Newsdesk Archive
Evidence of “anti-demonic” funerary practices, with sickles placed around the throats of the deceased possibly to ward off demons, has been found in a 400-year-old cemetery in Poland.
Researchers examined more than 250 human skeletons which were excavated since 2008 from a post Medieval cemetery in Drawsko, a rural settlement site in northwestern Poland.
Archaeologists are mapping the area before road is replaced and teasing secrets from the ancient landscape
Some 3,400 years before the roaring torrent of the A303 road sliced the Stonehenge landscape in half, some people cut a beautiful pit a metre deep into the chalk with no tools except picks made of red deer antlers.
When the sun comes up for several days around the Winter Solstice, a 5,000-year-old tomb in Ireland can do a special trick.
This year, a sizable crowd gathered outside the Neolithic burial mound to glimpse the annual spectacle.
The winter solstice is a vampire's delight. No other night is longer and no day shorter. But it also means the subsequent days get longer.
This year's winter solstice will occur at 11:48 p.m. ET Monday (04:49 GMT Tuesday). At that moment, the sun will be directly overhead at 23.5 degrees south latitude, and the Earth's axial tilt will be as far from the sun as possible.
Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) have found the clearest indications yet that planets with masses several times that of Jupiter have recently formed in the discs of gas and dust around four young stars. Measurements of the gas around the stars also provide additional clues about the properties of those planets.
A NASA team moved a step closer to building a completely 3-D printed, high-performance rocket engine by manufacturing complex engine parts and test firing them together with cryogenic liquid hydrogen and oxygen to produce 20,000 pounds of thrust.
A little wiggle on a graph, representing just a handful of particles, has set the world of physics abuzz. Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland, the largest particle accelerator on Earth, reported yesterday that their machine might have produced a brand new particle not included in the established laws of particle physics known as the Standard Model.
The supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies are the most massive objects in the universe; the one in the middle of our Milky Way is as heavy as 4 million suns, and astronomers have spotted examples weighing in at billions of suns. But just how big can they grow? One astrophysicist says there is a limit: an eye-watering 50 billion suns.
Gullies on Mars that appeared to have possibly been carved by water were probably dug out by great chunks of dry ice, a pair of French researchers say.
Even as certain lines of evidence mount for the very occasional occurrence of water on present-day Mars, the findings published by the journal Nature Geoscience serve as a reminder that not every familiar-looking geological feature on Mars has an analogue on Earth.
The Aurora Borealis - better known as the Northern Lights - was spotted across parts of England on Sunday.
They are caused by charged particles emitted by the sun colliding with atoms in the earth's atmosphere - different gases create the range of colours.
Birds use sophisticated changes to the structure of their feathers to create multi-coloured plumage, using a process that could pave the way for the creation of paints and clothing colours that won't fade over time.
Small birds played an important role in Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. Darwin's study of finches he had collected in the Galápagos Islands helped him identify speciation, or how new biological species appear.
Two striking sea snakes have been spotted drifting off the coast of Western Australia, more than 15 years after the species was declared extinct. These bright yellow short nosed sea snakes (Aipysurus apraefrontalis) vanished from their natural habitat in the Timor Sea between 1998 and 2002, only to reappear in full view of a park ranger this month.
Something else other than the rise of agriculture spurred the accelerated growth in human population sizes that in turn gave rise to urbanized civilization. At least, so suggests a recent study* conducted by H. Jabran Zahid of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, and his colleagues from the University of Wyoming, the results of which are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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.
A tiny, shrimplike creature that lived 508 million years ago has been discovered carrying about two-dozen fossilized eggs with preserved embryos in its body, making it the earliest example of brood care with preserved embryos on record, a new study finds.
The tomb of Maia, the wet nurse of King Tutankhamun in Saqqara, opens to public today for the first time since its discovery in 1996.
The tomb is one of the most beautiful from the New Kingdom. It is a rock-hewn discovered in 1996 by French Egyptologist Alain Zivie in the well-known necropolis of Saqqara, 30 km (20 miles) south of Cairo.
