Newsdesk Archive

Near Earth Objects (NEOs) are asteroids or comets whose orbits sometimes bring them close to the Earth, thereby posing a potentially threat. The asteroid that struck Chelyabinsk last year was an NEO about 40 meters in diameter. While it is relatively easy to detect an NEO in visible light by watching its movement across the sky from night to night, determining its size and its potential hazard is more difficult because its optical brightness results from both its size and its reflectivity. CfA astronomers have for several years been using the IRAC infrared camera on Spitzer to measure the infrared light emitted by NEOs and, combined with optical measurements, to deduce their probable dimensions.

The long-standing mantra about Mars has been to follow the water. But scientists have gone beyond that in an attempt to figure out where the water came from and how long it lasted. A new study published in Science suggests Mars’ ancient past may have had a more massive atmosphere billions of years ago than it does today, with an active hydrosphere capable of storing water in long-lived lakes.

Researchers have a new way to rank the life-hosting potential of alien worlds. The "habitability index" metric could help guide the operations of future observatories, such as NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), that will scan exoplanet atmospheres for signs of life, scientists said.

Astronauts may have grown lettuce aboard the International Space Station, but astronauts on Mars will need more calorie-dense food to survive. In the film ‘The Martian’, botanist Mark Watney, played by Matt Damon, grows potatoes in order to survive on the red planet. Now scientists have revealed they have already come up with a system that can produce sweet potatoes and strawberries in poor conditions, which could one day be used on Mars or the moon.

A baboon in an English zoo has put a premium on dental hygiene. At Devon's Paignton Zoo, the residents of 'Baboon Rock' had been given broom heads to play with. While some of the younger animals used them to sweep, an older female hamadryas baboon named Georgia pried loose a bristle on one of the brooms and used it to floss her teeth.

Unlike their horse cousins, zebras have never been domesticated—and for good reason: They can be aggressive, panicky, and unpredictable, making them difficult to train. They also have powerful legs that can carry them at speeds up to 35 mph, and have a kick that can break the jaw of a predator. Those Chuck Norris-like skills are useful when you have lions, cheetahs, and hyenas chasing you down for lunch.

Such an animal has not been seen on Czech territory for hundreds of years. A Dutch breeding program has recreated massive bovines closely related to aurochs, once the heaviest European land mammal and the wild ancestor of today's cattle that became extinct in the 17th century.

A 48 million year-old horse-like equoid fetus has been discovered at the Messel pit near Frankfurt, Germany according to a study published October 7, 2015 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Jens Lorenz Franzen from Senckenberg Research Institute Frankfurt, Germany, and Naturhistorisches Museum Basel, Switzerland, and colleagues.

The state joins a number of communities moving away from the former name Alaska has officially renamed Columbus Day “Indigenous Peoples Day,” joining a growing body of local governments moving in that direction.

The wreck of a 600-year-old warship which helped Henry V wage war on France is believed to have been found buried in a river. The Holigost - or Holy Ghost - was one of four "great ships" commissioned by the king in his war against France.

David Borlaug, president of the Lewis and Clark Fort Mandan Foundation, said two great mysteries have always attended the explorers’ story: one, the location of the fort, and two, whether explorer Meriwether Lewis was killed or committed suicide. The second question has mostly settled on the side of suicide, but the question of where the fort was built and whether the Missouri River would ever give up the secret has never been.

British cheese has always had a heavenly reputation but to our ancestors it really was food for the gods. Archaeologists have discovered that the builders of Stonehenge offered up cheese, milk and yoghurt to their deities during ancient ceremonies, keeping ‘impure’ meat for feasting amongst themselves. Related: Cheese made from cashews shreds the competition

In 2011, the tiny mountain nation of Bhutan announced a lofty goal: make the country’s agricultural system 100 percent organic by the year 2020. If it succeeded, it would be the first country in the world to achieve the feat. Bhutan — nestled in the Himalayas between India and China — only has about 700,000 people living within its borders, and most are farmers. It’s a majority Buddhist kingdom, and its culture reflects several key tenets of that religion — sustainable development, conservation of the environment, preservation of the culture, and good governance.

