Newsdesk Archive

Shortening the school week to four days has a positive impact on elementary school students’ academic performance in mathematics, according to researchers at Georgia State University and Montana State University. The researchers found a four-day school week had a statistically significant impact on math scores for fifth-grade students, while reading scores were not affected.

The past several years have been bruising ones for the credibility of the social sciences. A star social psychologist was caught fabricating data, leading to more than 50 retracted papers. A top journal published a study supporting the existence of ESP that was widely criticized. The journal Science pulled a political science paper on the effect of gay canvassers on voters’ behavior because of concerns about faked data.

If you stuck to Aesop’s fables, you might think of all ants as the ancient storyteller described them—industrious, hard-working, and always preparing for a rainy day. But not every ant has the same personality, according to a new study. Some colonies are full of adventurous risk-takers, whereas others are less aggressive about foraging for food and exploring the great outdoors.

A closer look at how honey bee colonies determine which larvae will serve as workers and which will become queens reveals that a plant chemical, p-coumaric acid, plays a key role in the bees' developmental fate. The study, reported in the journal Science Advances, shows that broad developmental changes occur when honey bee larvae - those destined to be workers - are switched from eating royal jelly (a glandular secretion) to a diet of jelly that includes honey and beebread (a type of processed pollen).

Scientists have developed a method, using a double layer of lipids, which facilitates the assembly of DNA origami units, bringing us one-step closer to DNA nanomachines.

Researchers have incorporated molecules of porphyrin CO2 catalysts into the sponge-like crystals of covalent organic frameworks (COFs) to create a molecular system that not only absorbs carbon dioxide, but also selectively reduces it to CO, a primary building block for a wide range of chemical products.

Generating and storing renewable energy, such as solar or wind power, is a key barrier to a clean-energy economy. When the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis (JCAP) was established at Caltech and its partnering institutions in 2010, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Energy Innovation Hub had one main goal: a cost-effective method of producing fuels using only sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide, mimicking the natural process of photosynthesis in plants and storing energy in the form of chemical fuels for use on demand.

Can the Dutch rail network run on wind? Julian Turner, writing in Railway-technology.com, reported that the Dutch rail network will run entirely on renewable wind energy by 2018.

It’s one of the strangest concepts in the already strange field of quantum physics: Measuring the condition or state of a quantum particle like an electron can instantly change the state of another electron—even if it’s light-years away. That idea irked the likes of Albert Einstein, as it suggests that something can travel faster than light and that reality is somehow determined by the measurements we make.

An 'alien plughole' on Mars that has baffled scientists could have a simple explanation. Astronomers claim the strange crater, which has a terraced rather than bowl pattern, has been created by water ice. To confirm their theory, researchers found an enormous slab of water ice just beneath the crater, measuring 130ft (40 metre) thick.

A team of Nasa recruits has begun living in a dome near a barren volcano in Hawaii to simulate what life would be like on Mars. The isolation experience, which will last a year starting on Friday, will be the longest of its type attempted.

Scientists hope a new historical database will offer insights into important moments in the evolution of religion, such as the construction of Gobekli Tepe in southern Turkey. At 11,500 years old, it's been called "the first manmade holy place."

New tests on a highly controversial papyrus fragment may add credence to evidence suggesting Jesus had a wife. The so-called “Gospel of Jesus’s Wife” is a fragment of Coptic text no bigger than a business card, in which a translated line refers to Jesus saying the words “my wife”, as well as referencing a disciple called “Mary”.

The oldest case of acute decompensated heart failure has been found in 3,500-year-old mummified remains, a research team announced at the international congress of Egyptology in Florence. Consisting of just a head and canopic jars containing internal organs, the remains were found in a plundered tomb by the Italian Egyptologist Ernesto Schiaparelli in 1904 in the Valley of the Queens, Luxor, and are now housed at the Egyptian Museum in Turin.