Archaeologists believe Maia, Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun’s wet nurse, may have actually been his sister Meritaten.
On Sunday, Egyptian officials and French archaeologist Alain Zivie unveiled Maia’s tomb to journalists ahead of its opening to the public next month.
The debate about the world’s oldest tattoos is over—they belong to Ötzi, the European Tyrolean Iceman who died and was buried beneath an Alpine glacier along the Austrian–Italian border around 3250 B.C. Ötzi had 61 tattoos across his body, including his left wrist, lower legs, lower back and torso.
Of all the varied and incredible possibilities presented by the controversial new gene-editing technique known as CRISPR-Cas9, perhaps the most intriguing are efforts to bring animals back from extinction. Candidates for de-extinction, as the process is known, include species like the passenger pigeon (the last one died in captivity in 1914), the dodo (last seen in 1662) and the sea cow (1768, a mere 27 years after it had been discovered by Europeans.)
China has a 3,000-year tradition of carving ivory. Shutting down its thriving ivory market won’t be easy.
When Chinese President Xi Jinping announced in September 2015 that China would, together with the United States, work toward a complete domestic ban on ivory, it was a welcome step in the fight against elephant poaching. Yet it was also only the first step in a long road.
Related: Carnivore hunting policy does not always align with science, say researchers
Maybe humans did not invent the mortar and pestle.
Parrots at an aviary at the University of York, in England, have been observed using small pebbles and date pits to grind up calcium deposits found in shells to eat. It is the first observation of such activity by Greater vasa parrots (Coracopsis vasa), and is the first evidence of tools used for grinding by a species other than humans.
Voluntary acts of kindness and positive outward gestures without thought of reward are two of the more redeeming aspects of human society, but to what extent do these prosocial behaviours exist in other animals?
A new study by researchers in Austria suggests that dogs are prosocial among their own kind too, with an experiment involving the voluntary offering of food between the animals showing that dogs also understand the concept of giving.
It's a new dawn for transport, lodging—and pretty much every service under the sun—and it's all about "sharing."
The so-called sharing economy gained traction across the globe in 2015 as Uber upended the taxi business, Airbnb disrupted the hotel sector and a host of online and mobile startups let people moonlight as chefs or handymen.
A medical document shows that Adolf Hitler only had one testicle, German media said on Saturday, suggesting there is some truth after all to a popular British song that says the dictator had "only got one ball".
There has long been speculation that Hitler was missing one testicle, with rumors circulating that he lost the other one during the Battle of the Somme in the First World War.
A team of Australian researchers from Monash University are developing “bionic” eyes that have no need for the ocular system itself.
In an attempt to restore some semblance of sight to the blind, researchers are working on a system that requires 11 small tiles to be implanted into various parts of the brain that receive and process signals related to visual stimuli.
Max Planck — the Nobel Prize–winning physicist who pioneered quantum theory — once said the following about scientific progress:
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
Recently, researchers at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) released a working paper — titled, "Does Science Advance One Funeral at a Time?" — that puts Planck's principle to the test.
Given the impact the Star Wars franchise has had on society, it's inevitable that a segment of the public would love to make a lightsaber, and even train with it. But what technology could possibly yield the lightsaber? With that desire, came the first attempts to reverse-engineer the device. Reverse engineering, in this context, is thinking about how to do it…not actually building one. However, this research about clumping photons made the rounds a while ago.
A new material that is both highly transparent and electrically conductive could make large screen displays, smart windows, and even touchscreens and solar cells more affordable and efficient.
Indium tin oxide, the transparent conductor currently used for more than 90 percent of the display market, has been the dominant material for the past 60 years.
Almost all of Costa Rica's electricity came from renewable sources this year, making it one of a few countries in the world to eschew fossil fuels in energy generation, the state electricity agency said Friday.
The Costa Rican Electricity Institute (ICE) said in a statement it achieved "99 percent renewable electricity generation" this year.
They call it Europe’s Galapagos. Lake Ohrid in Macedonia is the most biodiverse lake of its size in the world, home to more than 350 species found nowhere else and listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site based on its natural value. It is also Europe’s oldest lake, having survived for more than a million years.
