Newsdesk Archive
Geologists hauling hundreds of pounds of 250-million-year-old rocks from Siberia, through Russian and American customs, say luck was on their side. Not only did they successfully transport the huge haul, but they also may have confirmed the cause of Earth's worst mass extinction.
Genes, like people, have families — lineages that stretch back through time, all the way to a founding member. That ancestor multiplied and spread, morphing a bit with each new iteration.
On the coral reef, knowing who's your friend and who's your enemy can sometimes be a little complicated. Take seaweed, for instance. Normally it's the enemy of coral, secreting toxic chemicals, blocking the sunlight, and damaging coral with its rough surfaces. But when hordes of hungry crown-of-thorns sea stars invade the reef, everything changes, reports a new study.
It is not just humans who are concerned about the privacy implications of drones.
An Arnhem TV station has lost one of its expensive drones after a chimpanzee managed to knock it out of the sky with a stick as it was supposed to be capturing footage of the Royal Burgers Zoo chimp enclosure for a TV show.
The April incident has now been analysed by researchers, who claim it was a 'unique and deliberate action'.
Twin pandas born at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo would have been fraternal brothers, if the firstborn cub hadn’t died just five days after making its debut on Earth.
The twins were born just about 5 hours apart from one another on Saturday (Aug. 22) at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo in Washington, D.C.
A prehistoric fish has been seen in some English rivers for the first time since the 1800s in the wake of conservation work, the Environment Agency said.
Lamprey, snake-like creatures that were around 200 million years before the dinosaurs and are the world's oldest living vertebrates, were once a common sight in the country's waterways.
Related: An Ancient Fish Is Running Out of Time
On a clear sunny day in March, in a snow-covered area of the South Peace River region of British Columbia, a female caribou is on the ground, struggling to get back on its feet.
Surrounded by a team of biologists, veterinarians, and First Nations community members, the sedated animal is slowly opening its eyes. Cec Heron, lands and resource manager for the West Moberly First Nations, gently strokes its back and speaks to it in a soft voice.
On a Sunday morning on the Nicaraguan island of Rama Cay, Becky McCray visits with her family in her parents’ home over a breakfast of beans, coconut rice, coconut bread, and thick coffee, with the grounds still swimming in the bottom of the cup. The food was prepared over an open fire in a wall-less kitchen building; the aroma of coffee mingles with the wood smoke and the salty sea breeze.
For researchers trying to untangle the roots of the current epidemic of asthma, one observation is especially intriguing: Children who grow up on dairy farms are much less likely than the average child to develop the respiratory disease. Now, a European team studying mice has homed in on a possible explanation: Bits of bacteria found in farm dust trigger an inflammatory response in the animals’ lungs that later protects them from asthma.
Alcohol businesses are seeing ‘phenomenal growth’ alongside marijuana industry in Colorado, dispelling concerns that consumers prefer pot over booze
The joy of running. That sense of well-being, freedom and extra energy that runners often experience is not just a matter of endorphins. A new study shows that the "runner's high" phenomenon is also caused by dopamine, an important neurotransmitter for motivation.
Scientists have found that current school and university start times are damaging the learning and health of students. Drawing on the latest sleep research, the authors conclude students start times should be 8:30 or later at age 10; 10:00 or later at 16; and 11:00 or later at 18. Implementing these start times should protect students from short sleep duration and chronic sleep deprivation, which are linked to poor learning and health problems.
On Friday (Aug. 28), six scientists left the comforts of civilization, set to be gone for an entire year. Their mission will simulate what it might be like for astronauts journeying to Mars.
In the confines of a 36-foot-wide (11 meters) and 20-foot-high (6 m) solar-powered dome in a remote location on the island of Hawaii, the six team members will have to live together for 365 days.
Researchers at the University of Kansas working with an international team at the Large Hadron Collider have produced quark-gluon plasma -- a state of matter thought to have existed right at the birth of the universe -- with fewer particles than previously thought possible.
