Newsdesk Archive
It appears that ants, usually seen as the ultimate self-sacrificing workers, are also not bad at saving their own skins.
Scientists have shown that ants with a life-threatening fungus are able to "self-medicate", eating a normally harmful substance that treats the condition.
Related: Pesticides linked to bee decline for first time in a countrywide field study
For nearly a century the carcass of a small, reddish-brown monkey from South America gathered dust in a windowless backroom of the American Natural History Museum in New York City.
Like a morgue corpse in a drawer with the wrong toe tag, it was a victim of mistaken identity. No one realised during all those years that it was, in fact, a specimen of an unknown species.
Related: Bizarre bat with longest tongue discovered in Bolivian park
Birds are among the most successful creatures on the planet, with more than 10,000 species living across the globe, occupying a dizzying array of niches and eating everything from large animals to hard-to-open nuts and seeds.
Related: Owls use 'stealth technology' to help capture prey
Just like many humans do, bears freak out when they spot a "UFO" – although they seem to be better at hiding their anxiety.
Drones flying near American black bears in Minnesota caused the animals' heart rates to soar, even though few bears showed any outward symptoms of stress, according to a new study led by University of Minnesota researchers.
Artificial-intelligence researchers have long struggled to make computers perform a task that is simple for humans: picking out one person’s speech when multiple people nearby are talking simultaneously.
It is called the ‘cocktail-party problem’.
Related: This ultraviolet printer is 100x faster than ordinary 3D printers
Two-factor authentication based on ambient sound has been the focus of four researchers from the Institute of Information Security ETH Zurich. Nikolaos Karapanos, Claudio Marforio, Claudio Soriente, and Srdjan Capkun posted their work on the .arXiv server and they presented their research at the recent Usenix conference in Washington, DC.
Automation can unnerve some people, and the automation of art has a special power to offend humanity’s view of itself as soulful: How could a thing without psychological or emotional states express itself with the spirit and feeling seemingly necessary for making music?
A group of UFO researchers with backgrounds in science have come together to analyze an alleged UFO video they have confirmed comes from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
Related: Vatican chief astronomer believes in UFOs and aliens
Related: 'The ISS is being monitored by aliens': Conspiracy theorists spot yet another UFO hovering above the space station
Related: Flying Humanoid Over Los Angeles Seen by Multiple Witnesses
Just one year ago, Facebook feeds were awash with videos and photos of people pouring buckets of cold water on their heads all in the name of medical research.
At the time, the Ice Bucket Challenge had become the viral campaign everyone was talking about — an online effort to raise awareness and funds for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, better known as ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease. The movement attracted criticism of social media "slacktivism" — a convenient way for people to act like they're making a difference without achieving anything at all.
A controversial statue unveiled by the Satanic Temple at a secret ceremony in Detroit has attracted protests. But who is the goat-headed figure? And what do the elements of the statue symbolise?
A psychologist in Italy has figured out how to induce a drug-free altered state of consciousness by asking 20 volunteers to sit and stare into each other’s eyes for 10 minutes straight. Not only did the deceptively simple task bring on strange ‘out of body’ experiences for the volunteers, it also caused them to see hallucinations of monsters, their relatives, and themselves in their partner’s face.
People who work 55 hours or more per week have a 33 percent greater risk of stroke and a 13 percent greater risk of coronary heart disease than those working standard hours, researchers reported on Wednesday in the Lancet.
New research has revealed that having mentally healthy friends can help someone recover from depression or even remain mentally healthy in the first place.
But crucially having depressed friends does not make you more likely to become depressed yourself. In other words the results indicate that healthy mood spreads through social networks but depression does not.
New finding is first example in humans of the theory of epigenetic inheritance: the idea that environmental factors can affect the genes of your children
Genetic changes stemming from the trauma suffered by Holocaust survivors are capable of being passed on to their children, the clearest sign yet that one person’s life experience can affect subsequent generations.
Most of us think of gratitude as a sweet emotion, but researchers say there’s a downside to being thankful: it can make us crave sugary treats.
