Newsdesk Archive
Researchers at the University of Zurich, the Università della Svizzera italiana, and the University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland have developed software enabling drones to autonomously detect and follow forest paths. With the new drones, missing persons can be found and rescued quickly in forests and mountain areas.
The math behind all the discussion of tonight’s Powerball drawing assumes true randomness – equal likelihood for each number to be chosen, both in the drawing itself and, crucially, in the process of assigning “Quick Picks” to ticket buyers who don’t wish to choose their own numbers.
Are those assumptions reasonable?
The old advice to dress for the job you want, not the job you have, may have roots in more than simply how others perceive you—many studies show that the clothes you wear can affect your mental and physical performance.
Related: Does your name reveal how creative you are?
A flurry of newspaper headlines have called into question the existence of SAD, or Seasonal Affective Disorder. Scientists, they reported, appear to have debunked a widespread conviction, that feeling low in winter time is a genuine illness caused by disturbed levels of brain chemicals and that demands treatment.
Horses are able to discriminate between happy and angry human facial expressions, according to research.
In an experiment using photographs of male human faces, scientists from the University of Sussex showed that domestic horses "responded negatively" to angry expressions.
A small team of researchers from Brazil and Argentina has found via skull analysis and modeling that a kind of new-world monkey appears to have undergone changes in individual parts of its brain during evolutionary periods which led to advances in cognitive development. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team describes their study and results and why they believe what they found might apply to humans as well.
This story begins like a typical fish tale: A guy is standing along a river, checking his bait for any takers. But that’s where any similarities end, because the catch here was a whole new species of fish. A new species of fish that uses electric pulses for navigation and communication.
Scared skiers and snowboarders in the resort of Formigal, in the Pyrenees, are keeping their eyes peeled for a large yeti-like monster that has been spotted roaming the slopes of the ski resort in north-eastern Spain.
Related: The Mysterious Rock Apes of the Vietnam War
Beliefs in all-knowing gods that punish wrongdoers helped enable the rise of modern civilizations, a new cross-cultural study suggests.
Cooperation among throngs of strangers in expanding societies required a common faith in moralistic gods, say sociocultural anthropologist Benjamin Purzycki of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and his colleagues.
Alt: Beliefs about all-knowing gods fosters co-operation
Indian officials say a meteorite struck the campus of a private engineering college on Saturday, killing one person. If scientists confirm the explosion was due to a meteorite, it would be the first recorded human fatality due to a falling space rock.
Alt: That Wasn’t a Meteorite That Killed a Man in India, NASA Says
A team of Turkish archaeologists have found an early Christian church in an ancient underground settlement near modern-day Nevsehir, the capital district of Nevsehir Province in the Central Anatolia Region of Turkey.
A dispute over whether a rare early Koran dates from the Prophet Muhammad's lifetime is the latest controversy related to carbon dating. The technique has revolutionised archaeology but is far from an exact science.
In July the University of Birmingham made headlines when it revealed two leaves of worn parchment recently rediscovered in its archives were probably made between AD568 and 645.
New research shows that southern Scandinavia was warm enough for Neanderthals to settle. So why didn’t they?
Did Neanderthals ever reach Scandinavia?
Scientists have debated this question for years. Some argue that they never reached so far north because it was simply too cold.
Archaeologists in Sweden say they have uncovered the remains of a 9,200-year-old storage for fermented fish.
“We’d never seen a site like this with so many well preserved fish bones, so it was amazing to find,”
Alt: Signs of early settlement in the Nordic region date back to the cradle of civiliation
Research published in 2012 garnered international attention by suggesting that a possible early human ancestor had lived on a diverse woodland diet including hard foods mixed in with tree bark, fruit, leaves and other plant products.
But new research by an international team of researchers now shows that Australopithecus sediba didn't have the jaw and tooth structure necessary to exist on a steady diet of hard foods.
Some 40 years ago, Washington State University anthropologist Barry Hewlett noticed that when the Aka pygmies stopped to rest between hunts, parents would give their infants small axes, digging sticks and knives.
