Newsdesk Archive
The squirming, yipping puppies in Alexander Travis' lab don't seem like medical marvels. But these furry wonders are the first dogs born using in vitro fertilization, a process that's taken more than 30 years to develop for canines.
The cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus) is now at home on the African plains, but it started a migration 100,000 years ago from North America towards its current habitat. The research found that the migration from North America was costly for the species, triggering the first major reduction in their gene pool.
The discovery of a spaniel-size ceratopsian that walked on its two hind legs reveals that Late Jurassic horned dinosaurs were much more diverse than previously thought, a new study finds.
Researchers uncovered the remains of the 160-million-year-old, plant-eating creature in China's Gobi desert.
The fossil of an aquatic dinosaur with large owl-like eyes has been unearthed in Japan.
The 72-million-year-old fossil of a mosasaur is the first of its kind to be found in the region and it is the first to be found with eyes positioned in the front of its head to give it binocular vision.
Sightings of the Loch Ness Monster are at their highest in more than a decade with five eye witnesses accounts of the mythical creature made in the past year.
Gary Campbell, keeper of the Official Loch Ness Monster Sightings Register, said it was a 'vintage' year for Nessie reports in Scotland.
Many of us fear going to the dentist, and that fear is made worse by the dreadful prospect that on any given visit, you could be subjected to a whirring drill boring its way through your poor, hurty teeth.
But the findings of a new seven-year study by Australian researchers suggest that many of us have nothing to worry about, with research into 'no drill' oral care techniques showing there's often no need for the traditional 'fill and drill' approach that has defined dentistry for decades.
Alt: Australian study finds 'no-drill' dentistry stops tooth decay
A team of chemical engineers at the University of Pittsburgh recently identified the two main factors for determining the optimal catalyst for turning atmospheric CO2 into liquid fuel. The results of the study, which appeared in the journal ACS Catalysis, will streamline the search for an inexpensive yet highly effective new catalyst.
A California company with visions of building a futuristic transportation system to one day zip people and packages at nearly the speed of sound announced Tuesday it is building a test facility in southern Nevada.
Hyperloop Technologies Inc. and the Nevada governor's office said the 50-acre facility at a fledgling North Las Vegas business park will test a linear electric motor at speeds of about 335 mph—about half the speed envisioned in a full-scale system.
It’s been well established that men perform better than women when it comes to specific spatial tasks. But how much of that is linked to sex hormones versus cultural conditioning and other factors?
Researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) decided to explore this idea by administering testosterone to women and testing how they performed in wayfinding tasks in a virtual environment.
A new species of toothy pterosaur is a native of Texas, but is strikingly similar to an English species. Named Cimoliopterus dunni, the new pterosaur's closest cousin is England's Cimoliopterus cuvieri. Identification of the 94-million-year-old flying marine reptile links prehistoric Texas to England, says paleontologist and suggests gene flow between the two populations was possible shortly before that date, despite progressive widening of the North Atlantic Ocean.
The asteroid impact suspected of killing the dinosaurs may also have triggered a global algal bloom that contributed to a massive marine extinction more than 60 million years ago, according to a new study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, a publication of the American Geophysical Union.
Scientists scrambled across lava-covered slopes on the Galápagos Islands to try to resurrect Lonesome George and another extinct species. Here's how they're planning to bring the giant tortoises back.
An 80-foot cable dangled beneath a helicopter as it emerged from the mists and flew to an anchored ship, where it gently deposited its living cargo. A century-old giant tortoise lumbered out of a tangle of green netting and stretched its mustard-yellow neck from its shell.
That man's best friend has a conscience is what every owner would be willing to bet, without even thinking about it for a moment. This means that dogs haveself-consciousness. But the problem in science is that ideas and assumptions must be demonstrated. It is not enough for someone to have an inkling of something for it to be considered a scientific fact.
