Newsdesk Archive

There have been many estimates for when the earth's inner core was formed, but scientists from the University of Liverpool have used new data which indicates that the Earth's inner core was formed 1 - 1.5 billion years ago as it "froze" from the surrounding molten iron outer core.

Using images from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and ESO's Very Large Telescope, astronomers have discovered never-before-seen structures within a dusty disc surrounding a nearby star. The fast-moving wave-like features in the disc of the star AU Microscopii are unlike anything ever observed, or even predicted, before now. The origin and nature of these features present a new mystery for astronomers to explore. The results are published in the journal Nature on 8 October 2015.

Researchers from the University of Southampton have developed a new method for measuring the mass of pulsars – highly magnetised rotating neutron stars formed from the remains of massive stars after they explode into supernovae.

Does Jupiter protect us from harm, or cause more objects to change trajectory and head towards Earth? Like me, you're probably a little ego-geocentric about the importance of Earth. It's where you were born, it's where you keep all your stuff. It's even where you're going to die – I know, I know, not you Elon Musk, you're going to "retire" on Mars, right after you nuke the snot out of it.

Scientists are to send two spacecraft to knock an asteroid off course, as part of a practice for what they would do if a rock was threatening the future of humanity. The joint US-European Aida (Asteroid Deflection & Assessment) mission will send a small spacecraft to crash into the egg-shaped rock, known as Didymoon. That asteroid doesn’t pose any threat to us — and is far too small to do so — but the mission will be important test for whether our plans would work if we do eventually come at risk of civilisation being wiped out by a space rock.

The world just won't seem to end on schedule. The 2012 Mayan apocalypse was a total bust. The "super blood moon" of September 2015 failed to lead to rains of frogs and fire. And the May 2011 predictions of judgment day by an Oakland, California, radio preacher failed to pan out. Or did they?

An extinct human relative found in a dark, cramped cave in South Africa was adept at both swinging in the trees and walking on two feet, making it unique among our known ancient forerunners, scientists say. A fresh analysis of hand and foot bones of Homo naledi, the latest addition to the human genus, shows that while the creature’s foot resembles that of modern humans, its fingers are curved, in an unmistakable sign of arboreal living.

When we humans strut our stuff, we do it by coordinating the movements of our hips and upper bodies. As the pelvis rotates forward, the trunk moves in the opposite direction, cancelling out angular momentum and reducing the amount of energy burned while walking. Finally, swinging arms counterbalance the sway of the hips, completing the characteristic human gait.

The blue whale is the largest creature on Earth and perhaps the biggest that ever lived, so it is no surprise it has a huge appetite. But the strategies this behemoth uses to get enough food has not been well understood - until now. Scientists said on Friday a study of blue whales off California's coast that used tags to track their movements and their prey, tiny shrimp-like crustaceans called krill, showed these marine mammals are not indiscriminate grazers as long thought.

A monkey that sneezes when it rains and a "walking" fish are among more than 200 species discovered in the fragile eastern Himalayas in recent years, according to conservation group WWF. WWF has compiled a survey of wildlife discovered by scientists across Bhutan, northeast India, Nepal, north Myanmar and southern Tibet in a bid to raise awareness of the threats facing the ecologically sensitive region.

A team of scientists have discovered a new species of rat in Indonesia. The species, which has been named Hyorhinomys stuempkei - hog-nosed rat - has "distinct and unique features uncommon to other rats", they said.

Scientists are planning to clone the only giant pandas in the UK in a bid to save them from extinction. The experts who cloned Dolly the sheep have taken tissue samples from Tian Tian and Yang Guang at Edinburgh Zoo and used them to grow more cells.

From “brain games” designed to enhance mental fitness, to games used to improve real-world problems, to games created purely to entertain, today’s video games can have a variety of potential impacts on the brain. A new article argues that it is the specific content, dynamics, and mechanics of individual games that determine their effects on the brain and that action video games might have particularly positive benefits.

The part of the brain responsible for seeing is more powerful than previously believed. In fact, the visual cortex can essentially make decisions just like the brain's traditional 'higher level' areas, finds a new study.

A mysterious archaeological site dubbed “The Rock Herd” which consists of rock carvings of animal heads made by an unknown sculptor in an unknown time period has been found near the eastern Bulgarian city of Sliven. The unexplained site which appears to be an archaeological monument located in the mountains near Sliven has become known to the Bulgarian public from photos posted on Facebook, reports the local news site “Sliven Agency”.

