Newsdesk Archive
Excess algae, prepare to meet your maker. A remote-controlled floating drone could cut a swath through algae-clogged water, turning the overgrowth into biofuel.
The drone concept comes from Swedish industrial design student Fredrik Ausinsch, who envisions a clean way to remove excess algae in the Baltic Sea. Abnormally frequent and large algal blooms there produce toxins that kill marine animals.
On the day before her first birthday, Layla's parents were told that all treatments for her leukaemia had failed and she was going to die.
Now, just months after her family was told her cancer was incurable, Layla is not only alive, but a happy, giggling child with no trace of leukaemia in her body.
Related: New way to find DNA damage: Chemists look for precursors to disease mutations
An intense debate has flared over whether the federal government should fund research that creates partly human creatures using human stem cells.
The National Institutes of Health declared a moratorium in late September on funding this kind of research. NIH officials said they needed to assess the science and to evaluate the ethical and moral questions it raises. As part of that assessment, the NIH is holding a daylong workshop Friday.
Concert promoters hoping to bring out legends such as Whitney Houston, Billie Holiday and Elvis Presley used to face an obvious problem—the singers are dead.
But with rapid advances in technology, those stars and many more are returning to life through holograms, the three-dimensional light projections that have opened new frontiers for the live music and other industries.
Related: When Does an Android Become a Creepazoid?
A new study of sleepwalkers found an intriguing paradox: Although sleepwalkers have an increased risk for headaches and migraines while awake, during sleepwalking episodes they are unlikely to feel pain even while suffering an injury.
Many people are already familiar with the concept of confirmation bias, which is the tendency for people to seek out arguments that support their existing opinions. It turns out that we’re not only addicted to seeking information that confirms our biases, we’re also willing to tolerate really weak arguments to support our opinions. So weak, in fact, that if we’re tricked into thinking our own arguments come from a stranger, we’re likely to reject them.
Remains of a church on Cabo Verde's Santiago Island, off the West African coast, dates back to late 15th century – when Portugal first colonised the islands that played a central role in the global African slave trade. Archaeological excavations are helping Cabo Verdeans gain new insight into their remarkable and long-obscured history.
Among the narrow cobbled sidewalks and winding canals of Venice’s Sant’Agostin neighborhood is a pretty yellow palazzo, its balcony overflowing with pink astoria flowers. Amid the ornate windows and lush flower boxes, it’s easy to miss a small plaque, carved in stone and written in formal Italian, commemorating one of the most important men in publishing history. This was the home of Aldus Manutius, says the plaque, and it was from here that “the light of Greek letters returned to shine upon civilized peoples.”
A sad tale of a Medieval traveler has emerged from the historical center of Moscow as archaeologists unearthed a rare letter written on birch bark.
Dated to the 14th century, the manuscript was found in a district close to Red Square by a team of the Russian Academy of Sciences who dug 13 feet down. They retrieved hundreds of objects that provide new information about life in Moscow in the Middle Ages.
Human ancestors living in Central Europe between 320,000 and 300,000 years ago may have used wooden spears to fend off fearsome, meat-eating rivals — saber-toothed cats.
From 2011 to 2013, a team led by paleontologist Jordi Serangeli of the University of Tübingen in Germany found five teeth and a partial leg bone from two of these roughly 200-kilogram predators at a site where researchers previously discovered ancient wooden spears.
Related: Ancient Native American 'Twins' Had Different Mothers
The first animals to have complex skeletons existed about 550 million years ago, fossils of a tiny marine creature unearthed in Namibia suggest. The find is the first to suggest the earliest complex animals on Earth -- which may be related to many of today's animal species -- lived millions of years earlier than was previously known.
Archaeologists with The Australian National University (ANU) have discovered fossils of seven giant rat species on East Timor, with the largest up to 10 times the size of modern rats.
With their bulging eyes and ability to re-grow their tails, modern salamanders are rather unusual.
Now two of their ancient relatives have been discovered in north eastern Brazil, and one is even more unusual than those alive today.
Concentrations of selenium, a vital element for many organisms at the base of today’s ocean food chain, dropped substantially in seawater in advance of three of Earth’s largest die-offs, a new study suggests. Researchers analyzed the levels of various trace elements in hundreds of samples of carbon-rich shales that had been deposited in oxygen-poor regions of the ocean surrounding ancient continents during the past 3.5 billion years.