It might not just be expectant mothers who have to pay attention to their lifestyle. Now a new study published in Science could be relevant to a growing body of research looking at ways in which the lifestyle and environment of men before they become fathers could influence the lives of their children and grandchildren.

'Switching off' certain genes that contribute to the aging process could help increase lifespan dramatically, say American scientists after ten years of research. Research conducted by the Buck Institute for Research of Ageing and the Unversity of Washington have managed to detect 238 genes which, when switched off, dramatically increase the life span of yeast cells.

Women who were born in the summer are more likely to be healthy adults, suggests new research published in the journal Heliyon. The authors of the study, which involved almost half a million people in the UK, say more sunlight - and therefore higher vitamin D exposure - in the second trimester of pregnancy could explain the effect, but more research is needed.

Every year around this time, mice find their way into our 110-year-old home. They’re sneaky, of course, so a pretty rare event, perhaps once a season, to clearly see one skitter toward the basement. Every day, though, I whip my head around at every shadow and creak, convinced I’m seeing a mouse out of the corner of my eye.

Each person is unique. You can identify people by their DNA, fingerprints, personal preferences and behavior. But new research out of Yale University has shown we have another unique identifier: How our brains work. “We all have this intuition that people are unique. We all have our own strengths and weaknesses, our quirks and personalities, what we’re good at and how we handle things,” says study co-first author Emily Finn, a pHD student in neuroscience at Yale. “It’s very easy to observe that from the outside … but it’s been pretty hard to find correlates in brain activities.”

The artist Eric Fischl remembers the time a friend waved a catalog at him to alert him that one of his paintings was up for auction for six figures in London. In reality, the work was a fake, but so convincing, Mr. Fischl said, “I thought I was losing my mind.” Brushes with forgery like that one two decades ago, and concerns about his legacy and estate, prompted Mr. Fischl to appear in London on Monday to vouch for a new authentication system that would let artists sign their works with specks of synthetic DNA.

Excerpted from The Soul of Ancient Egypt: Restoring the Spiritual Engine of the World by Robert Bauval and Ahmed Osman When Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet, he pondered on the violent feud between the noble families of the Capulets and Montagues and their obsession with their names. This prompted the English bard to ask the rhetorical question: “What’s in a name?” He then gave his reply by saying, “That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” To an ancient Egyptian, however, such a concept would have been completely alien. A thing had to be called by its correct allocated name and no other, for it was only the correct name and its proper utterance that made vocal the soul of the object or person so named. Names became talismans, magical devices imbued with an invisible, immaterial, and immeasurable energy that, when correctly dispatched, would force the mind to unleash the most potent of emotions and the deepest of thoughts. An Egyptian would not, therefore, have hesitated to reply to Shakespeare’s question with the words “to lose my name is to lose my soul.”

Restorers are at work on King Tutankhamun’s beard, Egypt’s state-run news agency MENA said. According to the report, the restoration began on Saturday and is being carried out by a German-Egyptian team of restorers led by specialist Christian Eckmann.

About 30 miles northeast of Mexico City, Teotihuacan—or Teo, as archaeologists call it—is the most visited archaeological ruin in the Western Hemisphere. David Carballo, an assistant professor of archaeology at Boston University and author of Urbanization and Religion in Ancient Central Mexico (Oxford University Press, 2015), has studied Teotihuacan, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, since 1999, trying to learn how this ancient metropolis arose around the first century BCE and flourished for more than 600 years.

A 2,400-year-old underground tomb complex, containing what appears to be an aristocratic family, has been discovered near the ancient city of Soloi in northern Cyprus. The complex contains three burial chambers, two of which were intact while the third had been looted.

