on a large scale.
Researchers at the University of California, Riverside have developed a new, more computationally efficient way to process data from the Global Positioning System (GPS), to enhance location accuracy from the meter-level down to a few centimeters.
University of Washington astronomers have identified a rare type of supernova 'impostor' in a nearby galaxy, with implications for how scientists look at the short, complex lives of massive stars.
What could be bigger than gravitational waves? Predicted by Einstein, confirmed to exist this week, they are born of black holes colliding and the sound of space time itself warping through the Earth.
What couldn’t be bigger, say scientists still pining for answers to the other mysteries of physics.
A nuclear reactor in China has created plasma at a temperature of 50 million Kelvins (49.999 million degrees Celsius or 90 million Fahrenheit) for 102 seconds.
The temperature is thought to be three times hotter than the core of the sun or “roughly the same as a mid-sized thermo-nuclear explosion,” according to the South China Morning Post.
Alt: Chinese Fusion Test Reportedly Reaches New Milestone
UK scientists say they have produced a new mix of cement that should be much more effective at containing nuclear waste in a deep repository.
The material develops mineral phases that readily trap radioactive isotopes trying to pass through it.
NASA will decide soon whether a Mars lander that was supposed to launch next month will ever get off the ground.
NASA announced in December that its InSight lander, which is designed to probe the interior structure of Mars, would not be ready to blast off in March as originally planned because of a leak in the vacuum container surrounding one its key instruments.
Mission scientists have decided to give up trying to contact the comet lander Philae.
The European Space Agency's Rosetta mission dropped the robot onto Comet 67P in November 2014.
Researchers at McMaster University have established a connection between a person's ability to maintain a firm grip and having the self-control to finish their schoolwork.
There is not yet a clear cause-and-effect relationship between squeezing a handgrip and working up the willpower to tackle a school assignment, but it's clear there is a connection
Parenting stubborn kids can be, um.... challenging. When you're trying to explain to your toddler for the umpteenth time why socks are necessary in winter or convince your preschooler that green foods truly aren't poisonous, you might want to throw up your hands in despair. New research might help, offering you a fresh injection of perspective for those days when you're on the edge of losing your cool.
Almost all of our genes may be influenced by the food we eat, according to new research published in the journal Nature Microbiology. The study, carried out in yeast – which can be used to model some of the body's fundamental processes – shows that while the activity of our genes influences our metabolism, the opposite is also true and the nutrients available to cells influence our genes.
Stories about desperate parents seeking anything to relieve their children’s seizures abound, but how much scientific evidence is there for cannabis’ effectiveness?
Related: Starting age of marijuana use may have long-term effects on brain development
Alcohol harms the liver in two ways, by damaging the organ’s cells directly and by disrupting gut microbiota, which can scar the liver. Now researchers have figured out the mechanism behind the microbial imbalance due to drinking
Related: Early diet of infants, not maternal obesity, influences development of gut microbiome
Scientists have modified a plant gene that normally fights bacterial infection to confer resistance to a virus. The method is the first time a plant's innate defense system has been altered to deliver resistance to a new disease.
A small team of researchers with École Polytechnique in France has found that all trees, regardless of size or species, tend to break at near the same wind speed. In their paper published in Physical Review Letters, the team describes tests they conducted in a lab and how they came up with a scaling law to describe the point at which a tree will break due to wind stress.
When the earth shakes in California, the first place you are likely to hear about it is on social media.
"Earthquake!" "Did you feel that?" "How big?" are common messages on Twitter and Facebook as Californians try to share information on their mobile phones in real time.
Related: Researchers find new cause of strong earthquakes
A new study contributes to "increasing the energy efficiency of industrial processes and cutting the emission of gases that pollute the atmosphere."
When tackling the challenge of meeting energy demand while being environmentally friendly, "it is very important not only to use fossil fuels more rationally but also to seek alternative energy sources,"
Machines could put more than half the world’s population out of a job in the next 30 years, according to a computer scientist who said on Saturday that artificial intelligence’s threat to the economy should not be understated.
Expert Moshe Vardi told the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS): “We are approaching a time when machines will be able to outperform humans at almost any task.
When computers speak, how human should they sound?
This was a question that a team of six IBM linguists, engineers and marketers faced in 2009, when they began designing a function that turned text into speech for Watson, the company’s “Jeopardy!”-playing artificial intelligence program.
A researcher in Russia has made more than 48 million journal articles - almost every single peer-reviewed paper every published - freely available online. And she's now refusing to shut the site down, despite a court injunction and a lawsuit from Elsevier, one of the world's biggest publishers.
Valentine's Day is a time to celebrate romance and love and kissy-face fealty. But the origins of this festival of candy and cupids are actually dark, bloody — and a bit muddled.
Though no one has pinpointed the exact origin of the holiday, one good place to start is ancient Rome, where men hit on women by, well, hitting them.
Modern European and Asian people may owe more than skin or hair colour to Neanderthal ancestry. Interbreeding 50,000 years ago between two species of human may also have bequeathed a sunburn hazard called keratosis, addiction to nicotine, and a greater risk of depression.
