Newsdesk Archive
When Prof. Juan de Pablo and his collaborators set about to explain unusual peaks in what should have been featureless optical data, they thought there was a problem in their calculations. In fact, what they were seeing was real. The peaks were an indication of molecular order in a material thought to be entirely amorphous and random: Their experiments had produced a new kind of glass.
Sunlight can be brutal. It wears down even the strongest structures, including rooftops and naval ships, and it heats up metal slides and bleachers until they're too hot to use. To fend off damage and heat from the sun's harsh rays, scientists have developed a new, environmentally friendly paint out of glass that bounces sunlight off metal surfaces—keeping them cool and durable.
One of the problems with being on the cutting edge of electric car technology is you're not as sure of being able to find a filling station as all the petrol-burning drivers around you. If a new road surface being trialled in the UK finds wider use, that sort of 'range anxiety' could be gone for good - the roads actually charge your car as you drive.
Two schools in South Australia have welcomed a set of NAO robots into their classrooms, in an attempt to figure out how artificial intelligence can be effectively incorporated into the Australian curriculum.
Researchers have created a surprisingly simple yet targeted brain game that reduces anxiety by helping people focus in an increasingly distracting world.
“Down the line we could roll out an online or mobile game based on this research that specifically targets distraction and helps people stay focused and feel less anxious,”
Related: EMB midnight - How many uses can you think of for a PAPER CLIP? Scientists discover people with autism have 'fewer ideas but are more creative and think outside the box'
Every now and again we get news stories about how someone in a coma “woke up” when their loved ones played or sang their favorite song. It sounds like sentimental exaggeration. According to at least a couple of studies, music really might help.
A new study suggests that joining a religious group could do more for someone’s “sustained happiness” than other forms of social participation, such as volunteering, playing sports or taking a class.
A study in the American Journal of Epidemiology by researchers at the London School of Economics and Erasmus University Medical Center in the Netherlands found that the secret to sustained happiness lies in participation in religion.
The idea of erasing people's memories sounds like something straight from the script of Men In Black, but what if those memories are damaging ones - like knowledge of an addiction to a harmful substance? Researchers in the US are testing a drug that they say can effectively wipe away memories of a meth addiction in the brains of laboratory mice.
People who smoke cigarettes know it’s bad for their health, but quitting is difficult. To make it easier, scientists are taking a novel approach – they are turning to microorganisms that thrive on nicotine. In a new paper published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, researchers describe successful tests on a nicotine-degrading enzyme from a common soil bacterium called Pseudomonas putida.
Some of the most precise human data yet on whether cutting carbs or fat has the most benefits for losing body fat. Now, researchers show how, contrary to popular claims, restricting dietary fat can lead to greater body fat loss than carb restriction, even though a low-carb diet reduces insulin and increases fat burning.
Last month, something unusual happened in the food industry.
The Danish Dairy Research Foundation, likely in hopes of boosting butter's regard, funded a study about the popular lipid. But when the research was delivered, it didn't exactly paint butter in a favorable light. In fact, it did just the opposite.
For most authors the prospect of their books sending readers to sleep would be horrifying.
But the latest publishing phenomenon which is topping the Amazon charts is a book which promises to do just that, at least for children.
Alt: The Rabbit Who Wants to Fall Asleep: Psychologist develops bedtime book to send children to sleep in minutes
Attention Lord of the Rings fans: Minas Tirith might be real — eventually.
A self-professed “ambitious team of architects and structural engineers” has launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise the necessary funds to build the fictional city created by J.R.R. Tolkein and visualized by Peter Jackson in his cinematic version of Lord of the Rings.
Alt:
Architects crowdfund to build £1.85 billion Minas Tirith in England
The British Library is calling on the public to help solve a mystery nearly 800 years in the making: Just what is written on this sword?
The double-edged sword, which is part of an exhibition on the Magna Carta and on loan from the British Museum, weighs 2 pounds 10 ounces and measures 38 inches in length and 6.5 inches across the hilt.