A new discovery documents the intricate arrangement of the muscles and ligaments that controlled the main feathers of the wing of an ancient bird, supporting the notion that at least some of the most ancient birds performed aerodynamic feats in a fashion similar to those of many living birds.

A new study shows that iron-bearing rocks that formed at the ocean floor 3.2 billion years ago carry unmistakable evidence of oxygen. The only logical source for that oxygen is the earliest known example of photosynthesis by living organisms, say geoscientists.

Italian archaeologists digging in a small Tuscan village have unearthed part of what they believe is a large and impressive ancient Roman mosaic. Laying in a private property next to a local road in the village Capraia e Limite, the mosaic features two different designs.

The search to uncover the true story behind the "Gospel of Jesus's Wife," a controversial papyrus that suggests that Jesus Christ had a wife, has extended beyond the theology halls of Harvard Divinity School, back to 1960s East Germany. The origin of the papyrus has remained elusive, and many scholars debate the document's authenticity.

A trip to Cappadocia is rarely complete without a descent into the underground city of Derinkuyu. But while it and other similar subterranean settlements have acquired a fame that extends even beyond Turkey, the underground city of Ayd?ntepe in northern Turkey remains far off the tourist trail.

In 2007, the Whole Foods supermarket chain built one of their largest stores on New York City’s storied Lower East Side, occupying an entire block of East Houston Street from the Bowery to Chrystie Street. For the well-off, the abundant availability of high-quality organic foods was a welcome addition, but for the majority of locals, many of whom had roots going back generations to New York’s immigrant beginnings, the scale of the new store, selling wares that few of them could easily afford, was a symbolic affront to the traditions of this part of the city.

People with heart disease may benefit from maintaining positive emotions, according to health researchers. Over the course of five years the researchers tracked more than 1,000 patients with coronary heart disease. Patients who reported higher positive psychological states were more likely to be physically active, sleep better and take their heart medications and were also less likely to smoke, compared to patients with lower levels of positive states.

Opinions about beauty may be shaped just as much by past social interactions as by our genes Beauty really is in the eye of the beholder, because much of what attracts us to other people is guided by our individual life experiences, according to a survey that asked thousands of volunteers to rate the attractiveness of various multinational faces.

Researchers at the UNC School of Medicine found that people with anorexia nervosa have very different microbial communities residing inside their guts compared to healthy individuals and that this bacterial imbalance is associated with some of the psychological symptoms related to the eating disorder.

Just switch them off and on again. “Rebooting” ordinary pancreas cells so they produce insulin could potentially help people with type 1 diabetes manage their blood sugar levels without the need for daily injections. The approach is simpler and potentially safer than giving people stem cells that have been coaxed into becoming insulin-producing cells.

A Disney Research team has developed technology that projects coloring book characters in 3D while you're still working on coloring them. The process was detailed in a new paper called "Live Texturing of Augmented Reality Characters from Colored Drawings," and it was presented at the IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality on September 29th. That title's a mouthful, but it's descriptive

The man who created the 5-hour Energy drink says he has more money than he needs—about $4 billion more. So he’s giving it away, spending his fortune on a quest to fix the world's biggest problems, including energy. Manoj Bhargava has built a stationary bike to power the millions of homes worldwide that have little or zero electricity. Early next year in India, he plans to distribute 10,000 of his Free Electric battery-equipped bikes, which he says will keep lights and basic appliances going for an entire day with one hour of pedaling.

When given the choice between sinking and swimming, these RoboBees will swim every time. We first wrote about Harvard scientists' invention of robotic bees back in 2013. In some ways, not much has changed. The bees are still leashed to their power supply, too small to carry onboard computers and batteries. But in the past two years, they've picked up a new trick: they've learned how to swim.

Deforestation downs 10 billion trees around the globe annually. Replanting trees by hand is slow, expensive, and barely puts a dent in reversing the damage. But one startup wants to use drones that can reforest our increasingly tree-strapped Earth, on a big enough scale to replace slow and expensive hired humans.

Almost one-third of cactus species are under threat as a result of over-harvesting and illegal trade in the plants, a global study has concluded. Conservationists voiced concern, saying the level of threat to cacti was much greater than previously thought.

