Newsdesk Archive
A crypt with up to 30 burials is giving archeologists fresh insights of intriguing ancient Siberians famed for their death masks which give us a clear idea of how they looked. Made of gypsum, the masks recreate the - at least partially - European look of the people who lived mainly around the Yenesei River.
An ancient arrowhead with human blood on it points to a Maya bloodletting ceremony in which a person's "life force" fed the gods, two researchers say.
The ceremony took place around 500 years ago in Guatemala at a temple at the site of Zacpetén.
A drought in southern Mexico has caused water levels to fall so much that the remains of a long-abandoned, 16th-century church are now visible above the waterline.
The Temple of Santiago, also known as the Temple of Quechula, normally rests under nearly 100 feet of water since the completion of a dam in 1966 created the Nezahualcoyotl reservoir in Chiapas. But the drought has caused water levels to drop by more than 80 feet, leading to eerie sights such as this one.
Alt: Drought uncovers 400-year-old church in Mexican reservoir (VIDEO)
There's a surprising new wrinkle in the story of the celebrated Shroud of Turin.
A group of Italian researchers have found that the 14-foot-long garment -- believed by some to be the burial cloth of Jesus Christ, even though science has proven that's not the case -- contains DNA from plants found all over Earth.
Alt: Mystery of the Shroud of Turin deepens: Genetic study reveals the fabric contains DNA from plants found all over the world
When did life on Earth begin? Scientists have dug down through the geologic record, and the deeper they look, the more it seems that biology appeared early in our planet’s 4.5-billion-year history. So far, geologists have uncovered possible traces of life as far back as 3.8 billion years. Now, a controversial new study presents potential evidence that life arose 300 million years before that, during the mysterious period following Earth’s formation.
Alt: Life on Earth likely started 4.1 billion years ago -- much earlier than scientists thought
The moon's battered surface could help scientists understand how life first took root on Earth.
Some parts of the moon were so heavily bombarded with small asteroids billions of years ago that the impacts completely shattered the upper crust there, a new study reports.
NASA has picked the three winners in a design contest for 3D-printed habitats that could help future astronauts live on Mars.
The $25,000 first prize in NASA's 3D-Printed Habitat Challenge Design Competition went to Team Space Exploration Architecture and Clouds Architecture Office for the "Mars Ice House" design, which looks like a translucent, smooth-edged pyramid.
How is this for hot response in a crowdfunding campaign. The project creator's goal was $5,000. So far the campaign has gathered $30,023 with 26 days to go.
What does not come as a surprise is that the product is all about batteries—or in this instance a flashlight that does not need any. No buttons. No batteries. The flashlight does not require any external energy source.
TUCSON — Ours is one of the most colorful relationships of history: We need flowers for our very survival, and in turn flowers — the plants that exist as crop cultivars or horticultural cut flowers or potted beauties — rely on us to reproduce and spread. But all is not well in this storied partnership: We who behold or nurture flowers are condemning their wild relatives to extinction at an alarming rate, and the world is quickly becoming a lesser place without them.
Related: Marine food chains at risk of collapse, extensive study of world's oceans finds
Freeze-dried lettuce leaves are a surprising new source for shelf-stable drugs, report researchers.
Biopharmaceuticals, or drugs that are based on whole proteins, are expensive to make and require refrigeration to store. Insulin, for example, is unaffordable and inaccessible to most of the global population.
An orange pigment found in lichens and rhubarb called parietin may have potential as an anti-cancer drug, scientists at Winship Cancer Institute of Emory University have discovered.
The results are scheduled for publication on October 19 in Nature Cell Biology.
An attempt by UN officials to get countries to decriminalise the possession and use of all drugs has been foiled, the BBC can reveal.
A paper from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) has been withdrawn after pressure from at least one country.
Related: Finally – a change in course on drug policy
There is no amount of alcohol that is safe to drink during any trimester of pregnancy, advises a new report from the American Academy of Pediatrics.
And all forms of alcohol — including beer, wine and liquor — pose a similar risk to the developing fetus, according to the report from the nation's largest group of pediatricians.