A comet plunging into the sea could have triggered a tidal wave that devastated bronze age settlements on the island, say scientists
Homer talks of Poseidon lashing out, Plato refers to a massive marine disaster. What happened on Sardinia in the second millennium BC? What dramatic event swept away the Tyrrhenian civilisation and the “tower builders” cited by Strabo and the poet Hesiod in antiquity? Was it an earthquake or a tidal wave? A comet?
During a high-resolution mapping of the seafloor surrounding Sicily, researchers discovered an ancient treasure: a stone monolith spanning 39 feet (12 meters), resting on the bottom of the Mediterranean.
Stunned, the researchers sent down divers with cameras and video recorders to get a closer look at the monolith, which had broken into two parts. They dove 131 feet (40 m) underwater in an area called the Pantelleria Vecchia Bank, located about 37 miles (60 kilometers) south of Sicily.
Scientists can now say definitively that humans are responsible for the death of ancient megafauna like the sabretooth tiger, the woolly mammoth, the woolly rhino and the giant armadillo, according to new research.
About 142 million years ago, two carnivorous dinosaurs wandered along a beach and left their large footprints behind in the sand, a new study finds.
These footprints, now fossilized, are helping researchers understand what types of dinosaurs lived in what is now modern-day northern Germany.
Ancient human remains from a Siberian cave dating back 50,000 years or more could provide a missing link in understanding how modern humans evolved.
Fragments of an early human skull and rib were found at Strashnaya - or Scary - Cave in the Altai Mountains during a summer archaeological dig.
Baron de Rothschild's lost ship was one of three carrying raw materials from France to the Baron's glass factory near Zichron Yaakov. The ship vanished without a trace in the late 19th century. Has it now been found more than a century later?
A mass burial site that may contain 30 victims of the Great Plague has been discovered in the City of London.
The skeletons were found during excavation of the Bedlam burial ground at Liverpool Street, which will serve the cross-London Crossrail line.
Throughout the Upper Paleolithic era, between about ten thousand and fifty thousand years ago, hunter-gatherers across a broad swath of Eurasia—from the Pyrenees to Siberia—carved small objects out of stone, mammoth ivory, clay, and bone that represented human figures, nearly all of them female. These carvings are the oldest figurative works of art made by Homo sapiens, and they are known collectively as Venus figurines.
For at least the last five centuries, people from the region near the Qinling Mountains in central China went into Dayu Cave to retrieve water and pray. Some of them marked their visits with graffiti—bold black text against the yellow-brown walls—that recorded the droughts that sent them to the cave’s Dragon Lake. Now scientists have matched those chronicles with chemical data compiled from the cave itself and found evidence that more hard times could be ahead.
In early January, a video clip featuring Bill Gates started making the rounds on the Internet. But he wasn’t delivering one of his inspiring speeches about vaccines or getting drenched in ice water to raise awareness about ALS. He was just drinking a glass of water.
Sounds boring, right? The catch: five minutes before Gates took his first sip, that water had been human waste pumped in from a local sewage facility. That’s right: Bill Gates drank poop water to entertain an audience on the Internet.
When the owl swooped, the “blind” mice ran away. This was thanks to a new type of gene therapy to reprogramme cells deep in the eye to sense light.
After treatment, the mice ran for cover when played a video of an approaching owl, just like mice with normal vision. “You could say they were trying to escape, but we don’t know for sure,” says Rob Lucas of the University of Manchester, UK, co-leader of the team that developed and tested the treatment. “What we can say is that they react to the owl in the same way as sighted mice, whereas the untreated mice didn’t do anything.”
In what appears to be an unexpected challenge to a long-accepted fact of biology, Johns Hopkins researchers say they have found that ribosomes—the molecular machines in all cells that build proteins—can sometimes do so even within the so-called untranslated regions of the ribbons of genetic material known as messenger RNA (mRNA).
Electrostatic interactions induced by short, positively charged, hydrophobic peptides are all it takes to attach RNA to vesicle membranes. The discovery provides new insight into how RNA and membranes could have come together to form protocells – precursors to life – 4 billion years ago on Earth.