Over the past half decade, ancient DNA research has revealed some surprising aspects to our evolutionary history during the past 50,000 years. Perhaps the most startling of these has been the extent to which the ancestors of living people across the planet interbred with other closely related species of human.

A 3,000 year-old village discovered in central California has been found to contain an unusual set of burials — with more than a half dozen individuals buried without their heads, and nearly as many others buried intact, with an extra skull by their side. In two of the graves, the crowns of the severed skulls had even been fashioned into smooth, polished bowls.

New evidence has emerged in the wake of an excavation of a Mexican archaeological site that several hundred conquistadors were captured in the early sixteenth century by Aztecs, with the expectation that the Spanish colonialists would stay for dinner – as the main course.

Communities across America are beginning to embrace Indigenous People’s Day. Is this an example of political correctness run amok, as conservatives tend to see it? Or, as are liberals right in arguing that it’s an important acknowledgement that beneath the foundation of our vaunted Western values lie the scorched remains of millions of native Americans? Alt: Christopher Columbus Was a Sadist - There Shouldn't Be a Holiday in His Name

Say goodbye to Miami and New Orleans. No matter what we do to curb global warming, these and other beloved US cities will sink below rising seas, according to a study Monday. But making extreme carbon cuts and moving to renewable energy could save millions of people living in iconic coastal areas of the United States, said the findings in the October 12 edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a peer-reviewed US journal.

The oceans crash against skyscrapers, making aquatic tunnels of Manhattan streets. Heavy layers of snow pile on endlessly, burying entire civilizations in canopies of white. Eventually, liquid turns to ice, and life as we know it is threatened by an eternal freeze. This is the harrowing disaster scenario of “The Day After Tomorrow,” a 2004 science fiction film directed by Roland Emmerich and starring Jake Gyllenhaal.

Earth's gravitational pull is massaging the moon, opening up faults in the lunar crust, researchers say. Just as the moon's gravitational pull causes seas and lakes to rise and fall as tides on Earth, the Earth exerts tidal forces on the moon. Scientists have known this for a while, but now they've found that Earth's pull actually opens up faults on the moon.

E.T. was the perfect extraterrestrial: Cute, smart and — best of all — a perfect pacifist. Unfortunately, scientists aren't so sure that an actual intelligent alien would be so benign. In a recent interview with El País, famed physicist Stephen Hawking posited that an alien visitation would put Earthlings in the same position as Native Americans when Columbus landed on their shores.

The path to Mars goes through the moon — or the region of space near the moon, anyway. NASA aims to put boots on Mars in the 2030s after first gathering human-spaceflight experience and expertise in low Earth orbit and the "proving ground" of cis-lunar space near the moon.

A pilot project to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere and turn it into pellets that can either be used as fuel or stored underground for later has been launched by a Vancouver-based start-up called Carbon Engineering.

Zimbabwe is to ban the use of electric water heaters and require all newly built properties to use solar power, as it tries to tackle big power shortages. Energy officials say existing electric heaters - or geysers - will be phased out over the next five years.

A furry, beaverlike mammal that survived the apocalyptic dinosaur-killing space rock that crashed to Earth 66 million years ago hid out in what is now New Mexico, grinding up leafy meals with its enormous molars. Related: New Tool For Studying Extinct Animals

Over the past half-decade, ancient DNA research has revealed some surprising aspects to our evolutionary history during the past 50,000 years. Perhaps the most startling of these has been the extent to which the ancestors of living people across the planet interbred with other closely related species of human. But where in the world did these cross-species mating’s occur? Which archaic species were involved? Just how much of the human genome comprises DNA from these archaic relatives? And what impact did interbreeding have on our evolution and general biology as a species?

