Newsdesk Archive
Fountains and tanks in the villages of Zamora province looked as if they were filled with blood last autumn.
But this wasn't down to a Halloween prank or a Biblical plague, as a number of people suggested on Twitter. Instead it was caused by microalgae.
A mysterious piece of space junk that was detected hurtling towards Earth about a month ago splashed down in the Indian Ocean this morning, scientists said.
The space debris, named WT1190F, entered the Earth's atmosphere and landed off the coast of Sri Lanka, according to NASA.
An enduring astronomical mystery is how stars and galaxies acquire their magnetic fields. Physicists Jonathan Squire and Amitava Bhattacharjee at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) have found a clue to the answer in the collective behavior of small magnetic disturbances. In a paper published in October in Physical Review Letters, the scientists report that small magnetic perturbations can combine to form large-scale magnetic fields just like those found throughout the universe.
Einstein was wrong about at least one thing: There are, in fact, "spooky actions at a distance," as now proven by researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
Einstein used that term to refer to quantum mechanics, which describes the curious behavior of the smallest particles of matter and light.
For the first time, scientists have discovered a classic formula for pi in the world of quantum physics. Pi is the ratio between a circle's circumference and its diameter, and is incredibly important in pure mathematics, but now scientists have also found it "lurking" in the world of physics, when using quantum mechanics to compare the energy levels of a hydrogen atom.
Why is that exciting? Well, it reveals an incredibly special and previously unknown connection between quantum physics and maths.
While listening to music, you might find yourself tapping your foot or bobbing your head to the beat. What you might not have expected is that as you listen to your favorite tune, the rhythms in your brain also follow along.
Eating sweet foods causes the brain to form a memory of a meal, according to researchers at Georgia State University, Georgia Regents University and Charlie Norwood VA Medical Center.
The findings, published online in the journal Hippocampus, show that neurons in the dorsal hippocampus, the part of the brain that is critical for episodic memory, are activated by consuming sweets. Episodic memory is the memory of autobiographical events experienced at a particular time and place.
A new genetic analysis of human gut bacteria is turning up some really weird critters—so weird, in fact, that some biologists are speculating we’ve found an entirely new domain of life. We should take that possibility with a healthy dose of skepticism. But here’s why it’s even being discussed.
In a battle against an infection, antibiotics can bring victory over enemy germs. Yet that war-winning aid can come with significant collateral damage; microbial allies and innocents are killed off, too. Such casualties may be unavoidable in some cases, but a lot of people take antibiotics when they’re not necessary or appropriate. And the toll of antibiotics on a healthy microbiome can, in some places, be serious, a new study suggests.
States across the US are facing opiate epidemics, which often start with prescription drugs, either legally prescribed or illegally bought. (Some people start taking opiates to treat legitimate pain and get addicted; some get pills from friends.) Over 2 million people in the US are addicted to opiates, and addiction is hard to treat.
Related: Scientists unravel brain circuits involved in cravings
It's known as 'ecstasy' or 'molly,' an illegal 'club drug' once popular at all-night dance parties, but researchers are finding MDMA could help war veterans and others suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Related: Medical Marijuana For Morning Sickness? Some Doctors Think It'll Help Pregnant Women Relieve Severe Nausea
A new RNA test of blood platelets can be used to detect, classify and pinpoint the location of cancer by analyzing a sample equivalent to one drop of blood. Using this new method for blood-based RNA tests of blood platelets, researchers have been able to identify cancer with 96 per cent accuracy, scientists report.
Material scientist Andreas Hermann , orthodontist Yijin Ren and their colleagues have made a 3D printing substrate which kills bacteria on contact. The first applications will be in dentistry, but other implants may follow. Their results were recently published in the journal Advanced Functional Materials.
Researchers from Portugal are using a neutron beam to study the molecular changes that occur when bones burn.
The experiments, under way at the Isis facility in Oxfordshire, are aimed at solving a problem for archaeologists and forensic scientists.
Lasers could heat materials to temperatures hotter than the centre of the Sun in only 20 quadrillionths of a second, according to new research.
Theoretical physicists from Imperial College London have devised an extremely rapid heating mechanism that they believe could heat certain materials to ten million degrees in much less than a million millionth of a second.