Pain-relieving opioids, like morphine or codeine, are important for medical purposes. The drugs have been around for millennia however even today they are still made from poppy flowers, making the production of the drugs dependent on poppy farming. Now, for the first time, researchers from Stanford University have been able to synthesize opioids from yeast cultures grown in the lab, according to a study published today in Science.
In the latest effort to build an artificial laboratory model of the brain, Australian researchers have developed a novel method for constructing layered biological structures that looks just like cerebral cortex tissue using a handheld 3D printer.
Neuroscientists rarely get the opportunity to study the human brain directly, and so work on cells or tissue slices that have been dissected from animals and grown in Petri dishes.
A “mother” robot which can build its own “children,” test which ones do best then modify their design, has been developed by scientists at Cambridge University.
In a video released by the university, the robot was shown building its own “cube babies” before watching as they take their first steps.
For most of recent history, babies have had a pretty good run, PR-wise. Not only have they been successfully branded as “bundles of joy,” they’ve also been widely recognized as the reason, collectively at least, that we're here (what with reproduction being so crucial to existence).
New research suggests that the adult IQ of babies who were born prematurely or with a very low birth weight can be predicted when they are a toddler.
Researchers at the University of Warwick found that the IQ of adults born very premature can be predicted when they are 2 years old. The IQ of adults who were born full-term couldn't be accurately predicted till the age of six.
A new study published in the Journal of Neuroscience has revealed an intrinsic biological difference between males and females in the molecular regulation of synapses in the hippocampus. This provides a reason to believe that female and male brains may respond differently to drugs targeting certain synaptic pathways.
Rapid eye movement during sleep triggers the parts of our brain involved in processing visual images while we are awake, a new study shows.
The finding, published today in Nature Communications, may help explain why we can remember vivid dreams when we are woken during this phase of sleep.
Researchers have created unusually intelligent mice by altering a single gene and as a result the mice were also less likely to feel anxiety or recall fear.
The study, led by the University of Leeds and Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, is published today in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology.
University of Queensland researchers have shown, like humans, fruit flies may be self-aware of their actions.
Scientists at UQ’s Queensland Brain Institute placed tethered Drosophila melanogaster fruit flies in front of a digital display, on an air-supported ball, while recording multiple parts of their brain simultaneously.
Male elephant seals compete fiercely for access to females during the breeding season, and their violent, bloody fights take a toll on both winners and losers. These battles are relatively rare, however, and a new study shows that the males avoid costly fights by learning the distinctive vocal calls of their rivals. When they recognize the call of another male, they know whether to attack or flee depending on the challenger's dominance status.
Lyrebirds are renowned mimics — their impersonations of other birds can fool even the species they're copying, and they can replicate mechanical sounds from a chainsaw to a camera shutter too.
Like all songbirds, lyrebirds use song to stake out their territory and attract a partner. They have the most diverse repertoire of all songbirds — and it's not just the fellas that turn out a tune.
Hospitals have a free and powerful tool that they could use more often to help reduce the pain that surgery patients experience: music.
Scores of studies over the years have looked at the power of music to ease this kind of pain; an analysis published Wednesday in The Lancet that pulls all those findings together builds a strong case.
The recent emergence of isolated tribes from jungles in Peru and Brazil is challenging officials in both countries to rethink their “no contact” policies and to prepare for a possible wave of “first contacts” as the Amazon wilderness that harbors the highly vulnerable indigenous groups continues to shrink.
We know a lot about language, but we know very little about how speech developed. Did we start with gesturing and grunts? Beating our chests and pointing? Most linguists agree that some combination of movement and sound probably got us started. But how did we decide which sounds to use for various words?
Koko the gorilla is best known for a lifelong study to teach her a silent form of communication, American Sign Language. But some of the simple sounds she has learned may change the perception that humans are the only primates with the capacity for speech.