Like the Ents from JRR Tolkien’s epic Lord of the Rings saga, these trees actually move. But can they walk fast enough to escape the chainsaw and machetes that threaten them?
It takes a whole day to travel from Ecuador’s capital, Quito, to the heart of the Unesco Sumaco Biosphere Reserve, some 100km to the southeast. The journey entails three hours by car to the edge of the forest, and then anywhere from seven to 15 hours by boat, mule and foot, mostly uphill and on a muddy road, to reach the interior. But the effort is worth it.
Researchers have unearthed a fossil of a sponge, no bigger than a grain of sand, that existed 60 million years earlier than many expected.
This is the first time paleontologists have found a convincing fossil sponge specimen that predates the Cambrian explosion — a 20-million-year phenomenon, beginning about 542 million years ago, when most major types of animal life appear.
Evolution may be more intelligent than we thought, according to researchers. In a new article, the authors make the case that evolution is able to learn from previous experience, which could provide a better explanation of how evolution by natural selection produces such apparently intelligent designs.
Cancer is overwhelmingly a result of environmental factors and not largely down to bad luck, a study suggests.
Earlier this year, researchers sparked a debate after suggesting two-thirds of cancer types were down to luck rather than factors such as smoking.
One sunny day this fall, I caught a glimpse of the new psychiatry. At a mental hospital near Yale University, a depressed patient was being injected with ketamine. For 40 minutes, the drug flowed into her arm, bound for cells in her brain. If it acts as expected, ketamine will become the first drug to quickly stop suicidal drive, with the potential to save many lives. Other studies of ketamine are evaluating its effect as a vaccination against depression and post-traumatic stress. Between them, the goal is nothing less than to redefine our understanding of mental illness itself.
There are countless people throughout the US and throughout the world who have been steered away from a life of drug or alcohol addiction after a spiritual experience with a psychedelic drug. In fact, Bill Wilson, the co-founder of the alcoholics anonymous program, actually considered promoting LSD as a tool for alcoholics to shake their addiction.
Related: America's First Legal Ayahuasca 'Church' Lets You Trip on Hallucinogenic Tea
In a move akin to Google’s efforts to help you avoid drunk e-mailing, computer scientists are now trying to keep you happy while using the Web—by gauging when you get ticked off.
From three different experiments, researchers found that Internet users who became frustrated, confused, or upset while online tended to move their cursor sporadically and less precisely, instead of in smooth strokes.
Processors that use the strangeness of quantum mechanics are reportedly achieving much greater problem-solving speed than standard computers – but what will the effect on security be?
Researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have created an algorithm that can predict how memorable or forgettable an image is almost as accurately as humans—and they plan to turn it into an app that subtly tweaks photos to make them more memorable.
A NIMS MANA group theoretically demonstrated that the results of the experiments on the peculiar superconducting state reported by a Chinese research group in January 2015 prove the existence of the Majorana-type particles.
Black holes at the heart of galaxies could swell to 50 billion times the mass of the sun before losing the discs of gas they rely on to sustain themselves, according to research at the University of Leicester.
In a study titled 'How Big Can a Black Hole Grow?', Professor Andrew King from the University of Leicester's Department of Physics and Astronomy explores supermassive black holes at the centre of galaxies, around which are regions of space where gas settles into an orbiting disc.
An effect of general relativity that is barely measurable on Earth has been spotted in full force around a black hole.
Physicists detected the signature of a black hole twisting the fabric of spacetime around it. The discovery offers the best evidence yet of this relativity-driven twisting effect, known as frame dragging, around a black hole where it is most powerful.
A newly discovered asteroid the size of a city bus gave Earth a close shave this morning (Dec. 19), zipping well within the orbit of the moon.
The near-Earth asteroid 2015 YB, which is about 34 feet (10 meters) wide, cruised within a mere 36,800 miles (59,220 kilometers) of the planet at around 7 a.m. EST (1200 GMT) today, just two days after the space rock was first spotted.