Rose gardeners have a lot to say about aphids. Some may advise insecticides as a way to manage an infestation, but others will swear by live ladybugs (natural predators of aphids). The latter is more environmental friendly, and once the ladybugs run out of food to eat, they move on.

A carnivorous pitcher plant uses power from falling raindrops to fling ants to their doom, biologists have discovered. The team, from the University of Bristol, found that raindrops kick off very fast vibrations in the lid of the plant's jug-shaped leaves.

A team of scientists led by Dr Pierre-Marc Delaux (John Innes Centre / University of Wisconsin, Madison) has solved a long-running mystery about the first stages of plant life on earth. The team of scientists from the John Innes Centre, the University of Wisconsin -- Madison and other international collaborators, has discovered how an ancient alga was able to inhabit land, before it went on to evolve into the world's first plant and colonise the earth.

Mummification was widely practiced in what is now Britain throughout the Bronze Age, a new study reports. Archaeologists used microscopic bone analysis to study 34 human remains from Britain dating to the Bronze Age, spanning from 2200 B.C. to 750 B.C., and compared them with known mummies in northern Yemen and Ireland. The pattern of erosion in 16 of the British skeletons was consistent with that of the known mummies.

The ancient city of Palmyra risks complete destruction, Syria’s director general of antiquities and museums warned Monday, a day after Islamic State militants destroyed the city’s vaunted 2,000-year-old Arch of Triumph in the latest attack on Syria’s most revered historic sites. “If the situation continues like this, I’m sure we will lose Palmyra in three to six months,” the director, Maamoun AbdulKarim, said from Damascus. “We are in shock once again.”

When I eventually reach Graham Hancock's house, I am late and out of breath. The amateur archaeologist lives in a grand slab of a place halfway up one of Bath's lung-busting hills and I have been struggling with a bag full of his bestselling books. The 65-year-old opens his imposing front door, waves away my apologies, and ushers me straight down to his study Get Magicans of the Gods now from Amazon.co.uk, or Pre-order from Amazon.com

Dramatically perched on an Andes mountain ridge some 8,000 feet above sea level in Peru, Machu Picchu is a visual wonder and a technical masterpiece. "It is breathtaking," said Brenda Bradley, an associate professor of anthropology at the George Washington University.

From the country where hotels are operated by robots and androids serve as clerks at department stores comes the latest unmanned project: the robot cab. Japan’s cabinet office, Kanagawa prefecture and Robot Taxi Inc. on Thursday said they will start experimenting with unmanned taxi service beginning in 2016. The service will be offered for approximately 50 people in Kanagawa prefecture, just south of Tokyo, with the auto-driving car carrying them from their homes to local grocery stores.

Daimler and Mercedes-Benz have taken the first autonomous-driving truck for a spin on a motorway in southern Germany, after a special license was issued that allowed the robot truck to hit the public-access road. The Mercedes-Benz Actros, a 430-horsepower truck, equipped with the intelligent ‘Highway Pilot’ system, drove for 14 kilometers (9 miles) on the A8 motorway, without the help of the driver.

Researchers from the University of Georgia found that genomes of snake species such as king cobra, boa constrictor and Burmese phyton were interestingly embedded with blueprints for the development of limbs. As snakes are the best examples that movement can be possible even without arms and legs, this finding came as a surprise for the experts.

When researchers captured Eurasian reed warblers along the Russian coast during their spring migrations and flew them 1,000 kilometers east to Zvenigorod, the birds weren't fazed; they simply re-oriented themselves toward their original destination. Now, the researchers who first demonstrated the birds' navigational skill in the Cell Press journal Current Biology several years ago are back with new evidence that reed warblers rely on a geomagnetic map to point them in the right direction.

Removing humans from what is now the exclusion zone around the damaged Chernobyl nuclear reactor has allowed wildlife to return. This is according to a long-term census of mammals in the area, which researchers say has shown that wildlife numbers are likely to be "much higher than they were before the accident".

A farmer, ploughing a field near Snettisham in Norfolk in 1948, turned up what he thought was a bit of an old brass bedstead. But it was gold, not brass, which he’d discovered and this was just the first piece of the richest iron age hoard ever discovered in Europe, including more than 200 torcs and fragments of torcs: neck rings made of gold, silver and bronze. Today, the collection is in the British Museum, and earlier this year, I was lucky enough to get a close look at some of these beautiful treasures.