A new study has found that Neanderthals arrived on the Italian peninsular 250,000 years ago, 100,000 years earlier than previously thought.
The new research has the potential to cause a significant rethink over the timing and distribution of proto-humans across Prehistoric Europe
The long history of severe droughts across Europe and the Mediterranean has largely been told through historical documents and ancient journals, each chronicling the impact in a geographically restricted area. Now, for the first time, an atlas based on scientific evidence provides the big picture, using tree rings to map the reach and severity of dry and wet periods across Europe, and parts of North Africa and the Middle East, year to year over the past 2,000 years.
Related: Amazonian natives had little impact on land, new research finds
Sprawling earthen swastika designs, crosses and rings that cover part of Kazakhstan are becoming a little less mysterious: Archaeologists have found and investigated 60 of these symbols, called geoglyphs, and determined when they were created and what their potential function might have been.
The ancient Elamite site of Haft Tappeh is located in southwestern Iran. Archaeologists from Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) have been progressively examining the city located at the site since 2002, and have unearthed evidence of a human tragedy that occurred here 3,400 years ago.
The Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities has just announced that a scientific team has found initial evidence of what might be a hidden chamber in the tomb of King Tutankhamun.
A survey of the tomb was conducted using infrared thermography, which measures temperature distributions on a surface.
Alt: Egypt using infrared scans to see if Queen Nefertiti is buried near King Tut
Three tombs have been opened to the public for the first time in Egypt's ancient city of Luxor, while two others have been reopened after restoration and conservation work. The new tombs, located in the small village of Qurnat Marey, were opened for the first time since their discovery in a ceremony officiated by the Egyptian Minister of Antiquities Mamdouh El Damaty.
A team of researchers with Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology and Dong-A University, both in South Korea, has developed an artificial skin that can detect both pressure and heat with a high degree of sensitivity, at the same time. In their paper published in the journal Science Advances, the team describes how they created the skin, what they found in testing it and the other types of things it can sense.
Related: Bacteria-Powered Shirts Vent When You Sweat
With Wi-Fi capability being offered in some vehicles and other cars being developed to drive autonomously, the auto industry is in the fast lane toward more futuristic amenities.
Related: Jewelry Designed to Prevent Sexual Assault
A British baby has become the first in the world to be free of leukaemia through a ground-breaking genetic editing technique which creates designer immune cells to fight cancer.
Doctors had given up all hope of saving Layla Richards, now 17 months, after she failed to respond to chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant.
A gastric balloon that's swallowed like a pill and then sits in the stomach filled with fluid helped patients lose more than a third of their excess weight over a four-month period, researchers have reported.
The Elipse device has not been approved for weight loss by the Food & Drug Administration.
How'd you like to travel from New York to London in less than an hour? One imaginative inventor has developed a concept plane that could take passengers across the pond in just 30 minutes — at least in theory.
The aircraft concept, dubbed the Skreemr, is the brainchild of Charles Bombardier, an engineer and inventor who writes about his futuristic prototype designs in the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail.
Up until recently, soda was cheaper than bottled water in La Mancalona, a village in the jungle of Mexico's Yucatan peninsula. As with many remote communities, clean drinking water was almost a luxury for the local subsistence farmers.
Related: Nigerians Are Building Fireproof, Bulletproof, And Eco-Friendly Homes With Plastic Bottles And Mud
Children of religious parents may not be as altruistic as their parents think, according to new research from six countries around the world.
Alt: Religious upbringing linked to less altruism
Related: Morrisons vows to donate all unsold food, following public outcry
Mexico's Supreme Court ruled 4-to-1 Wednesday that outlawing the possession and use of the marijuana plant represents a violation of fundamental human rights. While the ruling does not mean that marijuana is now legal in the country — it only applies to the four plaintiffs in this specific case — it gives a tremendous amount of political space for lawmakers to introduce marijuana reform bills at the state and federal level in Mexico.
Related: Oxytocin makes socializing feel fun, just like marijuana
There are renewed claims of an Unidentified Flying Object (UFO) sighting after a live stream from a camera on-board the International Space Station zoomed in on a bright spot in space before cutting off mid-stream.
Related: Green UFO Seen Entering Mount Etna Volcano on Sicily
Related: Mystery after 'UFO zapped police car, cracking windscreen and blinding driver'
Prepare to have your mind blown.
