Newsdesk Archive
A new species combining wolves, coyotes and dogs is evolving before scientists’ eyes in the eastern United States.
Alt: Greater than the sum of its parts
Admit it, you've probably tried showing your dog or cat a mirror, just to see what would happen. And chances are they either completely ignored it, or freaked out thinking it was another dog or cat to attack - or play with. There's no shortage of adorable videos starring puppies versus mirrors, but the antics don't really explain whether an animal can actually recognise itself in the mirror.
Our brains not only contain learning mechanisms but also forgetting mechanisms that erase "unnecessary" learning. A research has now been able to describe one of these mechanisms at the cellular level.
Related: New Study Suggests Alzheimer's Is Associated with Brain Fungus
Related: Mental maps: Route-learning changes brain tissue
In 1961, when more and more people were buying television sets to go with their radios, the BBC wanted to work out the best times to air its programmes. So its audience-research department decided to ask a sample of people across the United Kingdom to record what they were doing every half hour of the day, and to indicate whether the TV or radio was on.
Time, at least defined thermodynamically, might not always run forward, at least not inside black holes.
Recent research published in Physical Review Letters may have discovered a new area law in general relativity that describes the geometry of black holes as curved "holographic screens."
In 1990, an important space probe was launched, tasked with the ambitious mission of orbiting the sun and scanning our star at all latitudes. However, the much-publicized mission was not solar research but the detection of tiny particles from interstellar space. This joint NASA/ESA mission, lasting 19 years, has revealed the properties of the particles originating from interstellar space and has provided new insights on these tiny cosmic visitors.
Oligarchs who have tired of their superyachts could instead spend future holidays on Halo, a proposed residential airship with a living area the size of four football pitches and an estimated cost of $330 million.
Regular sightings of suspicious flying objects in and around Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International (IGI) Airport have put security agencies guarding the airport on high alert.
Related: Dogs 'mysteriously fall ill after being walked in notorious UFO hotspot dubbed UK Roswell'
Related: Odd Parallels Are Rife Between ‘Ghost Ships’ and Modern UFOs
Related: Rock painting from 10,000 years ago ‘shows UFO meeting cavemen’
It is a mystery civilisation that has baffled the archaeological world for decades.
The Indus - the largest yet least known of all the first great urban cultures - thrived from 2600 to 1900 BC, and then abruptly vanished from historical records.
Very little is known about the people, who strangely left no archaeological evidence of warfare and communicated in one of the world's most complex scripts
Is it a medieval fake or a relic of Jesus Christ? A new analysis of DNA from the Shroud of Turin reveals that people from all over the world have touched the venerated garment.
"Individuals from different ethnic groups and geographical locations came into contact with the Shroud [of Turin] either in Europe (France and Turin) or directly in their own lands of origin (Europe, northeast Africa, Caucasus, Anatolia, Middle East and India),"
Oxford University is dispatching some of its most distinguished academics to create a research team to study Christian relics
From Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales to the Indiana Jones films, the age-old fascination with holy relics has inspired pilgrims, crusaders and thriller writers alike.
The unassuming slab of limestone doesn’t look like much. It’s crudely fractured and chipped on the sides, pockmarked with age, and is perched not too prominently on a shelf at the Israel Museum. But its smoothly hewn face and crisply etched Greek letters, still bearing faint traces of red paint, belie monumental significance.
High in the skies over Kazakhstan, space-age technology has revealed an ancient mystery on the ground.
Satellite pictures of a remote and treeless northern steppe reveal colossal earthworks — geometric figures of squares, crosses, lines and rings the size of several football fields, recognizable only from the air and the oldest estimated at 8,000 years old.
Alt: NASA releases images of enormous 8,000-year-old patterns
It's no wonder the Great Pyramid of Giza is considered one of the "Seven Wonders of the Ancient World." It's 4,000 years old and scientists are still wondering how it was built, and what secrets it may be hiding.
To try to solve some of these mysteries, researchers have organized the "ScanPyramids" initiative.
Alt: By Scanning Pyramids, Will Scientists Unravel Secrets of Ancient Egypt?
UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA—Most of what we know about Mayan civilization relates to kings, queens and their elaborate temples. To understand what life was like for the 99 percent, one researcher turned to ancient animal bones stored at the Florida Museum of Natural History.
From sturdy chimpanzees to massive gorillas to humans themselves, the living great apes are all large-bodied, weighing between 30 and 180 kilograms. So for years most researchers thought the ancestral ape must have tipped the scales as well. But the partial skeleton of an 11.6-million-year-old primitive ape may force scientists to reimagine the ancestor of all living apes and humans. With a muzzle like a gibbon but a large brain for its body size, the ancient primate has traits that link it to all apes and humans—yet it weighed only 4 kg to 5 kg, according to a report today in Science.
While the anthropogenic impact on global species diversity is clear, the role of ancient human populations in causing extinctions is more controversial. New data presented at the Society of Vertebrate Palaeontology meetings in Dallas, Texas, implicates early humans in the extinction of large mammals, birds and lizards in Australia. More precise dating of these extinction events places them 10 thousand years after the first arrival of humans in Australia, suggesting human predation was the most likely cause.
A nasty little 66-million-year-old family secret has been leaked by a recently unearthed tyrannosaur bone. The bone has peculiar teeth marks that strongly suggest it was gnawed by another tyrannosaur. The find could be some of the best evidence yet that tyrannosaurs were not shy about eating their own kind.
Related: Tiny Terror: Controversial Dinosaur Species Is Just an Awkward Tween Tyrannosaurus
An undergraduate University of Alberta paleontology student has discovered an Ornithomimus dinosaur with preserved tail feathers and soft tissue. The discovery is shedding light on the convergent evolution of these dinosaurs with ostriches and emus relating to thermoregulation and is also tightening the linkages between dinosaurs and modern birds.
UN weather and climate agency says hole over Antarctica is larger due to colder stratosphere but will shrink again
The UN’s weather and climate agency said on Thursday there was no cause for alarm about a record-size hole this month in the ozone layer which shields life on Earth from the Sun, as it should shrink again.
A new NASA study says that an increase in Antarctic snow accumulation that began 10,000 years ago is currently adding enough ice to the continent to outweigh the increased losses from its thinning glaciers.
The research challenges the conclusions of other studies, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) 2013 report, which says that Antarctica is overall losing land ice.
Strapped by drought, farmers are increasingly sowing solar panels rather than seeds.
Several years ago, Nick Rajkovich bought 1,200 acres in California's Fresno County, planning to grow almonds for his family's farming business.
Related: Study suggests a ten-fold efficiency increase possible when converting carbon dioxide to fuel using solar energy
An inexpensive method for generating clean fuel is the modern-day equivalent of the philosopher's stone. One compelling idea is to use solar energy to split water into its constituent hydrogen and oxygen and then harvest the hydrogen for use as fuel. But splitting water efficiently turns out to be not so easy.
People who work in well-ventilated offices with below-average levels of indoor pollutants and carbon dioxide have significantly higher cognitive functioning scores -- in crucial areas such as responding to a crisis or developing strategy -- than those who work in offices with typical levels.
You can swot up on vocabulary in your sleep -- but only if you don't confuse your brain in the process. Researchers funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation have invited people to their sleep lab for a Dutch language course.
We spend a lot of time indoors. According to one study, employed Americans spend a mere 2 percent of their time outdoors. Some of our time is spent in transit (6 percent), but the vast majority of our time, 92 percent, is spent inside.
Related: Up to 27 seconds of inattention after talking to your car or smartphone
Sox4 (magenta) at the outer edge of the developing utricle, and occasionally within the nuclei of new hair cells (green). Proliferating support cells appear in white. Credit: Laboratory of Sensory Neuroscience, Rockefeller University/PNAS
Loud noise, trauma, infections, plain old aging—many things can destroy hair cells, the delicate sensors of balance and sound within the inner ear.
Inhibiting a family of enzymes inside hair follicles that are suspended in a resting state restores hair growth, a new study has found. In experiments with mouse and human hair follicles, researchers found that drugs that inhibit the Janus kinase (JAK) family of enzymes promote rapid and robust hair growth when directly applied to the skin.