“Gratitude has sweet side effects,” says Ann Schlosser, professor of marketing at the University of Washington. “This study finds evidence that feeling grateful for the helpful—or metaphorically ‘sweet’—actions of others increases preference for and consumption of sweets.”
New research suggests that acupuncture treatments could help lower blood pressure in hypertensive patients.
A study conducted by researchers with the Susan Samueli Center for Integrative Medicine confirm that this ancient Chinese practice is beneficial in treating mild to moderate hypertension, and indicates that regular use could help people control their blood pressure and lessen their risk of stroke and heart disease.
Japan's government has announced that it's cutting back on gifts for 100-year-old citizens, as the country's growing elderly population has made the practice too expensive to continue. Traditionally, the Japanese prime minister presents centenarians with a silver sake dish or sakazuki worth ¥8,000 ($64) as part of the country's Respect for the Aged Day celebrations. When the program began in 1963, 153 individuals were given cups, but last year that number had risen to 29,357.
Whistled Turkish is a non-conformist. Most obviously, it bucks the normal language trend of using consonants and vowels, opting instead for a bird-like whistle. But more importantly, it departs from other language forms in a more fundamental respect: it's processed differently by the brain.
People with psychopathic characteristics are less likely to be affected by "contagious yawning" than those who are empathetic, according to a Baylor University psychology study.
Yawning after spotting someone else yawn is associated with empathy and bonding, and "catching" yawns happens with many social mammals, among them humans, chimpanzees and dogs, researchers say.
A Washington State University team of bio-anthropologists theorize that humans first used the cannabis plant for its medicinal qualities rather than for the euphoric high it produces when eaten or smoked.
Sally Chew wrote at the Fix that the group of scientists studied one of the last remaining indigenous hunter-gatherer tribes, the nomadic Aka people of Africa’s Congo Basin.
Political disturbance and armed conflict in the Middle East since 2010 have had the unintended consequence of making the air cleaner.
Researchers say that in countries like Syria and Iraq, levels of air pollutants have fallen dramatically.
Is Earth slowly heading for a new ice age? Looking at the decreasing number of sunspots, it may seem that we are entering a nearly spotless solar cycle which could result in lower temperatures for decades. "The solar cycle is starting to decline. Now we have less active regions visible on the sun's disk," Yaireska M. Collado-Vega, a space weather forecaster at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, told Phys.org.
Have you heard that a giant asteroid is due to strike Earth sometime between Sept. 15 and Sept. 28?
If so, you probably thought it was a hoax. And you'd be right.
Alt: NASA: There is No Asteroid Threatening Earth
New results show how collisions between comets and planets can make molecules that are the essential building blocks of life.
This suggests that the chemistry needed to gather the molecular ingredients for life could be more common than previously recognised.
The biggest planets in the Solar System may have gotten their start from the smallest of rocks: centimetre-sized pebbles that formed 4.5 billion years ago from dust and ice swirling around the newborn Sun.
Saturn's moon, Enceladus, may not have a heart of stone—at least, not completely. A new model suggests the satellite has a rubble-filled pile of boulders and ice at its core, rather than a more conventional solid stone center. This “fluffy core” could help solve the mystery of the moon’s underground ocean.
More than any other scientific idea, Einstein's relativity has cemented the notion that space and time are inseparable qualities of the universe.
It began with Einstein's reworking of the classical transformation of moving coordinate systems in special relativity, and culminated a mere - but painful - decade later as he generalized and expanded these ideas to describe accelerating and gravitating systems. Space and time became space-time, or just spacetime - the cosmic fabric into which we are all woven.
Results of the XENON100 experiment are a bright spot in the search for dark matter. The team of international scientists involved in the project demonstrated the sensitivity of their detector and recorded results that challenge several dark matter models and a longstanding claim of dark matter detection.
Ripped from the pages of a sci-fi novel, physicists have crafted a wormhole that tunnels a magnetic field through space.