An astrophysicist says he may have found evidence of alternate or parallel universes by looking back in time to just after the Big Bang more than 13 billion years ago.
Related: ‘Mysterious Glow’ May Indicate Evidence of Parallel Universes
Professor Brian Cox has said that if an advanced alien civilisation had built a megastructure to harness energy from its star, it would not be "horrendously surprising". The physicist was speaking about the possibility of an alien megastructure around the star KIC 8462852 on Shaun Keavney's BBC Radio 6 breakfast show.
One hundred years ago today at the Prussian Academy of Sciences, Albert Einstein gave the first in a series of lectures that rewrote Newton’s laws of gravity and changed the world. In The Hunt for Vulcan: . . . And How Albert Einstein Destroyed a Planet, Discovered Relativity, and Deciphered the Universe, Tom Levenson reveals how this revolution could not have happened without disproving an obscure astronomical calculation.
According to Newton, Mercury’s wobble was caused by the gravitational pull of some other planet. Enter Vulcan—the so-called “other” planet—first observed in 1859; confirmed by the greatest astronomer of the day, Urbain Le Verrier; and hailed by The New York Times as one of the great discoveries of the century. Trouble was, it didn’t exist.
The air on Mars — what there is of it — is leaking away, about half a pound a second sputtering into space, scientists announced on Thursday.
The planet’s early atmosphere is thought to have been as thick as or thicker than Earth’s today, and even over the 4.5-billion-year history of the solar system, that slow leak would not explain how it atrophied to its current wisps.
Alt: Mars atmosphere 'eroded by Sun activity', BBC
One of the biggest and most important findings made by NASA recently was the confirmation that liquid water currently flows on Mars. Scientists suspected this a long time ago, but really strong evidence was needed to confirm this hypothesis. Now, with the discovery of hydrated minerals on downhill flows, which are known as recurring slope lineae (RSL), we know that liquid water not only existed in the past on Mars, but also flows there in present day. But how does this breakthrough finding reflect our current knowledge about present-day Mars, and how could it change our understanding of the history of our reddish neighbor?
Related: How to colonize Mars
Auroras can occur almost anywhere on Mars, according to new data from NASA's MAVEN spacecraft.
Scientists have found auroral activity across most of the red planet, as opposed to on Earth where auroras only occur in the higher latitudes.
Mysteriously, Earth's chemical composition is drastically different from that of the rocks that most likely helped to form the planet.
Now, scientists think they may have an answer to this long-standing puzzle: The constant pummeling that formed Earth may have altered its composition.
Dark matter particles may have interacted extensively with normal matter long ago, when the universe was very hot, a new study suggests.
The nature of dark matter is currently one of the greatest mysteries in science. The invisible substance — which is detectable via its gravitational influence on "normal" matter — is thought to make up five-sixths of all matter in the universe.
On 15 June 2015, V404 Cygni (V404 Cyg), a binary system comprising a sun-like star orbiting a black hole, woke up. A huge outburst of energy across the electromagnetic spectrum 'lit up' the sky. The last such outburst was 1989.
Astronomers have discovered a giant gathering of galaxies in a very remote part of the universe, thanks to NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). The galaxy cluster, located 8.5 billion light-years away, is the most massive structure yet found at such great distances.
Galaxy clusters are gravitationally bound groups of thousands of galaxies, which themselves each contain hundreds of billions of stars. The clusters grow bigger and bigger over time as they acquire new members.
In 1907, a Massachusetts doctor named Duncan MacDougall performed an unusual series of experiments. Intrigued by the idea that the human soul had mass, and could therefore be weighed, Dr. MacDougall put together a bed fitted with a sensitive set of beam scales, and convinced a series of terminally ill patients to lie on it during the final moments of their lives.
Why does the Hawaiian language flow melodically from vowel to vowel, whereas Hungarian is peppered with consonants? It may have something to do with the climate and terrain where those languages developed, a new study of more than 600 languages from around the world suggests.
Related: Does an "M" Sound Round to You?
Ever wonder what might make one species split in two? A new study in the journal Current Biology shows that it could come down to a simple female preference for a specific type of buzz.
Red mason bees are small solitary bees that are common across Europe, but females prefer to mate locally.
Cockroaches are often associated with dirty kitchens and grimy bathrooms - scuttling away as soon as you enter the room and turn on the light. But pest controllers aren't the only people interested in them - these insects are inspiring research into antibiotics, robots and mechanical limbs, writes Mary Colwell.
