Newsdesk Archive
Saturn's moon, Titan, is the only object in the Solar System other than Earth known to have liquid on its surface. While most of the lakes are found around the poles, the dry regions near the equator contain signs of evaporated material left behind like rings on a bathtub that, when combined with geological features, suggest that the location of the liquids on the moon has shifted over time.
Scientists are baffled about what has caused red marks resembling huge cat scratches on one of Saturn’s icy moons.
Like graffiti sprayed by an unknown artist, unexplained arc-shaped, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has picked up reddish streaks running across the surface.
While pursing his Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania, Steven Jasinski fulfilled a childhood dream: He discovered a brand-new dinosaur.
Jasinski, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Earth and Environmental Science and curator of paleontology and geology at the State Museum of Pennsylvania, was reviewing the museum's collection when he found a fossil that caught his eye. “As soon as I looked at the specimen, I could tell it was not the dinosaur it was thought to have been,”
At least 12,000 years ago, a mastodon with a toothache died on top of a pile of seashells beside a creek near what is now Yorktown, Virginia. The flesh decayed, leaving teeth and bones that were gradually covered by sediment from the creek. Over the years, the bones of other mastodons in Virginia dissolved. But this one was in just the right place to survive.
Dozens of small, fiber-wrapped bundles discovered in a cave in Arizona have been found to contain wild tobacco, the first scientific evidence suggesting that Ancestral Puebloans of the prehistoric Southwest chewed tobacco for personal use, archaeologists say.
Artefacts discovered amid submerged ruins of cities of Thonis-Heracleion and Canopus to be unveiled in major Paris exhibition
Spectacular ancient Egyptian treasures are to be exhibited for the first time having been discovered underwater in the submerged ruins of the near-legendary cities of Thonis-Heracleion and Canopus.
The Viking hit-and-run raids on monastic communities such as Lindisfarne and Iona were the most infamous result of burgeoning Scandinavian maritime prowess in the closing years of the Eighth Century.
Grabbing something hot and tasty on the move? You have the ancient Romans to thank. "Street food" was their invention, generally enjoyed with wine, gambling or even prostitutes.
Food on the go was an integral part of daily life in the empire, from nibbling on salted peas while watching gladiators battle in the Colosseum, to grabbing a sausage or fried fish snack after a dip in Rome's famed baths.
It can be a frustrating and disheartening routine for all concerned: a small child pushes unwanted food around their plate, while an exasperated parent looks on.
Oleogustus
/OH-lee-oh-GUHS-tuhs/ n.
The taste of certain fats.
Move over, umami. Fat is the newest member of the pantheon of basic tastes, joining salty, sweet, sour, bitter and savory, or umami.
Alt: Scientists Make The Case For A 6th Taste — But It's Less Than Tasty
Conventional theories used by economists for the past 150 years to explain how societies buy, sell, and trade goods and services may be able to unlock mysteries about the behavior of microbial life on earth, according to a study by researchers from Claremont Graduate University, Boston University, and Columbia University.
Britain’s oilseed rape harvest looks set to be better than normal this summer, according to figures which appear to undermine farmers’ claims that the ban on nerve-agent pesticides would decimate the crop.
According to a new study published online in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, massive aquifers underneath deserts contain approximately one trillion tons of carbon, about a quarter more than the amount stored in plants on land.
Related: Missing: One Year's Worth of California Rain
A teen is tackling serious water quality issues that threaten the health of rivers, streams and groundwater. Now she has just put the final touches on her research of a plastic adsorbent that removes pharmaceutical drugs from water sources.
There is something strange, very strange, going on inside the heads of people using the fast-acting psychedelic. Machine elves, anyone?
Have you encountered stick men, machine elves or other discarnate entities while tripping brains on DMT? If so, you're not alone.
I began bemused. The notion that humanity might be living in an artificial reality — a simulated universe — seemed sophomoric, at best science fiction.
It's like the movie "The Matrix," Bostrom said, except that "instead of having brains in vats that are fed by sensory inputs from a simulator, the brains themselves would also be part of the simulation.
An aurora with a glow resembling the Earth's Northern Lights has been spotted outside the solar system for the first time.
Astronomers found the aurora light display around a brown dwarf 20 light years away.
BILLIONS of years ago, Neptune made one giant leap. This jump left behind a close-knit group of icy objects called the Kuiper belt kernel, 6.5 billion kilometres from the sun, according to a new study.
The dark red pole on Pluto's largest moon Charon may be some of the dwarf planet's own siphoned-off atmosphere. Images and data captured by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft suggest that the reddish region at the top of the moon could be the frozen-out atmosphere from Pluto.
Earth’s magnetic field, which protects the planet from harmful blasts of solar radiation, is much older than scientists had previously thought, researchers say. In fact, this invisible, protective shield likely existed shortly after the planet formed — a finding that could shed light on why Earth is habitable and Mars is not.
Life may have lived and thrived in the oceans and lakes that once covered Mars — but some scientists want to focus the search for life on Mars on the organisms that held on when the water dried up: The last life-forms to survive on the Red Planet.
The spacecraft which made a spectacular landing on a comet last year has discovered a rich array of carbon compounds.
One leading scientist has even described the chemicals as "a frozen primordial soup".
Kepler-452b is the most Earth-like planet ever discovered, a place with just enough sunlight to possibly support the crops and house plants of life forms like ourselves.