To parents living in the developed world, this could be seen as irresponsible. But in all the intervening years, Hewlett has never seen an infant cut him- or herself.
We’ve all been there: Some jerk cuts you off on the highway. You lean on the horn, scream abuse. You want to get out the car and kick the @#$% out of the bozo’s SUV.
Road rage is just one example of what neurobiologist Douglas Fields calls “snapping.” From domestic violence to mass shootings, the news is full of stories of seemingly “normal” people suddenly going berserk. The easy availability of guns only compounds the problem.
Related: A sigh's not just a sigh - it's a fundamental life-sustaining reflex
Dogs have measurable IQs, like people, suggests new research from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and the University of Edinburgh.
The research, published in the journal Intelligence, looked at whether dog intelligence is structured in a similar way as in humans.
Largest quantitative study of howling, and first to use machine learning, defines different howl types and finds that wolves use these types more or less depending on their species, resembling a howling dialect. Researchers say findings could help conservation efforts and shed light on the earliest evolution of our own use of language.
Biologists say they have solved the riddle of how a tiny bacterium senses light and moves towards it: the entire organism acts like an eyeball.
In a single-celled pond slime, they observed how incoming rays are bent by the bug's spherical surface and focused in a spot on the far side of the cell.
The spread of a disease that is decimating global bee populations is humanmade, and driven by European honeybee populations, new research has concluded.
Related: Monsanto's glyphosate now most heavily used weed-killer in history, study says
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.
Every school kid learns the basic structure of the Earth: a thin outer crust, a thick mantle, and a Mars-sized core. But is this structure universal? Will rocky exoplanets orbiting other stars have the same three layers? New research suggests that the answer is yes - they will have interiors very similar to Earth.
"We wanted to see how Earth-like these rocky planets are. It turns out they are very Earth-like," says lead author Li Zeng of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA).
Astronomers have found a protoplanetary disk surrounding a young star with a rather chilly secret: the planetary building blocks it contains are cold, so cold in fact that it doesn’t jibe with current planetary formation models.
Related: Hubble finds misbehaving spiral
A strike by a medium-size asteroid could change Earth's climate dramatically for a few years, making life difficult for people around the world, a new study suggests.
Such an impact on land (as opposed to at sea) could cause average global temperatures to plunge to ice age levels and lead to steep drops in precipitation and plant productivity, among other effects, researchers said.
Researchers from the international Past Global Changes (PAGES) project write in the journal Nature Geoscience that they have identified an unprecedented, long-lasting cooling in the northern hemisphere 1500 years ago. The drop in temperature immediately followed three large volcanic eruptions in quick succession in the years 536, 540 and 547 AD. Volcanoes can cause climate cooling by ejecting large volumes of small particles - sulfate aerosols - that enter the atmosphere blocking sunlight.
Huge sea-level rises caused by climate change will last far longer than the entire history of human civilisation to date, according to new research, unless the brief window of opportunity of the next few decades is used to cut carbon emissions drastically.
In a new study, scientists have proposed that tiny residual effects measured by ether-drift experiments in the 1920s and '30s may be the first evidence of a temperature gradient that was theorized in the 1970s, but never before detected in a laboratory. The theorized temperature gradient is thought to be caused by the solar system moving at 370 km/sec through the cosmic background radiation (CBR), which is the faint electromagnetic radiation that fills the universe.
Just last week, we reported that Germany’s revolutionary nuclear fusion machine managed to heat hydrogen gas to 80 million degrees Celsius, and sustain a cloud of hydrogen plasma for a quarter of a second. This was a huge milestone in the decades-long pursuit of controlled nuclear fusion, because if we can produce and hold onto hydrogen plasma for a certain period, we can harness the clean, practically limitless energy that fuels our Sun.
Engineers from Drexel University have devised a bacteria-powered microrobot that can be steered through fluids with applied electric fields. Imagine a tiny, tiny robotic system covered over by even tinier biomolecular arms (flagella) working cooperatively as a "bacterial surface" to move the biobot from place to place, and then, just as importantly, imagine an algorithm that can steer the thing.