A unique petroglyph discovered near the Atlantic coast of northern Spain has provided evidence that contacts between ancient Atlantic cultures and contemporaneous cultures of the Mediterranean were earlier and perhaps more intense than previously thought.

After finding buck-toothed fossils in the New Mexico badlands, researchers suggest a beaver-like species likely thrived after an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago.

The fish, named Rhegmaspis xiphoidea, belongs to an extinct group of jawless marine and freshwater fish called galeaspids, characterized by their big and bizzare head-shields. The species swam in Devonian period seas about 410 million years ago, long before dinosaurs lived on Earth, according to a study published in the journal Vertebrata PalAsiatica.

Decades of research on Montana's state fossil -- the "good mother lizard" Maiasaura peeblesorum -- has resulted in the most detailed life history of any dinosaur known and created a model to which all other dinosaurs can be compared, according to new research published recently in the journal Paleobiology.

In his laboratory at the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., Dr. Dennis Stanford hands me a slab of brown plaster. It’s a replica of a bone fragment – from a mastodon or a giant ground sloth – the original having been dredged from the bottom of the Chesapeake Bay. On the slab is an etching of a mastodon, placed there by some unknown artist long ago. By itself, the find is a truly remarkable one. But more than this, the artifact, dated to a staggering 22,000 years ago, is now part of a growing body of evidence that could overturn everything scientists once thought they knew about the peopling of the Americas.

James Bristle and a friend were digging in his southern Michigan soybean field when they unearthed what looked like a bent fence post, caked with mud. Instead, it was part of a pelvis from an ancient woolly mammoth that lived up to 15,000 years ago.

A Mono County doctor has been indicted on 21 felony counts related to the alleged looting of Native American artifacts from tribal and public lands including Death Valley National Park. The case against Jonathan Bourne, 59, an anesthesiologist at Mammoth Hospital, stems from a yearlong investigation launched after photos of him digging a wooden bow out of a melting glacier in the High Sierra appeared on a hiking club's website.

ISIS militants have destroyed the iconic Arch of Triumph in Palmyra, the latest cultural treasure of the ancient site that they have reduced to rubble, Syrian authorities said.

When the eastern flank of a Cape Verde volcano splashed into the sea some 73,000 years ago, it generated an enormous wave that rose to 170 metres of height before it crashed into a nearby island, geophysicists have discovered. The mega-tsunami, reported on 2 October in Science Advances1, is one of the largest in the geological record. These kinds of apocalyptic events could happen again, although it is impossible to say when or where, says Ricardo Ramalho, a geophysicist at the University of Bristol, UK, and a co-author of the Cape Verde study. “Most of these fairly young oceanic volcanoes — such as in the Azores and the Canary Islands and Hawaii — are incredibly high and steep, so the potential energy for a collapse to happen again is there,” he says.

A serendipitous deal between a history museum and a smuggler has provided new insight into one of the most famous stories ever told: "The Epic of Gilgamesh." The new finding, a clay tablet, reveals a previously unknown "chapter" of the epic poem from ancient Mesopotamia. This new section brings both noise and color to a forest for the gods that was thought to be a quiet place in the work of literature. The newfound verse also reveals details about the inner conflict the poem's heroes endured.

During the press conference held Thursday at the State Information Authority in Heliopolis, archaeologist Nicholas Reeves announced that the gold funerary mask belonging to the boy king was originally made for his stepmother Nefertiti.

How happy you are may have something to do with who you know -- and where you come from. A sociology professor, set out to discover whether knowing high-status people helped or harmed mental health, using depressive symptoms as a proxy.

Researchers are testing a prosthesis that translates short-term memories into longer-term ones, with the potential to bypass damaged portions of the brain. Related: Sleep may strengthen long-term memories in the immune system

A drug now being used to treat cancer might make it easier to learn a language, sharpen memory and help those with dementia and Alzheimer's disease by rewiring the brain and keeping neurons alive. New research found that a drug -- RGFP966 -- administered to rats made them more attuned to what they were hearing, able to retain and remember more information, and develop new connections that allowed these memories to be transmitted between brain cells.

Researchers are continually on the hunt for a male contraceptive that could be the equivalent to the pill taken by women, and new research in Japan suggests we might have finally gotten there. A study on mice by researchers from Osaka University has discovered a way of making male mice infertile temporarily by blocking a specific protein in the animals’ sperm – a protein that’s also found in human sperm.