Shanidar Cave, in northern Iraq's mountainous Kurdistan region, is a one-of-a-kind window into the lives of Neanderthals. Excavated in the 1950s and 1960s, remains from the cave (provisionally dated to between 65,000 and 35,000 years ago) suggest that the ancient human relatives cared for the infirm, ceremonially buried their dead and waged violent conflict. Related: Wind and insect patterns dispel myth of 'finer feelings' in Neanderthal burial rituals

The long awaited sequel to 1995’s best seller ‘Fingerprints of the Gods’ is here and author Graham Hancock joins us to reveal new evidence of an ancient prehistoric civilisation that was destroyed and lost to time. The turbulent sea of argument and insult that surrounds the true story of our past, from 33 mins in.

Archaeologists have uncovered some inexplicable finds in a rare case involving the discovery of a Maya wall painting, or mural, at a shrine complex at the ancient site of Tulix Mul in northern Belize. Buried anciently under a fill of large uncut stones at the beginning of the Maya Late Classic period, a vaulted room within a monumental structure features a plastered wall that hides two successive wall paintings, an unusual find for archaeologists investigating Maya remains.

Archaeologists from the University of Reading have found the earliest dated evidence for human activity in Scotland - with a helping hand from a herd of pigs. The team made the remarkable discovery of a set of 12,000 year-old Ice Age stone tools while excavating Rubha Port an t-Seilich, on Islay in the Inner Hebrides in 2013. The tools include scrapers used for cleaning skins, sharp points likely used for hunting big game, such as reindeer, and much more.

One of the most intriguing questions researchers hope to answer is whether Celtic art had links into the wider Eurasian world. Until now, this material has mainly been analysed in terms of its European stylistic development, but the research team is now broadening its scope to look at the relationship between Celtic art and Iron Age art in the Eurasian steppe.

Britons are increasingly returning to the pagan custom of being buried with their most prized possessions amid a shift away from traditional Christian funeral practices, new research among undertakers reveals.

Antioxidants are supposed to keep your cells healthy. That is why millions of people gobble supplements like vitamin E and beta-carotene each year. Today, however, a new study adds to a growing body of research suggesting these supplements actually have a harmful effect in one serious disease: cancer.

Hundreds of opioid addicts are being treated with medical marijuana in Massachusetts, with advocates touting the new therapy as a life-changing alternative to a deadly epidemic — and facing down critics who contend they are peddling junk science. Related: Liberal Democrats set up expert panel on cannabis legalisation

Hair analysis for cannabinoids is extensively applied in workplace drug testing and in child protection cases, although valid data on incorporation of the main analytical targets, ?9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) and 11-nor-9-carboxy-THC (THC-COOH), into human hair is widely missing. In the light of the serious consequences of positive test results the mechanisms of drug incorporation into hair urgently need scientific evaluation. Our studies show that all three cannabinoids can be present in hair of non-consuming individuals because of transfer through cannabis consumers, via their hands, their sebum/sweat, or cannabis smoke.

Over the summer, the Texas Forensic Science Commission, which sets standards for physical evidence in state courts, came to an unsettling conclusion: There was something wrong with how state labs were analyzing DNA evidence. It seemed the labs were using an outdated protocol for calculating the probability of DNA matches in "mixtures"; that is, crime scene samples that contain genetic material from several people. It may have affected thousands of cases going back to 1999.

Highly efficient robots on wheels could soon be hauling trash in a neighborhood near you. Together with universities in Sweden and the United States, Swedish auto manufacturer Volvo is developing these useful robots, which will be able to roll around a neighborhood, pick up waste bins and chuck the trash into the back of garbage trucks.

Robot researchers have had much success in getting robots to walk and run; another challenge has persisted for years, and that is getting robots to pick up and hold on to objects successfully. An international workshop on autonomous grasping and manipulation last year spoke of "new algorithms for selecting, executing, and evaluating grasps. In parallel to the progress made on the software level, new robot hands and sensors have also been designed for operating in everyday environments." Related: Stephen Hawking says we should be more frightened of capitalism than robots

No, that glowing door you see there isn't some portal to an unknown dimension or etherial plane. It's actually part of a robot designed to be built into the closet of the future. The whole contraption is called Laundroid and it exists to make the very pedestrian task of folding laundry a whole lot easier.