There is no such thing as a typical firstborn, middle child or baby of the family according to a study that debunks the idea that personality is determined by birth order. However, the paper, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, supported earlier findings that the first child in a family was likely to be more intelligent.
Related: Premature birth appears to weaken brain connections
When you tickle the toes of newborn babies, the experience for them isn't quite as you would imagine it to be. That's because, according to new evidence, infants in the first four months of life apparently feel that touch and wiggle their feet without connecting the sensation to you.
Having more than 11 moles on one arm indicates a higher-than-average risk of skin cancer or melanoma, research suggests.
Counting moles on the right arm was found to be a good indicator of total moles on the body. More than 100 indicates five times the normal risk.
While lungs remain the main way by which air pollutants get into the body, and, if in sufficient quantities, cause ill-health effects, a new study shows that certain pollutants (‘semi-volatiles’ like phthalates) can be drawn in by the skin. This effect is known as ‘dermal uptake’ and the levels absorbed can be equivalent to those drawn in through breathing via the lungs.
The idea of life existing in a buried sea inside a moon of Jupiter may seem strange, perhaps impossible. But a series of laboratory tests show that some terrestrial bacteria would adapt well to the salty and sulfate-rich ocean believed to exist beneath the hard icy shell of Europa.
Joint US and German research teams have discovered a new form of solar ejection involving high energy blast waves and helium-3 based particle matter. The discovery was aided by NASA spacecraft STEREO A and ACE.
After decades of space exploration, and countless movies on the subject, why exactly does Mars continue to inspire such high levels of cultural and scientific fascination?
Both the red planet and NASA — the most prominent vehicle for space exploration — are coasting on a wave of newfound popularity, taking center stage in big-budget Hollywood productions.
Big-data analysis consists of searching for buried patterns that have some kind of predictive power. But choosing which "features" of the data to analyze usually requires some human intuition. In a database containing, say, the beginning and end dates of various sales promotions and weekly profits, the crucial data may not be the dates themselves but the spans between them, or not the total profits but the averages across those spans.
Plastic foam coffee cups tossed nonchalantly into garbage cans—after they’ve served as vessels for morning caffeination or an afternoon pick-me-up—can languish in landfills for many years, along with other polystyrene waste.
According to a new paper in the journal Current Biology, honeybees may select caffeinated nectar over an uncaffeinated but otherwise equal-quality alternative. As a result, plants may be lacing their nectar with caffeine as a way to pass off sub-standard forage.
The Australian government has given green signal to the growth of cannabis for medical and scientific purposes, CNN Philippines reports.
Related: Croatia Legalizes Use of Medical Marijuana
NORTHGLENN, Colo. — The capsule was small and dark and the water smelled a bit like a used gym sock, but Caleb Preuss, 28, climbed in anyway, lying supine in a bath of saline.
Once he was inside, the stabbing back pain that had dogged him for months disappeared almost immediately. “It’s something you can never experience otherwise,” he said after he climbed out, “unless maybe you’re an astronaut.”
NASA scientists have released the best views yet of the northern extremes of Saturn’s moon Enceladus. The images were collected as the agency’s Cassini spacecraft swept within 4,000 miles (6,000 km) of the icy moon on October 14, 2015.
The revelation that dark streaks flowing downhill on Mars are signs of present-day liquid water has sparked debate on how best to investigate the Red Planet features.
These dark streaks, called Recurring Slope Lineae (RSL), flow down steep slopes during warm seasons and fade when the weather is cooler. The streaks are caused by liquid water laden with salts, scientists announced last month.
It’s amazing — the things you find on Mars. We’ve seen a floating spoon, Bigfoot, rats and now, well what do you know, Buddha, himself, has been spotted on the Red Planet.
According to Scott C. Waring, ufosightingsdaily.com, this statue of a “Stunning Martian God” was spotted this October. In fact, the feature had been seen before, but never in such revealing detail.
Ufology is one of forteana's toughest nuts. Organizations like MUFON, NUFORC, and others have tons of data winding up as interactive maps and infographics. That's all well and good knowing where to see saucers, but what does it all mean? Could there be an underlying pattern?