How does matter make mind? More specifically, how does a physical object generate subjective experiences like those you are immersed in as you read this sentence? How does stuff become conscious? This is called the mind-body problem, or, by philosopher David Chalmers, the “hard problem.”
People who casually like or retweet activist content on social media are often criticized as 'slacktivists.' But in analyzing millions of tweets surrounding social protests, researchers find that in fact, these peripheral users serve to double the reach of the core protesters' message.
If you said: “Yeah, sure, close enough,” then you are probably politically liberal, and strongly support the idea of government aid for the homeless and unemployed. You are also likely to support same-sex marriage and legalisation of marijuana for recreational use.
Although this sounds like some sort of satire, these were – broadly speaking – the findings of a recent study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
'Delay discounting' is the tendency, given the choice, to take a smaller reward that is available immediately, instead of a larger reward that will be delivered in the future. According to a report presented today at the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology annual meeting in Hollywood, Florida, delay discounting is strongly influenced by our genetic makeup. That is, it is a trait that can be inherited.
Plenty of companies invest big money to provide their employees with upscale workplace eateries or at least catered meals. But are those companies getting a good return on their investment? According to a new study, the answer is yes.
The Romans practiced crucifixion – literally, “fixed to a cross” – for nearly a millennium. It was a public, painful, and slow form of execution, and used as a way to deter future crimes and humiliate the dying person. Since it was done to thousands of people and involved nails, you’d probably assume we have skeletal evidence of crucifixion. But there’s only one, single bony example of Roman crucifixion, and even that is still heavily debated by experts.
In the bible, Jesus is described as having turned water into wine, but now scientists may be able to perform something close to their own 'miracle' - resurrecting a 2,000-year-old drink.
Researchers are using ancient grape seeds and genetic testing to recreate the ancient wines drunk by Jesus Christ, King David and their contemporaries.
An image of a portrait underneath the Mona Lisa has been found beneath the existing painting using reflective light technology, according to a French scientist.
Pascal Cotte said he has spent more than 10 years using the technology to analyse the painting.
China's first mind-controlled car has been developed by researchers in the north-east port city of Tianjin.
Chinese researchers have developed what they say is the country's first car that uses nothing but brain power to drive.
Columbia Engineering researchers have, for the first time, harnessed the molecular machinery of living systems to power an integrated circuit from adenosine triphosphate (ATP), the energy currency of life. They achieved this by integrating a conventional solid-state complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) integrated circuit with an artificial lipid bilayer membrane containing ATP-powered ion pumps, opening the door to creating entirely new artificial systems that contain both biological and solid-state components.
Peering into the seething soup of primordial matter created in particle collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC)-an "atom smasher" dedicated to nuclear physics research at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory-scientists have come to a new understanding of how particles are produced in these collisions.
As world leaders meet in Paris to agree a legal framework aimed at limiting use of fossil fuels and the resulting rises in global temperatures, a UK company says it could be as little as five years from making "reactor relevant" fusion, a potential game changer in energy production.
Tree by tree, more than a dozen African governments pledged to restore the continent’s natural forests at the United Nations climate talks on Sunday.
The earth has lost more than half its forests over the course of human history, according to the World Resources Institute.
Farmers need to dramatically cut the amount of antibiotics used in agriculture, because of the threat to human health, a report says.
Some infections are becoming almost impossible to treat, because of the excessive use of antibiotics.
According to a study of farmworker children in the Salinas Valley, chronic exposure to pesticides can damage children's lung function almost as much as secondhand cigarette smoke does, the Independent reports.
The mosquito that is responsible for most of the world’s malaria has been genetically modified to spread genes that could wipe out its species.
Researchers engineered Anopheles gambiae mosquitoes — which spreads malaria across sub-Saharan Africa — to pass on genes that cause infertility in female offspring.
In a world’s first, researchers from the US and UK have created an impression of a submerged human as recorded by a dolphin’s echolocation.
