Newsdesk Archive
From floating spoons and coffins to crabs and pyramids, alien hunters are often reporting strange structures in images beamed back from the surface of Mars.
Now, the latest 'discovery' seen using high-resolution images of the Martian surface, a mysterious circle of stones have been spotted on top of a raised mound on the planet.
Alt: Is This Marshenge? Stonehenge-Like Formation Seen On Mars
Archaeologists excavating the famous ancient Greek shipwreck that yielded the Antikythera mechanism have recovered more than 50 items including a bronze armrest (possibly part of a throne), remains of a bone flute, fine glassware, luxury ceramics, a pawn from an ancient board game, and several elements of the ship itself.
Researchers in Portugal have found the first radiological outline of a kidney in an ancient Egyptian mummy and the oldest case of renal tuberculosis.
Kept at the National Museum of Archaeology in Lisbon, Portugal, the mummy, of unknown provenance, dates back to some 2,800 years
Italian archaeologists trying to solve the mystery behind the identity of one of the world's most famous models said Wednesday that they had found shards of bone which could have belonged to Mona Lisa.
The team is certain that Florentine Lisa Gherardini was the mysterious woman who sat for Leonardo da Vinci's portrait, but after years of research on skeletons unearthed in the Tuscan city, they have just one bit of femur that might match -- and even that is too damaged for DNA testing.
The bones of men who may have witnessed the tumultuous events of 1066 in Westminster Abbey, when one king was buried and two were crowned in a year, have been discovered along with the skeleton of a three-year-old child buried under Victorian drainage pipes just outside the wall of Poet’s Corner.
The world’s oldest flour was made from oat some 32,000 years ago, according to a new analysis of a Paleolithic stone tool.
Recovered in 1989 from a cave in southeastern Italy called Grotta Paglicci, in a layer dating to the Gravettian period about 32,000 years ago, the pestle-type stone was used by hunter-gatherers who made intensive use of the cave.
Contrary to popular theories, people living during the last ice age ate more than woolly mammoths, bison, and other large game.
Fish was also on the menu for some ancient Alaskans, say scientists.
An international team of researchers has unearthed the oldest case of decapitation in the New World -- a 9,000-year-old skull buried in Brazil with two severed hands covering the face.
The grave was excavated in 2007 in the rock shelter of Lapa do Santo, an archaeological site that has yielded 26 human burials dating to the early Holocene period. It consisted of a circular pit covered with five limestone cobbles.
The hardest bit of your body is the enamel coating your teeth. But new analyses of fish fossils, as well as genetic analyses of a living fish species, suggest that this specialized material once served a very different function: to toughen some bones and scales of ancient fish. The findings bolster earlier suggestions that ancient fish had enamel-armored scales, and they point to a new scenario for exactly how the substance ended up on teeth.
More than two-dozen complete fossils of Africa's earliest known coelacanth, a new species named Serenichthys kowiensis, have been found.
The specimens, 30 in total, were discovered near Grahamstown, in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa, in what was once an estuary 360 million years ago.
As if life wasn't hard enough during the last Ice Age, a new study has found Australia's first human inhabitants had to contend with giant killer lizards. Researchers working in Central Queensland were amazed when they unearthed the first evidence that Australia's early human inhabitants and giant apex predator lizards had overlapped.
Scientists have uncovered a new species of duck-billed dinosaur, a 30-footlong herbivore that endured months of winter darkness and probably experienced snow. The skeletal remains of the dinosaurs were found in a remote part of Alaska. These dinosaurs were the northernmost dinosaurs known to have ever lived.
Alt: A New Dinosaur Has Been Discovered -- And He's Hungry
In its early life, Earth suffered a meteorite pummelling that lasted 100 million years and may have changed its chemical makeup forever, researchers said Wednesday.
The steady stream of Earth-shattering collisions shortly after the birth of our solar system, ripped up the planet's surface and altered the very composition of the rock we call home.