The Ancient Egyptian papyrus Cairo 86637 calendar is the oldest preserved historical document of naked eye observations of a variable star, the eclipsing binary Algol -- a manifestation of Horus, a god and a king. This calendar contains lucky or unlucky prognoses for each day of one year. Researchers have performed a statistical analysis of the Cairo Calendar mythological texts.
New digital techniques have allowed researchers to predict structural evolution of the skull in the lineage of Homo sapiens and Neanderthals, in an effort to fill in blanks in the fossil record, and provide the first 3D rendering of their last common ancestor. The study suggests populations that led to the lineage split were older than previously thought.
The history of human evolution keeps getting more complicated.
Researchers this week announced the discovery of a thigh bone that could serve as evidence of a new branch in the our family tree. The femur was dated to around 14,000 years ago, challenging the notion that other species of ancient humans died out after modern humans appeared. Instead, this find suggests that our distant cousins may have co-existed with several other species of hominins for quite some time.
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 UCL-led study funded by the Natural Environment Research Council.
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.
From Roman gladiatorial combat to Egyptian animal mummies, capturing and manipulating wild carnivores has long been a way for humans to demonstrate state or individual power. Historians and scientists alike have attempted to determine when humans first began to use carnivores to establish their place on the social ladder, one of the earliest examples being Moctezuma's 14th century zoo at the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan.
Every time something is discovered in Egypt's Valley of the Kings, the whispers begin. Is it the queen? Has she finally been found? They're asking about Nefertiti, the legendary beauty who was married to one of ancient Egypt's strangest pharaohs. Her burial site has never been found, and its location is one of the enduring mysteries in Egyptology.
The buzz is now as loud as ever, as scans of King Tut’s tomb indicate there may be hidden chambers behind sections of walls.
How do you keep a demon from disturbing the living? A blade to the throat should do the trick.
A few skeletons unearthed in a 400-year-old Polish cemetery have been discovered with sickles placed around their necks. Archaeologists believe this strange burial practice is evidence of a belief in magic and a fear of demons.
A collective effort to scrutinize one of the biggest mysteries in mathematics has ended with a few clues but no firm answers.
The mystery concerns an impenetrable but potentially groundbreaking proof — of a puzzle known as the abc conjecture — that appeared online three years ago.
Wolf 1061 is a red dwarf star located in the constellation Ophiuchus, only 14 light-years from Earth.
The three exoplanets discovered orbiting this star are between 1.3 and 5.2 times the size of our own, according to the team led by Dr Duncan Wright of the University of New South Wales.
Using one of the world’s most powerful lasers, physicists have found experimental evidence for Saturn’s helium “rain,” a phenomenon in which a mixture of liquid hydrogen and helium separates like oil and water, sending droplets of helium deep in the planet’s atmosphere. The results show the range of blistering temperatures and crushing pressures at which this takes place. But they also suggest that a helium rain could also fall on Jupiter, where such behavior was almost completely unexpected.
The famous geysers on Saturn's icy, ocean-harboring moon Enceladus aren't what they used to be.
The geysers, which blast material from Enceladus' subsurface ocean into space from the moon's south polar region, were first spotted by NASA's Saturn-orbiting Cassini spacecraft back in 2005. Now, a new study of Cassini data shows that the geysers' output has dropped by 30 to 50 percent since then.
As NASA’s Curiosity rover treks up a three-mile-high mountain on Mars, the rocks are changing. That says something about how the planet’s climate and environment changed more than three billion years ago — but scientists are not sure what.
Scientists may never know for sure if NASA's Curiosity rover detected signs of life on Mars two years ago, but now is the right time for them to gather some promising clues.
Last December, the Curiosity team announced that methane concentrations in the air around the rover, which has been exploring Mars' 96-mile-wide (154 kilometers) Gale Crater since August 2012, jumped by a factor of 10 for about two months from late 2013 through early 2014.
Solar farms have been making headlines lately, and solar power options are gaining in popularity as their efficiency levels improve. But a new photovoltaic solution is going to bring solar farms directly to the skies in order to supercharge that efficiency. Since cloud coverage creates uncertainty around the effectiveness of solar farms, why not bring the solar cells themselves above the clouds? Using stratospheric balloons, it may be possible to source solar power from the open skies without any kind of environmental interference.