"Wormholes" are cosmic tunnels that can connect two distant regions of the universe, and have been popularised by the dissemination of theoretical physics and by works of science fiction like Stargate, Star Trek or, more recently, Interstellar. Using present-day technology it would be impossible to create a gravitational wormhole, as the field would have to be manipulated with huge amounts of gravitational energy, which no-one yet knows how to generate.
An intriguing signal from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) might prove to be the crack that prises apart the standard model — physicists’ current best description of how matter and forces interact.
Analysis of data gathered during 2011–12 at the collider at CERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, suggests that in particular decays, short-lived particles called B-mesons create taus more frequently than they create muons.
Black holes are known to have many strange properties, such as that they allow nothing—not even light—to escape after falling in. A lesser known but equally bizarre property is that black holes appear to "know" what happens in the future in order to form in the first place. However, this strange property arises from the way in which black holes are defined, which has motivated some physicists to explore alternative definitions.
Researchers have reported the detection of the farthest object yet, galaxy EGS8p7. At more than 13.2 billion years old, it provides a fascinating glimpse of the very early universe, just 600,000 years after the Big Bang
The existence of parallel universes may seem like something cooked up by science fiction writers, with little relevance to modern theoretical physics. But the idea that we live in a "multiverse" made up of an infinite number of parallel universes has long been considered a scientific possibility – although it is still a matter of vigorous debate among physicists. The race is now on to find a way to test the theory, including searching the sky for signs of collisions with other universes.
Some of the moon soil collected by Apollo astronauts has deteriorated significantly during its four-plus decades on Earth, a new study reports.
Scientists found that the median particle size in a set of 20 different Apollo soil samples held in laboratories for research use has decreased by more than half since the samples were first measured 40 years ago.
A so-called "floating spoon" on Mars spotted by NASA's Curiosity rover is cooking up a storm on the Internet, but it's actually a cool rock formation sculpted over time by the Martian winds, officials with the space agency say.
Scientists may be closer to solving the mystery of how Mars changed from a world with surface water billions of years ago to the arid Red Planet of today. A new analysis of the largest known deposit of carbonate minerals on Mars suggests that the original Martian atmosphere may have already lost most of its carbon dioxide by the era of valley network formation.
A little oxygenated slice of paradise survives deep in an icy Antarctic lake, providing a window into what life on Earth may have been like before oxygen permeated the atmosphere.
Activities of the Maya 2,000 years ago in Central America contributed to the decline of their environment. New research finds evidence of their influence on today’s environmental conditions, as well.
It’s the first study to show the full extent of the “Mayacene” as a microcosm of the early Anthropocene—a period when human activity began greatly affecting environmental conditions.
An international team of researchers has sequenced the first complete genome of an Iberian farmer, which is also the first ancient genome from the entire Mediterranean area. This new genome allows to know the distinctive genetic changes of Neolithic migration in Southern Europe which led to the abandonment of the hunter-gatherer way of life.
Animal mummies were an important feature of ancient Egyptian religious life, particularly from 600 BC to 250 CE.
Ancient Egyptians believed in many gods and associated different animals with them. Millions of mummies of cats, dogs, ibises, and raptors (were connected to the sun god Re) have been discovered in catacombs throughout Egypt and are found in museums all over the world today.
An elaborate ancient sarcophagus has been discovered at a building site in the Israeli city of Ashkelon, the Israel Antiquities Authority announced Thursday.
However, the sarcophagus, which is around 1,800 years old, was severely damaged when building contractors attempted to remove it improperly from the ground, according to officials.
A treasure of 2,976 silver Roman coins from the 1st-2nd century AD has been discovered by archaeologists during the excavations of the ruins of the Ancient Thracian and Roman city of Serdica in the downtown of the Bulgarian capital Sofia.
Archeologists are having a field day in Poland's longest river, the Vistula, which because of a drought has hit a record low water level allowing them to uncover a treasure trove of ancient artifacts.