As the availability of clean, potable water becomes an increasingly urgent issue in many parts of the world, researchers are searching for new ways to treat salty, brackish or contaminated water to make it usable. Now a team at MIT has come up with an innovative approach that, unlike most traditional desalination systems, does not separate ions or water molecules with filters, which can become clogged, or boiling, which consumes great amounts of energy.
It was a time when stone-age hunter gatherers were spreading across northern Europe and into Britain as the glaciers of the last ice age retreated.
But just as these mesolithic tribes were settling in these newly uncovered areas a giant tsunami triggered by an underwater landslide off the coast of Norway devastated large parts of Europe.
A lost island in ?zmir’s Dikili, which was mentioned in ancient sources, was recently found within the scope of a research project carried out by a group of Turkish and foreign experts
A lost island where the ancient city of Kane was located has been found by geo-archaeologists in the Aegean province of ?zmir’s Dikili district. The island was mentioned in ancient sources.
A new study provides substantial support for earlier claims of 520-million-year-old arthropod brain systems, provoking thoughts about the nature of brains, life, and intelligence in the cosmos.
Soft, squishy, and delicate; brain and nervous system tissues may be some of the worst candidates for preservation in the fossil record.
Rats as big as dachshunds once lived alongside humans — who frequently ate the robust rodents, according to a recent study.
Scientists on an expedition to the island nation of East Timor discovered fossils representing seven new species of giant rats, all larger than any species ever found.
It sounds like something straight out of a “Hunger Games” novel: The rulers of a sprawling empire select beautiful children from throughout their vast territories and kill them in a ritualistic event to reinforce their power.
During the Inca civilization, which thrived in South America before the arrival of Europeans, these ritual sacrifices were known as capococha. One of the victims was a 7-year-old boy who lived more than 500 years ago.
What are the world’s oldest tattoos?
If you ask the Internet this question you find a quick and easy answer: The oldest tattoos belong to Ötzi, aka the Iceman, who died and was frozen beneath an Alpine glacier along the Austrian-Italian border between about 3370 and 3100 BC. Thanks to numerous studies, including new findings published earlier this year, we know that Ötzi had a total of 61 tattoos across this body.
It may be one of the Middle East's most mysterious structures, but it's easy to miss from the roadside.
The prehistoric stone monument of Rujm el-Hiri, or Gilgal Refaim, went unnoticed for centuries in a bare expanse of field in the disputed region of the Golan Heights.
Architects seeking solutions for sustainable living in the 21st century are taking notes from the ancient city of Caral in Peru, an engineering marvel built some 5,000 years ago.
Caral's builders created a city of pyramids, sunken amphitheaters, seismically resilient buildings and underground ducts that channeled the wind to keep their fires burning all with basic tools.
Archaeologists in Peru have unearthed a 1,500-year old frieze with human figures believed to be from the indigenous Moche culture, the latest find at a site famous for its pre-Incan treasures.
The discovery, in Peru's northern La Libertad region, was made at the Huaca de la Luna, or Shrine of the Moon, the El Comercio newspaper reported on Sunday.
Unexplored caves. A harsh, icy terrain. Swarms of animals eager to nibble at human visitors.
Its sounds like the premise of a new science fiction flick. But for Gina Moseley, a National Geographic grantee and cave scientist at Austria’s University of Innsbruck, not only is it science fact, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to decode the Earth’s past climate.
A glacier in northeast Greenland that holds enough water to raise global sea levels by more than 18 inches has come unmoored from a stabilizing sill and is crumbling into the North Atlantic Ocean. Losing mass at a rate of 5 billion tons per year, glacier Zachariae Isstrom entered a phase of accelerated retreat in 2012.
Climate change is progressing rapidly. It is not the first time in our planet’s history that temperatures have been rising, but it is happening much faster now than it ever has before. Or is it? Researchers at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) have shown in the latest edition of the journal Nature Communications* that the temperature changes millions of years ago probably happened no more slowly than they are happening today.
The famous Columbian mammoth — an 11-ton creature known for traversing North America during the last ice age — might actually be the same species as the Eurasian steppe mammoth, a new study finds.
The discovery suggests that the first mammoth to enter North America was the Eurasian steppe mammoth, and not its ancestor — a European creature called Mammuthus meridionalis. The two species differ greatly, in that the steppe mammoth had many more adaptations to living in cold weather.