Earth ‘overshoot day’ – the day each year when our demands on the planet outstrip its ability to regenerate – comes six days earlier than 2014, with world’s population currently consuming the equivalent of 1.6 planets a year
To conserve the planet's ecosystems and their diverse plant and animal species, human populations should consume less meat, according to Florida International University researchers.
Competition played a more important role in the evolution of the dog family (wolves, foxes, and their relatives) than climate change, shows a new international study. Researchers analyzed over 2000 fossils and revealed that the arrival of felids to North America from Asia had a deadly impact on the diversity of the dog family, contributing to the extinction of as many as 40 of their species.
The apparent discovery, based on scans of King Tutankhamun’s burial chamber, could yield treasure beyond what was found in his famous resting place
Alt: King Tut's Tomb May Hide Nefertiti's Secret Grave
Cleopatra VII Philopator, commonly known simply as Cleopatra, ruled over Egypt during the century preceding the birth of Christ.
Over the next two thousand years and counting, she would be renowned for her outstanding physical beauty, inspiring innumerable works of art depicting her as an alluring temptress, and spawning countless modern beauty parlours in her name.
For more than two decades, University of Virginia Tibet Center archaeologist and historian John Vincent Bellezza has been exploring highland central Asia, going places where few archaeologists and explorers have ventured. Since 1992, he has investigated and documented scores of monumental sites, rock art, castles, temples, residential structures, and other features on the desolate reaches of the Tibetan Plateau, building a knowledge base on a vast archaic civilization and ancient religion that flourished long before Buddhism emerged and dominated this otherwise comparatively sparsely populated high altitude region.
The remains of an ancient female warrior still clasping a huge sword and dagger have been discovered in South Kazakhstan.
Dubbed Red Sonja after the fearsome warrior woman portrayed by Brigitte Nielsen in the hit 1980s film, the skeleton was found with an impressive arsenal of weapons.
A trio of researchers, two with the University of Wisconsin, the other with the University of California, has conducted a study, the results of which suggest that maybe humans did not get a start on language using only hand gestures as many scientists have theorized. Instead, as Marcus Perlman, Rick Dale and Gary Lupyan note in their paper published in Royal Society Open Science, it may have been a result of both noise-making and gesturing.
A linguist from the University of Houston is proposing a solution to a centuries-old puzzle: What sparked the “nonsense” language in “Gulliver’s Travels”?
Irving N. Rothman, a professor of English literature and Jewish studies at UH, says the mystery words are, in fact, variations of Hebrew.
A wooden sea monster emerged on Tuesday from the Baltic sea after lying on the seabed off the southern Swedish town of Ronneby for more than 500 years.
Representing a ferocious looking creature with lion ears and crocodile-like mouth, the 660-pound figurehead stood at the prow of a ship. It was carved from the top of an 11-foot-long beam.
It's not surprising to find alien-like creatures lurking in the deep sea. But what about something that looks like it fell off your dinner plate, then grew a head?
A team from energy giant BP recently stumbled upon a wiggly, pasta-like creature more than 4,000 feet under water off the Angola coast while using a remotely operated deep-sea vehicle for oil well maintenance, according to the journal New Scientist.
With its eight tentacles, large eyes and intelligent demeanour, it has been likened to an alien form of life. Now scientists have decoded the genome of the octopus and have discovered just how different it is to other intelligent creatures both on land and sea.
Alt: Don't freak out, but scientists think octopuses 'might be aliens' after DNA study
With the financial aid of a biotechnology executive whose daughter may need a lung transplant, U.S. researchers have been shattering records in xenotransplantation, or between-species organ transplants.
A global contest to name 32 alien planets has entered the home stretch.
The public can now vote on a list of proposed common names for the 32 exoplanets, as well as most of their host stars, in the International Astronomical Union's "NameExoWorlds" competition. Voting is open through Oct. 31, and the winning names will be announced in mid-November, IAU representatives said.