"There are pieces of marble and stoneware and fragments of fountains, window sills, columns, concrete slabs, cannonballs," said Hubert Kowalski, a researcher at Warsaw University's archeological institute.
Billy Ó Foghlú, from The Australian National University (ANU), has found evidence that the artifact may have been a mouthpiece from an iron-age horn and not a spear-butt as previously thought.
There are an infinite number of musical notes, the ancient Greeks discovered, yet we use just a fraction of them because of the limitations of modern instruments.
Now an Edinburgh researcher claims that a new computer-based system of music notation will render traditional instruments obsolete and herald a new age of harmony.
Researchers have discovered a protein that can be used to create ice-cream that melts more slowly than conventional products. It works by binding together air, fat and water – creating a pudding with a super-smooth consistency.
Consider a contest of unmanned aerial vehicle versus energy. And one where energy wins. Boeing has a compact laser weapons system to pull the win off. The system directs energy on its targets, focusing energy on a spot in order to damage the target. Think of it as a welding torch, said Isaac Neal, Boeing engineer, but from many hundreds of meters away.
Researchers have developed a technique to build tiny models of human tissues using a process that turns human cells into a biological equivalent of LEGO bricks. These mini-tissues in a dish can be used to study how particular structural features of tissue affect normal growth or go awry in cancer.
A device that reanimates organs taken from dead patients has shown promise in heart transplant surgeries, though it's raising some ethical concerns, as well. As MIT Technology Review reports, the so-called "heart in a box" uses tubing and oxygen to pump blood and electrolytes into hearts from recently deceased patients, allowing the organs to continue functioning within a chamber.
The blind spot of the human eye can be shrunk with certain eye-training exercises, thus improving a person’s vision slightly, a small new study suggests.
The viruses that cause the common cold are always lurking. But consider this: Even if we touch a doorknob or keyboard that's covered in cold germs from an infected person, we don't always catch the cold.
In the popular mind, mass extinctions are associated with catastrophic events, like giant meteorite impacts and volcanic super-eruptions.
But the world's first known mass extinction, which took place about 540 million years ago, now appears to have had a more subtle cause: evolution itself.
A 3000-year-old fragment of pottery has solved a mystery behind the movement of an ancient people of South East Asia into the Pacific.
These ancient colonisers - known as Lapita - carried with them agricultural plants derived from mainland New Guinea. However, until now there has been no evidence of an early connection between the Lapita and indigenous New Guineans.
Within the framework of the South Assassif Conservation Project on Luxor's west bank, an Egyptian-American stumbled upon a 26th dynasty tomb that belongs to the vizier of Upper Egypt, Padibastet.
New evidence that the Neanderthals were not as primitive as popular opinion would have them is constantly emerging. The latest find in this respect is a hole in the floor of a cave in Abric Romani, near Barcelona, that researchers believe was used for heated water.
Residents in the historic city of Palmyra reported a massive explosion in its ancient ruins but the temple of Bel, one of Syria’s most prized treasures, remains standing, the country’s antiquities chief told the Guardian.
The world might seem a little grayer than usual when we're down in the dumps and we often talk about 'feeling blue' -- new research suggests that the associations we make between emotion and color go beyond mere metaphor. The results of two studies indicate that feeling sadness may actually change how we perceive color.
A 39-year-old man who had had been completely paralyzed for four years was able to voluntarily control his leg muscles and take thousands of steps in a robotic device during five days of training with the aid of the robotic device combined with a novel noninvasive spinal stimulation pattern that does not require surgery, a team of scientists reports.
For quite some time, there had been something unusual about the small town of Candido Godoi, Brazil. Year after year, a strange sort of magic had seemed to transpire here, and throughout the surrounding region, the place became known for this oddity, after which the town garnered a special nickname: The Town of Twins.
Research into 430,000-year-old fossils collected in northern Spain found that the evolution of the human body's size and shape has gone through four main stages, according to a paper published this week.