"This device can transmit the magnetic field from one point in space to another point, through a path that is magnetically invisible," said study co-author Jordi Prat-Camps, a doctoral candidate in physics at the Autonomous University of Barcelona in Spain. "From a magnetic point of view, this device acts like a wormhole, as if the magnetic field was transferred through an extra special dimension."
Buried deep in the Antarctic ice, an observatory has spotted ghostly, nearly massless particles coming from inside our galaxy and points beyond the Milky Way.
Finding these cosmic neutrinos not only confirms their existence but also sheds light on the origins of cosmic rays, the researchers said.
Hydrogen sulfide — the compound responsible for the smell of rotten eggs — conducts electricity with zero resistance at a record high temperature of 203 kelvin (–70 °C), reports a paper published today in Nature.
If dark energy is hiding in our midst in the form of hypothetical particles called "chameleons," Holger Müller and his team at the University of California, Berkeley, plan to flush them out.
The results of an experiment reported in this week's issue of Science narrows the search for chameleons a thousand times compared to previous tests, and Müller, an assistant professor of physics, hopes that his next experiment will either expose chameleons or similar ultralight particles as the real dark energy, or prove they were a will-o'-the-wisp after all.
A 2,000-kilometer strip of desert stretching across Namibia is pockmarked with mysterious “fairy circles.” From Angola to South Africa, millions of these bare patches of dirt (which can be seen on Google Earth if you know where to look) dot the landscape, each some five to 10 meters across. And they are not static; they grow and shrink and disappear and reappear.
LA's scheme to cover a reservoir under 96 million "shade balls" may not be all it is touted to be, experts told FoxNews.com, with some critics going so far as to refer to the plan as a "potential disaster."
The city made national headlines last week when Mayor Eric Garcetti and Department of Water officials dumped $34.5 million worth of the tiny, black plastic balls into the city's 175-acre Van Norman Complex reservoir in the Sylmar section.
As Californians continue pumping groundwater in response to the historic drought, the California Department of Water Resources has released a new NASA report showing land in the San Joaquin Valley is sinking faster than ever before, nearly 2 inches (5 centimeters) per month in some locations.
Rice University scientists are cleaning soil contaminated by oil spills in a way that saves energy and reclaims the soil's fertility.
They use a process known as pyrolysis, which involves heating contaminated soils in the absence of oxygen. This approach is much better for the environment than standard incineration techniques for fast remediation, said Rice environmental engineer Pedro Alvarez.
What if there were a way to take the waste heat that spews from car tailpipes or power plant chimneys and turn it into electricity? Matt Scullin thinks there is, and he's formed a company to turn that idea into a reality.
The key to Scullin's plans is something called thermoelectrics. "A thermoelectric is a material that turns heat into electricity," he says.
Mimicking photosynthesis is not easy. The bottleneck of artificial photosynthesis is visible light as converting it into other energy is not efficient. Researchers at Michigan Technological University have found a way to solve this issue, leading to an efficient technique to produce hydrogen fuel. Last week, the Journal of Physical Chemistry published their work.
The Hyperloop sounds like science fiction, Elon Musk’s pipe dream: leapfrog high speed rail and go right to packing us into capsules that fling us across the country in hours using what are, essentially, pneumatic tubes. It sounds crazy, when you think about it.
It’s starting to look a little less crazy.
We’ll believe it when we see it, but two men, one a Pole and one a German, say they know the location of a heavily armored Nazi train that was rumored to be hidden away in a tunnel during the dying days of the Second World War—a train that could contain upwards of 300 tons of gold.
Alt: Poland's 'Nazi gold train' find: Myth and reality
Archaeologists say they have have found the main trophy rack of sacrificed human skulls at Mexico City’s Templo Mayor Aztec ruin site.
Racks known as “tzompantli” were where the Aztecs displayed the severed heads of sacrifice victims on wooden poles pushed through the sides of the skull. The poles were suspended horizontally on vertical posts.
A series of tiny cut marks on fossilised bones are the earliest evidence that our ape-like ancestors were using stone tools to butcher meat, new research has claimed.
