Newsdesk Archive
The U.S. twin birth rate reached a record high in 2014, a new report finds.
The country's twin birth rate hit 33.9 twins per 1,000 births in 2014, up from 33.7 twins per 1,000 births in 2013, according to the report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
According to a government analysis, the number of children asthma in the U.S. has finally stopped increasing and may have started falling, Wamu reports.
The percentage of U.S. children with asthma doubled in the 1980s and 1990s and had been increasing steadily since then.
Beijing and Delhi are both planning major initiatives to kick cars off their streets, at least part of the time. Now even cities that aren’t famous for their pollution are taking drastic measures to clean up their air. Today, Milan’s streets are filled with bikes and pedestrians as part of three-day car ban.
It may seem counterintuitive, but cleaner air could actually be exacerbating global warming trends.
The soot and other particles that make up air pollution tend to scatter light back out into space. As countries around the globe have cleaned up their act, there are fewer particles to reflect light, meaning more sunlight is reaching the Earth's surface and warming it, Martin Wild, a researcher at ETH Zurich in Switzerland
It took 100 million years for oxygen levels in the oceans and atmosphere to increase to the level that allowed the explosion of animal life on Earth about 600 million years ago, according to a recent study.
Before now, it was not known how quickly Earth’s oceans and atmosphere became oxygenated, and whether animal life expanded before or after the rise in oxygen.
A new analysis of the fossil record shows that a deep pattern in nature remained the same for 300 million years. Then, 6,000 years ago, the pattern was disrupted — at about the same time that agriculture spread across North America.
Prehistoric human populations of hunter-gatherers in the region that is now Wyoming and Colorado grew at the same rate as farming societies in Europe, according to a new radiocarbon analysis involving University of Wyoming researchers.
The number of gold coins and plates unearthed from an east China ancient tomb has increased to 378, after archaeologists found another 68 on Friday.
The new finds include 20 thin plates about 22 centimeters long and 10 centimeters wide.
A vast network of 200-year-old tunnels lies beneath Liverpool’s streets – and no one knows why they’re there. Chris Baraniuk meets the dedicated volunteers digging up their secrets.
Elon Musk’s dream and ultimate goal of establishing a permanent human presence on the Red Planet in the form of “A City on Mars” took a gigantic step forward with the game changing rocket landing and recovery technology vividly demonstrated by his firm’s Falcon 9 booster this past Monday, Dec. 21 – following a successful blastoff from the Florida space coast just minutes earlier on the first SpaceX launch since a catastrophic mid-air calamity six months ago.
Using mathematical models, scientists have 'looked' into the interior of super-Earths and discovered that they may contain compounds that are forbidden by the classical rules of chemistry -- these substances may increase the heat transfer rate and strengthen the magnetic field on these planets. The findings have been presented in a paper published in the journal Scientific Reports.
All over the planet, every day, oceans send plumes of sea spray into the atmosphere. Beyond the poetry of crashing ocean waves, this salt- and carbon-rich spray has a dramatic effect on the formation and duration of clouds.
A songbird species that flourishes on the salmon-rich side of dams in the western United States struggles when it tries to nest on the side closed off from the fish and the nutrients they leave behind.
But the songbird and the rest of the divided ecosystem rebounds, faster than some experts expected, when dams come down and rivers are allowed to resume their natural flow.
Between December 28 and February 13, a team of students and volunteers will join forces in Finland to build the world’s longest ice bridge — 213 feet long and 16 feet wide — that’s strong enough to hold a two-ton car.
Adding an artistic twist, the team plans to design the bridge based on a 1502 sketch by Leonardo Da Vinci
Chile is considering erecting a permanent pier for tourism and scientific research at one of its bases in Antarctica, Agence France-Presse reports. Government officials said Friday they are looking into whether the move would be logistically feasible.