Will Siberia one day be a place that parents describe to their children in bedtime stories about the poor shivering Siberians who got sucked down mysterious holes that opened all across their frozen land? It’s not that far from the truth as Russian scientists studying the massive craters that have already formed in northern Siberia are predicting new ones and warning they will be even wider and deeper with no signs of stopping.
We're going to Mars -- and we're going in the not-too-distant future.
NASA says preparations for a manned mission to the Red Planet are proceeding as planned, with humans expected to set foot on Mars in the 2030s.
Related: What Happens When You Get Your Period In Space?
Just as in the well-known children's story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, something good happens when things are done in moderation, rather than in extremes.
A new study has translated "not too hot or too cold, just right" to the quantum world and the generation of quantum entanglement – the binding within and between matter and light – and suggests that the universe started "neither too fast nor too slow."
Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have "teleported" or transferred quantum information carried in light particles over 100 kilometers (km) of optical fiber, four times farther than the previous record.
Researchers used a brain-to-brain interface they developed to allow pairs of participants to play a '20 question' style game by transmitting signals from one brain to another over the Internet. Their experiment is thought to be the first to demonstrate that two brains can be directly linked to allow someone to accurately guess what is on another person's mind.
A man who lost the use of his legs to a spinal cord injury has walked again after scientists rerouted signals from his brain to electrodes on his knees. The 26-year-old American has used a wheelchair for five years after an accident left him paralysed from the waist down. Doctors said he was the first person with paraplegia caused by a spinal injury to walk without relying on robotic limbs that are controlled manually.
If you really want to impress on your next camping trip, forget those solar-powered battery chargers everyone else is lugging around. Instead, prepare for gasps of envy and awe as you reach into your backpack and pull out your own collapsible wind turbine.
It’s the sort of Fonzie-cool move that eco-friendly camping legends are made of. And it’s already a reality, thanks to a team of Icelandic inventors and a series of increasingly successful crowdfunding projects.
An edible alternative to plastic water bottles made from seaweed has topped the UK round of an EU competition for new, more sustainable products.
The new spherical form of packaging, called Ooho and described by its makers as “water you can eat”, is biodegradeable, hygenic and costs 1p per unit to make. It is made chiefly from calcium chloride and a seaweed derivative called sodium alginate.
Beer enthusiasts, rejoice! Wild strains of yeast could one day help brewers develop new kinds of suds, including new sour ones and others that taste of honey, researchers say.
These wild microbes could also lead to new and faster ways of brewing traditional varieties of beer, the scientists added.
Scientists have found a cheap new way to kill coral-eating starfish that are damaging the Great Barrier Reef.
The crown-of-thorns starfish is one of the main culprits in a massive coral cover decline on the reef.
Scientists are preparing to make the first ever withdrawal from the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a seed bank built in an abandoned Arctic coal mine that's designed to preserve crops and plants in the event of global disaster. The civil war in Syria has prompted the withdrawal, with researchers in the Middle East requesting seeds to replace those previously stored in a gene bank in the war-torn Syrian city of Aleppo.
Scotland has more than 400 words and expressions for snow, according to a project to compile a Scots thesaurus.
Academics have officially logged 421 terms - including "snaw" (snow), "sneesl" (to begin to rain or snow) and "skelf" (a large snowflake).
New research suggests that the movements involved in fidgeting may counteract the adverse health impacts of sitting for long periods.
In a study published today in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, a team of researchers, co-led by the University of Leeds and UCL, report that an increased risk of mortality from sitting for long periods was only found in those who consider themselves very occasional fidgeters.
A person who needs the toilet is the purest person you’ll ever meet. Stripped of all niceties and social conventions, and assigned with a task that simply cannot be allowed to fail, you briefly get to witness them for who they really are. Aggression, contrition, frustration and cowardice; these are all attributes that come to the fore when someone is consumed by the urge to urinate as quickly as possible. Plus, it turns out that they’re scientifically better than you at lying.
Our long-term memory is consolidated when we sleep. Short-term memory traces in the hippocampus, an area deep in the brain, are then relocated to more outer parts of the brain. An international team of neuroscientists now shows how a three-step brain oscillation plays an important part in that process.