The sight of a cockroach on the run may strike fear into your heart, but what if it were running to save you? That's what researchers at UC Berkeley had in mind when they designed CRAM, a robot prototype that looks just like a cockroach. CRAM ("compressible robot with articulated mechanisms") has a jointed exoskeleton and a soft shell that allow it to shape shift and move through small spaces. The researchers think CRAM, whose existence was partially funded by the US Army, could be the first step in creating an incredibly effective search-and-rescue robot.
Australian scientists hope that a tiny device just 3cm long and a few millimetres wide will enable paralysed patients to walk again by allowing them to control bionic limbs with the power of subconscious thought.
Alt: Scientists Found a Way to Control Machines With Your Mind, No Brain Surgery Required
Timed flashes of light during sleep may be the best way to combat jet lag, a study has found.
Researchers found that exposing volunteers to short “camera flashes” of light as they slept reset their body clocks.
There’s evidence that mindfulness meditation can improve how we age and even fight disease. Yet, little is known about the brain changes behind the effects.
A new study may offer clues. The results suggest this type of meditation lowers levels of interleukin-6, which is involved in inflammation.
For years, retired Maj. David Underwood has noticed that whenever he drove under power lines and around other electromagnetic fields, he would feel a buzz in what remained of his arm. When traveling by car through Texas' open spaces, the buzz often became more powerful.
17,000 US police departments stunned more than 2 million people in the past decade
Related: A Single Concussion May Triple the Long-Term Risk of Suicide
Related: Sleep deprivation linked to false confessions
Finding safe, new uses for psychoactive drugs, well-known chemical compounds that can alter the mind, is a fashionable occupation for a niche group of tech enthusiasts called biohackers. Biohackers are hobbyists that typically experiment with psychoactive drugs, among other life-enhancing tools, outside of institutional laboratories.
Related: Meet the psychiatrists who are bringing LSD back to the medical mainstream
The way your brain works may vary from season to season, a new study suggests.
Researchers found that when people in the study did certain cognitive tasks, the ways that the brain utilizes its resources to complete those tasks changed with the seasons.
Archaeological excavations of Viking latrine pits in Denmark have revealed that these populations suffered massive worm infestations. The way that their genes developed to protect their vital organs from disease caused by worms has become the inherited trait which can now lead to lung disease in smokers.
A conspiracy theorist’s YouTube video about how this ancient Greek grave marker depicts a laptop more than 2,000 years before personal computers were even a thing has resurfaced, and went viral over the weekend.
We obviously don’t need to tell you that this definitely is not a laptop, and no, the ancient Greeks didn’t possess the technology to go time travelling in search of a better way to communicate with the Oracle of Delphi - a divine being who acted as the official conduit between man and the gods - but what the hell is it?
The Ministry of Antiquities has addressed the German Embassy in Egypt and other concerned authorities to take necessary action towards banning the German teen, Andrej Ciesielski from entering Egypt for life.
Ciesielski, an adrenaline junkie who engages in “roofing” or “urban exploration” from Munich, scaled the Cheops pyramid at Giza without permission and shot an 8 minute video and photos documenting him climbing the 138.8 metre structure.
CAIRO — Egyptian authorities have arrested three people after they appeared in a video selling stones from the 4,500-year-old Giza Pyramids to undercover journalists.
Hydrogen fuel cells - an ultra-clean energy source - offer a lot of potential for powering the transportation of the future, but there are significant hurdles to overcome: price, size, and supply, to name just three. Now UK budget airline EasyJet thinks it might have found a way to incorporate hydrogen fuel cells into its planes in a way that's safe and cost-effective.
Violinist Rosemary Johnson has spent the last 27 years coming to terms with the reality she would never make music again, following a devastating car crash.
A member of the Welsh National Opera Orchestra she was destined to become a world class musician before the road accident in 1988, which left her in a coma for seven months.
At the 2013 trials of DARPA’s robotics competition in Florida, a high-tech robot named Hubo had just about completed a tricky challenge: climbing up a ladder roughly the height of a small elephant.