One of the oldest cemeteries in Europe has recently been discovered, with graves dating back almost 8,500 years. Two of the most intriguing finds are the skeleton of a six-month-old child and a mysterious upright burial of a man in his early 20s.
Two new hominin specimens, a finger bone and a molar, that were found in South Africa's Sterkfontein Caves seem to be from early hominins that can be associated with early stone tool-bearing sediments that entered the cave more than two million years ago.
In a spectacular valley less than two hours’ drive north of Cape Town, a small herd of animals provides the chance to travel back in time over more than a century.
The animals roaming over a wide plain encased by jagged mountain ranges look like quaggas, a subspecies of the plains zebra — but quaggas are extinct.
Related: Significant changes in rhino bone health over 50 million years
For giant tortoises living in the tropics, you either find a way to get out of the sun, or you die.
Usually, that means waiting out the hottest part of the day behind a rock or beneath the shade of a tree or bush.
When sand wasps leave home in the morning they capture snapshots of the landscape around their nest to make sure they can find their way back later, a study using high-speed video has found.
Like most birds, the great tit is (mostly) monogamous. Every winter pairs of the stunning yellow-breasted songbirds (above) reunite for the upcoming breeding season and spend the bulk of their time together—staking out territory, building nests and even foraging. The strength of their bond is palpable, but what would happen if the birds were forced to choose between love and food?
It's official: There really was a giant, flightless bird with a head the size of a horse's wandering about in the winter twilight of the high Arctic some 53 million years ago.
The confirmation comes from a new study by researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and the University of Colorado Boulder that describes the first and only fossil evidence from the Arctic of a massive bird known as Gastornis.
The catastrophic release of fresh water from a vast south American lake at the end of the last Ice Age was significant enough to change circulation in the Pacific Ocean according to new research. The study reveals that the lake, which was about one third the size of Wales, drained several times between 13,000 and 8,000 years ago, with devastating consequences.
For the first time in nearly 50 years, officials are debating turning off the tap for part of Niagara Falls.
Officials have proposed drying out two of the three waterfalls that make up Niagara Falls — American Falls and Bridal Veil Falls — so that workers can repair the aging pedestrian bridges that span the rapids along the river that feeds the falls.
As glaciers melt due to climate change, the increasingly hot and parched Earth is absorbing some of that water inland, slowing sea level rise, NASA experts said Thursday.
Satellite measurements over the past decade show for the first time that the Earth's continents have soaked up and stored an extra 3.2 trillion tons of water in soils, lakes and underground aquifers, the experts said in a study in the journal Science.
A powerful greenhouse effect can destroy a planet's chances of hosting life, a new study suggests.
Until proven otherwise, scientists on Earth assume water is necessary for life to arise on other planets
Perhaps it was the full moon, or maybe the return of the X-Files to the province has upped B.C.'s sense of the paranormal, but whatever the reason, something spooked the residents of Nanaimo on Wednesday night.
Related: Did a UFO cause a Mexican volcanic eruption? Conspiracy theorists claim 'transporter craft' spotted overhead
Related: Video Evidence Shows ‘Asteroid Buster’ UFO Took Out Chelyabinsk Meteor Mid-Air, UFO Hunters Claim
Related: Is this a 230ft UFO orbiting an asteroid? Experts claim grainy black and white footage shows alien activity
Maxwell's demon, a hypothetical being that appears to violate the second law of thermodynamics, has been widely studied since it was first proposed in 1867 by James Clerk Maxwell. But most of these studies have been theoretical, with only a handful of experiments having actually realized Maxwell's demon.
Amid the season known for transforming Nebraska into an outdoor ice rink, a University of Nebraska-Lincoln-led research team has predicted a new molecular form of the slippery stuff that even Mother Nature has never borne.
The proposed ice, which the researchers describe in a Feb. 12, 2016 study in the journal Science Advances, would be about 25 percent less dense than a record-low form synthesized by a European team in 2014.
Following the first successful test of the Wendelstein X-7 Stellarator-extremely sophisticated nuclear reactor in Germany-the Chinese have accomplished a wildly impressive in one of their reactors. According to the South China Morning Post, China's Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) was able to sustain 90 million Fahrenheit plasma (50 million Kelvin) for 102 seconds. For context, the center of the sun is thought to be only about a third as hot.
More than a billion years ago, in a galaxy far away, two black holes surrendered to one another’s inexorable attraction and collided with such force that it disturbed the very fabric of the universe.
On Thursday, scientists announced to the world that they had detected the ripple-like gravitational waves that still course from this violent event and simultaneously confirmed a prediction made by Albert Einstein a century ago.
Alt: Einstein's gravitational waves found at last
Our Milky Way may be beautiful, but it sure can ruin our view of the cosmos.
Now, astronomers have just taken a peek behind the mess of stars and dust to find a veritable galactic zoo in a previously unexplored region of space.
If you want evidence that US intelligence agencies aren’t losing surveillance abilities because of the rising use of encryption by tech companies, look no further than the testimony on Tuesday by the director of national intelligence, James Clapper.