Radio telescope, which was in danger of closing down due to federal government funding cuts, wins reprieve from project funded by Russian internet billionaire
Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell was the sixth human to walk on the Moon. Since then, he has become a leader in the UFO community, frequently stating that he is personally aware of many UFO encounters and subsequent cover-ups by governments, military leaders and others.
Alt: 'Aliens tried to save America from nuclear war': UFOs shot at missiles in White Sands to protect Earth, claims former astronaut
University of Michigan astronomers have found the smallest black hole ever observed in the centre of a galaxy
Alt: How can a supermassive black hole be teeny?
Matter and antimatter appear to be perfect mirror images of each other as far as anyone can see, scientists have discovered with unprecedented precision, foiling hope of solving the mystery as to why there is far more matter than antimatter in the universe.
Scientists at Massachusetts Institute for Technology (MIT) in the US have designed a 6.6-metre-wide fusion reactor that they say could provide electricity to around 100,000 people. Even better, it could be up and running within 10 years, according to their calculations.
The world’s population, now 7.3 billion, is expected to reach the 11 billion mark by 2100, according to revised population projections released yesterday by the United Nations (UN) Population Division.
The brains of people with epilepsy appear to react to music differently from the brains of those who do not have the disorder, a finding that could lead to new therapies to prevent seizures, according to new research.
Many people think of nail biting as a nervous habit, but the driving force may not be anxiety. Mounting evidence shows that people who compulsively bite their nails, pick their skin or pull their hair are often perfectionists, and their actions may help soothe boredom, irritation and dissatisfaction.
Some days, the french fries are just irresistible. You know it's not the best thing to put in your body, but did that salad really stand a chance after the smell of fried garlic, Parmesan and thyme on crisp potato wedges wafted over to you?
Pigs are clean, people say. But they are now taking hygiene to another level, preferring their food washed
Rather than gobbling down an apple, beetroot or piece of chicken covered with sand, the boars preferred it clean.
They carried it using their snout to the water creek that ran through their enclosure. They then swirled it around in the water before eating it.
Europe's last wild sturgeons got a rare boost this summer when the conservationist group WWF Bulgaria released more than 50,000 babies of these prehistoric fish into the lower Danube, marking the end of a three-year project co-funded by the European Union.
These so-called giant "living fossils" date back to the time of the dinosaurs but are now teetering on the brink of extinction.
Lions were hunted to local extinction in Rwanda. Now a new group of imported lions seems to be doing well in the country.
A week after their release into the Akagera National Park in the northeast of Rwanda, the lions took down a waterbuck on the lakeshore and were gorging themselves on the carcass.
A solitary species of shark has astonished biologists with a surprising way of producing offspring – the females store sperm from a male for nearly four years before using it to fertilise their eggs.
The brownbanded bamboo shark, a shy nocturnal fish normally found living in the Pacific ocean off the coast of Japan and Indonesia, appears to have developed an unusual strategy to deal with its lonely lifestyle.
Dogs capable of sniffing out cancer have been approved for use in a trial by the NHS.
The charity Medical Detection Dogs has gained approval from Milton Keynes University Hospital for further trials, after an initial study showed specially trained dogs can detect prostate tumours in urine in 93% of cases.
Research reveals that most individuals with cancer have religious and spiritual beliefs, or derive comfort from religious and spiritual experiences. But what impact does this have on patients' health? Recent analyses of all published studies on the topic--which included more than 44,000 patients--shed new light on the associations of religion and spirituality with cancer patients' mental, social, and physical well-being.
For hundreds of years, the Mazatec people of Oaxaca in southern Mexico have conducted rituals that combine their own ancient beliefs with those of Catholicism. Healers use herbs and other plants, incense, and chanting in order to learn the cures for illness, seek out lost objects and people, and travel to spiritual or astral dimensions. The most famous component of their rituals is the “magic” mushroom, which contains the psychedelic chemical psilocybin. Another tool in the Mazatec healing toolbox is “divine sage,” Salvia divinorum, which is said to belong to the Virgin Mary and the leaves of which are consumed for their physical and spiritual healing powers.