Research finds around 1000 molecular reactions to exercise, opening the door for drug treatments to mirror the health benefits of exercise. Drugs that mimic the benefits of exercise could soon become a reality thanks to breakthrough research from the University of Sydney's Charles Perkins Centre.

Future wars will have much more devastating weapons than airstrikes, tanks and even nuclear weapons. Russia’s Ministry of Emergency Situations warned about new threats, including geophysical and genetic weapons that could pose threats to Russia’s well-being in the future. Future weapons will be based on energy, electromagnetic, radiological, geophysical and genetic principles. There will also be special information weapons to change people's perception, completely changing their mind, the Ministry said.

NASA scientists were conferring today about a nearby planet that is shockingly similar to Earth. It is just 5% smaller in radius and 15% smaller in mass. It is almost the exact same age as our planet, and gets its warmth from an identical star. The only thing that’s a bit off is that it orbits a bit closer to its star than Earth does, so it receives nearly twice as much radiation. On the other, it also reflects away a lot of that radiation. Its theoretical (equilibrium) temperature is just below freezing, so with a little natural greenhouse warming it would be quite an inviting place.

Red dwarf stars may be able to support habitable exoplanets after all — through complex tidal interactions between star and planet, global magnetic fields could evolve, protecting hypothetical life forms from the red dwarfs’ ferocious nature. Once identified as the perfect place to search for habitable exoplanets, in recent years, the life-giving reputation of red dwarf stars has taken a downturn. Sure, red dwarfs are abundant in our galaxy and we’ve spotted many with planetary systems, but the environment surrounding these tiny stars are generally considered to be a bad place for alien life to set up home.

Although scientists have long considered oxygen a sign that life exists on an alien planet, new research suggests the element could be produced without it. Oxygen may function as a sign of life on Earth, but that's not necessarily the case for planets around other stars. The new research shows that the interaction of titanium oxide with water could produce oxygen in the atmosphere of an exoplanet without the involvement of living organisms.

Without water, life as we understand it would be impossible. It is the one substance upon which our existence depends. And now it has been found streaking down the red, dusty slopes of the hills of Mars. The discovery, announced by Nasa last week , that the Red Planet has running water has provided scientists who are seeking life there with a major boost. As Jim Green, Nasa’s director of planetary science, put it: “If you look at Earth, water is an essential ingredient. Wherever we find water, we find life.”

Will NASA’s first Martian colony be built from ice? The agency has awarded the first place prize in its 3-D Printed Mars Habitat Contest to the visually stunning Mars Ice House, a sleek structure that aims to harness the Red Planet’s liquid water and low temperatures to build a “multi-layered pressurized radiation shell of ice.”

When news “broke” about the discovery of liquid water gushing over the slopes of Mars this week, the world went Red Planet crazy… again. Water (in a liquid state) has been confirmed to exist on the parched planet’s surface, turning a once desert world into a veritable oasis. That’s what the headlines led us to believe, at least. Of course, this isn’t the first time water has been discovered on Mars. Related: Mars Orbiter Spots a Huge Avalanche of Carbon Dioxide on the Red Planet

He wants to create two tiny pulsing suns over the Martian poles A few weeks ago, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk was likened to a James Bond villain after he announced his idea to nuke Mars on The Late Show with Steven Colbert. He said it was the most rapid way to induce climate change on the planet. Now the billionaire has clarified those comments a bit further. He doesn't want to nuke the surface of Mars; he just wants to nuke the sky over the Martian poles every couple of seconds.

On 25 September, a sensational rumour appeared on Twitter: Lawrence Krauss, a cosmologist, reported hearing that the world’s largest gravitational-wave observatory had seen a signal, barely a week after its official re-opening. The rumour had been spreading around physics circles for at least a week. If it is true, and if the signal seen by the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) genuinely represents the signature of a gravitational wave, it would confirm one of the most-elusive and spectacular predictions of the general theory of relativity almost exactly 100 years after Albert Einstein first proposed it.

Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology have arrived at how what is known as time-reversal symmetry can break in one class of superconducting material. The results have been published in the highly ranked Nature Physics journal, which also put the Chalmers researchers' study on the cover.