If you thought that the worst thing that you could get on your cell phone was a sext message from a creepy politician, guess again. A girl in Peru downloaded a Ouija board app to her phone, tried it out and ended up seemingly possessed by an evil spirit. This isn’t the first report of demons using cell phones. Is it time to go back to landlines and phone booths? Related: Edward Snowden: Smartphones can be hacked into with just one text message and then used to spy on their owners Related: More than 10,000 problems fixed through ‘Improve Detroit’ cell phone app

"Daddy, read me a word problem," is probably not a request that many fathers hear. Yet if a school child's parents replace a bedtime story with a math discussion even one night a week, the child's math skill may improve markedly compared with peers who listen to nonmathematical stories, a new study shows. The effect is sizable: Over the course of one 9-month school year, students who do bedtime math gain on average the equivalent of a 3-month advantage over their peers, researchers report online today in Science

Most female mammals give birth and care for their offspring, while the males often breed with multiple partners and play little role in parenting once the mating is over. Yet researchers have had a hard time pinpointing where, exactly, in the brain these differences between the sexes are located and how they translate into behavior. The extent of "hardwired parental behavior" is hotly disputed.

If you’re like most people, when a baby smiles at you, you smile back. If you’re these scientists, though, you carefully record the baby’s smiles in order to build a creepy baby-simulating robot (complete with a face that only a scientist could love — see figure below). In the process of building the robot, the authors of this study found that by 4 months, babies and their mothers fall into a predictable smiling routine: “mothers consistently attempted to maximize the time spent in mutual smiling, while infants tried to maximize mother-only smile time.”

A team of researchers at Wayne State University have discovered that mothers with high levels of lead in their blood not only affect the fetal cells of their unborn children, but also their grandchildren. Their study, Multigenerational epigenetic inheritance in humans: DNA methylation changes associated with maternal exposure to lead can be transmitted to the grandchildren, was published online this week in Scientific Reports.

If you have diabetes, or cancer or even heart problems, maybe you should blame it on your dad's behavior or environment. Or even your grandfather's. That's because, in recent years, scientists have shown that, before his offspring are even conceived, a father's life experiences involving food, drugs, exposure to toxic products and even stress can affect the development and health not only of his children, but even of his grandchildren.

Animal birth control could soon be just a shot away: A new injection makes male and female mice infertile by tricking their muscles into producing hormone-blocking antibodies. If the approach works in dogs and cats, researchers say, it could be used to neuter and spay pets and to control reproduction in feral animal populations. A similar approach could one day spur the development of long-term birth control options for humans.

For the villager, who asks to be identified only as Bernadette, life is a running battle. On tiny plots of corn, millet and sweet potatoes next to Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, she and her neighbors scrape a bare subsistence for themselves and their children. Her sweet potatoes, she told us last year, are under constant attack from baboons and elephants that stray from the park in search of food. Related: A moment that changed me – my husband fell in love with a bonobo

How do you reverse the damage done to the planet when 3 billion to 6 billion trees are cut down every year to make way for other crops such as soy beans, palm oil trees or grazing land for cattle? Replanting trees is one obvious solution. Earlier this year, a charitable organization planted 1 million seedlings in one day in Ecuador. Although admirable, more trees are needed to keep up with industrial-scale deforestation.

Three British companies have created a device to deter drones from entering sensitive areas by freezing them in mid-flight. The Anti-UAV Defense System (Auds) works by covertly jamming a drone's signal, making it unresponsive.