Archaeologists say the findings prove that early humans living around 3.4 million years ago – long before the emergence of our own branch of the evolutionary tree Homo – were using stone tools to cut up meat.
An Egyptologist who has said Queen Nefertiti’s crypt may be hidden behind King Tutankhamun’s 3,300-year-old tomb in the famed Valley of the Kings has been invited to Cairo to defend his theory.
Related: Not just Nefertiti – there are plenty of influential women in history. If you look for them…
In Peru, Kenya and India, NGOs are helping communities overcome water scarcity using wisdom from the past
Across large swaths of the Thar desert in western India, traditional techniques for harvesting the little amount of rain that falls has helped people survive the powerful effects of the sun for centuries.
The mystery surrounding the ancient rock paintings of Utah's Black Dragon Canyon has finally been solved. For decades, researchers and creationists have debated whether the vibrant red pictographs are images of humans and animals, or rather, depictions of a large winged monster, possibly a pterosaur.
BEIRUT, Lebanon — For decades, he was the bespectacled caretaker of some of Syria’s greatest archaeological treasures. He explored the sprawling ruins in his hometown, named a daughter Zenobia after its ancient queen, and became so intertwined with its development that one historian called him “Mr. Palmyra.”
Amid excavations at four different ancient sites in the Central Anatolian province of Yozgat, a cuneiform tablet has been unearthed in the U?akl? Mound at the Büyük Ta?l?k village.
Thought to date back to around 2,000 B.C., the cuneiform tablet in the Sorgun district of Yozgat shows symbols of Ishtar, known as the Hittite goddess of love, war, fertility and sexuality, more clearly than those on any other unearthed tablets.
Tropical haven on Tibetan Plateau may have provided last refuge for modern man's ancestor long after extinction elsewhere
A tropical paradise that existed more than six million years ago on the Tibetan Plateau may have provided a final shelter for a common ancestor of humans and apes, a new study claims.
They’re ugly. They’re misshapen. They’re perfectly edible. But these fruit and veggies will never make it to the produce section in your grocery store.
Vast quantities of asymmetrical fruit and veggies are cast aside on the farm simply because we like our roughage to look beautiful before we chew it up in our mouths.
A few years ago, we were warned that the world’s helium reserves were running out. Today, researchers announced there may be several potential new sources of the precious gas hidden throughout the world.
An international research team has some good news for the struggling honeybee, and the millions of people who depend on them to pollinate crops and other plants. These valuable pollinators have faced widespread colony losses over the past decade, largely due to the spread of a predatory mite called Varroa destructor. But the bees might not be in as dire a state as it seems, according to research.
What is possibly the world's most endangered cat is clawing its way back from the edge of extinction.
The number of Amur - or Siberian - leopards in the wild appears to have made a significant recovery in recent years, following efforts by Russian and Chinese authorities to protect them.
Leading scientists and experts in the field of rhino conservation state in a new paper that it is safe to consider the Sumatran rhinoceros extinct in the wild in Malaysia. The survival of the Sumatran rhino now depends on the 100 or fewer remaining individuals in the wild in Indonesia and the nine rhinos in captivity.
On its Facebook page, the Smithsonian National Zoo announced that giant panda Mei Xiang's ultrasound today showed something exciting: a fetus of about 4 centimeters long.
Related: Giant Panda Liang Liang Gives Birth in Malaysia
New research from the University of East Anglia could one day help build computers from DNA.
Scientists have found a way to 'switch' the structure of DNA using copper salts and EDTA (Ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid) - an agent commonly found in shampoo and other household products.
Last month, a group of American inventors challenged a team of Japanese engineers to a giant robot duel. Japan accepted the challenge, and with the date of the duel now slated for summer 2016, Team USA (aka MegaBots Inc.) wants the public's money to make it sure it doesn't get tossed on the scrapheap in the first round. The company has set up a Kickstarter to raise funds for an upgrade to its robot, setting $500,000 as its minimum target and adding stretch goals of up to $1.5 million for extra melee weapons, balancing algorithms, and even new life support systems, to be designed in collaboration with NASA.