Italian surgeon Sergio Canavero says he will change medical history as soon as 2017 – he even has a volunteer. Can it be done? Earlier this year, Canavero became famous around the world when he enlarged on plans, long cherished, to remove the heads of two people. One would be alive, with an ailing body (a paraplegic, say), the other newly dead or doomed (perhaps the braindead victim of an accident).

A few weeks ago, a drunk man in Japan was arrested for kicking a humanoid robot that was stationed as a greeter at a SoftBank, Corp., store, which develops the robots. According to the police report, the man said he was angry at the attitude of one of the store clerks. The "Pepper robot" now moves more slowly, and its internal computer system may have been damaged.

A school of fish might seem like a sea of identical faces, but at least one species has no problem telling its comrades—and even strangers—apart, new research says. To human eyes, which cannot see ultraviolet light, the Ambon damselfish (Pomacentrus amboinensis), appears yellow with a few spots.

Hummingbird eggs and babies are a favourite snack for nest-robbing jays, so what’s a mother hummingbird to do to protect her family? According to a study published recently, the hummingbird builds her nest near or under a hawk nest because jays stay away to avoid being eaten by the hungry hawks

The mystery of why some people appear to have healthy lungs despite a lifetime of smoking has been explained by UK scientists. The analysis of more than 50,000 people showed favourable mutations in people's DNA enhanced lung function and masked the deadly impact of smoking.

Lacking certain gut microbes in the first three months after birth can put babies at risk for asthma, a new study shows. Children who had low levels of four types of bacteria early in infancy were more likely to be diagnosed with asthma by age 3 than tots who had more of the microbes in their feces.

Dramatic increases in exposure to toxic chemicals in the last four decades are threatening human reproduction and health, according to experts. Exposure to toxic environmental chemicals is linked to millions of deaths and costs billions of dollars every year, according to the authors.

A new translation effort aims to make all of Shakespeare’s plays comprehensible to today’s audiences The Oregon Shakespeare Festival will announce next week that it has commissioned translations of all 39 of the Bard’s plays into modern English, with the idea of having them ready to perform in three years. Yes, translations—because Shakespeare’s English is so far removed from the English of 2015 that it often interferes with our own comprehension.

Is that guy sexy? Is that woman beautiful? If you ask these questions to a group of people, they may have different answers, and a new study hints at why: Your perception of other people's attractiveness is mainly the result of your own experiences. In the study of twins, researchers found that a person's environment plays a bigger role than genes in shaping whom they find attractive.

A mass grave of woolly mammoths has been discovered in Siberia, with around 550 bones from the extinct creatures being recovered from the remote site. Found close to the 2,268-mile-long Ob River, it is the fifth such necropolis to be found in the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Region.

Archeologists using 21st-century technology are mapping out the exact spots British soldiers and Colonial militiamen were standing as they fired at each other during a pivotal skirmish on the first day of the American Revolution.

A rare wooden boat dating to the Bronze Age has been discovered in Kent. The log boat was unearthed at a boatyard in Hollow Shore, Faversham, on Sunday but was returned to the water to prevent it from drying out.

A nearly 3,000-year-old carving stolen more than four decades ago from a remote area of southern Mexico has been recovered in France. The Olmec carving dating to around 900 B.C. had been chipped off the rock face sometime between the arrival of an archaeological team in 1968 and 1972, when the team returned to the area. It resurfaced recently in France under unclear circumstances.

Three inscriptions might have revealed the identity of the individual originally buried in the mysterious mound complex that was opened in northern Greece last summer, Greek archaeologists announced on Wednesday.

The Egyptian pharaoh queen Nefertiti could be buried in King Tutankhamun's tomb, says a British archaeologist. Nicholas Reeves says he believes there may be two hidden doorways behind the Tutankhamun's burial chamber, leading to two undiscovered rooms.

Ancient Egyptians expected to be very busy in the afterlife. Thousands of years ago they painted big beautiful eyes on the outside of their coffins so that they could see what was going on in the world. Some of the nobility around the upper Egyptian city of Asyut even had detailed tables of star movements drawn on the inside of their coffins. The depictions look like timetables or spreadsheets of when various stars first appear (or disappear) over the horizon at different times of the year—only a lot more beautiful.

It’s a mystery that has been unsolved for 17 years. The Marree Man was first discovered in the South Australian outback in June 1998. The 28km-long artwork was so distinct it could be seen in space, with a NASA satellite image from 1998 capturing a vivid carving of a man throwing a stick.