Earlier this year Los Angeles residents met about a new plan to release thousands of mosquitoes in their backyards. The bugs—all males—would not bite humans like females do, and area officials hoped these particular insects would block further reproduction of their kind. To some local residents the approach seemed a bit counterintuitive at first. Yet they were told the method would help curb pesticide use while simultaneously beating back their mosquito population.
Japanese macaques are so tidy that they even wash their food in salt water, and now a new study finds that these monkeys have fewer parasites than other primates that are not nearly as careful.
Related: Why Do Humans Have Allergies? Parasite Infections May Be the Trigger
Related: Man Dies After Tapeworm Inside Him Gets Cancer
In just under a month, world leaders will gather in Paris to try to agree a new course of action to tackle climate change. One key concern is that global warming could affect food crops. To help guarantee that key plants survive the worst possible scenarios, samples of seeds are being gathered in what's called the Global Seed Vault - an underground store on the Svalbard Islands in the Arctic
Diamonds may not be as rare as once believed, but this finding in a new Johns Hopkins University research report won't mean deep discounts at local jewelry stores.
"Diamond formation in the deep Earth, the very deep Earth, may be a more common process than we thought," said Johns Hopkins geochemist Dimitri A. Sverjensky
The Scottish government has announced that it’s approved the construction of the UK’s first – and world’s largest – floating offshore wind development.
Related: World’s first solar airport takes off in southern India
Related: Solar panel shade won’t cool Earth
Until an earthquake in 226 BCE knocked it down, the Colossus of Rhodes, a 30-metre-high iron and bronze statue of the Greek god Helios, sat near the harbour of Rhodes, Greece, for 54 years.
Now, a plan put forth by a small team of scientists seeks to rebuild the ancient statue and boost tourism and local jobs in the process.
University of Colorado, Boulder and National Science Foundation—Continuing research at a Maya village in El Salvador—frozen in time by a blanket of volcanic ash from 1,400 years ago—shows farming families who lived there went about their daily lives with virtually no strong-arming by the elite royalty lording over the valley.
Tyrannosaurus rex and at least one other carnivorous dinosaur were capable of opening their jaws up to 90 degrees.
Plant-eating dinosaurs, on the other hand, were limited to a narrower jaw gape, suggesting that feeding style and diet of dinosaurs were closely linked to how wide they could open their mouths.
Scientists have discovered a new giant raptor believed to be the largest specimen ever found with wing feathers.
Named Dakotaraptor, the fossil from the Hell Creek Formation in South Dakota is thought to be about 17 feet long, making it among the largest raptors in the world.
Any artist-created images you may have seen depicting prehistoric humans hunting or fighting with saber-toothed cats may not represent a scene very far from reality about 300,000 years ago when Lower Paleolithic humans actually did share the same environment with the big cats in what is present-day Europe.
After possibly 5,000 years alive, doing anything other than dying would be a surprise. But Britain’s oldest tree is very much alive – and has amazed observers by apparently changing sex.
A plant geneticist has discovered the gene in the ancient Australian native tobacco plant Nicotiana benthamiana, known as Pitjuri to Australian indigenous Aboriginals tribes. The discovery was made while tracing the history of the Pitjuri plant, which for decades has been used by geneticists as a model plant upon which to test viruses and vaccines.
All four moons are tiny. Hydra — the largest — measures just 55 kilometers along its long axis; teeny Kerberos spans only 7 kilometers. One surprise is how reflective the moons are. All four bounce back roughly half of the sunlight that reaches them. “My own gut tells me that we’re seeing water ice surfaces,” Weaver says.
Related: The space artist who saw Pluto before Nasa
Scientists have developed a communication solution that can allow orbiting space station in outer space to maintain uninterrupted contact with robots working on the surface of a planet. The technology also has potential industrial applications, such as to reduce lags and jitters in mobile gaming. The technology is an important step forward for initiatives such as the human mission to Mars.
Tiny spacecraft have their ambitions of space exploration too. The small-sized satellites called CubeSats, made of box-shaped four-inch units, are successfully operating in the low Earth orbit, conducting a variety of scientific research. Now, space agencies like NASA and ESA a planning to send these nanosatellites way farther than ever before – to deep space destinations, like asteroids and Mars.