Researchers at the VUMC Cancer Center Amsterdam have developed a ground breaking technique that can detect different types of cancer at an early stage from a single drop of blood.
Current cancer detection methods usually rely on scans and tissue biopsies, which are time consuming, difficult and often expensive.
Viruses normally seem like evil little germs; they often invade our bodies’ cells and hijack their inner machinery to mass produce viral invaders, which eventually destroy their host cells as they bust out to besiege more cells. The process repeats ad nauseam. But what if that wicked master plan could be twisted to do our bidding? What if viruses only invaded cells we wanted them to kill—like cancer cells?
Related: Chemicals in Personal Products May Stimulate Cancer More Than Thought
Neuroscientists are probing the idea that intestinal microbiota might influence brain development and behavior
Related: Gut bacteria could be blamed for obesity, diabetes
Related: Cutting Sugar Made Obese Kids Healthier in 10 Days
EPFL researchers have discovered how intestinal worm infections cross-talk with gut bacteria to help the immune system.
Intestinal worms infect over 2 billion people across the world, mostly children, in areas with poor sanitation. But despite causing serious health problems, worms can actually help the immune system of its host as an indirect way of protecting themselves.
Bacon, ham and sausages rank alongside cigarettes as a major cause of cancer, the World Health Organisation has said, placing cured and processed meats in the same category as asbestos, alcohol, arsenic and tobacco.
The report from the WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer said there was enough evidence to rank processed meats as group 1 carcinogens because of a causal link with bowel cancer.
Many of us enjoy the taste of a burger, but the negative impacts on the environment caused by the production of beef - not to mention the harm caused to the cattle providing it - are well known. Now there's hope for a better kind of beef: beef that's grown in a lab, and Dutch scientists think these artificially created 'test tube' burgers could be ready for public consumption within the next five years.
Related: Steak from vegetable proteins
The first successful weather satellite, TIROS-1, was launched in 1960. The images, though a bit blurry, picked up a typhoon 1,000 miles east of Australia. This satellite only lasted 78 days in orbit but it showed the benefits of space observations, ushering in an era of much more accurate weather information that has helped save lives and protect livelihoods.
Collections of ants have a remarkable ability to change shapes and tasks based on the demands of their environment. When floodwaters hit, they self-assemble and form rafts to stay alive. They can also use their bodies to build bridges and span gaps. What are the properties of these ant aggregations that allow for this wide range of abilities? New research says it's because the insects are actually liquid-like and solid-like simultaneously.
Related: Stick insects lure ants with fatty knobs
The first insect-like robot that can both fly and swim is creating a buzz of excitement in the robotics field.
The RoboBee, the brainchild of engineers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Science (SEAS), is a tiny insect smaller than a paperclip that has been able to fly for quite some time. But just recently, engineers implemented a modified flapping technique to give the robot swimming capabilities as well.
Related: Male mosquitoes lured to traps by sounds of female wing-beats
Off-the-shelf 3D printers could one day help create living organs to aid in repairing the human body, researchers say.
Scientists have developed a way to 3D print models of various anatomical structures, including hearts, brains, arteries and bones. In the future, this process could be used to create 3D-printed soft implants in which living tissue can grow to form organs.
Related: Change the shape, change the sound: Researchers develop algorithm to 3-D print vibrational sounds
Many of us have wished we could speak to a deceased family member.
Now, one academic says that this could be possible within 50 years – at least in the virtual sense.
Simon McKeown says people could soon be kept alive forever as avatars that can interact with relatives.
The first colonizers of the cosmos will be robots, not humans. At some point, they will become self-replicating robots that construct multiple versions of themselves from the raw materials of alien worlds.
Related: Russian 'Web Bots' to Write News Articles
Related: Construction site robot adapts as tools drop, plans change
A promotional video was also published showing the robot-cycle in action ("I am Yamaha Motobot," the machine in the video said with a boy-like robot voice.)
Related: When self-driving cars drive the ethical questions
Prepare to have your mind blown. This is the fascinating case study of a man who failed a paternity test because part of his genome actually belongs to his unborn twin. This means that the genetic father of the child is actually the man in question’s brother, who never made it past a few cells in the womb.