The Ministry of Public Works will explore possible locations in Fildes Bay on King George Island, which encompasses the town of Villa Las Estrellas and the Presidente Eduardo Frei Montalva base. The base is about 2,000 miles south of the capital, Santiago
Endowed with renewable resources, such as wind, sun, geothermal and hydro, the country is still relying on coal and other fossil fuels to produce its energy. Forward-looking public policies could make the difference and lead to sustainable and less polluted urban areas in the coming decades
Without meteorites, you probably wouldn’t be reading this. As writer Maria Golia explains in her new book, Meteorite: Nature and Culture, meteorite bombardments during Earth’s infancy may have delivered signature ingredients, like amino acids, to the primordial soup, contributing to life as we know it. Meteorites have helped us determine the age of the Earth, contributed to mass extinctions, and even turned the things they struck into “impactifacts” prized by collectors.
The diversity of mammals on Earth exploded straight after the dinosaur extinction event, according to UCL researchers.
New analysis of the fossil record shows that placental mammals, the group that today includes nearly 5000 species including humans, became more varied in anatomy during the Paleocene epoch – the 10 million years immediately following the event.
The Antalya Regional Board of Protection of Cultural and Natural Assets has decided to cancel a hotel that was planned to be constructed on an area that encompasses parts of the ancient city of Phaselis in Kemer.
The Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowment has planned to renovate a few small but ancient temples through donors. It has identified a number of temples in the district and has planned to call for suggestions from the Archaeological Survey of India for evolving a safe methodology to renovate the temples retaining their original grandeur.
In 2012, Islamist militants overran northern Mali, and an al Qaeda affiliate took control of Timbuktu and started destroying things. Some of the ancient structures, dating back to when Timbuktu was a center of Islamic culture, have been rebuilt, but you can't revive burned ancient manuscripts. Luckily, a huge number of the Islamic texts Timbuktu was famous for — more than 370,000 manuscripts — were spirited out of the city in a daring rescue operation spearheaded by Abdel Kader Haidara, one of Timbuktu's most active private librarians
A major excavation led by the British Museum has unearthed a wealth of revealing detail about a Greek trading city in ancient Egypt. Wood from Greek ships and Egyptian figurines dedicated to a “festival of drunkenness” are among more than 10,000 ancient artefacts discovered on the site of the city of Naukratis, which was on the Nile delta. The ancient port is mentioned in the accounts of Herodotus, the Greek historian writing in the fifth century BC.
A team of historians have claimed that an island off the coast of Canada has artifacts dating back to a time when the Roman Empire still ruled Europe and the Mediterranean.
According to Jovan Hutton Pulitzer, lead historian on the research project, a treasure trove of Roman-era artifacts, including a head sculpture, a fragment of a shield, a handful of golden coins from ancient Carthage, a legionnaire’s whistle, and a Roman sword, was found in the wreck of a ship off the coastline of Oak Island, which itself sits off the southern shores of Nova Scotia.
Intricate mosaic tiles, bathhouses and even graffiti in the ancient city of Pompeii have been officially unveiled to the public on Thursday after a lengthy restoration process.
These restored ruins are giving the world a renewed glimpse into the historic Roman town before it was laid to ruin by a devastating volcanic eruption about 2,000 years ago.
As we prepare for and take part in holiday festivities this time of year, celebration and merriment may come with increased demands that can add stress to our lives. But we can prevent that from getting the better of us. Reflecting on the true spirit of the season and the wisdom of kindness is one way that can help us boost our mood and dissolve the blues.
Throat cancer patients who have lost their voice can look forward to speaking again, without having to shell out thousands on an artificial voice box. A Bengaluru-based oncologist has invented a voice prosthesis priced at just Rs 50. The device weighs just about 25 grams and is seen as a boon for the poor.
What happens when someone claims to have proved a famous conjecture? Well, it depends. When a paper is submitted, the journal editor will pass it off to a respected expert for examination. That referee will then scan the paper looking for a significant new idea. If there isn’t one, then the whole argument is unlikely to get much more scrutiny.
Object-recognition systems are beginning to get pretty good—and in the case of Facebook's face-recognition algorithms, frighteningly good.
But object-recognition systems are typically trained on millions of visual examples, which is a far cry from how humans learn. Show a human two or three pictures of an object, and he or she can usually identify new instances of it.
Jorge* is around 60 years old, works a white collar job, has gray hair, married children, and grown grandchildren. People who work with him would never imagine that he participates in religious rituals using a mind altering tea.