A large international research team including Binghamton University anthropologist Rolf Quam studied the body size and shape in the human fossil collection from the site of the Sima de los Huesos in the Sierra de Atapuerca in northern Spain.
As global population rises and finite resources dwindle, farmers need new, more sustainable ways to control pests. Now, ecologists have found a safe, sustainable and cost-effective new pest control. But rather than a high-tech compound or genetic technology, it's a tiny, low-tech organism: the ant.
Their pregnancies are carried by the males but, when it comes to breeding, seahorses have more in common with humans than previously thought, new research from the University of Sydney reveals.
Seahorses are famed for being part of the only family in the animal kingdom (Syngnathidae) in which the male is responsible for pregnancy. What hasn't been known until now is the degree to which male seahorses nourish and protect their embryos in their brood pouch during the 24-day gestation period.
The fossilized remains of a new species of ancient river dolphin that lived at least 5.8 million years ago have been found in Panama, and the discovery could shed light on the evolutionary history of these freshwater mammals.
Morning Edition this summer has been profiling scientists who explore the natural world by listening to it. We call the series Close Listening: Decoding Nature Through Sound.
But sometimes listening isn't enough — scientists have to record animals and even talk back to them to figure out what they're saying.
Several studies have demonstrated that auditory enrichment can reduce stereotypic behaviors in captive animals. The purpose of this study was to determine the relative effectiveness of three different types of auditory enrichment-naturalistic sounds, classical music, and rock music-in reducing stereotypic behavior displayed by Western lowland gorillas (Gorilla gorilla gorilla). Three gorillas (one adult male, two adult females) were observed at the Buffalo Zoo for a total of 24 hr per music trial.
It started in late May.
When geoecologist Steffen Zuther and his colleagues arrived in central Kazakhstan to monitor the calving of one herd of saigas, a critically endangered, steppe-dwelling antelope, veterinarians in the area had already reported dead animals on the ground.
It appears that the standard tools used to identify chaotic signatures might be missing lots of hidden chaos — especially in systems that seem like they’re not chaotic at all.
Chaos theory is famously associated with so-called “strange attractors,” marked by a telltale butterfly-wing shape (see above). But according to a new paper by two University of Maryland mathematicians, sometimes chaos looks more like “a strange repeller,” or something else entirely.
The operators of a US$2-billion dark-matter experiment aboard the International Space Station are striving to figure out how to keep three crucial cooling pumps working after the failure of a fourth last year. The glitch raises the most serious concerns yet about whether the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS), which probes cosmic rays for signs of dark matter being annihilated in deep space, will last until the space station's planned retirement in 2024. Originally designed for a three-year mission, the AMS is in its fourth year with nine to go.
The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), a particle collider for nuclear physics research at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory, smashes large nuclei together at close to the speed of light to recreate the primordial soup of fundamental particles that existed in the very early universe. Experiments at RHIC—a DOE Office of Science User Facility that attracts more than 1,000 collaborators from around the world—have shown that this primordial soup, known as quark-gluon plasma (QGP), flows like a nearly friction free "perfect" liquid.
The lunar eclipse set to occur later this month has both skywatchers and some Christians excited, but for very different reasons.
John Hagee, founder and current leader of the Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas, has been prophesying for months that the upcoming "blood moon," so named for the reddish hue that the moon takes on as it is illuminated by sunlight passing through the Earth's atmosphere, will bring calamity.
At the time of Sedna's discovery in 2003, it was the farthest body ever seen in our planetary club. Its peculiar path—it never ventures near the giant planets—suggested an equally peculiar history. How did it get there? The sun may have snatched Sedna away from another star, new computer simulations show.
Scientists may be closer to solving the mystery of how Mars changed from a world with surface water billions of years ago to the arid Red Planet of today.
A new analysis of the largest known deposit of carbonate minerals on Mars suggests that the original Martian atmosphere may have already lost most of its carbon dioxide by the era of valley network formation.