Yes, this sounds completely crazy and like a headline you might read in a trashy magazine. But before you write it off as that, let’s go into some more details.
Demonstrating that beasts such as Sasquatch are not the creations of 20th and 21st century movie-makers, and hoaxers, are the surprisingly large number of newspaper accounts on the subject that date from the 1800s.
Related: Is Bigfoot an extraterrestrial visitor? Some researchers think so
Related: See the U.S. Government’s Official Guidelines on How to Hunt a Yeti
Related: Strange Creature Found in Paraguay
There are many possible explanations for hauntings, not least that humans are highly suggestible creatures, especially when we want to believe. But some ghost sightings might actually be the result of sounds — sound waves that vibrate just below our range of hearing, dubbed the “fear frequency.”
Related: A live exorcism will be performed on TV Friday. Here’s what to expect
Related: Norway Has a New Passion: Ghost Hunting
Scientists might have spotted another universe, just next to ours.
Scientists have spotted a glow in space that might have come from another universe, outside of ours, that we were alongside when the matter that surrounds us first came into existence.
The disappearance of Alpha Centauri Bb raises questions for planet hunters looking for Earth-sized alien worlds.
The planet, thought to be perhaps similar in mass to Earth, was hailed as a “landmark” when it was announced in 2012 in the journal Nature. The discovery got people excited about finding neighboring worlds that might harbor life in the Alpha Centauri system 4.3 light-years away—already home to science fiction characters such as the Transformers and the creatures of Avatar.
It's like something out of an interplanetary chess game. Astrophysicists at the University of Toronto have found that a close encounter with Jupiter about four billion years ago may have resulted in another planet's ejection from the Solar System altogether.
The existence of a fifth giant gas planet at the time of the Solar System's formation - in addition to Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune that we know of today - was first proposed in 2011. But if it did exist, how did it get pushed out?
Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity has been proven right again — and this time, physicists have pinned down just how precise it is: Any deviations from his theory of general relativity are so small that they would change calculations by just one part in 10,000 to one part in 100,000.
China will begin work on the world's largest super-collider in 2020, state-run media reported Thursday, in an attempt to increase understanding of the Higgs boson, or "god particle".
The facility, designed to smash subatomic particles together at enormous speed, will reportedly be at least twice the size of the Swiss-based CERN, where the Higgs boson was discovered.
The Chinese government has put an end to a longstanding policy that limited most urban couples to one child, according to the state-run Xinhua news agency. Under the new policy, couples will be allowed to have up to two children. The decision was announced at the end of a four-day meeting of China's ruling Communist Party, which convened this week to draw up the country's next five-year plan for economic and social development.
Never before have so many people in the developed world lived for so long — thanks to the enormous changes we have made to our environment, including sufficient food for everyone, clean drinking water and the eradication of many infectious diseases.
The result is that average life expectancy has doubled from 40 to 80 years since 1900, and the proportion of people who reach the age of 65 has increased three-fold, from 30 pc to 90 pc.
Because sound travels much more slowly than light, we can often see distant events before we hear them. That is why we can count the seconds between a lightning flash and its thunder to estimate distance.
But new research reveals that our brains can also detect and process sound delays that are too short to be noticed consciously.
We have long known the power of a good sing-along. Now, research from the University of Oxford has shown that singing is a great ice-breaker and can get groups of people to bond together more quickly than other activities can.
Distressed fish caught by predators emit a cry for help to attract other carnivores so they can escape during the ensuing chaos, Australian scientists said Thursday.
While researchers had discovered that fish emit a chemical substance found in their skin when injured to alert others nearby of the dangers, they did not know whether the distress call also benefited the captured prey.
A team of paleontologists shows in a new study of fossil amphibians that the extraordinary regenerative capacities of modern salamanders are likely an ancient feature of four-legged vertebrates that was subsequently lost in the course of evolution.
A new study of chickens overturns the popular assumption that evolution is only visible over long time scales. By studying individual chickens that were part of a long-term pedigree, the scientists led by Professor Greger Larson at Oxford University's Research Laboratory for Archaeology, found two mutations that had occurred in the mitochondrial genomes of the birds in only 50 years. For a long time scientists have believed that the rate of change in the mitochondrial genome was never faster than about 2% per million years. The identification of these mutations shows that the rate of evolution in this pedigree is in fact 15 times faster.