About 360 million years ago, Earth’s seas were filled with myriad fishes, including creatures the size of school buses. Then a mass extinction hit the Age of Fishes. It killed off most of the big guys, according to a new study, and effectively shrunk most vertebrate species to the size of a human forearm or smaller. The findings imply that our planet’s next mass extinction—which some believe is already underway—could similarly shrivel any species that remain.
A previously undiscovered dinosaur species showcases an evolutionary transition from an earlier duckbilled species to that group's descendants. The findings highlight how the new species of duckbilled dinosaur neatly fills a gap that had existed between an ancestral form with no crest and a descendant with a larger crest, providing key insight into the evolution of elaborate display structures in these gigantic extinct herbivores.
Were ancient bees specialists, devoting their pollen-collecting attentions to very specific plant partners? Or were they generalists, buzzing around to collect pollen from a variety of flowers in their midst? Researchers who've studied an ancient lineage of bees now say in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on November 12 that the answer to both questions is yes. Bees living some 50 million years ago simultaneously relied on both strategies in foraging for pollen
Mushrooms! They’re cute, delicious, intoxicating, and might just kill you. And, if none of those abilities makes you crazy for basidiomycetes (the group of fungi that includes mushrooms), maybe this one will: according to these scientists, mushroom spores have the power to make it rain! Apparently, the structure of the spore surface allows water to condense around it.
Molecules entombed inside pristine magmas suggest that Earth’s water came from soggy dust, not icy comets.
The relative abundance of a heavier variety of hydrogen called deuterium serves as a fingerprint of where in the solar system a reservoir of H2O originated (SN: 5/16/15, p. 18). Previous work hunting for the source of Earth’s water measured deuterium in seawater, but that’s a tainted metric, researchers report in the Nov. 13 Science.
New observations made near the south pole of Titan by NASA's Cassini spacecraft add to the evidence that winter comes in like a lion on this moon of Saturn.
Scientists have detected a monstrous new cloud of frozen compounds in the moon's low- to mid-stratosphere – a stable atmospheric region above the troposphere, or active weather layer.
An atmospheric haze around a faraway planet—like the one which probably shrouded and cooled the young Earth—could show that the world is potentially habitable, or even be a sign of life itself.
Astronomers often use the Earth as a proxy for hypothetical exoplanets in computer modeling to simulate what such worlds might be like and under what circumstances they might be hospitable to life.
A rocky Earth-sized planet that circles a small, nearby star could be the most important world ever found beyond the solar system, astronomers say.
The planet lies in the constellation of Vela in the southern sky and is close enough for telescopes to observe any atmosphere it has, a procedure that could help spot life on other planets in the future.
Astronomers have identified the most distant object yet in the Solar System.
Observations with Japan's Subaru telescope reveal the likely icy body to be some 15.5 billion km from the Sun - about three times further away than even far-flung Pluto.
The sight of an asteroid being ripped apart by a dead star and forming a glowing debris ring has been captured in an image for the first time.Comprised of dust particles and debris, the rings are formed by the star's gravity tearing apart asteroids that came too close.Gas produced by collisions among the debris within the ring is illuminated by ultraviolet rays from the star, causing it to emit a dark red glow.
An international team of astronomers, led researchers from the University of Cambridge and the Australian National University, have identified some of the oldest stars in our galaxy, which could contain vital clues about the early Universe, including an indication of how the first stars died.
An international team of architects and scientists have observed "thermal anomalies" in the pyramids of Giza, Egyptian antiquities officials say.
Thermal cameras detected higher temperatures in three adjacent stones at the bottom of the Great Pyramid.
Related: Possible Chambers in Pyramid Hold Hopes for Egypt's Tourism
Humans have been exploiting honeybees for almost 9,000 years, according to archaeological evidence.
Traces of beeswax found on ancient pottery from Europe, the Near East and North Africa suggest the first farmers kept bees.
A joint Greek-American archaeological expedition, co-directed by a University of Southampton (UK) researcher, has recorded 22 shipwrecks over 13 days in what may be the ancient shipwreck capital of the world.
The findings in the Fourni archipelago in the Greek Islands bring to light ancient trade networks that once connected the entire Mediterranean.