Researchers in France have discovered a new way to levitate liquid droplets, which surprisingly also creates a mini light show, with the droplet sparking as it floats above a faint blue glowing gap.
Described this week in the journal Applied Physics Letters, the work may offer an inexpensive new way to generate a freely movable microplasma, as well as yield insights into fundamental physics questions.
Engineers have developed a robotic system that can evolve and improve its performance.
A robot arm builds "babies" that get progressively better at moving without any human intervention.
Related: 'Machine teaching' holds the power to illuminate human learning
The quarterly earnings conference calls held by Tesla Motors are always intriguing, and so it was with last week's second-quarter update.
Financial analysts focused on the company's numbers -- it's still losing money as it invests, and a fresh capital raise seems inevitable -- but another topic raised some new business prospects.
Related: Elon Musk reveals Tesla model S cars will soon be able to automatically parallel park and drive themselves on the highway
Among those who don’t believe that humans largely are causing climate change, one popular argument has been that an increase in the Sun’s activity is the real culprit — or, “it’s the Sun, stupid,” as British newspaper columnist James Delingpole once put it.
Lending at least some plausibility to these hypothesis was the scientific consensus that the solar activity has been trending upwards in the 300 years since the Maunder Minimum that occurred between 1645 and 1715, when there was little sunspot activity.
Today, "shade balls" got their moment in the sun.
On Monday afternoon, the 20,000 black plastic balls tumbled down the slopes of Los Angeles Reservoir, joining 95,980,000 of their brethren already covering the surface of the water.
Iceland has been using geothermal energy to generate electricity for decades. In 2008, however, engineers discovered a reservoir of extremely hot water that has the potential to greatly expand geothermal electricity output.
Now geoscientists have for the first time produced a realistic simulation of how such reservoirs are created. They predict these natural phenomena are widespread in volcanic areas, such as Japan and New Zealand.
A cluster of icy bodies in the same region as Pluto could be proof that our early solar system was home to a fifth giant planet, according to new research. That planet may have “bumped” Neptune during its migration away from the sun 4 billion years ago, causing the ice giant to jump into its current orbit and scattering a cluster of its satellites into the Kuiper belt in the outer solar system.
The first Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System telescope is now in operation on Haleakala – on the Hawaiian island of Maui.
Known as ATLAS, the telescope is part of an asteroid impact early-warning system being developed by the University of Hawaii and funded by NASA. Once completed in 2015, ATLAS will consist of two telescopes 100 miles (62 kilometers) apart that will automatically scan the whole sky several times every night looking for moving objects.
The world’s most worrisome military flashpoint is arguably not in the Strait of Taiwan, the Korean Peninsula, Iran, Israel, Kashmir or Ukraine. In fact, it cannot be located on any map of Earth, even though it is very easy to find. To see it, just look up into a clear sky, to the no-man’s-land of Earth orbit, where a conflict is unfolding that is an arms race in all but name.
Ten years after launch, NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has revealed the Red Planet's diversity and activity, returning more data about Mars every week than all six other missions currently active there. And its work is far from over.
The workhorse orbiter now plays a key role in NASA's Journey to Mars planning. Images from the orbiter, revealing details as small as a desk, aid the analysis of potential landing sites for the 2016 InSight lander and Mars 2020 rover.
The Perseid meteor shower maximum is almost upon us, and this year especially, you don't want to miss it.
The annual August meteor shower is one of the most prolific natural light shows of the year with up to 100 shooting stars streaking across the sky per hour at its peak.
Without applause or encore, the lights are going out across the universe, as old stars die faster than new ones are born to replace them.
Astronomers described the slow death of the cosmos in fresh detail on Monday after training some of the world’s most powerful telescopes on a vast region of space.
Perhaps The Mona Lisa is the most famous painting in history because her enchanting smile is art’s most enigmatic mystery. By looking directly at Mona Lisa's lips, we notice that her smile is understated, almost nonexistent. But after looking into her eyes or the part in her hair (while paying attention to her mouth), her smile becomes much wider.