Hubo, a 5-foot-tall walking bot, was pitting its skills against a slew of formidable contenders, all in a contest designed to simulate what rescue robots might face in a disaster. Hubo had already climbed eight of the ladder’s nine rungs — more than any other bot in the competition.
The Pentagon is funding research to develop a microchip that not only promises brain-like artificial intelligence, it is small enough to fit inside a wide range of mobile devices.
Known as 'Eyeriss', the palm-sized processor has a staggering 168 cores and is based on 'neural networks' that are modelled on the human brain.
Related: Human Brain's Bizarre Folding Pattern Re-Created in a Vat
While governments and law enforcement continue to grapple with the ominous potential of drones, the solution looks likes it could actually be much more simple and archaic than imagined.
Related: Why do migratory birds sing on their tropical wintering grounds?
The mystery of a deep-sea creature that resembles a discarded purple sock has been solved, scientists report.
The animal, called Xenoturbella, is so bizarre that for 60 years researchers could not work out what it was - or where it fitted into the family tree.
Fish in today's oceans contain far lower levels of mercury, DDT and other toxic substances than at any time in the last four decades, according to a major review by scientists at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla.
The researchers looked at nearly 2,700 studies of pollutants found in fish samples taken from around the world between 1969 and 2012.
A fifth dead whale has been found washed up on the Lincolnshire coast, several miles from four other members of the same pod, marking the worst sperm whale stranding off the English coast since records began in 1913.
Researchers have discovered seasonal changes in the gut microbes of brown bears, which apparently help the beasts cope with the demands of hibernation.
Bears feast and gain weight in the warm months, ready for the big winter doze.
Cluttered and chaotic environments can cause stress, which can lead us to grab more of the indulgent snacks -- twice as many cookies according to this new study!
Conducted at the Cornell Food and Brand Lab and published in Environment and Behavior, the study shows that cluttered kitchens are caloric kitchens.
France has become the first country in the world to ban supermarkets from throwing away or destroying unsold food, forcing them instead to donate it to charities and food banks.
They course through many of the world’s biggest cities: miles of underground pipes built decades ago, ferrying steam or hot water to a network of buildings. Misty manhole covers on urban streets signal the presence of what’s known as district energy.
The use of fire by Aborigines to modify their environment had little, if any, impact on the natural erosion processes that shaped parts of south-eastern Australia, a new study has found.
The effect of fire use by Aboriginal Australians on the landscape has been widely debated, said the study's lead author Dr Eric Portenga of the University of Glasgow and Macquarie University.
Loss of ice in Antarctica caused by a warming ocean could raise global sea levels by three metres, research suggests.
Scientists carrying out fieldwork in the region have assessed the landscape to determine how the West Antarctic ice sheet might respond to increasing global temperatures.
A major and unexplained population shift occurred in Europe around 15,000 years ago when local hunter-gatherers were almost completely replaced by a group from another area, scientists researching our ancestors' genetics have discovered.
The enormous arena was empty, save for the seesaws and the dozens of condemned criminals who sat naked upon them, hands tied behind their backs. Unfamiliar with the recently invented contraptions known as petaurua, the men tested the seesaws uneasily. One criminal would push off the ground and suddenly find himself 15 feet in the air while his partner on the other side of the seesaw descended swiftly to the ground. How strange.
According to new research conducted by the University of Tübingen, hominin species from the Lower Paleolithic had much more in common with modern humans than was previously understood.
Homo hidelbergensis, the species of early hominin found in a coal mine in Schöningen, Germany, that would have been alive around 300,000 years in the past, are thought to have lived in social groups highly reminiscent of modern human cultures, according to new data gathered from the most recent forays into the mine.
Having a big head might not be such a bad thing, if it means you have a gigantic brain. Animals with bigger brains may be better problem-solvers, according to a new study.
Scientists long thought a correlation existed between an animal's relative brain size and its cognitive abilities, but even after decades of research, controversy over the answer abounds.
More than 100 years ago, American sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois was concerned that race was being used as a biological explanation for what he understood to be social and cultural differences between different populations of people. He spoke out against the idea of "white" and "black" as discrete groups, claiming that these distinctions ignored the scope of human diversity.