A new study published in PNAS uses brain scans of musicians and non-musicians to demonstrate that humans undergo what's called training-related neuroplasticity: training in music fundamentally changes our brains.
Recent advances in neuroscience have allowed scientists to examine what’s termed multi-sensory integration. Specific networks of neurons have been linked to senses like vision and hearing. Multi-sensory integration involves making sense out of input from several of these systems. It’s required for humans to interact with and interpret their surroundings.
A new study links anxiety, a brain structure called the orbitofrontal cortex, and optimism, finding that healthy adults who have larger OFCs tend to be more optimistic and less anxious.
The new analysis, reported in the journal Social, Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, offers the first evidence that optimism plays a mediating role in the relationship between the size of the OFC and anxiety.
People with a certain type of gene are more deeply affected by their life experiences, a new study has revealed. The findings challenge traditional thinking about depression, showing what might be considered a risk gene for depression in one context, may actually be beneficial in another.
How masculine you look - as a woman or a man - is linked to how much testosterone you were exposed to when in the womb, new research suggests.
The findings, reported today in the Royal Society journal Proceedings B, are the first direct evidence that there is a link between prenatal testosterone exposure and the structure of your face.
Don’t panic. That’s the emphatic message coming from researchers who have discovered a new virus in human blood. Though it’s unclear how common the pathogen is, there’s no evidence that it has caused anyone harm, and half of those infected appear to have cleared it.
The newfound virus’s genetic sequence shows that it has similarities to hepatitis C, which can cause serious liver damage, and to the harmless—and even helpful—human pegivirus (formerly dubbed hepatitis G).
An "unusual" new archaeological find could be the long-lost Tomb of the Maccabees, a burial site of leaders of a band of Jewish rebels from the second century B.C.
Israeli archeologists discovered the strange, pillared structure at the Horbat Ha-Gardi site near the ancient city of Modi'in.
Archaeologists have discovered a Pre-Roman era tomb in perfect condition at Pompeii, the team at the archaeological site buried in a 79AD volcanic eruption announced Monday.
“Pompeii continues to be an inexhaustible source of scientific discoveries,” Massimo Osanna, superintendent at the ancient city site, said in a statement.
The Egyptian Antiquities Ministry has granted preliminary approval for the use of a non-invasive radar to prove a theory that Queen Nefertiti's crypt may be hidden behind King Tutankhamun's 3,300-year-old tomb in the famous Valley of the Kings.
A security clearance for the radar's use will probably be obtained within a month allowing the scans to go ahead, said Mouchira Moussa, media consultant to Antiquities Minister Mamdouh el-Damaty.
A Stone Age site where cave rituals may have been performed some 9,000 years ago has been discovered on Blå Jungfrun, an island off the east coast of Sweden. The island has long been associated with tales of witchcraft, curses and supernatural powers.
Archaeological survey by state’s Department of Aboriginal Affairs identified no Aboriginal material at Bibra lake north site in Perth, despite 1970s study that uncovered more than 2,000 artefacts
A Western Australian government advisory committee has deregistered an Aboriginal heritage site that is “older than the pyramids” and reversed its previous opposition to a proposed freeway which will overlap the site.
Heavy metal pollution, typically caused by mining and smelting, is a major threat to human health - but the problem is seemingly not new. Researchers have found the earliest signs of such man-made pollution in caves in Spain and Gibraltar that date from at least the Middle Palaeolithic.
The evidence indicates prehistoric humans lived in caves up to 1.4 million years ago with high heavy metal levels caused from fires, fumes and ashes being present at least 450,000 years ago.
The indications of climate change are all around us today but now researchers have revealed for the first time when and where the first clear signs of global warming appeared in the temperature record and where those signals are likely to be clearly seen in extreme rainfall events in the near future.
Along the northern edge of the Gulf of Mexico is a 6,000-square mile dead zone of oxygen-depleted water filled with dead plants, dead fish and a damaged ecosystem.