The system, developed by John Stuart Reid (who also assisted with the project), made it possible to record and isolate dolphin echolocation sounds directed onto specific objects, and then create 2D images from those sounds.
A newly-released study by Canisius College Professor of Animal Behavior Michael Noonan, PhD, is providing insight as to why Beluga whales blow bubbles underwater and how their different shaped bubbles may be indicative of a Beluga's mood. The eight-year study, conducted at Marineland of Canada in Niagara Falls, Ontario, examined more than 11,000 bubbling events recorded over nearly 5,000 minutes of observation.
Australia's newest species of armoured dinosaur sported a parrot-like beak and inner ear similar to a turtle.
Kunbarrasaurus ieversi, or Kunbarrasaurus, appears to be a primitive ankylosaur, a group of four-legged herbivorous dinosaurs known for their heavy armour and club-like tail.
Dinosaurs evolved from their smaller ancestors in just a few million years and not the 10 million years or more scientists had suspected, according to a new study. The work, based on radioactive dating of rocks sandwiching the earliest fossils of those predecessors, suggests that paleontologists have long misjudged the overall pace of dinosaur evolution.
How old are you? What if, when someone asked you this question, you answered with the age of all humans? 2.3 million years, you would say. What about all primates? Around 80 million years old. If you wanted to answer for the whole of mammal-kind, you’d find the answer depends who you ask.
An international research team, led by Rodrigo Lacruz, PhD, assistant professor in the Department of Basic Science and Craniofacial Biology at New York University's College of Dentistry (NYUCD), has just published a study describing for the first time the developmental processes that differentiate Neanderthal facial skeletons from those of modern humans.
Standing at nearly 50 feet, the giant Buddha statue in Nara, Japan is world-famous for a reason. So are his tightly wound bronze curls—they even have religious significance. But now, reports Hideaki Ishiyama for The Asahi Shimbun, the Buddha’s ‘do has put officials in a hairy situation when a new analysis suggested that the statue has fewer curls than expected.
Evidence of quarrying for Stonehenge’s bluestones is among the dramatic discoveries leading archeologists to theorise that England’s greatest prehistoric monument may have first been erected in Wales.
It has long been known that the bluestones that form Stonehenge’s inner horseshoe came from the Preseli hills in Pembrokeshire, around 140 miles from Salisbury Plain.
A new study questions the popular notion that 10th-century Norse people were able to colonize Greenland because of a period of unusually warm weather. Researchers say the climate was already cold when the Norse arrived -- and that climate thus probably played little role in their mysterious demise some 400 years later. On a larger scale, the study adds to building evidence that the so-called Medieval Warm Period, when Europe enjoyed clement weather, did not necessarily extend to other parts of the world.
Alt: Even the cold was no match for the Vikings! Warriors battled freezing conditions to conquer Greenland and may NOT have been wiped out by the Little Ice Age
On a Spanish river bank 14,000 years ago, someone carved seven semi-circular shapes on a rock. Whether the artist realised the significance of the work is unknown – but, according to archaeologists, the resulting doodle could well be humanity’s first architectural drawing.
Before humans trekked across Eurasia to modern-day China, a familiar fruit was already there.
When ancient humans arrived in Asia, they may have experienced what could be described as one of life’s simple pleasures: biting into a sweet peach on a hot summer day, the juice running down your chin.
Well-preserved fossils of the extinct three-horn ruminant Xenokeryx amidalae found in central Spain suggest it is a close relation to modern giraffes.
A new investigation challenges the previously held view that this unusual looking creature is related to North American ancestors of deer.
Researchers from North Carolina State University have confirmed that blood vessel-like structures found in an 80 million-year-old hadrosaur fossil are original to the animal, and not biofilm or other contaminants. Their findings add to the growing body of evidence that structures like blood vessels and cells can persist over millions of years, and the data not only confirm earlier reports of protein sequences in dinosaurs, they represent a significant advance in methodology.