Related: Watch bizarre 'squid-shaped' UFO 'return to haunt man after first visit in 1991'
Related: UFOs May Be Returning to Brazil Looking for Revenge
The staggeringly complex LHC ‘atom smasher’ at the CERN centre in Geneva, Switzerland, will be fired up to its highest energy levels ever in a bid to detect – or even create – miniature black holes.
If successful a completely new universe will be revealed – rewriting not only the physics books but the philosophy books too. It is even possible that gravity from our own universe may ‘leak’ into this parallel universe, scientists at the LHC say.
CHINESE TV news reports have told how thousands of residents in TWO areas reported separately seeing a huge city form in the skies.
Onlookers, some who are said to have videoed the bizarre event, were said to be mesmerised as a towering city of sky scrapers appeared from the clouds.
The Tower of London has arguably been England’s premier fortress for almost a thousand years – but new evidence suggests that despite its impressive fortifications, its staff sometimes felt far from secure.
Research carried out by archaeologists in one of the fortresses’ major buildings has revealed that at least some of its inhabitants felt so insecure that they tried to use magic to give themselves an extra layer of protection.
Pieces of ancient, bronze sword blades and spearheads have been unearthed by archaeologists in Scotland. The pieces had been intentionally broken and thrown into a freshwater loch some 3,000 years ago in what is believed to be a ritual offering.
While walking along the Jersey Shore, a woman recently stumbled upon a rare spearhead about 10,000 to 11,000 years old, according to experts who believe the ancient artifact may hold clues into prehistoric life in the Americas.
The projectile point was examined this past Tuesday by curators at the New Jersey State Museum after Audrey Stanick -- a 58-year-old resident of Lanoka Harbor, New Jersey -- made the discovery on Oct. 6 while walking along a Seaside Heights beach with her sister looking for sea glass after a recent storm.
The discovery of a hoard of ancient human teeth in a Chinese cave has forced scientists to reconsider our species’ relations with our closest evolutionary cousins, the Neanderthals. The find, revealed in the science journal Nature, shows modern humans must have left their African homeland and reached southern China more than 80,000 years ago.
A trail-blazing British Museum exhibition about religion in Egypt after the fall of the pharaohs is to shine a light for the first time on an overlooked and difficult truth: how much the great world faiths and mythologies borrowed from each other and how many modern distinctions were made later.
The Derveni Papyrus has recently been inscribed as one of the works for protection within the Memory of the World Register by UNESCO. Named as the ‘Most Ancient Book in Europe,’ the history of the text’s discovery and decoding is almost as interesting as the content contained within. When the papyrus was discovered by chance in Derveni (near Thessalonika), Greece in 1962 the document was badly charred.
Martyrdom and historic loss are the common threads in two recent acquisitions by the J. Paul Getty Trust.
One is a poignant, nearly 600-year-old alabaster figure of a saint who Catholic tradition says was crucified by the ancient Romans – a sculpture that the Nazis looted in 1934 from a German Jewish industrialist.
The best teeth that Christina Warinner sees in her office are the ones with chunks of plaque as big as lima beans fixed to their enamel. Warinner is not a dentist, although she uses some of the same tools. She is an anthropologist at the University of Oklahoma, and she performs centuries-delayed dental cleanings on the likes of Vikings and Stone Age farmers to scrape up details about how humans once lived.
Lost a tooth? Soon your dentist could print you another – and it’ll help keep your mouth clean, too.
Getting fitted for a false tooth or other dental treatment tends to involve a mouthful of foul-tasting gunk and plaster casts. But now dentists are moving to high-tech digital scanning and 3D printing. That switch opens the door to more advanced materials that could improve your oral hygiene.
Related: Nanodiamonds might prevent tooth loss after root canals
Does glass in cathedral windows flow downward at room temperature—acting essentially as a liquid in super slow-motion? No. It's a myth. The larger volume observed at the bottom of some windows is due to the manufacturing process, not gravity.
But in more complex, high-tech kinds of glass, like Corning Gorilla Glass, a scratch- and damage-resistant glass used on more than one billion smartphones and tablets screens, susceptibility to room-temperature deformations have been known to exist for a few years.
Scientists testing a malaria vaccine for pregnant women made a surprising discovery that shows promise for treating cancer.