Dead zones like this occur when nitrogen and phosphorus from agricultural fertilizers and sewage washes downstream into the ocean and creates huge blooms of toxic algae. Sadly, there are hundreds of them around the world.
There is more oxygen in the core of Earth than originally thought. Geologists have discovered some new findings about Earth's core and mantle by considering their geophysical and geochemical signatures together.
With the huge supermoon lunar eclipse just one week away, it's time to dust off your small telescopes and binoculars, track down an observatory event or webcast, or draft your invitations for a moon-cake party. Don't wait too long — if you miss it, the next one isn't until 2033.
The huge, mysterious hexagon at Saturn's north pole may finally have an explanation.
The bizarre hexagonal cloud pattern was first discovered in 1988 by scientists reviewing data from NASA's Voyager flybys of Saturn in 1980 and 1981, but its existence was not confirmed until NASA's Cassini spacecraft observed the ringed planet up-close years later.
Scientists working with ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment), a heavy-ion detector on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) ring, have made precise measurements of particle mass and electric charge that confirm the existence of a fundamental symmetry in nature. The investigators include Brazilian researchers affiliated with the University of São Paulo (USP) and the University of Campinas (UNICAMP).
And now, the shipping forecast for Titan. Missions to explore the oceans on Saturn’s largest moon might have to contend with powerful currents driven by solar energy.
Titan is the only place in the solar system, besides Earth, that has large bodies of liquid on its surface, though its seas are composed of hydrocarbons such as methane rather than water. Now researchers have built simulations of currents in the large seas in the moon’s northern hemisphere, using maps created from radar data collected by the Cassini probe.
Astronomers have found evidence for a new intermediate-mass black hole about 5,000 times the mass of the sun. The discovery adds one more candidate to the list of potential medium-sized black holes, while strengthening the case that these objects do exist.
The experiment that should finally detect ripples in the fabric of space-time is up and running.
Labs in the US states of Washington and Louisiana began "listening" on Friday for the gravitational waves that are predicted to flow through the Earth when violent events occur in space.
The oldest signs of heavy metal pollution caused by human activity, dating from the early Stone Age, have been found in caves in Spain and Gibraltar, officials said Monday.
The findings, published in the journal Scientific Reports, indicate prehistoric humans inhabited caves with high heavy metal levels caused from fires, fumes and ashes which could have played a role in their tolerance of environmental pollution.
Visitors to the royal necropolis in the Valley of the Kings will be unable to admire the tomb of boy king Tutankhamun after 1 October as it will be closed for conservation.
On 21 September 1915 a barrister – sent to auction by his wife to buy some chairs – bought one of the world’s most important historical sites
He had been sent to the auction by his wife, so legend has it, to buy a set of dining chairs. Instead, barrister Cecil Chubb’s eye was caught by lot No 15: a few acres of Wiltshire downland – plus one ancient, crumbling, mysterious monument.
Construction workers in California's Santa Cruz mountains were subject to a surprise delay last week when a team of archaeologists took over the site to remove an ancient whale fossil.
The project site was expected to have a high potential for archaeological finds, so a monitor was assigned to the Scotts Valley development and found the fossil amid construction vehicles on Sept. 4.
Daniel Crawford, a senior at the University of Minnesota, has written music for a string quartet that traces rising temperatures since the 1880s
Four nervous-looking college students pick up their bows and start into a song at the botton of their range. As the string quartet plays, the music gets higher pitched. It dips and peaks, but you can still hear it building. By the end of the song, one of the violins is struggling to hit the high notes.
On a dusty patch of ground beneath a concrete overpass, about a hundred children, the sons and daughters of rickshaw drivers and farm laborers, sit cross-legged on dirty mats, in bare feet or flip-flops, learning their letters and numbers—and the basics of environmental protection.
Related: 'Delayed remembering': Kids can remember tomorrow what they forgot today
Caterpillars that munch on corn leaves have developed a clever way to get the most nutrients from their meals: They use their poop to trick the plants into lowering their defenses.