It is easy to see why AIDS seemed so mysterious and frightening when US medics first encountered it 35 years ago. The condition robbed young, healthy people of their strong immune system, leaving them weak and vulnerable. And it seemed to come out of nowhere.
In the mid 1900s, the most popular banana in the world—a sweet, creamy variety called Gros Michel grown in Latin America—all but disappeared from the planet. At the time, it was the only banana in the world that could be exported. But a fungus, known as Panama Disease, which first appeared in Australia in the late 1800s, changed that after jumping continents.
Policymakers are tasked with addressing climate change in the face of uncertainty: the 2013 IPCC report projects average global temperatures will increase by anywhere from 5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit (3 to 6 degrees Celsius) in the coming century if we continue on our path of greenhouse gas emissions.
The uncertainty is compounded by the fact that the consequences of any temperature change are unknown, including how something as basic as human fertility might be affected.
In a world where most regions are warming because of increasing concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2), central Antarctica has been cooling slightly in recent years. Greenhouse gases such as CO2 typically trap heat radiated back toward space from the planet’s surface, but large swaths of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet (the broad pink mass on the right side of the image) are, on average, actually colder than the upper layers of the atmosphere for much of the year—the only place on Earth where that’s true.
For many living things, a roughly 24-hour internal clock governs the rhythms of life—everything from sleep in animals, to leaf opening in plants and reproduction in bread mold. Scientists have come to understand much about this internal time-keeping system, but one important aspect, its complex response to temperature, remains enigmatic.
Last Monday, a team from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill published the first ever genome of a tardigrade—a group of endearing microscopic animals with a reputation for being nigh-invincible. Astonishingly, as we reported last week, they found that around 6,600 of the animal’s genes—a full sixth of its genome—had jumped in from bacteria and other foreign sources. And perhaps, they speculated, this massive horizontal gene transfer (HGT) explained the tardigrade’s famed ability to withstand extreme conditions.
Venus may have an unexpectedly youthful face, and that's good news for scientists interested in the planet's more modern blemishes. A new look at Venus' craters suggests that the surface might be up to 620 million years younger than previous estimates, a discovery that has implications for signs of relatively recent volcanic activity.
Scientists have a new idea about what happened to Mars’ once-thick atmosphere – perhaps it was never there.
Ever since an increasingly sophisticated series of Mars orbiters, landers and rovers have returned evidence that the planet once had flowing rivers, lakes and possibly even oceans on its surface, scientists have wondered how that was possible.
The moon’s orbit is askew, and two planetary scientists believe that they have come up with a good reason.
Intriguingly, their idea also explains why gold and platinum are found in the Earth’s crust, well within diggable reach.
The moon has long been considered an inert place where the lunar dust is only disturbed by the occasional impact from a meteor.
But researchers have discovered that, despite not having its own atmosphere, the moon may experience 'weather' of its own.
Inspired by the Shazam music-discovery app, scientists have discovered a way to identify "microquakes" that previously went unnoticed, which could help them predict larger temblors in the future.
Shazam uses an algorithm to identify patterns in music, helping people at bars answer such important questions as, "Is this a Lionel Richie song?"
At the climate summit in Paris this week, the South American nation of Uruguay has announced that it gets an enviable 94.5 percent of its electricity from renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar. And they've done it without government subsidies or raising the price for consumers.
Related: India to ban old trucks and buses to curb pollution
Related: Earth has lost a third of arable land in past 40 years, scientists say
A biotech consortium in China has announced that it intends to open a facility near Beijing with the aim of cloning up to a million cows a year to meet the country’s growing demand for beef. The factory won’t stop at cows. It also plans to clone racehorses, pets and even sniffer dogs. But the vast majority of animals it produces will be calves for meat production.
University of Wisconsin scientists have succeeded in growing functional vocal-cord tissue in the laboratory, a major step toward restoring a voice to people who have lost their vocal cords to cancer surgery or other injuries.