And yet, thanks to ayahuasca, Jorge became a teetotaler. A big change for someone who, when he was younger, would buy several cases of whiskey at once. “I opened the boxes and started emptying the bottles in the kitchen sink. My wife was shocked,” he told me.
A study conducted in the city of Newcastle, UK, has revealed what you always suspected. Over two-thirds of emergency room visits on weekends, especially in the wee hours of the morning, are directly related to alcohol consumption.
Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos signed a decree Tuesday legalizing and regulating medical marijuana, the latest softening of the country's hardline tactics in the war on drugs.
Related: Medical Marijuana ‘Cease Fire’ Begins
Everybody knows that a buildup of the wrong kind of fats can cause cardiovascular disease. A new study in nematode worms and mice also finds that a protein that transports fats around the body can hinder protective processes in cells and affect life span.
Related: Study identifies liver-generated hormone that regulates 'sweet tooth'
A team of astronomers using ESO's Very Large Telescope has captured the most detailed images ever of the hypergiant star VY Canis Majoris. These observations show how the unexpectedly large size of the particles of dust surrounding the star enable it to lose an enormous amount of mass as it begins to die. This process, understood now for the first time, is necessary to prepare such gigantic stars to meet explosive demises as supernovae.
According to the best current physics models, the universe should have collapsed shortly after inflation—the period that lasted for a fraction of a second immediately after the Big Bang.
The problem lies in part with Higgs bosons, which were produced during inflation and which explain why other particles have the masses that they do.
Theoretical physicists are churning out papers at a remarkable rate as they rush to analyse tantalizing hints of a new particle in data from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
Experimenters revealed their observations in a 15 December announcement at CERN, the European laboratory of particle physics that hosts the LHC near Geneva. Since then, 95 research manuscripts have been posted to the preprint server arXiv discussing the hypothetical particle, even though the statistical significance of the findings is low
There aren’t many fans of the sport of curling on Earth, even during the Winter Olympics. Could frustrated players have taken their rocks and moved to Mars? So far, that’s one of the better explanations for a strange phenomenon spotted on the surface of the Red Planet by Google Mars observers – skid marks that look like the result of rocks sliding across the ground. What else could it be?
THIS footage of the International Space Station apparently surrounded by Unidentifed Flying Objects (UFOs) this week as been branded "the best piece of evidence in years" for the existence of aliens.
Related: UFO captured? Man says he has proof
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A team using the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument suite aboard NASA's Curiosity rover has made the first detection of nitrogen on the surface of Mars from release during heating of Martian sediments.
The nitrogen was detected in the form of nitric oxide, and could be released from the breakdown of nitrates during heating. Nitrates are a class of molecules that contain nitrogen in a form that can be used by living organisms. The discovery adds to the evidence that ancient Mars was habitable for life.
If you've been to see the recent Ridley Scott film The Martian, you'll know that growing food on the Red Planet isn't exactly straightforward: the atmosphere is 95 percent carbon dioxide and there's precious little evidence to suggest there's enough water there to support life. Now a team made up of researchers from the International Potato Centre (CIP) and NASA is attempting to grow potatoes in Mars-like conditions.
A pair of Chilean condors have been brought to a zoo in Medellin as part of an effort to reintroduce the majestic birds in Colombia, where they have become all but extinct.
"Condors are a very endangered species," said Sandra Correa, director the Santa Fe Zoo in Medellin, who said the goal is to mate the birds to help replenish the population in Colombia, where only about 100 condors remain.
Researchers have confirmed that the Henry Mountains of southern Utah are home to a rare, genetically pure bison herd. The team included Utah State University scientists who analyzed tissue samples from the bison.
With only three northern white rhinoceroses left on Earth, conservationists are giving up on traditional breeding efforts and turning to cutting-edge science to save this subspecies.
At a meeting in Vienna from Dec. 3 to Dec. 6, researchers developed a plan to use stem cells to create fertilized rhino embryos, which will be carried by surrogate southern white rhino females.
Wild bees are key pollinators for agriculture across the United States, especially as managed honeybees face devastating declines. But these wild pollinators are struggling too. Can we save the bees?