Ancient Egyptians were likely to lose some of their front teeth before they could become mummies, says a new research debated at the International Congress of Egyptologists in Florence. Taking place after excerebration (brain removal) and evisceration (body organ removal) and before final wrapping, the procedure would force open the mouths of the deceased with a knife and iron chisel, breaking and dislocating teeth in the process.

The news that many dinosaurs were likely covered in a thick layer of feathers may make them seem a little less imposing — but it also means they may have been intensely colorful. Now scientists have found that the few feathers that survived the fossilization process may hold a clue to the dinosaurs' hue.

A dinosaur foot found by chance on a Welsh beach could be from the earliest known ancestor of Tyrannosaurus rex. Palaeontology student Sam Davies made the discovery while searching for fossils on Lavernock Beach, near Penarth, South Wales.

Some 10,000 Neanderthal artifacts, hearths, and a sleeping area have been found this month at Abric Romaní, an archaeological site in the Catalonia region of Spain. Archaeologists from The Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution (IPHES) found a hole among the hearths and heated rocks near a wall of the rockshelter that may have been used to heat water some 60,000 years ago.

The British Library is to lend one of its greatest treasures, the world’s oldest bible, to the British Museum for an ambitious and groundbreaking exhibition exploring 1,200 years of Christian, Islamic and Jewish faith in Egypt after the pharaohs. The Codex Sinaiticus is one of the most important books in the world and has only been lent once, in 1990 – also to the British Museum – when both collections shared the same building.

A new theory aims to explain the success of world religions—but testing it remains a challenge An ancient Egyptian spent her whole life preparing for the moment when her heart would be weighed. After death, she was escorted before a divine scale.

Edgar Mitchell, the 6th man to walk on the moon, accuses a British paper of fabricating a story about ETs saving America. Few people are surprised by the eye-popping headlines in The Mirror. But when the infamous British tabloid quoted astronaut Edgar Mitchell as saying that "UFOs came in peace" to "save America from nuclear war," it shocked everybody -- including Mitchell.

Buzz Aldrin is teaming up with Florida Institute of Technology to develop “a master plan” for colonizing Mars within 25 years. The second man to walk on the moon took part in a signing ceremony on Thursday at the university, less than an hour’s drive from Nasa’s Kennedy Space Center. The Buzz Aldrin Space Institute is set to open this fall.

Ethiopia has built a privately funded astronomical observatory, taking the first step towards creating a fully fledged national space agency. With the US$3 million investment, the East African country joins a handful of other African nations, including Nigeria, South Africa, and Egypt, that have their own space programs, and the government hopes the move will boost the local agriculture and communication industries.

Conspiracy theorists and others keep saying that we are going to be killed by an asteroid, and Nasa has been forced to point out that it is very, very unlikely that it’s going to happen.

In a massive study, a team of researchers from around the world has found a depressing, but unsurprising, result: the Universe is dying. Pretty quickly, too. This isn’t really an unexpected finding, but it’s the most detailed examination of its eventual death yet.

Mysterious red flashes seen high above the Earth are a little understood phenomenon known as sprites. The sprites, which appear as red dots in the top left hand corner, were photographed above a thunderstorm by the crew of the International Space Station as it flew over north-western Mexico.

A University of Oklahoma astrophysicist and his Chinese collaborator have found two supermassive black holes in Markarian 231, the nearest quasar to Earth, using observations from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. The discovery of two supermassive black holes--one larger one and a second, smaller one--are evidence of a binary black hole and suggests that supermassive black holes assemble their masses through violent mergers.

A team of physicists has found new hints of particles -- leptons, to be more precise -- being treated in strange ways not predicted by the Standard Model. The discovery could prove to be a significant lead in the search for non-standard phenomena.

We only have one example of a planet with life: Earth. But within the next generation, it should become possible to detect signs of life on planets orbiting distant stars. If we find alien life, new questions will arise. For example, did that life arise spontaneously? Or could it have spread from elsewhere? If life crossed the vast gulf of interstellar space long ago, how would we tell?

Astrobiologists draw upon what is known about Earth's most extreme lifeforms and the environments of Mars and Titan, Saturn's moon, to paint a clearer picture of what life on other planets could be like.