Thanks to NASA’s history-making New Horizons mission we now know more about Pluto than ever before, including how its surface is dominated by icy plains and mountains.
The bright glint of alien oceans may be visible from afar, allowing astronomers to flag potentially habitable exoplanets.
As Earth travels around the sun, it moves through phases much like the moon when seen from afar. The planet's oceans reflect a great deal of light, especially during the crescent phase. The same principle should apply to exoplanets, researchers say.
The next step in the exoplanet revolution may be an in-space "starshade" that lets alien worlds step out of a blinding glare.
Researchers are testing designs for a starshade, which would fly in formation with a future space-based telescope.
Many wasp species have chemicals in their venom that kill bacteria. In the last few years, researchers have found that some of these chemicals also kill cancer cells, though exactly how they work has remained a mystery.
Bumblebees infected with a common intestinal parasite are drawn to flowers whose nectar and pollen have a medicinal effect, a study shows. The findings suggest that plant chemistry could help combat the decline of bee species.
It’s always questionable to believe any stories told by fishermen, especially when they don’t bring back the actual fish they’re bragging about. At least a couple of Canadian anglers took some pictures of the world’s first – and so far only – glow-in-the-dark pike.
Pooh sticks is not a game of luck but rather depends on choosing the optimum stick, according to research from a leading scientist.
The timeless game, invented by Winnie the Pooh in AA Milne’s 1928 children’s classic, The House at Pooh Corner, sees competitors drop sticks into a river upstream of a bridge.
Fragments of the world's oldest Koran, found in Birmingham last month, may predate the Prophet Muhammad and could even rewrite the early history of Islam, according to scholars.
The pages, thought to be between 1,448 and 1,371 years old, were discovered bound within the pages of another Koran from the late seventh century at the library of the University of Birmingham.
Islamic State has destroyed part of another ancient temple in the Syrian city of Palmyra, according to activists on social media and a group monitoring the conflict, this time targeting the Temple of Bel.
The extent of the damage at the Roman-era structure in the central desert city was not known, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Sunday.
It is often described as a modern affliction due to our increasingly sedentary lifestyles and high fat diets, but scans of a 3,500-year-old Egyptian mummy have revealed it was a victim of heart disease.
The mummified head and lungs of Nebiri, an Egyptian chief of stables found in a tomb in Luxor in 1904, have been found to show classic signs of cardiovascular disease seen in more modern patients.
A mysterious pyramid-shaped flight of stairs dating to the time of Jesus, has been unearthed in ancient Jerusalem, the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) announced.
Made from large ashlar — or finely cut — stones, the 2,000-year-old stepped structure leads to a podium.
Remains of a Stone Age site thought to have been a hunting camp have been unearthed in County Durham.
The "exciting find" was uncovered in Upper Teesdale and dates back to about 7000BC.
About 460 million years ago, a sea scorpion about the size of an adult human swam around in the prehistoric waters that covered modern-day Iowa, likely dining on bivalves and squishy eel-like creatures, a new study finds.
Humans and canines have a long history of working together, with the use of hunting dogs stretching back to perhaps 20,000 years ago. And in some cultures, it seems ancient shamanic practices related to hunting success have extended to their four-legged partners: according to a new paper in the Journal of Ethnopharmacology, at least 43 difference species of psychedelic plants have been used in cultures around the world to allegedly improve the performance of hunting dogs.
Evidence left at the crime scene is abundant and global: Fossil remains show that sometime around 252 million years ago, about 90 percent of all species on Earth were suddenly wiped out — by far the largest of this planet’s five known mass extinctions. But pinpointing the culprit has been difficult, and controversial.
It’s a good news, bad news report. Earth today supports more than 3 trillion trees—eight times as many as we thought a decade ago. But that number is rapidly shrinking, according to a global tree survey released today. We are losing 15 billion trees a year to toilet paper, timber, farmland expansion, and other human needs.