A British researcher may have found the lost grave of Queen Nefertiti - and he says it has been hiding in plain sight.
Dr Nicholas Reeves, an English archaeologist at the University of Arizona, claims he has discovered a secret doorway leading out of Tutankhamun's burial chamber.
For more than 400 years, researchers have been attempting to uncover the fate of the 'lost colonists' who disappeared from a sandy outpost on Roanoke Island.
Queen Elizabeth I and explorer Sir Walter Raleigh had hoped the 1580s expedition would create a capital in the New World, but something went terribly wrong.
Alt: The Roanoke Island Colony: Lost, and Found?
When it comes to expanding his country's geographic boundaries, Russian President Vladimir Putin has more tricks up his sleeve than just invading his neighbors and illegally annexing their territory. In a submission to the United Nations, the Russian Federation is now claiming that it has the right to exert economic control over nearly half a million square miles of the Arctic Ocean, including the North Pole.
Giant rocks stacked in seemingly gravity-defying poses could indicate that earthquakes on the San Andreas Fault can jump to another major fault in Southern California, which in turn could affect the severity of quakes in the region and how the state prepares for future temblors.
In the south of France, there’s a strange-looking rock outcropping, where a jagged fracture runs through granite. The surface in and around the crevice is discolored black, as if wet or covered in algae. But the real cause of the rock’s odd appearance is that it was struck by lightning.
We think of lightning as something that starts fires, knocks down trees, and in rare instances strikes an unlucky or unwary person.
Fossil fish teeth recovered from the ocean floor around Tasmania have shed new light on the origins of the world's largest ocean current, according to a paper released in Nature this week.
Analysis of fish teeth recovered from drilling of the ocean floor, combined with the study of tectonic plate movements by Dr Joanne Whittaker of the University of Tasmania's Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies and Dr Simon Williams from the University of Sydney, has revealed how the flow of water around Antarctica began.
Are human remains the archaeology of death or the archaeology of life? This strange paradox stated in Pearson (1999), addresses that the surviving bones, tissues and skin are more likely to reveal information about a person’s life, not a person’s death.
Unusual embalming recipes have been identified on two ancient Egyptian mummies, according to new international research.
The study investigated the 18th Dynasty mummies of the royal architect Kha and his wife Merit, a couple who were believed to have undergone a short and poor mummification -- if no mummification at all -- despite their relative wealth at death.
The dinosaurs of Gondwana may have wandered around and died in fields of flowers that were the ancestors of daisies, suggests new research.
Findings published in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, show that the Asteraceae family of flowering plants is much older than previously thought.
Researchers in Alaska have uncovered the bones of a prehistoric marine reptile dating back 70?million years.
This is the first time an elasmosaur has ever been unearthed in this state. Its vertebrae were discovered embedded in an eroding cliff.
The Permian geologic period that ended the Paleozoic era climaxed around 252 million years ago with a sweeping global mass extinction event in which 90 to 95 percent of marine life became extinct. It would take 30 million years for planetary biodiversity to recover. Understanding the contributing factors of the end-Permian mass extinction is critical to understanding and perhaps mitigating the current anthropogenic climate change.
Humankind likes to believe it sits at the top of the evolutionary tree because of its complexity, but our success may be down to us actually losing some of our DNA.
Geneticists have discovered that modern humans actually possess far less genetic information in our cells than their ancestral cousins.
Alt: Ancestral humans had more DNA
Close but no cigar: How 16th Century observations paved the way for Darwin's landmark study
Documents dating back to the 16th Century provide a unique insight into one of Darwin's landmark studies - according to new research from the University of East Anglia.
State-of-the-art forensic technology from South Africa has been used to try and unravel the mystery of what was smoked in tobacco pipes found in the Stratford-upon-Avon garden of William Shakespeare.
A medieval sword linked to the Magna Carta is causing a bit of a mystery for historians at the British Library.
Researchers are appealing for help to deceiver the inscription on the sword which was found in the River Witham in July 1825.