Scientists at Pennsylvania State University recently discovered that fall armyworm caterpillars (Spodoptera frugiperda) can send chemical signals to plants through their poop, or frass.
A group of UBC students is betting probiotics could be the key to protecting bees from death caused by harmful pesticides.
"We rely heavily on bees for our food. They pollinate more than $15 billion worth of crops in the U.S. every year, but they are dying at alarming rates," said Yu Qing Du, a second-year engineering physics student. "We wanted to address an important issue with a worldwide impact."
Scientists say they are a step closer to growing fully functioning replacement kidneys, after promising results in animals.
When transplanted into pigs and rats, the kidneys worked, passing urine just like natural ones.
Stanford researchers have ripped the guts out of a virus and totally redesigned its core to repurpose its infectious capabilities into a safe vehicle for delivering vaccines and therapies directly where they are needed.
Like Pigpen's dusty haze or Olaf's personal flurry, each of us is surrounded by our own personal cloud—of invisible microbes. Now, it appears that this unique bacterial signature can be used to identify individuals even after they've left the room.
Light, sound, and now, heat -- just as optical invisibility cloaks can bend and diffract light to shield an object from sight, and specially fabricated acoustic metamaterials can hide an object from sound waves, a recently developed thermal cloak can render an object thermally invisible by actively redirecting incident heat.
There may be some truth in judgments that men make about women's sexual faithfulness based on their looks, according to researchers.
A new study suggests that just by comparing photographs of two unfamiliar women, men have some ability to accurately judge which one is more likely to cuckold them.
Related: Evidence of emotional 'load sharing' in close relationships
Concerns abound over whether laws legalizing pot for medical, recreational use will get drug into hands of more young people
Marijuana use among American high school students is significantly lower today than it was 15 years ago, despite the legalization in many states of marijuana for medical purposes, a move toward decriminalization of the drug and the approval of recreational use in a handful of places, new research suggests.
The cliche of the reclusive composer who loses their mind over manuscript is unhelpful. But, says pianist James Rhodes, there is a link between music, creativity and mental health that is both real and beneficial to people’s well-being
Not everyone wants to sleep in. A growing transhumanism community wants to sleep less, and better, and they’re going to great lengths to make it happen.
For those unaware, transhumanism is an intellectual and cultural movement that aims to improve the human condition, to push beyond our biological limitations, largely through technological advancements.
Dr Paul Kelley says children are losing 10 hours of sleep a week – and it’s all down to a clash between school start times and teenage body clocks
Sleep expert Dr Paul Kelley sounds a bit tired. He’s a morning type, which means he wakes at 6am after about eight hours of sleep. It’s lunchtime when we speak; he’s been up almost seven hours and he may seem weary because he’s being pursued by the world’s media who all want to speak to him about sleep – and the lack of it.
The next time someone accuses you of making an irrational decision, just explain that you're obeying the laws of quantum physics. A new trend taking shape in psychological science not only uses quantum physics to explain humans' (sometimes) paradoxical thinking, but may also help researchers resolve certain contradictions among the results of previous psychological studies.
Juries in criminal cases typically decide if someone is guilty, then a judge determines a suitable level of punishment. New research confirms that these two separate assessments of guilt and punishment -- though related -- are calculated in different parts of the brain. In fact, researchers have found that they can disrupt and change one decision without affecting the other.
Last month, a wild elephant and two of his friends were attacked by poachers. Wounded by poisoned arrows, they trudged across the African landscape to the one place that could help them: the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust (DSWT).
"We are sure that Mwende's father knew that if they returned to the stockades they would get the help and treatment they needed because this continuously happens with the injured bulls in the north; they all come to Ithumba when in need, understanding that there they can be helped," DWST wrote.
Related: Africa braced for snakebite crisis
A "spider-proof" shed has gone on sale for almost £2,000, but can technology really keep the creatures out, asks Justin Parkinson.