The head of Indonesia's anti-drugs agency has proposed building a prison island guarded by crocodiles to house death-row drug convicts.
Budi Waseso said crocodiles often made better guards than humans - because they could not be bribed.
Ants are so in tune with each other that they function as a single superorganism when under threat, new research finds.
The discovery, reported in the journal PLOS ONE, adds to the growing evidence that ultra social beings, such as ants, act more as one living entity than as individuals, at least under certain circumstances.
The hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica is nearing record-breaking size again, scientists say. In fact, new observations show that the infamous "ozone hole" is currently larger than the entire continent of North America.
Researchers at the German Aerospace Center are using Earth-observing satellites to monitor the protective ozone layer and recently reported that a large, nearly circular hole over Antarctica extends over an area measuring 26 million square km (10 million square miles).
After the 2010Deepwater Horizon spill released millions of barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, disaster response officials resorted to a desperate measure. They sent aircraft to spray chemical dispersants onto the spreading oil. The idea was to break up the spill into smaller droplets, which could be more easily consumed by oil-eating microbes in the Gulf water.
Alt: Study: Dispersants did not help oil degrade in BP spill
We all have our standards. For humans, it’s the five-second rule. For macaques, it’s “think twice before eating food off a pile of poop.” The monkeys have several ways of keeping their food (sort of) clean. And the most fastidious macaques, it seems, are rewarded with fewer parasites.
A Japanese study of a chimpanzee mother caring for her disabled infant in the wild has shed light on how humans developed their social behavior.
The first-of-its-kind study by a team of Kyoto University researchers was published Monday in the online edition of Primates, an international journal of primatology.
Unlike indebtedness, which can feel like a burden, gratitude is experienced as unequivocally positive. It does not feel like a duty (and, interestingly enough, is unlikely to be generated by an act of duty: if someone does something for you because they have to, you don’t feel particularly grateful). It boosts our wellbeing, and even our health. In one experiment, three sets of participants were told to write either about their problems, things they were grateful for, or neutral events, once each week for 10 weeks.
Hunger is a part of daily life. Before each meal, it beckons us to the table and reminds us that our existence depends on putting food in our mouths. Hunger is so universal that a complete trilogy of young adult books and movie spinoffs take their name from the sensation. Hunger stems from a lack of food, but it can represent the yearning for something else entirely. Metaphorically speaking, we can say we hunger for knowledge, for recognition, for new experiences (or freedom from the Capitol).
As much as 40% of the urban diet could eventually be produced in specialized domestic grow-boxes, an agricultural scientist has explained, cutting down on unnecessary shipping and also providing fresher, more nutritional food.
Gardens may be popping up in schools everywhere, but one school garden in Winnipeg, Canada is making news after growing a squash thought to be extinct for hundreds of years.
It all started with an archaeological dig on First Nations land that unearthed a small clay vessel estimated to be about 800 years old. Inside the vessel, the archaeologists found preserved seeds of an ancient squash.
A dinosaur reconstruction effort that began with half a giant thigh bone discovered in South Africa is puzzling palaeontologists, who think they might have stumbled across a new species.
After 20 years of patient collection, researchers finally have enough fossils to put together a complete picture of a 14-tonne creature from the sauropoda group of dinosaurs, characterised by their small head, long neck, long tail and elephant-like gait.
A vast river network that once carried water for hundreds of miles across Western Sahara has been discovered under the parched sands of Mauritania.
Radar images taken from a Japanese Earth observation satellite spotted the ancient river system beneath the shallow, dusty surface, apparently winding its way from more than 500km inland towards the coast.
An international research team led by a scientist at New Zealand's University of Otago has resolved the mystery of the processes involved in the Mediterranean Sea drying up around 5.6 million years ago.
The event, known as the Messinian Salinity Crisis (MSC), saw the Mediterranean become a 1.5km deep basin for around 270,000 years. It also left a kilometers-deep layer of salt due to seawater evaporation.
Autonomous, driverless buses will hit the streets of Switzerland in Spring next year, in one of the world's first trials of self-driving buses on public roads.
Two of the driverless buses, created by startup BestMile and launched under the banner of Swiss bus company PostBus, will enter service in the city of Sion, in the French-speaking canton of Valais.