Human gene-editing research, even on embryos, is needed and should go ahead, with one major caveat: No pregnancies can result, leaders of an international summit on the topic said December 3.
In recent years, scientists have devised increasingly precise molecular scissors for cutting and pasting DNA.
Imagine two nearby exoplanets orbiting the same sun, each with its own indigenous civilisation. They're going through history either as companionable neighbours or deadly rivals. This is a familiar situation in science fiction, but could it ever happen?
Matter known as ordinary, which makes up everything we know, corresponds to only 5% of the Universe. Approximately half of this percentage still eluded detection. Numerical simulations made it possible to predict that the rest of this ordinary matter should be located in the large-scale structures that form the "cosmic web" at temperatures between 100,000 and 10 million degrees.
Related: Faintest galaxy from the early universe, 400 million years after the big bang
Do you often take chances and yet still land on your feet? Then you probably have a well-developed brain.
This surprising discovery has been made as part of a project studying the brains of young male high and low risk-takers.
For years, psychologists have been debating the “bilingual advantage” – the idea that speaking more than one language fluently brings with it cognitive benefits. Believers and skeptics in the theory have been trading blows for a while, but matters recently came to a head in the form of a series of papers in the journal Cortex.
"If I'm allowed to have a favorite forger, which I know sounds a little bit funny, it would be Eric Hebborn, who's really the prince of art forgers," Noah Charney says. "He's the only one of over sixty that I look at in my book who I think is at the same level as the artists he forged."
This week on Hidden Brain, Shankar Vedantam explores how we tell real from fake, when it comes to fine art and fine wine. As Noah Charney, author of The Art of Forgery explains, the primary motivation for many of the forgers he studied is not money, but revenge.
Thousands of years ago lived a woman in the Egyptian city of Asyut, on the west side of the Nile River Valley, 375 miles south of the Mediterranean city of Alexandria. Her true name is unknown, but today some call her Hatason.
Alt: Unravelling the bandages of the 'royal' Hatason mummy: Scans of mysterious 3,200-year-old Egyptian remains confirm she is a woman but was NOT a queen
Archaeologists have unearthed hundreds of flint tools thought to be up to 11,000 years old in Lincoln.
The "significant" find, including tiny cutting blades, was made at the University of Lincoln.
Cartagena (Colombia) (AFP) - Colombia says it has found the shipwreck of a storied Spanish galleon laden with gold and precious stones, three centuries after it was sunk by the British in the Caribbean.
Four hundred years after they were buried in heart-shaped lead urns, five embalmed human hearts have been discovered in a cemetery in northwestern France.
Scientists said they were able to peer inside those organs with modern medical imaging techniques, revealing the hearts' chambers, valves and arteries, some still bearing marks of disease.
An intact Etruscan tomb, complete with sarcophagi, a full array of grave goods and a mysterious marble head, has has been brought to light in the Umbria region of Italy, in what promises to be one of the most important archaeological findings in recent history.
Sitting in plain sight but unnoticed for centuries, an unusual megalith near the Sea of Galilee has stumped experts. An ancient monument comprised of enormous stone circles dating to the Early Bronze Age remains a mystery to this day. No one knows who created the stone rings in the form of a wheel, nor why.
A lead and wood artifact discovered in a roughly 6,000-year-old grave in a desert cave is the oldest evidence of smelted lead on record in the Levant, a new study finds.
The artifact, which looks like something between an ancient wand and a tiny sword, suggests that people in Israel's northern Negev desert learned how to smelt lead during the Late Chalcolithic
A mysterious Egyptian mummy dating back about 3,200 years has dirt in the skull, a new investigation reveals.
The presence of what looks like dark sediment inside the mummy's head is bizarre, said the researchers, who used computed tomography (CT) to peer inside the mummy.