The BBC is pressing ahead with plans to utilise new facial coding technology – revealing viewers’ subconscious “emotional attachment” to programmes – after running successful trials.
Developed by a British start-up, CrowdEmotion, the technology uses cameras to record individuals’ expressions and actions.
Moore's law has died at the age of 51 after an extended illness.
In 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore made an observation that the number of components in integrated circuits was doubling every 12 months or so.
Graphene is going to change the world—or so we've been told.
Since its discovery a decade ago, scientists and tech gurus have hailed graphene as the wonder material that could replace silicon in electronics, increase the efficiency of batteries, the durability and conductivity of touch screens and pave the way for cheap thermal electric energy, among many other things.
By genetically reprogramming the most common type of cell in mammalian connective tissue, researchers have generated master heart cells -- primitive progenitors that form the developing heart. The feat could one day fuel drug discovery, powerful new models for heart disease and the raw material for treating diseased hearts.
A rabbit’s brain has been successfully returned from long-term cryogenic storage, marking the first time a whole mammalian brain has been recovered in near-perfect condition.
It marks a significant breakthrough in the field of cryonics and boosts the prospect of one day bringing frozen human brains back to life.
Fossils of what may be primitive relatives of gorillas suggest that the human and gorilla lineages split up to 10 million years ago, millions of years later than what has been recently suggested, researchers say. The finding could help resolve a controversy over the continent where the ape and human lineages first evolved, the scientists added.
A new study identifies a Jurassic age insect whose behavior and appearance closely mimic a butterfly -- but whose emergence on Earth predates the butterfly by about 40 million years.
Related: A 99-million-year-old erection has been perfectly preserved in this fossil
An international team of scientists have discovered two new plankton-eating fossil fish species of the genus called Rhinconichthys (Rink-O-nik-thees) from the oceans of the Cretaceous Period, about 92 million years ago, when dinosaurs roamed the planet.
England's King Henry VIII is best known for his erratic and sometimes violent behavior — he married six times and had two of his wives beheaded, for example — and now, researchers say the Tudor king's brutal ways may have stemmed from brain injuries he got during several sporting accidents.
The Roman Emperors used to spend their summers in the city of Baia, near Naples. With the passage of time, however, the majority of their luxury villas became immersed under water. Italian and Spanish researchers have now applied microscopic and geochemical techniques to confirm that the marble used to cover these ancient Roman buildings came from Carrara and other marble quarries in Turkey and Greece – valuable information for archaeologists and historians.
Related: Some 5,000 years ago, silver mining on the shores of the Aegean Sea
Isotope analysis of 2000-year-old skeletons buried in Imperial Rome reveal some were migrants from the Alps or North Africa, according to a study published February 10, 2016 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Kristina Killgrove from University of West Florida, USA, and Janet Montgomery from Durham University, UK.
Laser scans of Britain's terrain may reveal weathered Roman roads that have been hidden for centuries across the countryside of northern England.
Related: Enormous Roman arcade found in Essex was once part of a magnificent temple: 400ft-long arched structure is the largest of its kind found in the UK
Newly translated textbooks from the second and sixth centuries aimed at language learners also provide pointers on shopping, bathing, dining and how to deal with drunk relatives
On Thursday, the Harvard Semitic Museum will unveil a throne fit for an Egyptian queen—because it’s an exact replica of Queen Hetepheres’s throne, in which the Egyptian royal sat 4,500 years ago.
Over the past month, the excavation of an ancient city in Honduras has yielded a trove of remarkable stone artifacts from a mysterious, unnamed Pre-Columbian civilization. A joint American-Honduran team of archaeologists uncovered and removed more than 200 sculptures from the base of a large earthen mound at the center of the site, which is being called the “City of the Jaguar.”
A person with a metal detector has discovered a 1,800-year-old copper brooch, engraved with the letters "RMA," on the Isle of Wight in the United Kingdom. It contains wordplay that is, quite literally, "lovely," scientists have found.
The letters on the brooch, which dates to a time when the Roman Empire controlled Britain, contain different meanings depending on how they are read.
Magicians contains a cogent elucidation of everything from divination, astronomy, the war on consciousness, and the wisdom of the elder magi, to the most strange archeological and geological discoveries currently known. The text is satisfyingly bibliophile grade dense and riddled with footnotes in the best way possible, a veritable alchemical feast for the mind.
More gravitational wave discovery rumors are flying, but this time they’ve taken a specific — and, possibly, really exciting — new twist. And what’s more, we should find out whether the astrophysical rumor mill is correct or not by the end of this week; a National Science Foundation press announcement is planned for 10:30 a.m. ET on Thursday (Feb. 11), billed as an opportunity to bring together scientists from "Caltech, MIT and the LIGO Scientific Collaboration to update the scientific community on efforts to detect (gravitational waves)."
In quantum entanglement, two particles are correlated in such a way that any action on one of them affects the other even when they are far apart. The traditional methods of measuring the degree of quantum entanglement were originally developed for nonidentical particles, such as between an electron and a proton, or two atoms of different types.