Say hello to the ninja lanternshark, a species of shark that has only just been discovered. It's really weird. It hides in the deep — and its black skin keeps it camouflaged — but it also glows in the dark.
The ninja lanternshark was discovered by a team at the Pacific Shark Research Center, in Moss Landing, California.
Australian researchers are encouraging people to buy "underwater Christmas trees" to help restore seaweed that suddenly disappeared in the 1980s.
Poor water quality was blamed for the loss of crayweed from 43 miles (70km) of coastline around Sydney.
Two Australian surfers are on a mission to capture debris and waste floating in ocean waters.
Andrew Turton and Pete Ceglinski developed a water-filtering system called the Seabin that can be used in marinas and ports to capture plastic, paper, oil, fuel, detergent and other garbag.
If you rely on a good cup of coffee to get you through the morning, you might want to stock up: it looks like we'll soon be experiencing a shortage of beans that make up one of the world's most popular hot beverages. The latest coffee production figures are in, and while there's set to be a slight increase this year, it's down to a perfectly aligned combination of factors that isn't going to last much longer.
For the first time in nearly three decades, American scientists have produced a plutonium-238 sample, with a research team at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee announcing the feat in a statement released on Tuesday.
Plutonium-238 is a radioactive isotope that produces heat as it decays, and the new sample is in the same oxide power form used to manufacture heat sources for power systems, including those used in spacecraft instruments, they explained.
A team led by researchers from the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science has created a super-strong yet light structural metal with extremely high specific strength and modulus, or stiffness-to-weight ratio. The new metal is composed of magnesium infused with a dense and even dispersal of ceramic silicon carbide nanoparticles. It could be used to make lighter airplanes, spacecraft, and cars, helping to improve fuel efficiency, as well as in mobile electronics and biomedical devices.
Here’s a clever technological breakthrough that could help the environment in two ways. MIT announced this week that some of its researchers have figured out a way to make solar cells using parts from discarded car batteries that would otherwise have simply gone to waste. Essentially, the researchers have figured out how to extract lead from old car batteries and use it as a component in solar cells that they say are just as efficient as solar cells produced with “high-purity, commercially available starting materials.”
Seen from the air, the peninsula that is home to the mid-Norway town of Ørland and the nation's Main Air Station, looks like the head of a seahorse with its nose pointed south.
It didn't always look this way, though.
Earlier this year, a maintenance worker found a golden scepter in a Jerusalem cemetery. Antiquity experts were stumped, prompting a six-month long investigation into its origin. A Facebook user has now correctly identified the object — and well, let’s just say it’s not what they thought it was.
A gust of wind blowing up the Thames half a millennium ago may have been responsible for the creation of a small hoard of gold that has been dug out of the muddy banks of the river.
An ancient copy of the Koran found at the University of Birmingham may have belonged to Abu Bakr, one of the world’s first ever Muslims.
Radiocarbon dating carried out in July found the fragments to be at least 1,370-years-old, raising the possibility it could be the oldest copy of the Islamic holy book in existence.
A Turkish Erasmus student in Rome has been detained for carving his name into one of the 1,800-year-old columns in the historical Imperial Fora on Dec. 20.
According to a report by the daily Corriere della Sera, Turkish student Aziz Multu wrote his name with a coin on the ancient column. He was released after paying a punitive fine of 200 euros.
Ancient Egyptians wrote Calendars of Lucky and Unlucky Days that assigned astronomically influenced prognoses for each day of the year. The best preserved of these calendars is the Cairo Calendar dated to 1244 – 1163 BC (Ramesside Period). According to scientists at the University of Helsinki, this papyrus is the oldest preserved historical document of naked eye observations of a variable star, the eclipsing binary star Algol.
On 20 December 1990, Tim Berners-Lee, a scientist at the CERN research facility in Switzerland, turned on the world’s first website.
Hosted by the World Wide Web (where "www" comes from) on Berners-Lee's NeXT computer, the site was used internally by CERN scientists until the whole server was opened up to anyone with an Internet connection in August 1991.