Clean air comes at a price in smog-filled China.
A restaurant in Zhangjiagang city, Jiangsu province, had been charging diners extra to cover the cost of its new air purification system, according to multiple reports.
We know that China has a serious air pollution problem, caused largely by CO2 emissions. The government has promised to tackle the issue in the coming years, but some local councils have already started using a rather unconventional method of dispersing the smog: huge mist cannons.
China has successfully placed a satellite called the Dark Matter Particle Explorer (DAMPE) into a sun-synchronous orbit around the Earth. Its mission is to study high-energy particles and ?-rays as part of an overall objective to learn more about dark matter. The satellite was boosted into the sky by a Chinese Long March 2D rocket, launched from a northwest province in China.
If you go outside on a clear day and look up toward the sun—being careful to block out the bright disk with your thumb—you might see a hazy white region surrounding our star.
This haze is caused by airplanes, and it is gradually whitening blue skies, says Charles Long of NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado. “We might be actually conducting some unintentional geoengineering here,” Long said at a press conference this week at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting in San Francisco.
The temperature 3,000 kilometres below the surface of the Earth is much more varied than previously thought, scientists have found.
Related: Slumbering Volcano Erupts for First Time in a Century
Thomas Laqueur, author of The Work of the Dead, discusses the ways people have dealt with human remains over the course of history. Modern cemeteries, he says, are byproducts of the French Revolution.
Growing up as the son of a pathologist, Thomas Laqueur says, his father would leave the dinner table to conduct autopsies. Sometimes Laqueur would watch his father prepare pathological samples that he had taken from the bodies.
A 14,000-year-old thigh bone may upend human history.
Unearthed in southwest China, this femur resembles those of an ancient species of humans thought to be long extinct by the Late Pleistocene, scientists say.
Alt: Ancient human ancestor may have persisted through Ice Age
Alt: Could a Human Not in Our Species Still Exist?
In 1953, church personnel in Bari, Italy, opened up the tomb of St. Nicholas in order to start the process of mitigating water damage to the crypt over nearly a millennium. Once restoration was complete, in 1957, an Italian anatomy professor named Luigi Martino was the first modern researcher — and only researcher known to date — to do a complete osteological analysis of the bones of the saint. His anatomical discoveries reveal a different image of what Santa Claus looked like than what is commonly seen in popular culture.
Ancient mariners visited the New World more than a thousand years before Columbus - according to a sensational new report.
The main findings of the study, which centres on the mysterious Oak Island, off Nova Scotia, have been exclusively revealed to Johnston Press.
Alt: Did the ROMANS discover America? Radical theory claims sword found on Oak Island suggests ancient mariners set foot on the New World before Columbus
Backyards haven't changed much over the past 1,000 years or so, new archaeological findings suggest.
Rubbish pits, storage areas, outhouses, wells and short walls to keep the neighbors at bay are a few of the things that archaeologists in England recently unearthed while digging beneath an old bus depot in the city of Leicester.
A pair of researchers with Stanford University has found via crunching economic and war data, that the more trading partners a country has, the less likely it will be to engage in a war. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the pair describes how they first attacked the problem from the reverse perspective, looking at data that showed an inclination to go to war in the absence of trade partnerships and how they were unable to find any correlations.
Related: Experts discover new gait pattern among top Russian officials
An analysis of data gathered from 14 independent studies indicates that the influence of genes on intelligence varies according to people's social class in the US, but not in Western Europe or Australia. The findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
A drug-like molecule can activate innate immunity and induce genes to control infection in a range of RNA viruses, including West Nile, dengue, hepatitis C, influenza A, respiratory syncytial, Nipah, Lassa and Ebola, according to new research.
Related: Curing Hepatitis C, in an Experiment the Size of Egypt
Water bears turn into glass when they dry out.