New research from a team led by Carnegie's Robert Hazen predicts that Earth has more than 1,500 undiscovered minerals and that the exact mineral diversity of our planet is unique and could not be duplicated anywhere in the cosmos.

It's not a huge mystery why Los Angeles experiences earthquakes. The city sits near a boundary between two tectonic plates -- they shift, we shake. But what about places that aren't along tectonic plate boundaries?

Scientists in the US have managed to get cancerous human cells to start growing normally again by injecting them with biological processors called microRNAs. As cancer cells are just normal cells that grow abnormally, treating them is notoriously difficult - the differences between the cells are in some respects so slight that blasting out the cancerous tissue usually takes healthy tissue along with it.

The existence of "beer goggles"—the tendency to find fellow drinkers growing more attractive as you drink more—is in dispute. A study conducted in a naturalistic setting (that is, a pub), found that increased alcohol consumption did not boost attractiveness ratings.

Imagine that a loved one, let’s say your brother, has suffered a serious brain injury. After languishing in a coma, he finally “emerges”—that is, he cycles between sleep and wakefulness, yanks his hand away when it’s pricked, is startled by loud noises, and so on. But it’s not clear that he’s ever truly awake; his eyes are open, but they rove around aimlessly.

Close your eyes and imagine walking along a sandy beach and then gazing over the horizon as the Sun rises. How clear is the image that springs to mind? Most people can readily conjure images inside their head - known as their mind's eye.

Mostly untouched for 100 years, 15 Roman-era Egyptian mummy portraits and panel paintings were literally dusted off by scientists and art conservators from Northwestern University and the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology as they set out to investigate the materials the painters used nearly 2,000 years ago.

An ancient Greek palace filled with cultic objects and clay tablets written in a lost script may be the long-lost palace of Mycenaean Sparta, one of the most famous civilizations of ancient Greece. The 10-room complex, called Ayios Vassileios, was filled with striking artifacts, including fragments of ornate murals, a cultic cup with a bull's head, a seal emblazoned with a nautilus and several bronze swords.

?Last week, a pair of anonymous treasure hunters approached officials in Walbrzych, Poland? via their lawyer to claim they had found an old Nazi loot train. Now officials have confirmed that the pair certainly found a train. Whether it's full of gold remains to be seen. As NBC News reports, a press officer confirmed that a military train had been found and the town's deputy mayor Zygmunt Nowaczyk? made the following statement at a press conference:

Poland’s government on Thursday warned treasure-hunters that the Nazi “gold train” allegedly discovered in the country’s west is probably booby-trapped. Local media have for days been abuzz with old lore of trains full of gold and jewels stolen by the Nazis after two men — a German and a Pole — claimed to have found an armoured train car in the southwestern city of Walbrzych.

A group of intrepid Israeli researchers recently went back to the dawn of the Stone Age to make lunch. Using 12,500-year-old conical mortars carved into bedrock, they reconstructed how their ancient ancestors processed wild barley to produce groat meals, as well as a delicacy that might be termed 'proto-pita' -- small loaves of coal-baked, unleavened bread. In so doing, they re-enacted a critical moment in the rise of civilization.

In Palmyra, history is literally written on the walls: across temples and above doorways, encircling funerary monuments and snaking up the towering limestone columns that rise above the Syrian desert some 134 miles (215 km) northeast of Damascus.

Last year it was announced that 50 huge sprawling geoglyphs had been discovered in Kazakhstan by archaeologists surveying Google Earth, but since then there has been little information about how, when and why they were built. That is why Pittsburgh University scientists Shalkar Adambekov and Ronald Laporte are calling for further research into the geoglyphs, while working on getting the area designated as a world heritage site. The geoglyphs come in a huge range of shapes and sizes – there are rings, crosses, squares and a swastika. Unlike the famous Nazca lines in Peru, they were constructed by building mounds – the Nazca lines were created by digging into the ground.

The discovery of more than twenty spear points of about 50.000 years ago makes Teixoneres Cave (Moià, Barcelona) the archaeological site with the highest number of this kind of weapon in Catalonia.