Alt: Is It Time To Stop Using Race In Medical Research?
It's a theory that has been around for almost a century: There are no more than six degrees of separation between any two people on the planet.
But according to a study from Facebook, the world is actually smaller than we think. The social network has found there are on average just three and a half people between any one person and another.
Before developing perceptual constancy, three- to four-month-old babies have a striking ability to see image differences that are invisible to adults. They lose this superior skill around the age of five months
Related: In Baby's 'First Bite,' A Chance To Shape A Child's Taste
Related: Bilingual toddlers demonstrate greater cognitive flexibility, study finds
Despite the wishes of all those of us with a teetering to-be-read pile, companies and apps that promise to rapidly increase reading speeds are on a hiding to nothing, according to new research.
Related: Self-Publishing & Big Five Dominate Book Market, According to Nielsen
William Nicholson once said, "We read to know that we are not alone." And that sentiment, of reading to connect with the world and to feel less isolated, may be more than just a poetic thought. Doctors are now prescribing books to patients with depression, hoping that reading will help them find connections.
Related: Pilot study shows meditation can help US veterans manage chronic pain
Evidence in a study led by researchers at the University of British Columbia along with University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Public Health Associate Professor Peter S. Hendricks, Ph.D., suggests hallucinogens such as psilocybin or LSD may have therapeutic potential for reducing intimate partner violence, or IPV.
Being a die-hard fan of Star Trek, I basically grew up accepting the idea that people could be beamed from one location to the next. They made it look so easy; you just stepped onto the lighted pad while some guy in a red (or yellow) shirt hit a few icons on his control board and after a few wibbly lines and sparkles, away you went. They were never really clear on exactly how it worked or how far they could send you, but it must have been anywhere from a few hundred thousand miles to a million. What a way to travel!
Quick, what's the best way to provide an alternative source of energy for the Earth?
If you answered, "Get a mini black hole to orbit Earth," then you and physicist Stephen Hawking may be thinking on the same wavelength.
If I seem a little obsessed with dark matter at the moment, it's only because there is so much interesting stuff going on right now. But I can give it up any time—really! As I reported last month, there has been a lot of excitement among astrophysicists and cosmologists because there seems to be more gamma rays than expected coming from various places, including near the center of the Milky Way and other galaxies.
If you've ever wanted to reach out to potential life outside of our Solar System, this is your chance. A new project will beam people's text-based messages into space at light speed later this year, with the communications predicted to reach Polaris - or the North Star - in 434 years.
Last year, after attending the infamous Be-Witness presentation, some of my friends invited me to their podcasts so I could share my impressions about the farcical event organized by Jaime Maussan. They were particularly interested in learning about the reaction of the audience after the ad-nauseamly discussed Roswell slide was revealed --were they disappointed or outraged?
Alt: Edgar Mitchell, Sixth Astronaut to Walk on the Moon, Dies at 85
I’ve always liked the idea that Jupiter has acted like a protector to its little brother, Earth. That it has used its massive gravitational pull to divert asteroids and comets from a collision course with Earth. Maybe Jupiter even felt bad when one got through, and doomed the dinosaurs to extinction. But a new study has cast this idea into doubt.
Related: 100-Foot Asteroid to Buzz Earth Next Month
If a material is thicker, it should be less transparent, right? It turns out that in Saturn’s rings, that’s not always the case. A new examination of the B ring shows that even though it’s the most opaque of Saturn’s rings, it’s not the densest one.
The rain began to fall as Joe Giaime and I scrambled down a lonely rise, back toward the observatory’s main building. It wasn’t so much rain as a hard mist, characteristic of the muggy weather southern Louisiana often sees in January when moisture rolls inland from the Gulf of Mexico. As gray clouds fell like a shroud over the loblolly pines all around us, Giaime mused, “Well, I guess you’ve already gathered that we’re in the middle of nowhere."