When the digital currency Bitcoin came to life in January 2009, it was noticed by almost no one apart from the handful of programmers who followed cryptography discussion groups. Its origins were shadowy: it had been conceived the previous year by a still-mysterious person or group known only by the alias Satoshi Nakamoto1. And its purpose seemed quixotic: Bitcoin was to be a 'cryptocurrency', in which strong encryption algorithms were exploited in a new way to secure transactions. Users' identities would be shielded by pseudonyms. Records would be completely decentralized. And no one would be in charge — not governments, not banks, not even Nakamoto.

Can the passage of time be measured precisely, always and everywhere? The answer will upset many watchmakers. A team of physicists from the universities of Warsaw and Nottingham have just shown that when we are dealing with very large accelerations, no clock will actually be able to show the real passage of time, known as "proper time".

How small can a droplet shrink and remain a liquid? This existential question has been raised by a series of experiments conducted recently at the Large Hadron Collider and the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider that smash various atomic particles together at nearly the speed of light in order to create tiny drops of primordial soup: the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) that cosmologists are convinced dominated the universe microseconds after the Big Bang before the universe cooled down enough for atoms to form.

A new type of "quasiparticle" theorized by Caltech's Gil Refael, a professor of theoretical physics and condensed matter theory, could help improve the efficiency of a wide range of photonic devices—technologies, such as optical amplifiers, solar photovoltaic cells, and even barcode scanners, which create, manipulate, or detect light.

The photographs of Neil Armstrong taking his ‘small step for man’ from Apollo 11 are instantly recognisable and some of the most famous in the world. But there are equally stunning images from Nasa’s Apollo missions that are not so familiar and are so perfect, they look like stills from a sci-fi film. Related: Does this Apollo 17 photo show an alien spaceship? UFO hunters claim lights in vintage shot are proof of ET, but one expert says it's probably just space junk

Raising puppies and cheetah kittens together helps refocus the big cats’ nervous energy, zoos have discovered. Mixed-species friendships are all the rage these days, even between infamously mortal enemies like cats and dogs.

Crows mourn their dead to try and learn about potential dangers to their own lives, researchers have found. They found the birds can even remember an animal or person seen with a dead crow. The birds were also able to easily distinguish between people or hawks carrying dead crows and other birds.

The skin of a woolly mammoth preserved in the Siberian permafrost for more than 10,000 years has given Russian scientists fresh hope of being able to clone the extinct giants. The fragments of skin were discovered along with other remains from six of the ice age creatures. Researchers are now examining it for signs of 'living cells' in a special laboratory set up as part of attempts to resurrect the beasts.

Elephants hardly ever get cancer, but until now, researchers were stumped as to why. In a study that could help lead to a way to wipe out the disease in people, researchers identified a cancer-destroying mechanism involving a gene that encodes for the tumor suppressor protein p53.

Honeybees need a healthy diet of pollen, nectar and water. But at a bee laboratory in eastern Washington state, Steve Sheppard fills their feeding tubes with murky brown liquid from the forest. His bees are getting a healthy dose of mushroom juice.

A pioneering surgical technique has restored some hand and arm movement to patients immobilized by spinal cord injuries in the neck. Like railroad switchmen, the focus is on rerouting passageways. But, instead of trains on a track, surgeons redirect peripheral nerves in a quadriplegic’s arms and hands by connecting healthy nerves to the injured nerves.

Working with gut stem cells from humans and mice, scientists from the Johns Hopkins Children's Center and the University of Pittsburgh have successfully grown healthy intestine atop a 3-D scaffold made of a substance used in surgical sutures.

Last August, the seasonal harmful algal blooms (HABs) in Lake Erie grew so extreme that they poisoned the water system in Toledo, Ohio, leaving nearly half a million residents without drinking water. But a few researchers at the time collected some of the toxic HABs, and have now shown that, by heating them at temperatures of 700-1000 °C in argon gas, the HABs can be converted into a material called "hard carbon" that can be used as high-capacity, low-cost electrodes for sodium-ion (Na-ion) batteries.