Related: Rare Red-Fanged Spider Found in Australia
Related: Bush Blitz: The largest Australian nature discovery project finds four new bee species
Will it one day be possible to bring a woolly mammoth or a Neanderthal back to life? If so, should we? How is climate change affecting the evolution and extinction of species?
These are some of the questions explored in science writer Maura O’Connor’s new book, Resurrection Science: Conservation, De-Extinction and the Precarious Future of Wild Things.
Jay Whitacre, a materials scientist and professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s College of Engineering, is the recipient of the 2015 $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize. Whitacre is the inventor of the Aqueous Hybrid Ion (AHI) battery, a reliable, environmentally-benign and cost-efficient energy storage system. This first-of-its-kind battery, often used in combination with solar and wind energy systems, stores significant amounts of energy at a low cost per joule and allows for around-the-clock consumption.
A group of Australian solar power experts known as the Victorian Organic Solar Cell Consortium, which includes scientists from the CSIRO, the University of Melbourne and Monash University, have been working on printable solar cells over the past seven years. And they’re finally just about ready to hit the market.
Related: 3-D Printing Breaks the Glass Barrier
Scientists have developed a first-of-its-kind, 3-D printed guide that helps regrow both the sensory and motor functions of complex nerves after injury. The groundbreaking research has the potential to help more than 200,000 people annually who experience nerve injuries or disease.
UK scientists are seeking permission to genetically modify human embryos for the first time.
Researchers at The Francis Crick Institute in London want to use a controversial genetic technique to carry out research into infertility.
Human sperm cells have been made in the laboratory for the first time by culturing immature cells taken from the testes of infertile men. The breakthrough promises to help young boys made sterile by cancer treatments and adult men who cannot make their own sperm, scientists have claimed.
In a remote village in the Dominican Republic girls become boys at puberty because of a rare genetic disorder
In every way, Johnny is physically and biologically male. But, astonishingly he did not grow a penis until he hit puberty.
Within his studio in the Stockholm suburban community of Tumba, Sweden, archaeologist-sculptor Oscar Nilsson is applying a highly specialized knowledge and set of skills to reconstruct realistic and scientifically-informed likenesses of individuals who lived long before us.
Related: Scientists home in on origin of human, chimpanzee facial differences
A leather manuscript more than 4,000 years old has been painstakingly reconstructed by a scholar after it was rediscovered in the Egyptian museum in Cairo.
Containing religious spells as well as colourful depictions of divine and supernatural beings, predating those found in the Book of the Dead manuscripts, the leather roll is around 2.5 metres long, with text and drawings on both sides.
The remains of a 5,000-year-old adobe basament of a possible “throne” have been unearthed during excavations in Turkey, revealing the origins of the secularization of power and one of the first evidence of the birth of the state system.
Archaeologists working in northern Peru have discovered an intact 2,700-year-old tomb belonging to the high-altitude Pacopampa people. The tomb contains as number of fascinating artifacts, along with the bodies of two individuals thought to be high priests.
Wandering an arid region of the ancient supercontinent of Pangea about 260-million years ago, the pre-reptile Bunostegos akokanensis is the oldest known creature to have walked upright on all fours, according to a newly published study.
For the second time in two years, a captive snake in south-east Missouri has given birth without any interaction with a member of the opposite sex.
Officials at the Missouri department of conservation’s Cape Girardeau Conservation Nature Center say a female yellow-bellied water snake reproduced on her own in 2014 and again this summer. The snake has been living in captivity, without a male companion, for nearly eight years.
One is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do, unless, of course, you’re a hermaphroditic worm.
The free-living flatworm Macrostomum hystrix prefers to mate with others of its species; but if placed in isolation, the independent worm will do the nasty on its own for the sake of reproduction.
Thanks, pandas! Conservation areas set aside to protect China's national treasure also help to save many of China's other one-of-a-kind species, new research reveals.
The evidence for a recent pause in the rate of global warming lacks a sound statistical basis, a new study reveals. The finding highlights the importance of using appropriate statistical techniques and should go a long way toward restoring confidence in climate model projections.