The problems with your internet are, everyone knows, arcane and demanding. Do you have thick walls? Is your provider throttling your speeds? Maybe your router just doesn't look evil enough? These are all potential difficulties, but here's one you might not have heard of before: Christmas lights. According to advice from British telecoms watchdog Ofcom, electrical interference from your festive decorations could tangling be up your Wi-Fi. This is a seasonal issue, with ISPs receiving a spike in complaints during the holiday period, and blinking lights are apparently the worst offenders.
In 1921, in a Munich beer hall, newly appointed Nazi party leader Adolf Hitler gave a Christmas speech to an excited crowd.
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It’s believed that reindeer herders in Northern Europe learned about the psychedelic powers of the magic mushroom, also known as the fly agaric or Amanita muscaria, from watching reindeer eat them in the wintertime when other mushrooms aren’t available. Once they have a few ‘shrooms, the reindeer dance, prance and dash around aimlessly as if they’re blitzed. Sound familiar?
If you thought waking up on Christmas morning to above-average temperatures and no snow on the ground was scary, Boston Dynamics gives us a far more terrifying glimpse into a dystopian future where Santa’s reindeer have been replaced with (highly kickable) trotting robotic dogs.
A British couple has flown to South Korea to await the arrival of two puppies due to be born over Christmas after having their dead pet cloned.
Laura Jacques and her partner, Richard Remde, from Yorkshire, are the first UK customers to employ the services of the Sooam Biotech Research Foundation, which offers a dog cloning service for $100,000 (£67,000) per canine.
Dogs may be man’s best friend, but the humans who created them through generations of breeding have saddled them with an excess of detrimental DNA, according to a new study.
The behavioral findings hint that dogs, like humans, might be capable of their own form of empathy
This week, millions of people around the world will no doubt experience rapid mimicry—an involuntary, split-second mirroring of another person’s facial expressions—as they exchange smiles over gifts, good meals and holiday traditions. This phenomenon, observed in humans and many other primates, is considered a basic building block of our ability to feel empathy.
Dr Jolyon Troscianko, from the University of Exeter, and Dr Christian Rutz, from the University of St Andrews, have captured first video recordings documenting how these tropical corvids fashion these particularly complex tools in the wild.
The pair developed tiny video 'spy-cameras' which were attached to the crows, to observe their natural foraging behaviour.
Imperial College London has found that two networks of genes determine whether people are intelligent or not so bright.
Researchers have believed for some time that intellect is inherited with studies suggesting that up to 75 per cent of IQ is genetic, and the rest down to environmental factors such as schooling and friendship groups.
The reasons are unclear, but higher IQ is correlated with longer life span
People are living longer than ever. According to a 2015 World Health Organization report, Japanese live the longest, with an average life expectancy of 84, while Americans can expect to live to 77. At the same time, it is an obvious fact that some people live much longer than other people. There is inequality in mortality.
It may be something many parents have already suspected, but it appears the brains of teenage boys who play video game compulsively are wired differently to other players.
Researchers have found people who play a lot of computer games tend to have hyperconnectivity between several key brain networks.
Related: How music, language shape the brain
The end of the great age of pyramid building in Egypt was long thought to be a traumatic collapse that plunged the Nile Valley into a long era of chaos. New research is changing that view.
As world leaders celebrate a new agreement to limit the impact of greenhouse gases on human society, archaeologists have been taking a fresh look at one of the most dramatic instances of a civilization confronted with devastating climate change.
Orkney’s number of Stone Age sites implies that the remote Scottish islands once may have been at the centre of it all. But why? An exciting new discovery could hold the clues.
Researchers have made some surprising discoveries while investigating the underwater ruins of Lechaion, ancient Corinth’s partially submerged harbor town.
Lechaion was one of two bustling ports of the ancient city of Corinth. The harbor saw vibrant maritime activity for more than a thousand years, from the 6th century BCE to the 6th century CE. Ships and fleets departed filled with cargoes, colonists, and marines destined for ports all over the Mediterranean and beyond.
US actor Nicolas Cage has agreed to turn over a dinosaur skull he purchased for $276,000, after it turned out to be smuggled from Mongolia, his agent confirmed Tuesday.