When the team created the protein the malaria parasite uses to adhere to the placenta and added a toxin, they discovered that the protein is identical to a carbohydrate found in cancer cells.
DALLAS — The large and bulbous teeth of an early reptile likely helped it crunch beetles and other hard-shelled invertebrates about 290 million years ago, a new study finds.
But the curious creature also lost teeth as it aged, giving it a less toothy smile in its senior years.
Paleontologists have discovered a cliff-side in Utah brimming with fossils that offers a rare glimpse of desert life in western North America early in the age of dinosaurs.
Among the discoveries in what used to be a lake shoreline between giant sand dunes is a new pterosaur that would have been the largest flying reptile of the time. It wielded its ferocious teeth and powerful skull to gobble up small crocodile type creatures as it soared over a desert some 210 million years ago.
A cluster of baby duck-billed dinosaurs — hadrosaurs like the adorable character Ducky in the 1988 animated film "The Land Before Time" — was uncovered in a slab of rock from a fossil-rich part of Mongolia known as "Dragon's Tomb."
Case of the moustached kingfisher pits those who think ‘collecting’ can save a species against those who believe we should never kill rare animals
For Christopher Filardi of the American Museum of Natural History, there is nothing like the thrill of finding a mysterious species.
Whether or not we should continue to eat meat is an increasingly hot topic – its alleged impact on the climate and the ethical issues surrounding intensive farming have left many disillusioned with the carnivore's diet. But scientists believe that they have a viable alternative that doesn’t involve sacrificing your steak for Quorn or lentils.
Related: Forget Saving the Planet: Being a Vegetarian Is Cheaper Than Eating Meat
Ending the drought in the West will require rain—not too much rain—and smarter ways to collect and store that water. But something else that can keep things moist? Believe it or not: Beavers.
According to a story in Water Deeply, a group of ecologists have a plan to help repopulate the Central Coast of California with Castor canadensis, the large beavers which once roamed the state in great numbers.
Antarctica is one of the coldest, snowiest parts of the globe, but there may actually be less snow across the surface of the planet's southernmost continent than scientists originally thought.
Related: Melting of Antarctic ice shelves set to intensify
The sun has sprung a leak: A hole in the topmost layer of the sun and its magnetic field, the size of 50 Earths, is letting loose an ultrafast solar wind that has kicked off several nights of auroras down on Earth.
A new image, from NASA's orbiting Solar Dynamics Observatory, reveals the enormous hole as it was Oct. 10, taken at an ultraviolet wavelength unseen by the human eye.
There’s a new mystery in the universe and it goes by the name KIC 8462852. It is a star approximately 1500 light years away from the Earth, and displays a strange pattern of dimming that has astronomers scratching their heads.
With many natural causes apparently ruled out, there is even the suggestion that the signals could be caused by a giant structure, built in space near the star, presumably by extraterrestrials.
Alt: Has Kepler Discovered an Alien Megastructure?
Alt: NASA's Kepler Space-Telescope Data Yields a Bizarre Star --"Is It Orbited By a Swarm of ET Megastructures?”
One of the great early civilizations collapsed in a mere fifty years, with 75% of the population disappearing a century later. What the hell happened to ancient Greece?
Ancient Greece typically brings to mind robes and columns and people inventing democracy. That’s fine, but it arguably involves people who weren’t originally Greek. The classical age of Greece came after most of mainland Greece was populated by northern tribes like the Dorians.
Italian archaeologists are to start excavations in search of a fabled cache of ancient Roman treasure which, according to legend, was buried alongside the Gothic king who sacked the city in the 5th century.
If King Tut’s tomb hides a secret burial chamber, the mummy inside could belong to the elusive pharaoh Smenkhkare, or to queen Meritaton, the full or half sister of Tutankhamun, according to an international team of researchers.
Prompted by an inspection of King Tut’s tomb last month by the Egyptian Antiquities Ministry, the new study discusses the likelihood of various missing royals who might be concealed in the 3,300-year-old tomb and rules out the hypothesis that queen Nefertiti, the most favored candidate, is buried there.
Life in ancient Egypt is known to have been brutal at times but now a skeleton has revealed the true extent of the violence meted out to its citizens.