Carnivorous pitcher plants use falling raindrops to force prey to their doom, a new study finds.
This finding suggests that pitcher plants are not merely motionless pitfall traps, but instead actively use rapid movements to ensnare their meals, the researchers said.
Nature’s cloud seeders are mushrooms, with spores that promote raindrops and may lead to downpours, new research finds.
The study, published in the journal PLOS ONE, documents a previously unknown feedback system whereby rain stimulates mushroom growth, and then the fully fruited mushrooms release spores that could result in later rain.
We humans have altered our planet's surface, atmosphere, and its flora and fauna so dramatically that our impact is the defining feature of our geographical age, the Anthropocene. One school of thought regarding how to best fix, or at least halt, some of the damage we've caused to various ecosystems is to “rewild” them—to meddle even more by (re)introducing species to a landscape in order to help it revert to a healthier, pre-human-impact state. But the technique is controversial, and we're just starting to try to understand its impacts.
Archaeologists have discovered the oldest prehistoric building ever found in the Stonehenge landscape – but fear a new road tunnel could severely damage the site.
Evidence that Mesolithic hunter-gatherers were environmentally aware home builders has emerged a mile from Stonehenge – together with a stone age version of the storage heater.
Alt: Archaeologists discover Mesolithic eco home near Stonehenge
The ancient builders of Stonehenge may have hosted massive barbecue cookouts where thousands of revelers feasted on meat, new research suggests.
Archaeologists at the Neolithic settlement of Durrington Walls in modern-day southern England, where the builders of Stonehenge likely lived, found evidence that the village hosted open-air meat-roasting parties 4,500 years ago, with animals likely walking to the site for slaughter from regions far and wide.
The world’s oldest-known alphabet primer was found in a list of ancient Egyptian words inscribed on a shard of pottery from the 15th century B.C., according to a new study.
Called ostracon, the flake of limestone was unearthed near Luxor over 20 years ago. British Egyptologist Nigel Strudwick found it as he excavated Theban Tomb 99, which was the burial of Senneferi, a 18th Dynasty official who lived under the reign of Tuthmose III.
Lawrence Livermore scientists, in conjunction with international researchers, have discovered five new atomic nuclei to be added the chart of nuclides.
The study, conducted this fall, focuses on developing new methods of synthesis for super heavy elements. The newly discovered, exotic nuclei are one isotope each of heavy elements berkelium, neptunium and uranium and two isotopes of the element americium.
Astronomers have discovered a previously unknown component of the Milky Way. By mapping out the locations of a class of stars that vary in brightness called Cepheids, a disc of young stars buried behind thick dust clouds in the central bulge has been found.
According to a study published today in Nature Communications, solar storms could be much more powerful than previously assumed. Researchers at Lund University in Sweden have now confirmed that Earth was hit by two extreme solar storms more than 1000 years ago.
“If such enormous solar storms would hit Earth today, they could have devastating effects on our power supply, satellites and communication systems”, says Raimund Muscheler at the Department of Geology, Lund University.
Earth could be in danger as our galaxy throws out comets that could hurtle towards us and wipe us out, scientists have warned.
Scientists have previously presumed that we are in a relatively safe period for meteor impacts, which are linked with the journey of our sun and its planets, including Earth, through the Milky Way. But some orbits might be more upset than we know, and there is evidence of recent activity, which could mean that we are passing through another meteor shower.
A Halloween asteroid is due to scream past the Earth on the last day of the month, missing the planet by just 300,000 miles – frighteningly close by astronomical standards.
But scientists say there is no need to be scared, even on Halloween. The space rock, travelling at around 22 miles per second, will remain further away than the moon.
In the next week, our planet will experience one near miss and one impact. What else is heading our way?
Every day, Earth is hit by something from space. It is a sobering thought that we live on the celestial equivalent of a dartboard, especially since we are taught that the dinosaurs were wiped out by the impact of a giant asteroid 65m years ago.
The mystery behind a strangely dimming star could soon be solved.