The New Caledonian crow is an extremely smart corvid and the only non-human species thought to have its own cumulative technological culture. That means tool-building skill is passed from one generation to the next. As the implements change and improve over time, they seem to evolve right along with their users. Alt: Something to crow about: New Caledonian crows show strong evidence of social learning

If there is a certain pool of choices and we can exclude A and B, we can easily deduce that C must be the appropriate choice. The ability of animals to be able to solve this has been the focus of many studies in recent comparative cognitive research. A team of researchers have now found a method to test if Goffin cockatoos have the ability to infer by exclusion.

A couple of years ago, when the Cincinnati Zoo announced that it was going to try to breed two Sumatran rhinos who were brother and sister—Harapan and Suci—the news made international headlines. To many, it brought home just how dire the species’ situation is: Only about a hundred Sumatran rhinos remain in the world.

Global life expectancy has risen by more than six years since 1990 as healthy life expectancy grows; ischemic heart disease, lower respiratory infections, and stroke cause the most health loss around the world. Thanks to marked declines in death and illness caused by HIV/AIDS and malaria in the past decade and significant advances made in addressing communicable, maternal, neonatal, and nutritional disorders, health has improved significantly around the world.

His facial tattoo has faded over the years, but Nokying Wangnao can’t forget the first human head he took six decades ago. It was the head of a young boy. Wangnao is one of several hundred former headhunters still living in the mist-covered Naga hills along the wild frontier between India and Myanmar. When I met him in his thatched hut in the village of Hongphoi, he was weaving a bamboo basket and wearing a necklace of five bronze skulls—one for each head he took.

Desert nation Qatar will use "cutting-edge technology" to grow up to 70 percent of its own vegetables by 2023—a four-fold increase, officials from Doha's biggest agricultural group said Tuesday. The prediction comes after a successful two-year trial of the Zulal Oasis hydroponics project, which saw tomatoes grown in greenhouses without soil and using recycled irrigation water, by Hassad Food on farmland west of the capital, Doha.

Diamonds can form with the help of ancient saltwater, say researchers who have identified the gems that crystallized with the help of oceanic crust dating back as far as 200 million years ago. This finding could help solve the long-standing mystery of how diamonds form, and shed light on how matter gets cycled between the surface and the deep Earth, scientists added.

When you fill a sink, the water rises at the same rate to the same height in every corner. That's not the way it works with our rising seas. According to the 23-year record of satellite data from NASA and its partners, the sea level is rising a few millimeters a year -- a fraction of an inch.

A chunk of ice the size of downtown Manhattan fell off the Jakobshavn Glacier in Greenland on August 16, the fastest moving ice sheet in the world at present. As it melts, the glacier calves off icebergs and dumps freshwater into the North Atlantic at a rapid clip, a clip that has doubled in recent years.

American and Russian astronauts use separate water filtration systems on ISS, as Nasa astronauts also collect Russian urine when available to increase supply

Some dying stars suffer from 'irregular heartbeats', research led by astronomers at the University of Warwick has discovered. The research confirms rapid brightening events in otherwise normal pulsating white dwarfs, which are stars in the final stage of their life cycles.

A new study has demonstrated a new, efficient way to accelerate positrons, the antimatter opposites of electrons. The method may help boost the energy and shrink the size of future linear particle colliders -- powerful accelerators that could be used to unravel the properties of nature's fundamental building blocks.

Spookiness, it seems, is here to stay. Quantum theory has been put to its most stringent “loophole free” test yet, and it has come out victorious, ruling out more common sense views of reality (well, mostly).

A strange, four-mile tall limpet-like mountain on dwarf planet Ceres has been photographed in unprecedented detail by Nasa's Dawn spacecraft. Alt: Ceres' Four-Mile Tall 'Pyramid' Is Closer Than Ever, Still Puzzling

Humans could escape from black holes, rather than getting stuck in them, according to a new theory proposed by Stephen Hawking. Unfortunate space travellers won’t be able to return to their own universe, according to Hawking. But they will be able to escape somewhere else, he has proposed at a conference in Stockholm.