Egyptologists have in the past found punishments inscribed on ancient tablets - '100 lashes and five wounds' is just one example - but it was not known if such acts were isolated moments of extreme barbarity or common practice.
For thousands of years, humans have taken a masochistic pleasure from adding chilli to their food. Now research indicates that the spice that has undoubtedly made our lives more interesting may also make them longer.
There is only one mammal that enthusiastically eats chillies.
In dream or REM sleep, brain activity is more like awake than non-REM activity, and muscles are paralyzed. Various regions of the brain affect REM sleep, but neuroscientists have found a group of neurons in the medulla that seem to play a key role. Activating them makes mice go immediately into REM sleep, while inactivating them abolishes it. REM control could be useful for researchers studying the function of sleep in animals.
WENATCHEE, Wash. - A Washington State University researcher has found that yoga can help fathers in jail be better dads.
A study by WSU Extension educator Jennifer Crawford found that yoga, which can improve physical and mental health, may also help incarcerated fathers improve their parenting skills.
It's not pleasant to feel perpetually that you're responsible for mishaps and screw-ups, but some people do. Psychologists recognise this as a distinct trait, which they call "guilt-proneness" and now they've discovered that it tends to go hand in hand with an enhanced ability to recognise other people's emotions, at least from their facial expressions.
Oysters and chocolate maybe considered aphrodisiacs, but their stimulating powers pale into insignificance when compared to a mysterious mushroom found in Hawaii.
An as yet unnamed species of bright orange mushroom that grows on volcanic slopes has long been rumoured to possess potent properties. Researchers have discovered the 'fetid odour' of the fungus can trigger spontaneous climaxes in females.
A new species of coffee tree has been described from the Cusuco National Park, a national park in Honduras.
This new species belongs to the coffee family Rubiaceae, according to a paper published in the journal PhytoKeys.
A morning caffeine dose is something that so many of us find irresistible, and according to research, foraging bees seek a similar buzz.
Many plants produce caffeine in their nectar, primarily as a naturally bitter deterrent against plant-devouring insects, like caterpillars.
Overturning a 136-year-old ban, the Los Angeles City Council voted on Wednesday to legalize urban beekeeping.
Once the ordinance is signed by the mayor, Los Angeles will join cities including New York, San Francisco and Washington in allowing beekeeping. There is even a beehive on the White House grounds.
Could a famous gorilla and a bundle of kittens make the Internet forget about alien megastructures and inexplicable transit signals?
If any gorilla could accomplish that feat, Koko could. The Gorilla Foundation, in Redwood City, Calif., just released video of Koko receiving a heartwarming visit from a cardboard box full of kittens in celebration of her 44th birthday.
Is brain size related to cognitive ability of humans? This question has captured the attention of scientists for more than a century. An international team of researchers provides no evidence for a causal role of brain size for IQ test performance. In a meta-analysis of data from more than 8000 participants, they show that associations between in vivo brain volume and IQ are small.
Our ancestors may have got less sleep than we do, a study suggests.
US researchers studied the sleeping patterns of traditional societies in Africa and South America, whose lifestyles closely resemble ancient hunter gatherers.
Fossil finds from China have shaken up the traditional narrative of humankind's dispersal from Africa.
Scientists working in Daoxian, south China, have discovered teeth belonging to modern humans that date to at least 80,000 years ago.
Alt: Discovery of 47 teeth in Chinese cave changes picture of human migration out of Africa
The King James Bible, the most widely read book in the English language — from which phrases like "a man after his own heart" emerged — is as storied as it is elusive. Now, a historian claims to have found the oldest known draft of the Christian text in an obscure archive at the University of Cambridge.
After decades of excavations, researchers believe they have finally found the ruins of the Biblical city of Sodom.
Experts investigating the region of Tall el-Hammam in Jordan believe the remains of a 'monstrous' Bronze Age city match the Biblical description of the city destroyed by God.
New excavation in Bradgate Park, Leicestershire, to save flint artefacts from impact of erosion
After being hidden for nearly 15,000 years, the lives of Ice Age hunter-gatherers who migrated to Europe to benefit from warmer climes are to be revealed in an archaeological dig at a very rare site in Bradgate Park, Leicestershire.