For the first time, doctors have breached the human brain's protective layer to deliver cancer-fighting drugs.
The Canadian team used tiny gas-filled bubbles, injected into the bloodstream of a patient, to punch temporary holes in the blood-brain barrier.
PKS 1302-102 is one of the few known quasars with a pair of black holes within its accretion disc. It is also a curious case for astronomers as it will produce a powerful explosion when these two black holes merge. The scientists trying to determine the scale of this merger estimate that it could result in an enormous release of energy.
In the classic Sherlock Holmes story “Silver Blaze,” the famed detective solves a murder mystery by noticing something that does not happen: a watchdog's failure to bark in the middle of the night. Astronomers are now using a similar inference to solve the cosmic mystery of a black hole's birth—looking for stars that fail to explode.
Astronomers have found the most distant object ever in our solar system, three times farther away than Pluto. The dwarf planet, which has been designated V774104, is between 500 and 1000 kilometers across. It will take another year before scientists pin down its orbit, but it could end up joining an emerging class of extreme solar system objects whose strange orbits point to the hypothetical influence of rogue planets or nearby stars.
Mars' moon Phobos is slowly being pulled apart by tidal forces and scientists expect it to be destroyed in 30 to 50 million years, a new study has found.
The larger of Mars' two moons, Phobos is closer to the planet than any other in the solar system, orbiting at only 6,000 kilometres above the surface and being pulled closer by two metres every hundred years.
For such a small world, Pluto has an incredible diversity of features, including flowing glaciers, curiously pitted terrains, hazy skies, and multi-colored landscapes. Now scientists from the New Horizons mission have revealed that the distant dwarf planet is even weirder than they thought, with potential ice volcanoes, floating mountains, and misbehaving moons.
Alt: New Horizons: Pluto may have ice volcanoes
A new model of the Moon's formation suggests it developed in two distinct stages, producing inner and outer layers with different compositions.
Beginning with a massive impact that left a disc of material swirling around the proto-Earth, it predicts how our satellite clumped together over time.
Scientists at Southwest Research Institute combined dynamical, thermal, and chemical models of the Moon's formation to explain the relative lack of volatile elements in lunar rocks. Lunar rocks closely resemble Earth rocks in many respects, but Moon rocks are more depleted in volatile elements like potassium, sodium, and zinc, which tend to have lower boiling points and vaporize readily.
Related: Saturn's "Yin-Yang" moon Iapetus
We’re inventing the post-Mom economy, which—not to insult mothers or anything—should make us all happier and richer and finally bring us the leisurely future we were promised 50 years ago.
Give it another decade and we might not have anything to do outside of work except exercise at the gym or drink 3-D-printed bourbon at virtual-reality Star Wars bars.
Scientists have developed a new pain-free filling that allows cavities to be repaired without drilling or injections.
The tooth-rebuilding technique developed at King's College London does away with fillings and instead encourages teeth to repair themselves.
Archaeologists in China have confirmed the discovery of a staggering 10 tonnes of copper coins in an ancient grave dating back to around 2,000 years ago.
The incredible find in an old Western Han Dynasty tomb is now helping to shed light on the life of nobility in ancient times.
Two weeks of new thermal scanning of the pyramids of Giza have identified anomalies, including a major one in the largest pyramid, Egypt’s antiquities ministry has announced.
The antiquities minister, Mamdouh el-Damaty, and technical experts working on the project showed the thermal differences in the pyramid in a live camera presentation to journalists on Monday.
AMESBURY, England — About 6,300 years ago, a tree here toppled over.
For the ancients in this part of southern England, it created a prime real estate opportunity — next to a spring and near attractive hunting grounds.
A Mayan village frozen in time 1,400 years ago by a volcanic eruption reveals that commoners had power in a culture best known for the works of the elite class.
Though elites in city centers had an impressive record in developing arts, hieroglyphs and a complex calendar, rural villagers weren't under the thumb of this ruling class, excavations in El Salvador suggest.
600 unopened letters found in a postmaster’s trunk were discovered in The Hague’s Museum voor Communicatie in 2012, along with 2,000 opened but undelivered letters. They date from between 1689 and 1707, just after William of Orange’s invasion of England, Scotland, and Ireland, known as the ‘Glorious Revolution’.