A researcher from the University of Southampton has produced a scientific study of the climate scenario featured in the disaster movie 'The Day After Tomorrow'. In the 2004 film, climate warming caused an abrupt collapse of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC), leading to catastrophic events such as tornados destroying Los Angeles, New York being flooded and the northern hemisphere freezing.

A reassessment of ancient rocks has led scientists to estimate that Earth's inner core started to form earlier than was previously thought, around 1.3 billion years ago. As it started to freeze, the core began generating a bigger magnetic field, which continues to today.

Whale Rock. It's got quite a story to tell. When scientists first saw it in images returned from Nasa's Curiosity rover on Mars, they really weren't sure what to make of it.

The path to Mars goes through the moon — or the region of space near the moon, anyway. NASA aims to put boots on Mars in the 2030s after first gathering human-spaceflight experience and expertise in low Earth orbit and the "proving ground" of cis-lunar space near the moon.

Just days after doomsdayers claimed the end of the world was nigh, a Nasa animation has revealed a giant asteroid is heading towards the planet. Called Asteroid 86666 (2000 FL10), the 1.5-mile wide (2.5km) space rock is due to make its closest pass on 10 October.

The first color images of Pluto's atmospheric hazes, returned by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft last week, reveal that the hazes are blue. "Who would have expected a blue sky in the Kuiper Belt? It's gorgeous," said Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator from Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), Boulder, Colorado.

Ancient lakes that came and went over millions of years in the Gale crater basin on Mars may have persisted long enough for life to evolve in them, researchers have said. Nasa scientists analysed fresh images sent back from the Curiosity rover and found evidence of lakes in the basin that lasted for up to 10,000 years at a time – potentially long enough to support life.

Last week NASA confirmed the presence of water on Mars. But today, they’ve released a new study that suggests lakes on Mars’ surface stored enough water to support life billions of years ago. Alt: Wet paleoclimate of Mars revealed by ancient lakes at Gale Crater

Humans will be living and working on Mars in colonies entirely independent of Earth by the 2030s, Nasa has said. The US space organisation today released its plan for establishing permanent settlements on the red planet, setting out in detail plans to create ‘deep-space habitation facilities’ which will act as stepping stones to Mars.

“Baby, I was born this way,” Lady Gaga sang in a 2011 hit that quickly became a gay anthem. Indeed, over the past 2 decades, researchers have turned up considerable evidence that homosexuality isn't a lifestyle choice, but is rooted in a person's biology and at least in part determined by genetics. Yet actual “gay genes” have been elusive. Alt: Scientists find DNA differences between gay men and their straight twin brothers

The way our brain responds to others' good fortune is linked to how empathetic people report themselves to be, according to new research. They study shows that a part of the brain called the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) seems particularly attuned to other people's good news, but how it responds varies substantially depending on our levels of empathy.

When done properly, the chore decreased nervousness by 27% and increased mental inspiration by 25%. Mindful dishwashing can decrease stress and calm the mind, a new study finds.

First-born children are more likely to be short sighted because their parents force them to study more, research has suggested. Order of birth has long been seen as crucial to personality, with the oldest child often growing up to be more conservative, academic and law-abiding than their more reckless young siblings.

DNA from a man who lived in Ethiopia about 4,500 years ago is prompting scientists to rethink the history of human migration in Africa. Until now, the conventional wisdom had been that the first groups of modern humans left Africa roughly 70,000 years ago, stopping in the Middle East en route to Europe, Asia and beyond. Then about 3,000 years ago, a group of farmers from the Middle East and present-day Turkey came back to the Horn of Africa (probably bringing crops like wheat, barley and lentils with them).

If you have diabetes, cancer, or heart problems, maybe you should blame it on your dad’s behavior or environment. Or even your grandfather’s. That’s because, in recent years, scientists have shown that before his offspring are even conceived a father’s life experiences involving food, drugs, exposure to toxic products, and even stress can affect the development and health of his children and grandchildren.