After being hidden for nearly 15,000 years, the lives of Ice Age hunter-gatherers who migrated to Europe to benefit from warmer climes are to be revealed in an archaeological dig at a very rare site in Bradgate Park, Leicestershire.
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN, ANN ARBOR—Chemical clues about weaning age embedded in the tusks of juvenile Siberian woolly mammoths suggest that hunting, rather than climate change, was the primary cause of the elephant-like animal's extinction.
An inexpensive handheld device that can read strands of DNA has been hailed as revolutionary by scientists who tested the product.
The palm-sized sequencer gives researchers the power to analyse DNA almost anywhere, and could help track disease outbreaks, run checks on food, and combat the trafficking of endangered animals.
Many of us take our sense of touch for granted, perhaps because we can never turn it off, but it’s surprisingly complex. An intricate network of nerves brings different types of information about an object, like its temperature or wetness or hardness or weight, up to the brain, which compiles the information into a cohesive picture of the object.
Robots that display human-like vulnerabilities may get on better with people than ones programmed to be too perfect, researchers suggest.
Experts from the University of Lincoln found that people warmed to a robot if it made mistakes and showed human-like emotions, such as boredom.
Komatsu is the world’s second largest construction company, a venerable Japanese brand with 94 years of history that sells forklifts and bulldozers to customers around the globe. But in its home country, Komatsu has been struggling with an aging population, a trend that has left few young workers available to operate its machines.
At a press event today, Tesla announced the release tomorrow of version 7.0 of the Model S software, a big, widely anticipated new build that finally enables the car's self-driving features. Those capabilities were first announced last year and the necessary sensors were added to all Model S cars that have rolled off the assembly line since last September, but Tesla has needed additional time to flesh out the algorithms, which it has been testing this year.
Nature has had billions of years to perfect photosynthesis, which directly or indirectly supports virtually all life on Earth. In that time, the process has achieved almost 100 percent efficiency in transporting the energy of sunlight from receptors to reaction centers where it can be harnessed -- a performance vastly better than even the best solar cells.
After a two-year hiatus, the Large Hadron Collider, the largest and most powerful particle accelerator in the world, began its second run of experiments in June, smashing together subatomic particles at 13 teraelectronvolts (TeV)—the highest energy ever achieved in a laboratory. Physicists hope that such high-energy collisions may produce completely new particles, and potentially simulate the conditions that were seen in the early universe.
Science fiction literature is full of stories in which tunnels in space-time — known as wormholes — are used for time travel. How much fact lies within the fiction? The answer is, more than you might think. Scientists are looking at ways to use traversable wormholes (if they exist) to travel faster than the speed of light — and even to travel through time itself.
If alien life swims in the ocean beneath Europa's icy surface, it might have got its start from comets cracking the icy shell to deliver vital pre-life ingredients, say researchers.
New simulations show that a specific family of comets have the mass, velocity and opportunity to do the job -- penetrating the full range of likely Europan ice thicknesses.
Imagine a babbling river, making its way over stones and pebbles — the flow occasionally knocking a pebble forward along the riverbed.
Now imagine that scene on Mars.
According to new research, that’s no daydream. A novel study has examined the erosion patterns of rocks on Mars and determined they were carried by water for some 30 miles on the Red Planet.
The raging storm that creates Jupiter’s great red spot has waned and turned the planet’s famous blemish to orange, according to the most recent images from the Hubble space telescope.
Scientists trained the veteran observatory on Jupiter to capture the first of a series of annual portraits of the solar system’s outer planets.
Were dinosaurs really fast, aggressive hunters like the ones depicted in the movie 'Jurassic World'? Or did they have lower metabolic rates that made them move more like today's alligators and crocodiles? New research indicates that some dinosaurs, at least, had the capacity to elevate their body temperature using heat sources in the environment, such as the sun.
Dinosaur body temperatures widely varied, according to a new study that used dino eggshells to determine how hot, or not, some dinosaurs were.
The new research in the journal Nature Communications, represents the first time that dinosaur eggshells have been used to figure out the body temperature and metabolism of dinosaurs.