Engineer Roger Shawyer’s controversial EmDrive thruster jets back into relevancy this week, as a team of researchers at NASA’s Eagleworks Laboratories recently completed yet another round of testing on the seemingly impossible tech. Though no official peer-reviewed lab paper has been published yet, and NASA institutes strict press release restrictions on the Eagleworks lab these days, engineer Paul March took to the NASA Spaceflight forum to explain the group’s findings. In essence, by utilizing an improved experimental procedure, the team managed to mitigate some of the errors from prior tests — yet still found signals of unexplained thrust.
NASA is a fan of making announcements about its forthcoming announcements, but so far it hasn't failed to live up to its hype. First there was the discovery of the most Earth-like exoplanet to date, and just last month researchers shared evidence of salty, flowing water (!!) on the Red Planet.
While Mars doesn't have much in the way of Earth-like weather, it does evidently share one kind of weird meteorology: acid fog. A planetary scientist has pieced together a compelling story about how acidic vapors may have eaten at the rocks in a 100-acre area on Husband Hill in the Columbia Hills of Gusev Crater on Mars.
Related: Nasa opens discussion on where to land humans on Mars
New calculations suggest that vast valley networks that spider across the southern highlands of Mars may have been carved by a surprisingly small volume of water.
The study, published in the November issue of Planetary and Space Science, finds that the minimum water volume required to carve the valleys could have flowed through in as little as a few hundred to 10,000 years.
When the exoplanet Alpha Centauri Bb was announced in Nature in 2012, it was hailed a watershed moment in the search for Earth-like worlds beyond our solar system. But as eerie as it sounds, it now appears that Alpha Centauri Bb never existed.
According to new research, the closest exoplanet to our own star was probably a ghost—an artifact of an incomplete dataset.
Researchers share the first measurements of the attractive force between antiprotons. The discovery gives physicists new ways to look at the forces that bind matter and antimatter.
Related: "Clue to the Huge Mystery of Why Today's Universe Consists Mainly of Ordinary Matter"
An international team of scientists at the MicroBooNE physics experiment in the US, including researchers from the University of Cambridge, detected their first neutrino candidates, which are also known as 'ghost particles'. It represents a milestone for the project, involving years of hard work and a 40-foot-long particle detector that is filled with 170 tons of liquid argon.
Newfound lunar craters suggest that asteroids that smashed into the moon long ago were very different from the ones that now occupy the asteroid belt, researchers say.
Solving this asteroid mystery could yield answers regarding the habitability of the early Earth, scientists added.
Many of Earth's mass extinctions over the eons have been caused by comet strikes, a new study suggests.
Over the past 260 million years, cratering rates on Earth have peaked every 26 million years or so, in tune with a previously noted cycle of mass-extinction events, researchers found. Furthermore, five of the six largest impact craters known from the last quarter-billion years — including the 112-mile-wide (180 kilometers) crater associated with the demise of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago — were gouged out at roughly the same time that a mass extinction occurred.
Seven centuries ago, tens of thousands of people fled their homes in the American Southwest. Archaeologists are trying to work out why.
Vultures carve lazy circles in the sky as a stream of tourists marches down a walkway into Colorado's Spruce Canyon. Watching their steps, the visitors file along a series of switchbacks leading to one of the more improbable villages in North America — a warren of living quarters, storage rooms, defensive towers and ceremonial spaces all tucked into a large cleft in the face of a cliff.
Archaeologists in Jerusalem may have just solved one of the city's greatest geographical mysteries.
Excavators recently unearthed what they think are the ruins of the Acra, a fortress constructed more than 2,000 years ago by the Greek ruler Antiochus IV Epiphanes (215-164 B.C.). At one time mercenary soldiers and Hellenized Jews controlled the ancient fortress, enforcing a brutal rule over Jerusalem's residents.
A continuing look at a Maya village in El Salvador frozen in time by a blanket of volcanic ash 1,400 years ago shows the farming families who lived there went about their daily lives with virtually no strong-arming by the elite royalty lording over the valley.
Archaeologists exploring the remote reaches of a military training base in southern California have uncovered nearly 9,000 artifacts that represent more than 11,500 years of human history in the Mojave Desert, a new study reports.
The artifacts, found at multiple sites across the base, include more than 8,830 stone tools, flakes, ground stone, pieces of ceramic, and bone, as well as a single large biface blade that researchers say is a “classic” example of the 13,000-year-old style known as Clovis.
More than half of the world’s population of an endangered antelope died within two weeks earlier this year, in a phenomenon that scientists are unable to explain.