Astronomers around the world are keeping a close eye on the star KIC 8462852, which has dimmed dramatically numerous times over the past few years, dropping in brightness by up to 22 percent. These big dips have spurred speculation that the star may be surrounded by some type of alien megastructure — a hypothesis that will be put to the test if and when KIC 8462852 dims again.
Saturn’s 502km-diameter icy moon Enceladus has fascinated scientists since it was first seen up close by NASA’s Voyager probes in the 1980s. The moon is venting plumes of ice particles into space including traces of methane, carbon and simple organic compounds – making it a good candidate for harboring life.
Alt: The two moons that could host alien life: Nasa says it may soon find life-bearing oceans on Enceladus and Europa
Summer may be long since over, but NASA’s Cassini spacecraft wants to make one more run through the sprinklers. The probe will be plunging through the plumes of salty water spraying from the southern pole of Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus on Wednesday, in an attempt to learn more about the ocean within.
Alt: What’s behind Saturn moon’s icy wet curtains?
Scientists from the Rosetta mission have found oxygen in the atmosphere of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, a discovery that could change our understanding of how the solar system formed.
The molecular oxygen (O2) was detected by the ROSINA mass spectrometer, one of a suite of instruments aboard the Rosetta spacecraft that has been traveling with the comet since August 2014.
Comet Lovejoy lived up to its name by releasing large amounts of alcohol as well as a type of sugar into space, according to new observations by an international team. The discovery marks the first time ethyl alcohol, the same type in alcoholic beverages, has been observed in a comet. The finding adds to the evidence that comets could have been a source of the complex organic molecules necessary for the emergence of life.
Scientists have created the blackest material ever made, so dark that it can absorb almost all light that hits it.
The researchers, who were inspired by a completely white beetle, hope that the super-black material could help develop better and more efficient solar panels or completely change the way that they are made.
Researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab have developed software that uses variations in Wi-Fi signals to recognize human silhouettes through walls. The researchers built a device, called RF-Capture, that transmits wireless signals and then analyzes the reflections of those signals to piece together a human form, according to a study published this morning. It can also distinguish you from other people
A team of researchers from the Universities of Bristol and Sussex in collaboration with Ultrahaptics have built the world's first sonic tractor beam that can lift and move objects using sound waves.
Tractor beams are mysterious rays that can grab and lift objects.
Climate scientists have thought up plenty of futuristic ways to cool the planet, but an analysis published on October 26 examines what may be their wildest idea yet: spraying tiny diamonds high into the atmosphere.
Giants once roamed the earth. Oceans teemed with ninety-foot-long whales. Huge land animals--like truck-sized sloths and ten-ton mammoths--ate vast quantities of food, and, yes, deposited vast quantities of poop.
The magnitude 5.1 La Habra earthquake last year was the biggest temblor to strike the metro L.A. area since 2008. Now, a scientific fight has broken out over how soon another similar earthquake could strike.
We tend to associate mass extinctions with catastrophic events, like giant meteorite impacts and volcanic super-eruptions. The world’s first known mass extinction—about 540 million years ago— appears to have had a more subtle cause: evolution itself.
Alt: Earth’s first mass extinction was caused by the emergence of animals, scientists say
Recent storms and high tides have unearthed a prehistoric marvel on the coast of North Carolina.
Fossilized shark teeth, some as big as an adult hand, have been plucked from the sand by beachgoers in North Topsail Beach and Surf City, North Carolina, NBC-affiliate WITN first reported.
At the end of the Pleistocene mammoths of Northern Eurasia used to experience chronic mineral hunger. As a result they became extinct due to geochemical stress arising on a background of deep abiotic changes in ecosystems. Most likely they were receiving not enough of essential chemical elements. This hypothesis was developed by TSU paleontologists and based on a large-scale, 15-years long research.
When the largest modern-day plant-eaters—elephants—are confined to too small an area, they devastate the vegetation. So 15,000 years ago, when the herbivores like the Columbian mammoth, mastodons and giant ground sloths were even larger, more numerous and more widely distributed, how did the landscape survive?
The answer was probably enormous predators, creatures called "hypercarnivores" by a team of evolutionary biologists appearing online the week of Oct. 26 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Crows, it turns out, are quite observant, especially when it comes to their dead.