A pioneering surgical technique has restored some hand and arm movement to patients immobilized by spinal cord injuries in the neck, reports a new study. The researchers assessed outcomes of nerve-transfer surgery in nine quadriplegic patients with spinal cord injuries in the neck. Every patient in the study reported improved hand and arm function.

A Japanese firm plans to grow more than 10 million heads of lettuce a year by replacing its human farmers with robots in 2017. The machines will automate every step of the planting process, from germination to seeding, harvesting and delivery while also monitoring levels of carbon dioxide and lighting conditions.

Some people might find it enough reason to worry; others, enough reason to be upbeat about what we can achieve in computer science; all await the next chapters in artificial intelligence to see what more a machine can do to mimic human intelligence. We already saw what machines can do in arithmetic, chess and pattern recognition.

If you want to learn how something works, one strategy is to take it apart and put it back together again. For 10 years, a global initiative called the Blue Brain Project has been attempting to do this digitally with a section of juvenile rat brain. The project presents a first draft of this reconstruction, which contains over 31,000 neurons, 55 layers of cells, and 207 different neuron subtypes.

For the first time, primitive human kidneys have been created in a laboratory dish, by using stem cells. Although the kidneys cannot perform the functions of a fully formed adult kidney, the researchers hope the achievement will someday lead to new ways to treat people suffering from kidney failure.

One benefit of the closeness between pigs and humans is the potential to be organ donors. There are however, just a few nagging uncertainties that still stand in the way. The big one, the possibility of porcine endogenous retroviruses (PERVs) getting reactivated inside the human organ recipient, is no longer the concern it once was. That comes thanks to the recent groundbreaking work of the one-man army of genetics, George Church, and his lab at Harvard. The latest news, just reported in Nature, is that the group was able to use CRISPR gene-editing techniques to inactivate 62 PERVs in pig embryos.

Pigs foraging along a Scottish coastline have unwittingly uprooted the earliest evidence for a remote population of hunter-gatherers. The uprooted items, stone tools that have been dated to around 12,000 years ago, are described in the latest issue of British Archaeology. The tools were discovered on the east coast of the Isle of Islay, Scotland, and include sharp points -- likely used for hunting big game -- scrapers and more.

Past research has shown that the pleasure and reward centers of the brain are activated similarly by dangerous drugs as well as by exercise, which is why therapies have been developed for drug addicts that include lots of exercise. Now, researchers at the University of Missouri have found that activating these pleasure and reward receptors in the brain could provide the "reward" of dangerous drugs without having to consume those drugs.

Rats exposed to frequent physical, social, and predatory stress during adolescence solved problems and foraged more efficiently under high-threat conditions in adulthood compared with rats that developed without stress, according to Penn State researchers. The results may provide insights into how humans respond to adolescent stress.

Ravens spontaneously solve a task that requires both coordination and cooperation -- an ability that so far only a handful of species like chimpanzees and elephants have proved to master. A team of researchers has shown this for the ravens using an experimental set-up.

The mammoth floods in South Carolina have claimed the lives of fourteen people and left at least nine dams breached. But the water doesn’t seem to be much of a problem for ants, who are building body rafts to stay afloat. While reporting on the flood conditions, FOX Carolina reporter Adrian Acosta noticed that what he thought was a pile of mud, was actually moving. Upon closer inspection he realized the mass wasn’t dirt, but an ant island.

Major volcanic eruptions can have a significant effect on the flow of the biggest rivers around the world, research shows. In the first study of its kind, scientists sought to better understand how big volcanic eruptions, which can trigger a shortage of rainfall in many regions of the world, can impact on rivers. Their

Wind power is now the cheapest electricity to produce in both Germany and the U.K., even without government subsidies, according to a new analysis by Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF). It's the first time that threshold has been crossed by a G7 economy.1 But that's less interesting than what just happened in the U.S.