The actor bought the Tarbosaurus bataar fossil at a New York auction in March 2007 and “received a certificate of authenticity from the auction company,” said Alex Schack, who represents Cage.
When Norway announced plans to expand its Ørland Airport this year, archaeologists got excited. They knew that pre-construction excavation was likely to reveal ancient Viking artifacts. But they got far more than they had hoped.
Like amaranth and quinoa before it, millet – a hardy, gluten-free ancient seed – has become an "it" grain in recent years. Once dismissed as birdseed, millet can now be found sprinkled on top of mashed potatoes at top-rated restaurants, cooked into baby foods, and generally extolled for its nutritious virtues. Some have even dubbed millet "the new quinoa."
Happiness itself has no direct effect on mortality, a study of a million UK women has shown. Further, the widespread but mistaken belief that unhappiness and stress directly cause ill health came from studies that had simply confused cause and effect, say researchers.
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Much like trying to watch a video with the audio out of synch, older adults may have difficulty combining the stimuli they see and hear, and it could have implications for rapid decision-making tasks such as driving, according to new research.
In ancient Greek myth, the Hydra was a multi-headed monster that grew two more heads for every one that it lost. As it turns out, the real-life animal named after this mythical beast may be even more tenacious.
A new study finds that hydra — spindly, freshwater polyps — can live seemingly forever, without aging.
As they zero in on their sugary reward, foraging bumblebees follow an invisible clue: electric fields. Although some animals, including sharks, are known to have an electric sense, this is the first time the ability has been documented in insects.
Pollinating insects take in a large number of sensory cues, from colours and fragrances to petal textures and air humidity. Being able to judge which flowers will provide the most nectar, and which have already been plundered by other pollinators, helps them to use their energy more efficiently.
Google and Ford will create a joint venture to build self-driving vehicles with Google’s technology, a huge step by both companies toward a new business of automated ride sharing, Yahoo Autos has learned.
According to three sources familiar with the plans, the partnership is set to be announced by Ford at the Consumer Electronics Show in January.
X-ray vision, a comic book fantasy for decades, is becoming a reality in a lab at MIT.
A group of researchers led by Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Dina Katabi has developed software that uses variations in radio signals to recognize human silhouettes through walls and track their movements.
The imaginary feline known as Schrödinger's cat, which is both alive and dead (or neither) until beheld, is the best-known representation of the real-life phenomenon known as superposition.
Now, for the first time, scientists have demonstrated superposition over a macroscopic scale of about a half-yard (0.54 meters). This finding reveals that superposition is possible at the distances and timescales of everyday life, researchers said.
Since childhood, I've obsessed about existence. What is existence? What's the extent of existence? What's the purpose of existence? Now, six decades on, having explored many things, I'm no surer (and feeling no smarter), but I continue my pursuit.
Black holes earn their name because their gravity is so strong not even light can escape from them. Oddly, though, physicists have come up with a bit of theoretical sleight of hand to retrieve a speck of information that's been dropped into a black hole. The calculation touches on one of the biggest mysteries in physics: how all of the information trapped in a black hole leaks out as the black hole "evaporates." Many theorists think that must happen, but they don't know how.
Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are short bursts of radio emissions from the sky lasting only few milliseconds. However, their origin is still unknown, perplexing astronomers for years since the discovery of the first FRB in 2007. According to various studies, these peculiar radio bursts could be a product of a supernova, two black holes colliding, a spinning neutron star, or they could be related to hyperflares of magnetars. Now, astronomers from the Nanjing University in China are offering another explanation for this puzzling question, asking if collisions of asteroids with neutron stars are producing FRBs.
This Christmas Eve, we will be able to see an asteroid in the sky.
Asteroid 2003 SD220 will zoom past Earth about 11 million km (6,787,600 miles) away, which is more than 28 times the distance between Earth and the Moon.
Earth could be at higher risk of being hit by a comet than widely thought, according to astronomers who have suggested keeping a closer eye on distant objects.