At least 150,000 adult saiga antelopes were buried during a fortnight in May, but scientists say the actual figure will be significantly higher as many more carcasses were found but not counted as part of the burials. Calves were not counted, but it is thought that hundreds of thousands died too.
Early life contact with dogs helps to prevent asthma, concludes a new study that adds to the growing body of research that pet ownership can confer health benefits to humans.
Prior research had already found a link between reduced risk of asthma and dog ownership, so the new study, published in the journal JAMA Pediatrics, strengthens those findings.
Do Edinburgh chimps hoot with an accent? And could Dutch newcomers pick up their Scottish lilt?
These are the questions dividing primate researchers, some of whom have disputed a high-profile study that asserted a troop of chimps changed their calls to match the locals, and that the findings shed light on the evolution of language.
Related: Chimpanzee language claims lost in translation, researchers conclude
Related: Aussies slur their words and use only two-thirds of their mouth to speak because early settlers spent most of their days DRUNK, academic says
People who are married may be more likely to survive heart surgery than people who are divorced, separated or widowed, according to a new study.
Related: Bearded Men Are More Likely To Cheat And Steal
Related: Females more promiscuous in colder climates, says insect study
It's long been known that mood biases our judgments and perceptions, but this effect has usually been regarded as irrational or disadvantageous. A new theory argues that mood draws on experiences and can, in fact, help us quickly adapt to changes in our environment.
The accepted wisdom is that the young are more radical than the old. But is this true, and if it is, why should our politics change with the years?
Any man who is under 30, and is not a liberal, has no heart; and any man who is over 30, and is not a conservative, has no brains.
This maxim – variously attributed to Winston Churchill, Benjamin Disraeli and Victor Hugo, among others – neatly captures the common notion that to be on the left of the political spectrum is to be young and idealistic, while to be on the right is to be older and more pragmatic. But is there any evidence for this?
The phrase “designer babies” has been bandied around for decades, but parents seeking to design a baby currently have limited options. They can seek to avoid the birth of a baby with a specific genetic condition, or of an undesired sex, through pre-implantation genetic diagnoses (PGD) which involves IVF and embryo selection.
Related: Scientists uncover signal for when a pregnant woman is about to go into labor
Researchers in Japan discover neurological evidence that we empathize with robots "in pain."
The ability to feel empathy toward others is supposed to be an innate human ability. But when we refer to "others," does that include robots? New research suggests it does.
Why does humanity need robots? Sometimes, to spare us the need to talk to other humans, according to Andra Keay, managing director of Silicon Valley Robotics.
Speaking at the Web Summit conference in Dublin, she cited the example of Relay, a robot designed to work in hotels, taking items from staff to guests.
Google has said it expects to begin delivering packages to consumers via drones in 2017.
David Vos, the leader for Google’s Project Wing, said his company was in talks with the Federal Aviation Administration and other stakeholders about setting up an air traffic control system for drones that would use cellular and internet technology to co-ordinate unmanned aerial vehicle flights at altitudes under 500ft (152m).
European startup Starship Technologies thinks the answer to delivering groceries isn't drones, it's rovers. The company unveiled a self-driving, six-wheel robot today that it claims will reduce the price of home deliveries to almost nothing. Prototypes of the bot are currently being tested, and the plans to introduce pilot services in the US and UK in 2016. Each robot carries around 9 kilograms of shopping and is intended to take care of the final step of any delivery, making trips of no longer than 30 minutes from local hubs to customers' doorsteps.
A new cancer treatment strategy is on the horizon that experts say could be a game-changer and spare patients the extreme side effects of existing options such as chemotherapy.
Chemotherapy and other current cancer treatments are brutal, scorched-earth affairs that work because cancer cells are slightly – but not much – more susceptible to the havoc they wreak than the rest of the body.
Russian researchers have announced the discovery of cave lion cubs found in the Ice Age permafrost of Yakutia, Siberia. The frozen cats are the first of their kind ever found in such a well-preserved state.
Related: Was prehistoric man responsible for the extinction of Australia's massive animals? Hunting may have wiped out the marsupial lion and giant wombat
It’s a drama that is worthy of the stage – clergymen at a Worcestershire church are trying to identify a lone skull that, according to legend, could belong to William Shakespeare.
Despite their efforts the mystery isn’t any closer to being solved, however, as a church lawyer has blocked them from removing the skull from its vault and sending it to a lab for DNA testing.