In the mid-1800s, a railroad director, entrepreneur, and politician named Lewis Henry Morgan began visiting a largely undeveloped swath of land dotted with beaver ponds in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. What he saw amazed him: “[A] beaver district, more remarkable, perhaps, than any other of equal extent to be found in any part of North America,” he wrote. “A rare opportunity was thus offered to examine the works of the beaver, and to see him in his native wilds.”
In 2013, an obese man went to Hvidovre Hospital in Denmark to have his stomach stapled. All in all, it was ordinary bariatric surgery — with one big exception.
Scientists were investigating a tantalizing but controversial hypothesis: that a man’s experiences can alter his sperm, and that those changes in turn may alter his children.
That idea runs counter to standard thinking about heredity: that parents pass down only genes to their children.
A lazy lifestyle in early adulthood could damage cognitive ability in middle age, a study suggests
Related: Canada to become first G7 nation to legalize marijuana: government
You might find it hard to believe when you're running around the park after your pooch or cleaning up the latest vase it broke, but having a dog in the home can significantly reduce the likelihood that your kids will experience stress and anxiety, a new study has found.
Only a handful people around the world are born unable to feel pain. These individuals can often suffer a range of injuries when they are young. Babies with the condition tend to chew their fingers, toes and lips until they bleed, and toddlers can suffer an increased range of knocks, tumbles and encounters with sharp or hot objects.
Alt: Genetically modified mice reveal the secret to a painless life
Cooking with chloraminated water could put potentially harmful toxins in your food, according to a new study published in Water Research. The study reveals several molecules that are almost completely new to researchers, created by cooking with chloraminated tap water and iodized table salt.
Related: Commonly used pesticides weaken children's lungs and are 'are as damaging as passive smoking'
How do you build the world’s lightest metal? Make it mainly from air, according to scientists.
The material, known as a "microlattice," was developed by scientists at HRL Laboratories in Malibu, California, which is co-owned by Boeing and General Motors.
Related: Scientists turn gold into foam as light as air & malleable by hand
Creating a tornado sounds pretty easy, to hear Louis Michaud tell it. All you've got to do, he says, is "produce warm air, give it a spin, and basically have it rise."
He has built machines that do this—and of course, it wasn't quite so easy. With prototype after prototype of his Atmospheric Vortex Engine, the Ontario, Canada-based engineer set out to prove that humans could make their own twisters. He's done so on a small scale, creating narrow, wispy swirls easily dispersed by a strong wind.
The European Space Agency on Thursday launched a rocket carrying two cubes of gold and platinum almost a million miles from Earth so that scientists can see how they'll behave in free fall—at a cost of more than $450 million
Related: Holometer rules out first theory of space-time correlations
Astronomers have tied the origin of a Fast Radio Burst to a highly magnetized, gas-filled region of space, providing a new hint in the decade-long quest to explain the mysterious radio pulses.
A supermassive black hole anchoring the center of a nearby galaxy has been caught in a rarely seen double act: ripping apart a nearby sun-size star and shooting out jets of debris from its center at close to light speed.
Related: Event Horizon Telescope reveals magnetic fields at Milky Way's central black hole
Scientists have found the first direct evidence for explosive releases of energy in Saturn's magnetic bubble using data from the Cassini spacecraft, a joint mission between NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Italian Space Agency. The research is reported in the journal Nature Physics.
HD 106906b, a giant exoplanet discovered last year sitting at a large distance from its parent star, may have been kicked out of its birthplace in a process similar to what may have happened early in the history of our Solar System.
Yes, the universe is dying. Get over it.
Well, let's back up. The universe, as defined as "everything there is, in total summation," isn't going anywhere anytime soon. Or ever. If the universe changes into something else far into the future, well then, that's just more universe, isn't it?
The Sun could unleash huge superflares that would destroy much of the things we rely on for life on Earth, scientists have warned.
Huge flares of energy with the power of a billion one megaton nuclear bombs could destroy our communication and energy systems, they have said.