Advances at Oregon State University in manufacturing technology for "quantum dots" may soon lead to a new generation of LED lighting that produces a more user-friendly white light, while using less toxic materials and low-cost manufacturing processes that take advantage of simple microwave heating.
Man-made global warming has triggered a reversal of the natural ocean cooling that has occurred over the past 1,800 years, a study has found.
Related: Sun Causes City Buildings to Release Air Pollution
From polyester shirts, plastic milk jugs and PVC pipes to the production of high-grade industrial ethanol, the contribution of the chemical feedstock ethylene can be found just about everywhere around the globe.
But ethylene’s ubiquity as a building block in plastics and chemicals masks an underlying environmental cost.
Indiana University paleobotanist David Dilcher and colleagues in Europe have identified a 125 million- to 130 million-year-old freshwater plant as one of earliest flowering plants on Earth.
Alt: Ancient underwater plant 'could be world's first flower'
In the rainforests of west Africa, the woodlands of Brazil and the beaches of Thailand, archaeologists have unearthed some truly remarkable stone tools.
It's not the workmanship that makes them special. If anything, a casual observer might struggle to even identify them as ancient tools. It's not their antiquity that's exceptional either: they're only about the same age as the Egyptian pyramids.
An ape, directly socialized with humans, has learned the vocal and breathing control found in human speech, according to new research.
Koko the gorilla, famous for her ability communicate with her keepers using American Sign Language, has also developed breathing and grunting patterns associated with the ability to talk – something scientists thought to be impossible in her species.
A team of researchers with Princeton University has found that marmosets appear to learn at least some of their vocalizations from their parents. In their paper published in the journal Science, the group describes a study they carried out with the little South American monkeys and what they learned from it. David Margoliash with the University of Chicago and Ofer Tchernichovski with City University of New York offer some insight into the work done by the team in a Perspectives piece in the same journal edition.
For more than a century, researchers have tried to pin down exactly why so many animal species play in their infancy. Now a new study in wild macaque monkeys has found that infants who play more actually boost key motor skills. However, these skills are acquired at a cost. The researchers also discovered that active infants grow more slowly.
Spain’s north-eastern city of Tarragona has threatened to use DNA analysis of dog droppings to track down owners who fail to clear up their pet’s mess.
The coastal Mediterranean city would work with a local university to create a DNA database of registered dogs that could be used to identify their owners, said Ivana Martinez, the city’s city councillor for public spaces, on news radio Cadena Ser.
The first canines emerged in North America, where climate change transformed them from mongoose-like forest dwellers into pursuit-and-pounce predators, new research finds.
The discovery adds to the growing body of evidence that climate change dramatically affects the evolution of both predators and their prey.
Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Show a robot how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.
Having a robot understand and act upon a set of instructions so simple even a child could follow them is not such a far-fetched idea anymore, experts say.
Software may appear to operate without bias because it strictly uses computer code to reach conclusions. That’s why many companies use algorithms to help weed out job applicants when hiring for a new position.
But a team of computer scientists from the University of Utah, University of Arizona and Haverford College in Pennsylvania have discovered a way to find out if an algorithm used for hiring decisions, loan approvals and comparably weighty tasks could be biased like a human being.
For all the emphasis on design in the business world, there are entire classes of objects and experiences that feel stuck in time. Take a trip to the pharmacy—you wait in line, peruse the latest celebrity scandal in US Weekly, ponder whether peanut M&M’s purchased at the pharmacy count as health food, and pray that no embarrassing instructions accompany your meds.
Boston Dynamics, the robot company owned by Google, has released footage of Atlas, its six-foot humanoid robot stomping through woodland.
Like a scene from a sci-fi movie, Atlas is shown making its mechanical way through nature in footage featured in a YouTube video.
An almost fully-formed human brain has been grown in a lab for the first time, claim scientists from Ohio State University. The team behind the feat hope the brain could transform our understanding of neurological disease.