While superstition has often played into the image of the cunning black bird, new research suggests crows commonly pay attention to their dead not to mourn, but in an effort to understand what happened, so the birds still living may avoid a possible threat in the future. It's a survival tactic.
The baffling and strange behaviors of black holes have become somewhat less mysterious recently, with new observations from NASA's Explorer missions Swift and the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR. The two space telescopes caught a supermassive black hole in the midst of a giant eruption of X-ray light, helping astronomers address an ongoing puzzle: How do supermassive black holes flare?
Astronomers have for the first time probed the magnetic fields in the mysterious inner regions of stars, finding they are strongly magnetized.
Using a technique called asteroseismology, the scientists were able to calculate the magnetic field strengths in the fusion-powered hearts of dozens of red giants, stars that are evolved versions of our sun.
A Hall thruster is powering many of the satellites moving around Earth right now. It needs 100 million (yes, you read that right, 100 million) times less fuel than chemical thrusters. But it was never remotely sturdy enough to get anything to Mars—until now.
Humanity's most efficient path to Mars includes a pit stop near the moon, a new study suggests.
Mars-bound crewed spacecraft should launch with just enough fuel to get to filling stations near the moon, and these stations would then dispense propellant derived from lunar water-ice, according to the study.
Using a new process in planetary formation modeling, where planets grow from tiny bodies called 'pebbles,' scientists can explain why Mars is so much smaller than Earth. This same process also explains the rapid formation of the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn, as reported earlier this year.
Earth may be in great danger as the sun's path through the galaxy sends comet flying towards our planet, scientists have warned.
Researchers have identified a 26 million-year cycle of meteor impacts that coincides with the timing of mass extinctions over the past 260 million years.
Researchers from the University of Liverpool are using strategic game theory to analyse the accumulation of space debris, and to assess removal efforts and mitigation measures to limit its growth.
Space debris is non-manoeuvrable, human-made objects which orbit the Earth which poses a significant collision risk for operational spacecraft, especially in low-Earth orbit.
Related: Scientists predict space debris to enter earth's atmosphere around the Indian Ocean
The basic building blocks of life may have been present on Earth from the very beginning.
Astronomers detected 21 different complex organic molecules streaming from Comet Lovejoy during its highly anticipated close approach to the sun this past January. Many of these same carbon-containing compounds have also been spotted around newly forming sunlike stars, researchers said.
The world of quantum mechanics is weird. Objects that are far apart can influence each other in what Albert Einstein called “spooky action at a distance”, and cats can potentially be dead and alive at the same time. For decades, scientists have tried to prove that these effects are not just mathematical quirks, but real properties of the physical world.
Alt: The universe really is weird, and a landmark quantum experiment proves it
A team of physicists led by Caltech's David Hsieh 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.
An ultrapure material taken to pressures greater than that in the depths of the ocean and chilled to temperatures colder than outer space has revealed an unexpected phase transition that crosses two different phase categories.
A Purdue University-led team of researchers observed electrons transition from a topologically ordered phase to a broken symmetry phase.
A subversive urban agricultural group in San Francisco is turning ornamental trees into fruit-producing surprises for the local population but while technically breaking the law. A simple incision allows industrious grafters to add living branches to the mix; these scions heal in place then effectively become part of the existing tree.
Spending more time ‘forest bathing’ can have a positive effect on depression.
In autumn our woodlands are at their most enchanting. The sunlight angles gently in to create a changing mosaic of gold and brown; leaves twist and stall as they fall to the floor; branches chatter in the strengthening winds. It is the time of year when trees seem keenest to communicate with us, and when our bond with them is most vital.
Sometime around 1907, well before the modern randomized clinical trial was routine, American psychiatrist Henry Cotton began removing decaying teeth from his patients in hopes of curing their mental disorders. If that didn't work, he moved on to more invasive excisions: tonsils, testicles, ovaries and, in some cases, colons.
The research is in: music is one of the best cures we have for a hangover. There are some caveats to bear in mind, though - you stand the best chance of finding relief through song if you're already a fan of music in the first place, for one, and if you're listening to tunes you're already grown to like and have become accustomed to.