Alt: Superflare: Sun could release flares 1000x greater than previously recorded
The Universe, like the organisms that reside within it, is a mortal entity. Born in the Big Bang, it will eventually meet its fate through an equally cataclysmic process, whether it be in the form of a Big Rip, a Big Crunch, or an eternal deep freeze. Regardless, all life as we know it will be extinguished.
Unless, of course, our highly advanced offspring can find a way to escape the confines of the cosmos—or more radically, change the rules of the cosmological game.
Can watching a violent movie make you more likely to lie, cheat or steal? What about reading a violent book? While that may seem like a stretch, a new research study shows it may be the case. The study finds that exposure to human violence is strongly linked to an increase in cheating for monetary gain.
People who have a higher sense of purpose in life are at lower risk of death and cardiovascular disease, reports a pooled data analysis in Psychosomatic Medicine: Journal of Biobehavioral Medicine, the official journal of the American Psychosomatic Society.
“We are preparing for a future in which people may not be able to drive cars, or they may need artificial intelligence to support them to drive, and once they get off their cars they may need help from partner robots,” said Akifumi Tamaoki, general manager of Toyota’s partner robot division.
Babies learn about the world by exploring how their bodies move in space, grabbing toys, pushing things off tables, and by watching and imitating what adults are doing.
But when roboticists want to teach a robot how to do a task, they typically either write code or physically move a robot’s arm or body to show it how to perform an action.
Scientists have created tiny metal “nanoterminators” that they hope can carry cancer drugs straight to the problem cells.
The researchers hope that the new solution can allow doctors to send treatments much more quickly to their target, potentially allowing for the treatemnet of cancer much more effectively.
Researchers at Linköping University's Laboratory of Organic Electronics, Sweden, have developed power paper -- a new material with an outstanding ability to store energy. The material consists of nanocellulose and a conductive polymer. The results have been published in Advanced Science.
Computer data has been depicted as microscopic magnetic smudges, electric charges and even Lilliputian patterns of dots that reflect laser beams. It may ultimately move into the fabric of life itself — encoded in the organic molecules that are strung together like pearls to form strands of DNA.
A lethal fungus that has been threatening banana crops in Asia is now spreading to the rest of the world, and has some scientists warning of the popular fruit's extinction.
At sunrise in the fishing port of Villajoyosa in eastern Spain, a fleet of traditional fishing boats sets out on the Mediterranean to hunt for cuttlefish, prawns —and plastic bottles.
Since July, Spanish fishing boats have been picking up plastic waste in the Mediterranean that will be recycled into polyester fibres that will be used to make a high-end clothing line.
Although bees are often lauded for their pollination prowess, other insects are just as important for the success of the world's crops, according to a new study.
The finding, reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggested that non-bee pollinators such as flies, wasps, beetles and butterflies could provide potential insurance against declines in bee numbers.
Experiencing the death of a family dog is a miserable rite of passage for children and adults alike, but now scientists are conducting trials to try and increase the lifespan of pets.
Evolutionary geneticists at the University of Washington have been studying the ageing process of animals and they believe that common drugs could help increase longevity.
Hundreds of dinosaur footprints and handprints dating to 170 million years ago adorn the shore on the Isle of Skye, making it the largest dinosaur site ever discovered in Scotland, a new study finds.
Two lumpy pieces of fossilized poop show that some dinosaurs ate flowering plants during the Late Cretaceous period, about 75 million years ago, new research finds.
The two turds are a prize find, as fossilized dinosaur droppings containing traces of flowering plants, known as angiosperms, are rare, said study researcher Nicole Ridgwell, a graduate student in museum and field studies at the University of Colorado Boulder.
A small piece of the skull of the 8000-year-old "Viste Boy" has now been sent to Sweden for DNA analysis. Scientists hope to learn more about early migration into Norway as well as clarify the skeleton's actual sex.
The "Viste Boy" lived 8200 years ago at Viste, outside Stavanger in southwestern Norway.