That glazing enables the hardy microscopic creatures, also known as tardigrades, to withstand extreme desiccation
Plant biologists agree that it all began with green algae. At some point in our planet's history, the common ancestor of trees, ferns, and flowers developed an alternating life cycle--presumably allowing their offspring to float inland and conquer Earth. But on December 16 in Trends in Plant Science, Danish scientists argue that some green algae had been hanging out on land hundreds of millions of years before this adaptation and that land plants actually evolved from terrestrial, not aquatic, algae.
Among the stranger creatures to roam the earth during the time of the dinosaurs was not a dinosaur at all, but a marine reptile — the plesiosaur. This odd predator navigated Mesozoic Era waters with four flippers — two in the front and two in the back — a design unlike anything seen in modern-day swimmers. How the plesiosaur actually used its limbs to swim has remained something of a mystery.
A distinctive new dinosaur with a “sail” on its back has just been unearthed in Spain.
The new plant-eating dino, named Morelladon beltrani, adds to a growing number of medium to large-bodied dinosaurs of a similar kind that have all been found in the region that now comprises parts of Spain and Portugal.
The ancestry of every bird alive today can be traced back to a single “Founding Feathered Father” that lived in South America 95 million years ago, according to a new study.
The common ancestor of living birds, described in the journal Science Advances, likely lived much later than previously estimated. Prior reports suggested that the founding bird lived up to 170 million years ago during the Jurassic Period.
Three-dimensional computer models of fossils from a tiny mouse-size creature that lived about 210 million years ago in what is now Greenland clear up a long-standing mammal mystery.
The high-tech analysis of the fossils suggests that mammals originated more than 30 million years more recently than previously suggested, the researchers say.
Nestled near an abandoned mining town in the heart of Nevada, Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park may be the loneliest fossil monument in America.
“The park is about a three-hour drive from Reno,” says paleontologist Neil Kelley of Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. After you pass through the small town of Fallon, “you can easily drive the remaining two hours without seeing another vehicle.”
I led the team of researchers that discovered that Stonehenge was most likely to have been originally built in Pembrokeshire, Wales, before it was taken apart and transported some 180 miles to Wiltshire, England. It may sound like an impossible task without modern technology, but it wouldn’t have been the first time prehistoric Europeans managed to move a monument.
Excavators in Ningxia, northwest China, have unearthed what they believe to be a Chinese sphinx in a tomb that dates back to the Tang Dynasty (618–907 AD).
The burial chamber is located along the ancient Silk Road, thought to be established during the Han Dynasty (206 BC - 220 AD). It's a network of routes that run through a large portion of Asia, connecting western and eastern cultures for trading.
Some 40 plates have been planted inside the Bent Pyramid in Dahshur in an attempt to capture cosmic particles, Egypt's Ministry of Antiquities announced early today.
The installation is part of an ambitious project using muons, or cosmic particles, to investigate Egypt’s main pyramids.
Egypt has put the restored gold mask of Tutankhamun back on display after German experts removed glue applied in a botched repair when the priceless artefact’s beard fell off.
The restored mask – back in its display case at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo – was shown to journalists after more than two months’ work by a team of German experts.
A 2-foot-long wall carving featuring the pharaoh Seti I is back in Egypt after being repatriated from the United Kingdom, the Egyptian minister of antiquities announced Monday (Dec. 14).
Egypt has long pushed for the return of ancient artifacts — an effort that is only intensifying as political upheaval deters Egyptian tourism.
It’s hard to imagine a global force strong enough to change natural patterns that have persisted on Earth for more than 300 million years, but a new study shows that human beings have been doing exactly that for about 6,000 years.
The increase in human activity, perhaps tied to population growth and the spread of agriculture, seems to have upended the way plants and animals distribute themselves across the land, so that species today are far more segregated than they've been at any other time.
The key to helping animals evolve quickly in response to climate change could actually be their predators, according to a new study. The study is one of the first to show that species interactions, meaning the way species interact with each other in an ecosystem, like in a predator-prey relationship, is important to understanding how animals will respond to climate change.
Women who took a class of widely used antidepressants during their second and third trimesters of pregnancy were roughly twice as likely as those who did not to have a child who would later receive a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder, says a new study.