We often use the phrase ‘birdbrain’ as a mild insult, to mean someone who is dim-witted or acts stupidly. Birds’ brains are indeed much smaller, and far less convoluted, than our own, but our feathered friends have had a bad press, and some of them – the corvids, in particular – are capable of remarkable feats of intelligence.
An Australian zoo Wednesday unveiled a baby chimp adopted by a pregnant female in an "unheard of" act after his mother died during birth.
The baby, whose name Boon means blessing, was orphaned when mum Soona died shortly after he was born at Monarto Zoo, southeast of Adelaide, late last week.
Researchers have imaged in unprecedented detail the three-dimensional structure of supercoiled DNA, revealing that its shape is much more dynamic than the well-known double helix.
Nearly a year has passed since Rebecca Knickmeyer first met the participants in her latest study on brain development. Knickmeyer, a neuroscientist at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine in Chapel Hill, expects to see how 30 newborns have grown into crawling, inquisitive one-year-olds, using a battery of behavioural and temperament tests. In one test, a child's mother might disappear from the testing suite and then reappear with a stranger. Another ratchets up the weirdness with some Halloween masks. Then, if all goes well, the kids should nap peacefully as a noisy magnetic resonance imaging machine scans their brains.
After years of sporadic, sometimes deadly interactions with people along the Alto Madre de Dios River, a Mashco-Piro clan has suddenly stepped up contact.
SHIPETIARI, Peru—The Mashco-Piro appeared suddenly on the paths snaking through this beautiful, leafy village, armed with nearly seven-foot-long bamboo arrows sharpened to a knife edge.
Our bodies naturally adapt to cold, dark winter conditions. Scientists think the rise of warm houses and bright lights has baffled our immune systems
Wall-mounted thermostat
It’s time to turn down the heating and switch off the lights – all this cosiness is making us ill. At least that sounds like the advice from new research which suggests the “endless summer” we have created in our homes could be playing havoc with our health, and even causing early deaths.
A variety of animals are able to sense and react to electric fields, and living human cells will move along an electric field, for example in wound healing. Now a team lead by Min Zhao at the UC Davis Institute for Regenerative Cures has found the first actual "sensor mechanism" that allows a living cell detect an electric field. The work is published Oct. 9 in the journal Nature Communications.
New research involving a psychologist from the University of York has revealed for the first time that both belief in God and prejudice towards immigrants can be reduced by directing magnetic energy into the brain.
To paraphrase Rousseau, man is born free, yet everywhere he is caged. Barbed-wire, concrete walls, and gun-toting guards confine people to the nation-state of their birth. But why? The argument for open borders is both economic and moral. All people should be free to move about the earth, uncaged by the arbitrary lines known as borders.
The most striking trend of the past half-century is that individuals are travelling further but not more often. The total number of trips people make on average in a year has remained fairly stable since 1965, as has the time we spend travelling, but the distance we travel has almost doubled over the same period.
An exercise pill feels like cheating.
It doesn’t seem right that a simple drug should allow you to avoid the crucible of pain, sweating and aggravation that we’ve come to see as the price that must be paid for a fit and low-fat body.
But science marches on—and now what was once only the stuff of mid-workout fantasies may actually be possible.
For decades, metrologists have strived to retire ‘Le Grand K’ — the platinum and iridium cylinder that for 126 years has defined the kilogram from a high-security vault outside Paris. Now it looks as if they at last have the data needed to replace the cylinder with a definition based on mathematical constants.
In the Northern hemisphere’s sky, hovering above the Milky Way, there are two constellations—Cygnus the swan, her wings outstretched in full flight, and Lyra, the harp that accompanied poetry in ancient Greece, from which we take our word “lyric.”
Between these constellations sits an unusual star, invisible to the naked eye, but visible to the Kepler Space Telescope, which stared at it for more than four years, beginning in 2009.
What is a kilogram?
Easy. It’s 2.2 pounds.
This humble measurement is hugely important in certain fields — think medicine, engineering and technology — that keep our world turning. So if the official standard by which it is determined gets off by a few ticks, it could throw a huge wrench in those wheels.