Though not conscious the miniature brain, which resembles that of a five-week-old foetus, could potentially be useful for scientists who want to study the progression of developmental diseases.
German researchers have discovered what might be the earliest case of leukemia in a 7,000-year-old skeleton, they announced at the first European conference on evolutionary medicine.
Belonging to a female individual who died at 30-40 years, the skeleton was excavated in 1982 among other 72 burials at an early Neolithic site near Stuttgart-Mühlhausen in south western Germany.
Scientists have discovered the oldest known fossil of a hand bone to resemble that of a modern human, and they suggest it belonged to an unknown human relative that would have been much taller and larger than any of its contemporaries.
A unique fossil of a 20 million-year-old salamander has been found encased in a chunk of amber from an unlikely place – the Dominican Republic, where all salamanders are now extinct.
A mass grave containing at least 26 skeletons is further evidence of the brutal conflict that appears to have beset central Europe 7,000 years ago.
The remains were uncovered at Schöneck-Kilianstädten in central Germany.
Related: Ancient Civilization Drove Tanks and Trucks in Turkey
The island of Sardinia may be Plato’s island of Atlantis, an expert claims.
Writer and Atlantis expert Sergio Frau says the southern end of the Mediterranean isle resembles an underwater Pompeii, which may have been the inspiration for Plato’s fictional Island of Atlantis.
Ancient Egyptians took their legal rights seriously - and when it came to drawing up marriage documents, women knew how to get their way.
An 8-foot long (2.4 metres) contract, currently hanging at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, reveals just how far their nuptial agreements went.
Wider faces make men appear more dominant, ambitious and powerful and so better business leaders, a study suggests
Struggling companies hoping to reverse their fortunes could benefit from appointing a CEO with chiselled features, new research suggests.
With pages that can filter out bacteria, the drinkable book may solve a major public health problem for the 750 million people worldwide without access to clean drinking water.
They may look like typical sunglasses, but these are making waves for people who are colorblind. Since they first went on sale in 2012, glasses from the company EnChroma Labs have allowed people to see colors as they’ve never seen them before, according to an article published this weekend in the New York Times.
Not content with their version 1.0 bodies, biohackers are installing USB drives in their fingertips, giving themselves night-vision eyedrops and growing third ears on their arms (that can go online). Welcome to the world of DIY cyborgs
Scientists have developed a way of storing vast quantities of information for up to a million years in a single molecule of DNA.
The breakthrough could lead to digital archives of everything from ancient texts to Wikipedia being stored in the form of DNA that could, in theory, survive for hundreds of thousands of years without any loss of data.
A Canadian space firm is one step closer to revolutionizing space travel with a simple idea – instead of taking a rocket ship, why not take a giant elevator into space?
Thoth Technology Inc has been granted both US and UK patents for a space elevator designed to take astronauts up into the stratosphere, so they can then be propelled into space.
Deep within Martian craters, astronomers believe there may be gemstones that could contain traces of fossilised life.
Now, for the first time, scientists have discovered direct physical evidence of the existence of these gems on the red planet.
Water in liquid form is thought to be a necessity for life on Earth.
Naturally, some say that life may flourish under other conditions, and perhaps even in the absence of water.
As NASA and other space agencies continue humanity’s interplanetary reconnaissance, one thing is becoming very clear: on balance, the solar system is a rather soggy place. Water, mostly in the form of ice, lurks practically everywhere we look. There are water deposits on the Moon, on Mars, and even in the cold, shadowed floors of deep polar craters on sun-broiled Mercury. Water exists in even greater abundance further out from the sun, constituting much of the crust for a wealth of dwarf planets, moons, and asteroids and even occasionally forming subsurface oceans.
A small, rocky planet could host liquid water on its surface, if it also contains a carbon-dioxide atmosphere, researchers say.
The planet, which scientists have dubbed Kepler-62f, has a diameter 40 percent larger than that of Earth, and could contain oceans of water if its atmosphere keeps the planet warm.