In the fall of 1879, Dr. William James Beal walked to a secret spot on Michigan State University’s campus and planted a strange crop: 20 narrow-necked glass bottles, each filled with a mixture of moist sand and seeds. Each vessel was “left uncorked and placed with the mouth slanting downward so that water could not accumulate about the seeds,” Beal wrote. “These bottles were buried on a sandy knoll in a row running east and west.”
Until recently, being paralyzed from the waist down meant using a wheelchair to get around. And although daily life is more accessible to wheelchair users, they still face physical and social limitations. But researchers have been working to change that.
These micro-drones are expected to change the face of counter terrorism and warfare, as well as law enforcement and surveillance, in a big way.
The Close-In Covert Autonomous Disposable Aircraft, or CICADA, is playfully described as a “paper airplane with a circuit board” in a recent AFP article. The micro-drone is intended to be deployed in, what the U.S. military has taken to calling, “swarms.”
For years, the Hyperloop was a much buzzed-about myth. Finally, in 2013, Elon Musk provided a bit of substance by outlining the proposal in a research paper. People riding inside a tube, he said, could go from Los Angeles to San Francisco in just 30 minutes at speeds exceeding 700mph. But Musk had rockets and electric cars and batteries to build, and he expressed a hope that others would step forward to help carry the idea forward as an open source project.
Related: Quake early warning system for California is delayed by fight over who will pay
Archaeologists are using Environment Agency laser mapping data to rediscover hundreds of kilometres of ‘lost’ Roman roads.
Since 1998 the Environment Agency has used lasers to scan and map the English landscape from above to help with work such as flood modelling and tracking changing coastlines. But these LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) data are also publically available and have been used to help with everything from building virtual worlds to managing forests.
A 3,500-year-old Egyptian seal in the form of a scarab was discovered by an Israeli during a walk in the Lower Galilee.
Amit Haklai spotted a tiny white object while on an outing with his small children on the Horns of Hittim near Tiberias, Army Radio reported Tuesday.
Three 1,700 year old funerary inscriptions written in Aramaic and Greek were recently revealed in the ancient cemetery in in the north.
The two Aramaic inscriptions mention individuals referred to as “rabbis” who were buried in the western cemetery of Zippori; their names have not yet been deciphered.
The remains of 14 women believed to be of high status and importance have been found at Stonehenge, the iconic prehistoric monument in Wiltshire, England.
The discovery, along with other finds, supports the theory that Stonehenge functioned, at least for part of its long history, as a cremation cemetery for leaders and other noteworthy individuals, according to a report published in the latest issue of British Archaeology.
Alt: Stonehenge burial pit for the Neolithic elite contains a 'surprising' number of women: Find suggests females played a key role in the society and had same rights as men
A common (sexist) stereotype proposes that women behave irrationally in certain phases of their menstrual cycle (e.g., hysteria). And in fact, many studies have now shown that women do behave differently when they are ovulating—from wearing red to being more likely to vote for Obama.
Related: Women found to be more susceptible to contagious yawning than men
Birth, like life, is messy. But, while life’s messes often harm health, the untidiness of our entrance into the world may profoundly protect it—at least that’s a leading hypothesis among microbiome researchers.
Related: Increasing breastfeeding worldwide could prevent over 800000 child deaths and 20000 deaths from breast cancer every year
Related: 'BPA-free' plastic accelerates embryonic development, disrupts reproductive system
A wind farm that would be the largest in the world and power more than a million homes has been given the go-ahead in Britain.
Offshore wind developer Dong Energy said Wednesday a final decision had been made to construct the 1.2 gigawatt Hornsea Project One scheme off the coast of Yorkshire in northern England.
Morocco has officially turned on a massive solar power plant in the Sahara Desert, kicking off the first phase of a planned project to provide renewable energy to more than a million Moroccans.
The Noor I power plant is located near the town of Ouarzazate, on the edge of the Sahara. It's capable of generating up to 160 megawatts of power and covers thousands of acres of desert, making the first stage alone one of the world's biggest solar thermal power plants.
Newly grown rainforests can absorb 11 times as much carbon from the atmosphere as old-growth forests, a study has shown.