Archaeologists are searching for the lost tribes of prehistoric Britain – at the bottom of the North Sea.
In a unique and ground-breaking operation, scientists plan to search for evidence of Stone Age human activity on Britain’s very own ‘Atlantis’ – a vast prehistoric land, once located between England and southern Scandinavia, which was engulfed by rising sea levels some 7500 years ago.
The incredible Shigir Idol, wooden wonder from the prehistoric world, has been precisely dated by leading German scientists, and the results are sensational. The tall, carved wooden statue has been determined to be 11,000 years old, 1,500 years older than previously thought, making it the is the oldest of its kind in the world.
Alt: Mysterious Russian Statue Is 11,000 Years Old - Twice As Old As The Pyramids
A floor mosaic from the 4th century AD has been discovered by archaeologists in the downtown of the Bulgarian capital Sofia during excavations of the ruins of the Ancient Thracian and Roman city of Serdica.
EXPERTS could be moving closer to solving the mystery of a world-famous 16th century shipwreck which lies in mud off Plymouth - with the help of DNA from a the body of a dog found on board.
The dog was the only known casualty in the sinking of the unknown 'Cattewater Wreck', which was discovered just over 40 years ago.
Hidden within an ancient bronze water jug exhibited at the Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki in Greece are the cremated remains of three elite individuals. Anthropologists examining the fragments have come to a startling conclusion about cause of death: the pregnant woman may have died when a parasitic cyst ruptured, killing her and her baby.
A team of archaeologists from three universities, including scientists from the UO's Museum of Natural and Cultural History, is headed back to Fort Rock Cave, where in 1938 the UO's Luther Cressman found the world's oldest shoes.
One of the sandals found at Fort Rock CaveThe goal, says Tom Connolly, project leader and director of the museum's archaeological research program, is to explore the cave with modern techniques that might provide detailed new information about very old artifacts. The excavation will focus on the chronology and dating of the site deposits, and the collection of new samples for analysis.
Osborne explained to National Geographic that he literally bumped right into the skull. Though he instantly knew his find was significant, he didn't know how to recover the 500 pound fossil. He started by securing a new boat and diving gear from a local shop, but still couldn't figure out how to get the skull to the surface of the swamp without damaging it.
Rock art is one of the most fragile cultural treasures in the United States. Located out in the open, ancient drawings are continually threatened by acid rain, fungus, and … people shooting paint cans for fun. According to The Salt Lake Tribune, rock art in Utah County is being riddled with bullet holes and slopped with paint by careless visitors who also leave behind torn-up cans and broken bottles.
Art dealers and collectors can consider themselves officially warned: Artifacts and antiquities from the Middle East may have been stolen from ancient sites in Syria and Iraq by the Islamic State group, the FBI said in an alert issued Wednesday. Reports of the Islamic State group's involvement in looting such sites and selling plundered artifacts emerged as far back as a year ago.
Doctors told Amanda Boxtel that she would never walk again after a tragic skiing accident left her paralyzed from the waist down. But 22 years after she lost use of her legs, Boxtel can now stand and walk with the aid of a robotic exoskeleton.
NASA’s coolest discovery yet might not be in outer space, but right here on Earth.
The space agency has found a new material with the ability to self heal from a bullet wound in just two seconds.
Quantum entanglement is one of the more bizarre theories to come out of the study of quantum mechanics -- so strange, in fact, that Albert Einstein famously referred to it as "spooky action at a distance."
A team of scientists has successfully measured particles of light being "squeezed", in an experiment that had been written off in physics textbooks as impossible to observe.
Squeezing is a strange phenomenon of quantum physics. It creates a very specific form of light which is "low-noise" and is potentially useful in technology designed to pick up faint signals, such as the detection of gravitational waves.
Researchers have shown that non-invasive magnetic pulses can reset unhealthy activity in a region of the brain known to be overactive in patients with depression.