Avi Loeb has an unorthodox new idea about how to search for alien civilizations—and it is hardly a surprise. Loeb, who chairs the astronomy department at Harvard University, has spent much of his career thinking about how the first stars came to life after the big bang, and how galaxies were born. But lately he’s become intrigued with the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI, and he tends to come at it in unusual ways.

New strategies are required to make sure hitchhiking Earth microbes don't contanimate Mars and other alien worlds, researchers say. Today's spacecraft feature sensitive gear that may not be able to withstand the treatment that sterilized previous Mars explorers such as NASA's Viking landers, said Penelope Boston, co-founder of the National Cave and Karst Research Institute in New Mexico.

To William Shakespeare, brevity was the soul of wit. For scientists, it may be even more valuable, as conciseness seems to correlate with how frequently a research paper is cited. Adrian Letchford and his colleagues at the University of Warwick in Coventry, UK, analysed the titles of 140,000 of the most highly cited peer-reviewed papers published between 2007 and 2013 as listed on Scopus, a research-paper database.

Women's sexual orientation may be partly influenced by their romantic options, new research suggests. Women in the study who were rated as more attractive — and so, presumably, could attract sexier mates — were more likely to identify themselves as completely straight than the women who were less attractive

Yes, a good cry indeed might go a long way to make you feel better. These findings were established after a research team videotaped a group of participants while watching emotionally charged films. Afterwards, the participants were asked a few times to reflect on how they felt.

Developers at Akili are working on a game they hope might one day be prescribed to treat mental health conditions like ADHD and depression. But first, they must get past the FDA. "The qualities of a good video game, things that hook you, what makes the brain — snap — engage and go, could be a perfect vessel for actually delivering medicine,"

For too long, scientists focused on what we can see. Now they are at last starting to decode life’s software This summer marked the centenary of one of Britain’s most famous and controversial scientists – the astronomer Fred Hoyle. Hoyle’s championing of steady-state cosmology was daring enough, and turned out to be ultimately misguided, but his foray into the origin and nature of life in the 1970s prompted fierce criticism. He argued that the odds of life spontaneously springing from a non-living mix of chemicals were comparable to that of a whirlwind sweeping through a junkyard and assembling a Boeing 707.

Well, there’s no way this could go wrong. According to recent announcements, a small biotech startup in California has successfully added new synthetic components to the genetic alphabet of DNA, potentially creating entirely new kinds of life on Earth.

When you think endangered species, which come to mind? Tigers? Pandas? Gorillas? I'm guessing what probably does not are Hawaiian land snails. Yet a new analysis in the journal Conservation Biology suggests that some 95 percent of known Hawaiian land snails in the Amastridae family* could already be gone.

In early August, biologist Peter Ward returned from the South Pacific with news that he encountered an old friend, one he hadn't seen in over three decades. The University of Washington professor had seen what he considers one of the world's rarest animals, a remote encounter that may become even more infrequent if illegal fishing practices continue.

A spectacular new species of freshwater crayfish, Cherax snowden, has been described from the Oinsok River Drainage, Sawiat District in the central part of the Kepala Burung Peninsula, West Papua, Indonesia, by Christian Lukhaup from the Humboldt University of Berlin and colleagues.

University of Alberta paleontologists have discovered a new species of lizard, named Gueragama sulamericana, in the municipality of Cruzeiro do Oeste in Southern Brazil in the rock outcrops of a Late Cretaceous desert, dated approximately 80 million years ago.

In 2011, Popular Archaeology Magazine published an article by Mirjana Roksandic, a prominent paleoanthropologist with the University of Winnipeg, touching on the discovery of a partial hominin mandible in the Mala Balanica cave in the Sicevo Gorge in Serbia.

Archaeologists in Greece have discovered the ruins of an ancient palace with important archaic inscriptions dating back to the Mycenaean Age, the culture ministry said Tuesday. The palace, likely built around the 17th-16th centuries BC, had around ten rooms and was discovered near Sparta in southern Greece.