Most studies of potential hazards involved objects in the asteroid belt roughly between Mars and Jupiter, the researchers said. But they noted that the discovery in the last two decades of hundreds of giant comets dubbed “centaurs” requires expanding the list of potential hazards.
Alt: Giant comets could pose danger to life on Earth
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Giant tsunamis may have helped to shape the world around us today.
For nearly a decade, geologist Dallas Abbott and her colleagues have been trying to prove that an enormous space rock, possibly an asteroid, smashed into the Indian Ocean about 10,000 years ago and created a megatsunami, a set of giant waves that washed over the east coast of Africa. Such a tsunami could have created waves as high as 300 feet (91 meters)—three times larger than the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004 that left 230,000 dead.
It has been ridiculously warm across the eastern half of the country this month, with many spots likely to see their warmest December on record. New York City may reach as high as 72°F on Christmas Eve. Washington D.C. is forecast to reach the mid-70s, and Miami the mid-80s. One of the factors behind this decidedly un-Christmas-like weather is a feature that came to be associated with the brutally cold winters of the past few years: the infamous polar vortex.
Researchers have identified hydrothermal vents in the deep sea of the Caribbean which are unlike any found before. They are unusual in their structure, formed largely of talc, rather than the more usual sulphide minerals. Researchers analyzed samples from the VDVF - a vent field south of the Cayman Islands discovered by scientists and crew on board the RRS James Cook in 2010, and have published their findings.
For decades, this has been one of the most tantalizing — but elusive — renewable energy ideas around. Lightly-populated Iceland could tap into geothermal energy from its volcanoes, and its ample wind and hydro-power potential as well, and then transmit electricity along a proposed submarine cable to Great Britain, which has a lot more consumers to use it.
An earthquake of 4.6 magnitude in western Canada was caused by fracking, according to the region's energy regulator.
The British Coumbia Oil and Gas Commission said that the earthquake, which occurred in August, “was caused by fluid injection during hyrdraulic fracturing from an operator in the area,” the Globe and Mail reported.
Returned from the lowest cruising altitude over the dwarf planet yet, these shots of Ceres are incredibly detailed—and could even show us some surprises.
As NASA’s Dawn spacecraft and its cameras approach Ceres, photos are getting more revealing
In 2013, Chang'e-3, an unmanned lunar mission, touched down on the northern part of the Imbrium basin, one of the most prominent of the lava-filled impact basins visible from Earth.
The US space agency, Nasa, has suspended the March launch of its next mission to Mars because of a fault in a key research instrument.
Nasa said a problem with a seismometer provided by the French space agency meant the launch could not go ahead.
An astronomer recently made an unexpected discovery — not in the skies, but in a tea-kitchen at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen. Tucked away in the basement room of the Danish capital were cartons holding hundreds of glass plates imprinted with images of telescope observations, some of which are 120 years old.
For decades scientists thought that, in order to maintain a prosperous and powerful empire along the territories which make up what today is El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Belize and the southwest of Mexico, the Mayan elite must have exerted strict control over the nation’s people, customs and economy.
But new signs found at Cerén, an archaeological park located barely 35 kilometers west of San Salvador, tell a very different story of this civilization that emerged near 1,000 B.C. and developed until it collapsed in the sixteenth century.
Religious conflict has been dividing human society for more than 2,000 years, scientists say.
A new anthropological study of several Mexican archaeological sites dating back to 700BC has appeared to contradict a long-held belief that religion united early state societies.
In the Biblical book of Mark, the apostle describes how Jesus freed a man 'possessed by the devil' by casting his demons into pigs.
The event is known as the Miracle of the Swine, and now a 1,600-year-old slab found on the eastern shores of the Sea of Galilee could pinpoint the exact location of this incident.
A silver scroll discovered hidden in an ancient amulet has revealed what appears to be a magical spell that has remained a secret for 1,300 years.
The mysterious inscription is thought to have been made by a Jewish 'magician' living in the Muslim town of Jerash in Jordan in around 750AD.
Archaeologists digging in Austria found an ancient clay tablet that looks like a cell or cordless phone with keys etched with cuneiform characters that would imply it originally came from Mesopotamia. What is it? Is it evidence of an advanced civilization or time travel?