A batch of studies further confirms medical cannabis patients are right to try cannabidiol-rich marijuana products to treat intractable seizure disorders.
Three studies presented at the American Epilepsy Society’s 69th Annual Meeting in Philadelphia Dec. 7th found a marijuana-derived extract slashed pediatric seizures in half, and completely stopped seizures in nine percent of cases.
Related: Theresa May’s futile war on psychoactive drugs
Physical pain is a near universal problem, whether its sudden pangs or chronic aches. Yet, researchers’ efforts to quash it completely have fallen short—possibly due to a moonlighting channel in nerve cells. But that may be about to change.
Our drinking water is to a large extent purified by millions of "good bacteria" found in water pipes and purification plants, Swedish researchers have found. So far, the knowledge about them has been practically non-existent, but this new research is about to change that.
There’s no accounting for taste, but it may be a good thing that some microbes are cadaver connoisseurs—their picky palates for flesh, aged to their exacting preferences, may help forensic detectives call a time of death in unsolved murders, a new study suggests.
YouTube user pseudon name shares a video he stumbled upon at Facebook. Two bros in Utah discovered a strange ice formation upon a frozen lake, recording it for posterity. The formation appears to be at least six feet / 182cm in width, and riddled with regularly-spaced holes arranged like a mandala.
Related: After Blazing Siberian UFO Sighting, Expert Offers Scary Explanation
Related: New UFO Spotted on Comet 67P
Related: Aliens May Be Polar Bear-Sized
When a group of astronomers in Sweden thought they found a new object in the far reaches of the solar system, they were cautiously excited. Rather than waiting to go through the long scientific publishing process, they quickly posted their findings online, inviting other astronomers to double-check their work.
It was time for the spent rocket to die. So the 2,000kg Centaur upper stage, about the size of a yellow school bus, detached from its spacecraft and began falling toward the Moon six years ago. Soon lunar gravity took hold, tugging the Centaur ever faster toward the Moon’s inky black South Pole. An hour after separation, the rocket slammed into terra incognita at 9,000kph (or roughly 5,600mph).
Recent orbital and rover missions to Mars have turned up ample evidence of clays and other hydrated minerals formed when rocks are altered by the presence of water. Most of that alteration is thought to have happened during the earliest part of Martian history, more than 3.7 billion years ago. But a new study shows that later alteration -- within the last 2 billion years or so -- may be more common than many scientists had thought.
Related: Ancient Mars’ weather report: Continued cold and dry
The Large Underground Xenon (LUX) dark matter experiment, which operates nearly a mile underground at the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF) in the Black Hills of South Dakota, has already proven itself to be the most sensitive detector in the hunt for dark matter, the unseen stuff believed to account for most of the matter in the universe.
Related: Here are the top five candidates for 'dark matter'
Related: "It Will Be Perhaps the Greatest Discovery Ever" --Evidence of the Dark Universe
In April 2015, after traveling for about half the age of the universe, a flood of powerful gamma rays from a distant galaxy slammed into Earth's atmosphere. That torrent generated a cascade of light - a shower that fell onto the waiting mirrors of the Very Energetic Radiation Imaging Telescope Array System (VERITAS) in Arizona. The resulting data have given astronomers a unique look into that faraway galaxy and the black hole engine at its heart.
The two experiments that discovered the Higgs boson in 2012 have sensed an intriguing if very preliminary whiff of a possible new elementary particle. Both collaborations announced their observations on 15 December, as they released their first significant results since completing a major upgrade earlier this year.
Related: First high-energy LHC results: Supersymmetry still dead, watch for gravitons
After determining that the ocean beneath the icy surface of Saturn’s moon Enceladus has roughly the same pH as Windex or soapy water -- an indication that the water has been in contact with rock, creating potentially life-friendly chemistry -- scientists are moving on to the trickier hunt for evidence of hydrothermal venting.
Astronomers have confirmed water — essential for life as we know it — is also a key ingredient for making planets.
The discovery, reported in the journal Nature, solves the long-standing mystery of why some exoplanets — known as hot Jupiters — seem to have more water in their atmospheres than others.