The researchers have produced a map showing regions in Latin America where regrowing rainforests would deliver the greatest benefits.
The rapid melting of Greenland's ice sheet is used by many as proof the Earth is going through a period of global warming.
But the reasons why the centre of the massive body of ice has grown thicker over time has left climate scientists baffled.
The population of Stone Age Europe underwent a radical transformation toward the end of the last Ice Age, according to a study of ancient DNA.
"We uncovered a completely unknown chapter of human history: a major population turnover in Europe at the end of the last Ice Age," said Dr Johannes Krause of the Max Planck Institute, one of the study's authors.
Mali’s fabled city of Timbuktu on Thursday celebrated the recovery of its historic mausoleums, destroyed during an Islamist takeover of northern Mali in 2012 and rebuilt thanks to UN cultural agency UNESCO.
The dusty desert city formally received the keys to the precious shrines to Muslim saints dating back to medieval times at a ceremony consecrating their return that was held in the legendary Djingareyber mosque.
A strange fossil wildebeest had hollowed-out headgear that let it trumpet like a dinosaur.
The Ice Age beast, named Rusingoryx atopocranion, lived on Kenya’s Rusinga Island between 75,000 and 50,000 years ago, back when the area was carpeted in dry grasslands. The species was previously only known from partial skulls, but now a bonebed has revealed that they were more bizarre than anyone expected.
Woolly mammoth was never served at a lavish 1950s New York dinner where rare and extinct species were trumpeted as being on the menu, a researcher has said after putting leftover meat through DNA analysis.
The Explorers Club soiree became folklore after it was said to have included 250,000-year-old extinct mammoth. Meat from a giant ground sloth was also promised.
We live, for better or for worse, in a competition-driven world. Rivalry powers our economy, sparks technological innovation and encourages academic discovery. But it also compels people to manipulate the system and commit crimes. Some figure it’s just easier—and even acceptable—to cheat.
Alt: Study shows winning causes people to be more likely to cheat the next time
Gun deaths are a serious public health issue in the United States and the scope of the problem is often difficult to illustrate. A new study published in The American Journal of Medicine lays out the risk in concrete terms. When compared to 22 other high-income nations, Americans are ten times more likely to be killed by a gun than their counterparts in the developed world. Specifically, gun homicide rates are 25 times higher in the U.S. and, while the overall suicide rate is on par with other high-income nations, the U.S. gun suicide rate is eight times higher.
Since 2014, Mexican drug cartels have been suffering economically after marijuana was legalized and became conveniently available in Colorado. Operations in Mexico and along the southern border of the United States have reportedly been affected.
Related: What's That Word? Marijuana May Affect Verbal Memory
It’s probably not the first place you’d go to find relief from severe clinical depression, but the psychedelic party drug ketamine has revealed itself to be something of a 'miracle drug', performing far more quickly and effectively than traditional antidepressants and mood stabilisers. Where current treatments take weeks to work - and then might not work at all, depending on the patient - ketamine has been shown to treat the symptoms of depression within hours.
Fish in wildlife refuges are feminized, probably by hormone-skewing pollution. What does this portend for the health of all creatures—and people?
Related: Is it fish or just foul? 'Mutant' sea creature with a nose, feet, tail and WINGS baffles Caribbean island
Related: Massive Bird Die-Off Puzzles Alaska Scientists
Researchers are testing a new technology similar to Microsoft’s Kinect for Xbox One that allows orangutans in the Melbourne Zoo to use their bodies to control challenging games and applications.
If the trial is successful, within a few years the orangutans could be playing computer games with zoo visitors.
Did he or didn't he? That's the question groundhog and weather enthusiasts woke up wondering Tuesday.
For the winter weary, rest assured. Punxsutawney Phil, the groundhog famous for his weather predictions, did not see his shadow, a sign that spring will start early this year.
When deciding whether to take an umbrella, a quick glance at the Moon is probably the last place you look.
But according to scientists Earth’s closest neighbour actually impacts its rainfall. When the Moon is high in the sky, lunar forces create bulges in the planet’s atmosphere which change in the amount of rain which falls below.