If you’ve ever flipped through a book of prehistoric creatures or ambled through a major museum’s fossil halls, you’ve probably seen a plesiosaur.
These were the four-flippered marine reptiles that patrolled the seas for almost the entire Mesozoic era, some 250 to 66 million years ago. Some plesiosaurs were big-headed apex predators. Others had ludicrously long necks and snatched up fish and crustaceans with their little jaws.
The skeleton of a heavily feathered, ostrichlike dinosaur has "unparalleled" fossilized feathers and skin — anatomical features that aren't usually preserved in dinosaur remains, a new study reports.
The remains indicate that the dinosaur — an Ornithomimus, a fast-moving theropod (bipedal, mostly meat-eating dinosaurs) with an uncanny resemblance to an ostrich — sported a feathery coat during the Late Cretaceous, more than 66 million years ago.
Science has long dictated that brains don't fossilize, so when Nicholas Strausfeld co-authored the first ever report of a fossilized brain in a 2012 edition of Nature, it was met with "a lot of flack."
"It was questioned by many paleontologists, who thought - and in fact some claimed in print - that maybe it was just an artifact or a one-off, implausible fossilization event," said Strausfeld, a Regents' professor in UA's Department of Neuroscience.
A mishmash of ancient amphibians and reptiles once swam and hunted prey in an ancient Brazilian tropical lake, a new study finds.
However, few of these animals are known to science, said the researchers who recently excavated fossils from the 278-million-year-old lake.
The Internet was supposed to facilitate better exchange between the public and news media. But vile and hateful comments changed all that.
In the face of rising vitriol -- attacks, bigotry and general nastiness -- news organizations are increasingly throwing in the towel on online comments.
When you see a familiar face, when a bird-watcher catches a glimpse of a rare bird perched on a limb, or when a car-fancier spots a classic auto driving past, the same small region in the brain becomes engaged.
“Who thought it was a good idea to put a whale in a pool?” Howard Stern recently wondered on his satellite radio program.
The shock jock’s comment hints at just how much public scrutiny of captive orca shows has increased, driven by well-organized animal advocates and written into a new bill to outlaw the practice that was introduced in Congress last week.
When a kitchen sponge adsorbs water into its pores, it softens and expands. Now in a new study published in The Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters, scientists have discovered that, when microporous materials adsorb fluid, they initially soften but then stiffen as they adsorb more fluid. It's as if soaking your kitchen sponge in water eventually caused it to harden.
Ice was in the news quite a lot last week. There was, for example, the news that Antarctica could be gaining, not losing, ice, at least for now.
Lest you were tempted to breathe a sigh of relief, critics pointed to contrary evidence. And there were also these unsettling findings about the gigantic West Antarctic Ice Sheet.
The planet continues to set global temperature records and not in a good way. According to the United Kingdom’s Met Office, the Earth’s surface temperature will reach 1°C above pre-industrial levels this year for the first time.
Related: Earth's climate entering new 'permanent reality' as CO2 hits new high
Bright light streaked across California and was visible as far away as Nevada and Arizona, sparking a flurry of calls and an uproar on social media
The US navy fired an unarmed missile from a submarine off the coast of southern California on Saturday, creating a bright light that streaked across the state and was visible as far away as Nevada and Arizona.
Related: The Unlikely Struggle Of The Family Whose Neighbor Is Area 51
Related: Does Lightning Have an ‘Electric’ Relationship With UFO Encounters?
Related: SECOND mysterious black UFO crashes in Spanish field sparking terror among villagers
It was once the world's largest-known diamond, is worth a reported £100m and is currently part of Britain's crown jewels.
But India wants it back.
Bollywood stars and businessmen have united to instruct lawyers to begin legal proceedings in London’s High Court to return the Koh-i-Noor diamond.
The investigation of King Tut’s tomb to find secret chambers ended today with promising results, according to a statement from Egypt’s antiquity ministry.
Alt: Scientists on the verge of finding Queen Nefertiti's secret tomb: Heat detectors pick up chamber that could be secret room at the center of archaeologist's sensational claims
An Australian archaeological team in Cyprus has uncovered a theatre dating from 300 BC, the oldest structure of its kind yet unearthed on the Mediterranean island, the antiquities department said Friday.