Astronomers have found the smallest planet outside this solar system yet to be directly photographed by a telescope on Earth, a methane-shrouded gas giant much like a young Jupiter.
This newfound alien planet, called 51 Eridani b, orbits a star about 96 light-years from Earth in a planetary system that may be much like Earth's own solar system
An enigmatic ring of icy particles circling Saturn, herded into a narrow ribbon by two tiny moons, was probably born of a cosmic collision, according to a study published Monday in Nature Geoscience.
The so-called F ring, some 140,000 kilometres (87,000 miles) beyond the sixth planet from the Sun, orbits at the border between Saturn's other rings and several moons.
Evidence of a fourth ultra-high energy neutrino—the highest-energy neutrino yet—has been detected by the South Pole-based IceCube experiment, a project that Berkeley Lab researchers helped build and to which they currently contribute analysis.
Long considered a staple of science fiction, high speed space travel between galaxies — or warp speed — may actually be possible, according to astrophysicist Professor Geraint Lewis.
Professor Lewis is set to deliver a talk today at the National Science Week in Sydney, and said the futuristic concept was actually part of Albert Einstein's theory of relativity.
Astronomer Burak Ula?, with the Izmir Turk College Planetarium in Turkey has taken his work into a musical dimension, using star oscillations as a source for a musical composition. He has uploaded a paper describing what he has done along with sheet music and an audio recording of his work to the preprint server arXiv—along with a shout-out to other pioneers in the field, from Kepler to Pythagoras to modern composer scientists Jen? Keuler and Zoltán Kolláth.
Black-footed ferrets, a critically endangered species native to North America, have renewed hope for future survival thanks to successful efforts by a coalition of conservationists, to reproduce genetically important offspring using frozen semen from a ferret who has been dead for approximately 20 years. The sire, 'Scarface,' as he is affectionately called, was one of the last 18 black-footed ferrets to exist in the world in the 1980s.
Grief stricken after her father’s death, Susan Casey went to Maui for surf and solace. A pod of dolphins showed up and changed her life.
To try and heal her grief, she went to Maui. She had been a competitive open water swimmer all her life and one day, while swimming offshore, a pod of dolphins surrounded her. The experience haunted her. She gave up her life in New York, moved to Hawaii and began work on her book Voices in the Ocean: A Journey into the Wild and Haunting World of Dolphins.
Ants have a remarkably sophisticated sense of smell, allowing them to pick up odors that dictate how they behave and how they interact with each other, a new study says.
Each ant has a subtle, unique aroma, made from a blend of chemicals called pheromones stuck on the outside of its body. Minute differences in each ant's body odor provide behavioral cues that allow the insects to maintain complex social colonies with different roles for queens, workers, nurses and soldiers — all without saying a word.
A new mystery has been discovered in the migratory behavior of birds! Many songbirds travel long distances during their annual migrations, and it makes sense for them to do everything they can to conserve their energy during these journeys. Researchers have guessed that, for this reason, they might pick an altitude with favorable winds and stick with it rather than climbing and descending repeatedly, but there has been little data to back this up.
African lungfish, Protopterus annectens, can live in suspended animation, called aestivation, without food and water for three to five years. They wake up when water becomes available.
During suspended animation, animals are inactive for an extended period—they take in no food or water and make no urine or waste. They enter a state of torpor, slowing down the biological time in relation to the clock time.
Ah, the summertime sizzle of a shell-strewn beach, the bracing odour of the briny sea. There's nothing quite like it really.
If you happen to be on a beautiful beach, do take a good, deep, invigorating sniff!
An earthquake in 1570 changed the course of the Po River in Italy, new research finds.
The Po, the longest river in Italy, has shifted northward about 12 miles (20 kilometers) between the towns of Guastella and Ficarolo over the past 2,800 years, researchers reported July 20 in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth. This shift likely happened in spurts, forced by quakes.
Every year, hundreds of thousands of tourists from all over the world descend on the Royal Observatory in Greenwich to pose for a photograph astride the Prime Meridian, the famous line which divides the eastern and western hemispheres of the earth.