The truth may be finally emerging about the "Gospel of Jesus's Wife," a highly controversial papyrus suggesting that some people, in ancient times, believed Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene. New research on the papyrus' ink points to the possibility that it is authentic, researchers say, while newly obtained documents may shed light on the origins of the business-card-sized fragment.

A team of researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory developing a bioinorganic hybrid approach to artificial photosynthesis have achieved another milestone. Having generated quite a buzz with their hybrid system of semiconducting nanowires and bacteria that used electrons to synthesize carbon dioxide into acetate, the team has now developed a hybrid system that produces renewable molecular hydrogen and uses it to synthesize carbon dioxide into methane, the primary constituent of natural gas.

Scientists have found traces of carbon in volcanic glass collected from the Apollo missions to the Moon. The finding may not only explain the driving force behind ancient 'fire fountain' eruptions on the Moon but also suggest that some volatile elements on the Moon and Earth have a common origin.

A potential advancement in the United States' electric propulsion capability for the future of spaceflight is being underscored by a new NASA contract to support work on the VASIMR project – short for the Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket. VASIMR works with plasma, an electrically charged gas that can be heated to extreme temperatures by radio waves and controlled and guided by strong magnetic fields.

Solar physicists have captured the first direct observational signatures of resonant absorption, thought to play an important role in solving the 'coronal heating problem' which has defied explanation for over 70 years. An international research team combined high resolution observations from JAXA's Hinode and NASA's IRIS mission, together with state-of-the-art numerical simulations and modeling from NAOJ's ATERUI supercomputer. In the combined data, they were able to detect and identify the observational signatures of resonant absorption.

In mountainous regions earthquakes often cause strong landslides, which can be exacerbated by heavy rain. However, after an initial increase, the frequency of these mass wasting events, often enormous and dangerous, declines, in fact independently of meteorological events and aftershocks. Even after strong earthquake the activity of landslides returns back over the course of one to four years to the background level before the earthquake.

The first permanent sea sanctuary for whales and dolphins could be located in Vancouver, British Columbia, according to marine mammal experts who are also still considering other locations.

We humans have been using self-medication to cure the illnesses since the dawn of our species. There is some evidence that also other animals can exhibit this type of behavior, but the evidence has been hard to come by.

A newly discovered nocturnal spider about two inches across is able to steer while falling, much like a wingsuit flyer, in order to return to the tree from which it fell. Biologists found the spider in South America forests while working in Panama and Peru. Related: Borneo mountain hotbed of young biodiversity

A marine scientist is dwarfed by what is being called the biggest shark ever caught on camera in a recent video taken near Mexico's Guadalupe Island. How did this 20-foot-long (6 meters) great white Internet sensation become such a behemoth?

A giant panda at a zoo in the United States has given birth to twin cubs. Keepers at the Smithsonian National Zoo in Washington DC only discovered Mei Xiang was pregnant during an ultrasound scan last week. The zoo said both cubs appeared healthy.

Ice Age paleontologist recorded the maximum geographic distribution of the woolly mammoth during the last Ice Age and published the most accurate global map in this regard. The ice-age pachyderms populated a total area of 33,301,000 square kilometers and may thus be called the most successful large mammals of this era. The study determined that the distribution was limited by a number of climate-driven as well as climate-independent factors.

In April 1815, the most powerful volcanic blast in recorded history shook the planet in a catastrophe so vast that 200 years later, investigators are still struggling to grasp its repercussions. It played a role, they now understand, in icy weather, agricultural collapse and global pandemics — and even gave rise to celebrated monsters.

The Fuenta Magna is a large stone vessel, resembling a libation bowl, that was found in 1958 near Lake Titicaca in Bolivia. It features beautifully engraved anthropomorphic characters, zoological motifs characteristic of the local culture, and, more surprisingly, two types of scripts—a proto-Sumerian ancient alphabet and a local language of the ancient Pukara, forerunner of the Tiahuanaco civilization. Often referred to as “the Rosetta Stone of the Americas,” the stone vessel is one of the most controversial artifacts in South America as it raises questions about whether there may have been a connection between the Sumerians and the ancient inhabitants of the Andes, located thousands of miles away.