Related: Burial vault discovered 'accidentally' at Gloucester Cathedral
Classical scholars from Münster are excavating one of the few sites of ancient Roman Syria in Turkey that are currently accessible as a result of the political situation in the Middle East.
Münster classical scholars discovered invaluable ancient Syrian mosaics and buildings and are excavating one of the few sites that are currently accessible for studies on ancient Roman Syria despite the tense political situation in the Middle East.
Powerful X-ray imaging techniques have allowed French archaeologists to see the inaccessible contents of a mysterious and badly damaged 17th century box.
Scientists were able to virtually reconstruct in astounding resolution the circular elements that could be seen through the broken lid of the very rusted box. Inside, the box contained a treasure of small clay medals and two pearls.
Monday will see an international team of scientists set sail for the mid-Atlantic on a quest to sample microbes living deep in the ocean floor.
The expedition will use new types of rock drill developed in the UK and Germany to retrieve cores from up to 80m below the seabed.
It won’t take much to cause the entire West Antarctic Ice Sheet to collapse—and once it starts, it won’t stop. In the last year, a slew of papers has highlighted the vulnerability of the ice sheet covering the western half of the continent, suggesting that its downfall is inevitable—and probably already underway. Now, a new model shows just how this juggernaut could unfold.
A new NASA study found that Antarctica has been adding more ice than it's been losing, challenging other research, including that of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, that concludes that Earth’s southern continent is losing land ice overall.
The ice sheets and glaciers that extend over roughly 11% of the Earth’s land mass are home to a surprisingly abundant source of life. Sections of liquid water beneath and inside the ice provide a habitat for a genetically diverse variety of microbes. And studying these organisms gives us some clue what life may have looked like if there were indeed periods of the planet’s history when the land was entirely covered in ice for millions of years.
Earth’s long history starts with an epic preamble: A collision with a Mars-sized space rock rips into the young planet and jettisons debris that forms the moon. Over the next few billion years, plot twists abound. The oceans form. Life appears. Solar-powered microbes breathe oxygen into the air. Colossal environmental shifts reshape the planet’s surface and drive the evolution of early life.
A team of physicists has discovered an unusual form of matter—not a conventional metal, insulator, or magnet, for example, but something entirely different.
This phase, characterized by an unusual ordering of electrons, offers possibilities for new electronic device functionalities and could hold the solution to a long-standing mystery in condensed matter physics having to do with high-temperature superconductivity—the ability for some materials to conduct electricity without resistance, even at “high” temperatures approaching –100 degrees Celsius.
You can’t get a text message from a friend if you don’t own a phone. And you can’t get a message from the future unless you have a machine capable of receiving it.
That’s exactly the kind of machine University of Connecticut physics professor Ronald Mallett has in mind.
Quantum suicide is one of the most horrifying thought experiments proposed by Hans Moravec. To be brief, rig up a gun to a device measuring the spin value of a proton every ten seconds. The spin value randomly creates a quantum bit as 1 or 0. When the trigger's pulled and the quantum bit comes up 1, the gun fires, killing the subject. Zero? The subject survives, and will survive subsequent attempts should Hugh Everett's many-worlds interpretation prove correct.
Related: Parallel Universes are Popping Up All Over the Place
Until recently it was common for people in Bhutan to share stories of their encounters with the Himalayan yeti. But with the arrival of modernity, villagers no longer need to climb high into the mountains, where they once saw traces of the yeti - or thought they did. So a legend is slowly fading away.
Related: Loch Ness Monster Was 'PR Stunt Dreamed Up For Tourists In London Pub'
A dig in Jersey has yielded a stash of hunter-gatherer artefacts from the end of the last Ice Age, including stone pieces criss-crossed by carved lines.
They are similar to engravings found from the same period in Germany and southern France.
For more than 60 years, scientists have dreamed of a clean, inexhaustible energy source in the form of nuclear fusion.
And they're still dreaming.
But thanks to the efforts of the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics, experts hope that might soon change.
Japanese researchers have developed a new type of glass almost as hard as steel, a breakthrough that could lead to the development of substantially tougher windows and tableware.
Recent evolutionary changes for the fruit fly known as the 'apple maggot' is having a domino effect on three predatory wasp species, researchers have discovered.
Related: Musa nanensis: New Species of Wild Banana Discovered in Thailand