Ethiopia, on a mission to become carbon neutral by 2025, recently enlisted the help of giant solar tulips to reach its eco-friendly goal.
The country partnered with AORA Solar, clean tech company and developer of a modular solar-hybrid systems, to develop a flower power plant.
Norway will soon pay Brazil the final instalment of a $1bn payment for slowing the rate at which the Amazon rainforest is cut down, and is in talks about a further scheme.
An outright ban on the common use of plastic "microbeads" from products that enter wastewater is the best way to protect water quality, wildlife, and resources used by people, a group of conservation scientists suggest in a new analysis.
Related: Half of all marine life lost in 40 years: WWF report
Related: Tuna and mackerel populations suffer catastrophic 74% decline, research shows
An Australian photographer has captured a rare moment of animal communion with a shot of a fur seal surfing a humpback whale off the New South Wales coast.
Robyn Malcolm had been photographing a pod of whales on a feeding frenzy 500km (310 miles) south of Sydney.
We are familiar with many animal sounds – a lion’s roar, a dog’s bark, a parrot’s squawk – but what sound comes to mind when you think of a giraffe? The long-necked beasts make basic sounds like snorts or bursts through their nose, but nothing you could identify with a nice label – until now.
Biologists say they have discovered that giraffes hum.
Chimps and bonobos become very engrossed in movies featuring characters dressed in ape suits, found a new study that also tested the furry viewers’ memory skills.
The primates aced the tests, remembering and anticipating the memorable events that they saw on screen, even if they watched the film just one time.
Alt: Apes 'remember shocking movie scenes'
A first draft of the tree of life for all 2.3 million named species of animals, plants, fungi and microbes has been released. Thousands of smaller trees have been published over the years for select branches, but this is the first time those results have been combined into a single tree. The end result is a digital resource that is available online for anyone to use or edit, much like a 'Wikipedia' for evolutionary relationships.
If you go back far enough, all people share a common ancestry. But some populations are more closely related than others based on events in the past that brought them together. Now, researchers have shown that it's possible to use DNA evidence as a means to reconstruct and date those significant past events. The findings suggest that evidence in our genomes can help to recover lost bits of history.
Aboriginal society has preserved memories of Australia's coastline dating back more than 7,000 years.
That's the conclusion that University of the Sunshine Coast Professor of Geography Patrick Nunn reached in a ground-breaking paper published today in the academic journal, Australian Geographer.
New research from Massey University has compared work/life balance and life satisfaction levels across seven cultures – and found that New Zealand M?ori scored the highest on both fronts.
The report's lead author Professor Jarrod Haar says that while the survey respondents do not represent all M?ori, it does show that culture plays a role in the way people assess their own sense of wellbeing.
Genetic evolution Danish researchers, in collaboration with researchers in the United States and Britain, have studied the DNA of Greenlanders whose Inuit forefathers have been living in the Arctic for tens of thousands of years.
The ancient Chinese exercise Tai Chi is linked to improved physical capacity among older adults with certain common long term conditions, indicates a pooled analysis of the available evidence, published online in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.
Among people with breast cancer, heart failure, osteoarthritis and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), these improvements were not at the expense of worsening pain or breathlessness, the findings show.
Eating a Mediterranean diet or other healthy dietary pattern, comprising of fruit, vegetables, legumes, and nuts and low in processed meats, is associated with preventing the onset of depression, according to research. A large study of 15,093 people suggests depression could be linked with nutrient deficits.
In what may seem like a Hollywood blockbuster, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has developed an implant that goes directly onto the human brain.
The agency wrote in a statement their device is showing promise with improving patient’s memory tests scores. It is “raising hope that such approaches may someday help individuals suffering from memory deficits as a result of traumatic brain injury or other pathologies.”
Almost 100 years after Einstein presented the general theory of relativity in a Berlin lecture theatre, the quest to spot the gravitational waves he predicted may be entering its final stages.
This week, the world’s largest gravitational-wave facility is expected to start collecting data again after a 5-year US$200-million overhaul.