Astronomers in India have discovered a very unusual galaxy, and it’s dying. By now, in fact, it’s probably already dead.
The new galaxy, known as J021659-044920, is 9 billion light years away from Earth. That means it’s really old in cosmic terms (but not quite as old as the oldest object astronomers have ever found, a galaxy 13 billion light years away called UDFy-38135539).
Astronomers at the SETI institute (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) have reported their findings after monitoring the reputed megastructure-encompassed star KIC 8462852. No significant radio signals were detected in observations carried out from the Allen Telescope Array between October 15-30th (nearly 12 hours each day). However, there are caveats, namely that the sensitivity and frequency range were limited, and gaps existed in the coverage (e.g., between 6-7 Ghz).
Related: So far there are no signs of life coming from the 'alien megastructure' star
Austria's largest state said Thursday that 100 percent of its electricity is now generated using renewable sources of energy.
"We have invested heavily to boost energy efficiency and to expand renewables," said Erwin Proell, premier of 1.65-million-strong Lower Austria.
On Sunday, November 8, Peruvian President Ollanta Humala will approve the creation of a 3.3 million-acre national park at Sierra del Divisor, protecting an immense expanse of Amazon rainforest. The new park—which is larger than Yosemite and Yellowstone National Parks combined — strategically secures the final link in a 67 million-acre Andes-Amazon Conservation Corridor, forming one of the largest contiguous blocks of protected areas in the Amazon, and is vital to protecting one of the planet’s last remaining strongholds for wildlife biodiversity and indigenous communities.
Domestic dogs and cats might be a phenomenal evolutionary success story but we still know remarkably little about how, why and when these animals first became part of our human world.
Related: What makes a leader? Clues from the animal kingdom
A nanofiber hydrogel infused with snake venom may be the best material to stop bleeding quickly—and may perform better than anticoagulants, a new study suggests.
The hydrogel called SB50 incorporates batroxobin, a venom produced by two species of South American pit viper. It can be injected as a liquid and quickly turns into a gel that conforms to the site of a wound, keeping it closed, and promotes clotting within seconds.
Related: Electric eels curl up to deliver even more powerful shocks
New research led by physicists at the University of Warwick has used tools designed to study social networks to gain significant new insights into the Northern Lights, and space weather – particularly the interaction of events in the sun’s atmosphere with Earth’s ionosphere.
Bathed in bright blue and fluorescent pink light, the galaxy cluster in this image is home to the most powerful explosion since the big bang.
What's more, the explosion is ongoing and has been continuing for the last 100 million years, releasing as much energy as hundreds of millions of gamma ray bursts.
What's the difference between matter and antimatter? Sometimes nothing, a new study finds.
Scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) discovered that antimatter protons, called antiprotons, act just like their ordinary-matter cousins when they are close enough to interact via the so-called strong nuclear force, which binds protons and neutrons together into atomic nuclei.
If alien civilizations are broadcasting from around a strangely behaving star, they aren't chatting loud enough for humans to hear them from Earth, new observations show.
The star KIC 8462852 garnered popular attention in October, when scientists announced that it showed evidence of periodically dimming by 20 percent or more, which some people theorized could be caused by the shadow of an alien megastructure.
A mysterious bright light in the sky has sent Californians into panic - only for it to be explained soon afterwards.
The light was spotted travelling quickly over Orange County and neighbouring areas late on Saturday, leading to fevered speculation online over its origin.
If “The Stellarator” sounds like an energy source of comic book legend to you, you’re not that far off. It’s the largest nuclear fusion reactor in the world, and it’s set to turn on later this month.
Housed at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, the Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X) stellarator looks more like a psychotic giant’s art project than the future of energy.
A new report suggests that the marriage of AI and robotics could replace so many jobs that the era of mass employment could come to an end.
If you wanted relief from stories about tyre factories and steel plants closing, you could try relaxing with a new 300-page report from Bank of America Merrill Lynch which looks at the likely effects of a robot revolution.
Alt: Robots may shatter the global economic order within a decade
It’s likely to cause a few double takes, even among seen-it-all New Yorkers.
Next June, a working replica of a traditional Hawaiian voyaging canoe — 62 feet long, double-hulled, with two powerful crab-claw sails — will make its way down the Hudson River, one small leg in a three-year journey.