The enamel that gives our teeth their bite evolved from the scales of ancient fish that lived more than 400 million years ago, fossil and genetic evidence suggests. Enamel is the hardest tissue produced in the bodies of people and other vertebrates, including fish.

A new study explores one of the 'big five' mass extinctions, the Permian-Triassic event, revealing unexpected results about the types of animals that were most vulnerable to extinction, and the factors that might best predict community stability during times of great change. The authors say cutting-edge modeling techniques helped highlight the critical importance of understanding food webs (knowing 'who eats what') when trying to predict what communities look like before, during, and after a mass extinction.

The asteroid impact that triggered the mass extinction event that killed off the dinosaurs accelerated one of the planet's largest volcanic eruptions, further compounding the disaster, a new study suggests. The research, published in the journal Science, concluded that earthquakes generated by the impact into Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula 66 million years ago changed India's Deccan Traps volcanic field from a series of small eruptions to dramatically more massive events lasting hundreds of thousands of years.

The team behind Nasa's Dawn mission to Ceres has released striking new images, but remains unable to explain the dwarf planet's most intriguing mystery. Bright spots within a 90km-wide crater have baffled scientists since the probe spotted them on its approach.

The first private moon landing could be just two years away. California-based company Moon Express, which aims to fly commercial missions to the moon and help unlock its resources, has signed a five-launch deal with Rocket Lab, with the first two robotic liftoffs scheduled to take place in 2017.

A team of rocketeers launched an out-of-this-world Kickstarter campaign today (Oct. 1) to raise $1 million for "Moonspike" – an ambitious project to launch the first crowdfunded rocket to the moon. The Moonspike project aims to launch a small titanium payload carrying photos and videos from project backers into space, and ultimately crash it into the moon.

Penitentes are nature’s ice sculptures: snowy pillars that form high in the Andean glaciers, where the air is particularly dry. Now physicists have figured out not only how these pillars form, but also why they tend to form at preferred spacings between columns.

From Monday large shops in England will charge 5p for each plastic bag. But how did shoppers get so used to free carrier bags in the first place, asks Chris Stokel-Walker. The Single Use Carrier Bags Charges (England) Order 2015 comes into force on 5 October.

The central production line of active biomolecules – from DNA to RNA to proteins – is an exquisitely fine-tuned process with a rich evolutionary heritage. From the four-base nucleotide alphabet, three-letter sets, or codons, specify one of 20 amino acids to build the enzymes that make metabolism happen.

For decades, DARPA, the secretive research arm of the Department of Defense, has dreamed of turning soldiers into cyborgs. And now it’s finally happening. The agency has funded projects that involve implanting chips into soldiers’ brains that could one day enhance performance on the battlefield and repair traumatized brains once the fog of war has lifted. Related: DARPA Gives MIT Lab $32 Million To Program Living Cells

A team of researchers with members from the University of California and Rice University has found a way to get a flat transistor to defy theoretical limitations on Field Effect Transistors (FETs). In their paper published in the journal Nature, the team describes their work and why they believe it could lead to consumer devices that have both smaller electronics and longer battery life. Katsuhiro Tomioka with Erasmus MC University Medical Center in the Netherlands offers a News & Views article discussing the work done by the team in the same journal edition.

As long as the temperature is above absolute zero, gas molecules are always in constant random motion. They may diffuse—or spread out—through three-dimensional space or, in a process called "surface diffusion," along the two-dimensional surface of a solid. The most well-known mechanism to explain surface diffusion is a classical mechanism called thermal hopping, in which gas molecules jump from one adsorption site (the place where the gas molecules attach to the surface) to another at a temperature-dependent rate. So far, thermal hopping is the only mechanism known to explain the surface diffusion of hydrogen atoms on the surface of ice.

An energy harvesting technology that its developers say will be able to turn ambient radio frequency waves into usable electricity to charge low power devices was unveiled in London on Wednesday. Alt: Electricity from the air - Drayson's big idea

Living bacteria found in permafrost - '3.5 million years old' - is 'scientific sensation' which allows 'mice grannies' to reproduce. Alt: Has the secret to eternal life been found? Russian scientist says he is stronger and healthier after injecting himself with 3.5 MILLION year old bacteria