A pair of researchers, one with the University of Manchester, the other with the University of Salford, both in the U.K., has developed a new computer algorithm for estimating the body mass of extinct quadrupedal mammals. In their paper published in Royal Society Open Science, Charlotte Brassey and James Gardiner describe how they came up with the new algorithm and the ways that they believe it can be used to improve estimates of body mass of extinct creatures.

A recalculation of the dates at which boulders were uncovered by melting glaciers at the end of the last Ice Age has conclusively shown that the glacial retreat was due to rising levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, as opposed to other types of forces. The data helps to confirm predictions of future glacial retreat, and that most of the world's glaciers may disappear in the next few centuries.

Between about 850 C.E. and 1250 C.E., Chaco Canyon in northwestern New Mexico's San Juan Basin was at the center of a vast and sophisticated Pueblo culture. Today, the park is at the center of anoil and gas boom that archaeologists, environmentalists, and Native American activists say threatens a broader landscape filled with hundreds of Chacoan sites.

A message in a bottle that washed up more than 108 years after it was thrown into the sea may be the world's oldest, a marine association has said. The bottle was released in the North Sea between 1904 and 1906 and found by a woman on a beach in Amrum, Germany.

A robotic Japanese cargo vessel launched toward the International Space Station this morning, embarking on a five-day journey to the orbiting lab to deliver tons of supplies and experiment gear, including a rodent crew of 12 mice.

Neil Harbisson was born with achromatopsia, a rare condition that leaves around 1 in 30,000 people completely colorblind. But Harbisson embraced the opportunities afforded by modern technology - and the human brain's ability to adapt its methods of perception - and convinced doctors to implant an antenna into the back of his head through which he can now 'hear colours' through bone conduction.

A shifty gaze, fidgety stance or sweaty palms signal a liar in classic film noirs. In real life, however, it is surprisingly difficult to recognize when someone is telling a tall tale. Even among trained professionals, the lie-detection accuracy rate is only slightly better than pure chance. And courts tend to reject polygraph evidence because the tests lack standardized questions for determining falsehoods. For better odds, discussions of questionable claims appear to be the way to go. Psychologists at the University of Chicago have found that groups of people are consistently more reliable at rooting out fabrications than chance or individual judges.

Ah, the Berenstain Bears. These fuzzy critters are hands down some of the most beloved children's literature characters of the modern age. Whom among us hasn't learned a valuable (if not a little heavy-handed) lesson from Brother and Sister Bear?

There are unusual rut-like formations preserved in stone that date back millions of years, long before humankind is supposed to have harnessed that kind of technology. The formations are located in a remote area of modern day Turkey and are baffling archaeologists and historians alike.

Scientists may have discovered the secret behind one of the most famous mysteries in the history of art – the Mona Lisa’s smile. Experts from two UK universities said that a new study of another painting believed to be by Leonardo da Vinci, La Bella Principessa, prove that it uses the same technique of the “uncatchable smile”.

They decorated graves with flowers, held ceremonial meals before their funerals, and – as a new study from the University of Haifa now shows – the Natufians who lived in our region 15,000 – 11,500 years ago also created massive mortars that were used to pound food at their burial ceremonies. Alt: Did Stone Age man invent 'church bells' 15,000 years ago? Ceremonial boulders were hit like 'gongs' to call the community to funerals

A 2-million-year-old skull unearthed in South Africa belongs to the earliest baboon ever found, a new study finds. Researchers discovered the partial cranium at Malapa, a Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site filled with caves and fossil deposits and located about 31 miles (50 kilometers) northwest of Johannesburg.

A gray wolf pack has established itself in Northern California, state wildlife officials confirmed on Thursday, the first family of wolves known in the state in nearly 100 years. The group — two adult black-furred gray wolves and five 4-month-old pups — will be known as the Shasta Pack.