The technique is known as transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), and has been shown to treat persistent depression, as well as boost people's memories, aid Parkinson's sufferers, and help stroke patients to speak again.
Experiencing “senior moments” may be a good sign rather than a cause for concern, research suggests. The time to worry is when you begin to stop noticing memory lapses, scientists have shown.
A study, published in the journal Neurology, found that people with dementia tended to lose awareness of memory problems two to three years before the condition developed.
You're about to switch lanes on a busy road when you realize there's a car in your blind spot. You have to put a stop to your lane change -- and quickly. A new study suggests that this type of scenario makes a person less likely to remember what halted the action -- for example, the make and model of the car in the blind spot.
Consider, if you will, your favorite neurotic. You may need to look no further than across your breakfast table, or conjure a picture of the nation’s neurotic laureate — Woody Allen. Or perhaps you'd reach back in history, say, to Isaac Newton -- father of calculus, discoverer of the universal laws of motion, and a world-class neurotic. Throughout his long life, Newton was angry, secretive, thin-skinned, guilt-ridden and prone to fits of melancholy.
An Opinion piece published Thursday invites you to consider why your favorite neurotic is more likely than his or her sunny opposite to be creative.
An experiment heading up next week to the space station could help landlubbers down here on Earth conserve water by doing a better job of filtering out chemicals, salts or other contaminants. It could even be a lifesaver for drought-stricken Californians who are desperate for new sources of water.
With the speculative possibility of a sentient machine, can we assume that Artificial Superintelligence would “take drugs” or “get high”? Hopes&Fears looked toward researchers at Rensselaer AI & Reasoning Laboratory, as well as Dr. David Brin, a fellow at Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, for the answer.
A single dose of cocaine can interfere with your ability to recognise other people's emotions.
According to new research, the drug can damage social awareness, and can stop users from being able to process negative feelings such as anger, irritation or sadness. So, in other words, the reason you think you're so confident and social when you're high is because you just aren't able to process how annoyed everyone is with you.
As astronomical techniques become more advanced, a team of astrophysicists think they will be able to not only detect the signatures of alien life in exoplanetary atmospheres, but also track its relentless spread throughout the galaxy.
The research, headed by Henry Lin of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), assumes that this feat may be possible in a generation or so and that the hypothesis of panspermia may act as the delivery system for alien biology to hop from one star system to another.
According to our current model of the universe, we’re all trapped inside a prison we can never escape. We just haven’t noticed yet—because the prison is about 91 billion light-years in diameter. We haven’t developed the technology to even get a good look at it, much less travel within it, much less reach the edge. But one day in the far-flung future, it will be very, very important that we escape it. Because this universe, most physicists predict, will one day become uninhabitable.
Dark matter—the unseen 80 percent of the universe’s mass—doesn’t emit, absorb or reflect light. Astronomers know it exists only because it interacts with our slice of the ordinary universe through gravity. Hence the hunt for this missing mass has focused on so-called WIMPs—Weakly Interacting Massive Particles—which interact with each other as infrequently as they interact with normal matter.
Subatomic particles have been found that appear to defy the Standard Model of particle physics. The team working at Cern's Large Hadron Collider have found evidence of leptons decaying at different rates, which could possibly point to some undiscovered forces.
Publishing their findings in the journal Physical Review Letters, the team from the University of Maryland had been searching for conditions and behaviours that do not fit with the Standard Model.
Scientists think they have a pretty good idea of how old the Universe is, but its age can depend on exactly where you are in it. Because of the time it takes for light to travel, observers on a planet other than Earth could well come up with a different calculation.
Consider the pendulum of a grandfather clock. If you forget to wind it, you will eventually find the pendulum at rest, unmoving. However, this simple observation is only valid at the level of classical physics--the laws and principles that appear to explain the physics of relatively large objects at human scale. However, quantum mechanics, the underlying physical rules that govern the fundamental behavior of matter and light at the atomic scale, state that nothing can quite be completely at rest.