But don't pack your bags just yet.
Humanity would only have a 12-hour warning about the arrival of a “coronal mass ejection” that could damage the National Grid, pipelines and railway signals, according to a newly released document from the UK Cabinet Office.
The brain is extraordinarily good at alerting us to threats. Loud noises, noxious smells, approaching predators: they all send electrical impulses buzzing down our sensory neurons, pinging our brain’s fear circuitry and, in some cases, causing us to fight or flee. The brain is also adept at knowing when an initially threatening or startling stimulus turns out to be harmless or resolved.
Background music in restaurants and stores may be having a more profound effect on you than you think. In a new study, researchers placed 10 volunteers in different rooms with music from one of three regions—the United States, China, or India—playing on loop.
As of yet, no single factor can explain what causes people to behave in ways labelled psychopathic. But research suggests our genes may play a role.
One gene in particular is linked with an increased risk of violent or aggressive behaviour, studies have found.
New evidence has emerged supporting the idea that marijuana may help rehab patients recover from and kick their addictions to painkillers. The study, published by researchers at Columbia University earlier this month, showed that patients given a form of THC during their recovery experienced less severe withdrawal symptoms and were more likely to complete their treatment course.
Related: Utah tribal church cites ‘religious liberty’ in fight against ban on using peyote in ceremonies
A few months back, two puffy, red eyes full of goop landed my toddler in the doctor’s office, where an exam also turned up two ear infections. This double-eye, double-ear whammy led to her first dose of antibiotics, post haste.
Starvation early in life can alter an organism for generations to come, according to a new study in roundworms.
The effects are what Duke University biologist Ryan Baugh terms a "bet-hedging strategy." In nature, the worms live a boom-or-bust lifestyle in which the occasional famine will devastate the population, but not all of the worms are killed. The survivors are smaller and less fertile, and they acquire a toughness that lasts at least two generations.
THERE’S more to semen than sperm. In many animals, seminal fluid alters both the bodies and sometimes even the behaviour of females. Human semen, too, triggers changes in the uterus, and might have wider effects on women, aimed at just one goal.
For a long time, biologists have considered sex to be an inherent trait of multicellular life, while microbial eukaryotes were considered to be either optionally sexual or purely clonal. From this perspective, clonality in eukaryotes is seen as exceptional.
Look at the long, slender snout and small body of an African golden jackal, and you’d be forgiven if you confused it with the golden jackal of Eurasia. Even researchers have long considered them members of the same species, canis aureus. But a new study says the two are separate species despite their similar good looks
Virtually all experts agree that the happiness dogs feel is comparable to what humans experience, and that it’s similar to how humans feel towards each other.
A 2014 US Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report (pdf) found that, between 2009 and 2012, 9% of Americans were using a prescription antidepressant at least once a month. Now, a sizable bunch of birds are too.
Thirteen new species of spider have been discovered on Queensland’s Cape York peninsula – adding to the thousands of known species that give Australian wildlife its fearsome reputation.
When it comes to vaccinating their babies, bees don't have a choice—they naturally immunize their offspring against specific diseases found in their environments. And now for the first time, scientists have discovered how they do it.
When you think about the deadliest animal in the world, what immediately springs to mind? Sharks? Hippos? Crocodiles? While these animals may look the part, the biggest killer amongst us is much more inconspicuous, and it can deliver that one potentially fatal bite without you even noticing. I am of course referring to the mosquito. Mosquitoes kill more people each year than all other animals combined, and on average they kill even more people than humans do.
Feltham said he suspected Nessie was most likely to be a large Wels catfish, a native European fish that can grow up to 13 ft (4 meters) long. Victorians introduced the fish to the loch near Inverness to provide sport.
The strange saga of the Rh negatives, however, suggests strongly that it’s not to the stars that we need to look for proof that extraterrestrials exist.
Related: Dead LA man who had 1,200 guns, underwater car identified; believed to be ‘part alien’ secret government worker
Related: UFO Lights Up Tucson Sky Like Christmas Tree
Teleporting from one place to the next looks so fun on the big and little screen. But physicists who actually can do something like that with single atoms say teleporting people would be much messier.
A pair of researchers affiliated with Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and the Institute of Anthropomatics & Robotics has created a deep neural network application that is able to successfully match faces recorded using infrared light with those taken using natural lighting. M. Saquib Sarfraz and Rainer Stiefelhagen have written a paper describing their research and findings and have posted it on the preprint server arXiv.
Changying Precision Technology Company in Dongguan city has set up an unmanned factory run almost entirely by robots. The factory has since seen fewer defects and a higher rate of production.
The gravest fear that has rippled through humanity from the technology industry is that, someday, almost all of our jobs will be replaced by robots.
From Picasso’s “The Young Ladies of Avignon” to Munch’s “The Scream,” what was it about some paintings that arrested people’s attention upon viewing them, that cemented them in the canon of art history as iconic works?
Speed and consistency: these are the two qualities that Tim Anderson says he most values in the kitchen. As a former UK MasterChef champion and head of a forthcoming Japanese-soul food fusion restaurant in London, Anderson knows what he’s talking about. Right now, though, he’s in a slightly unusual kitchen, watching a pair of outsized robot arms methodically preparing a crab bisque, electric motors gently whining. The robot’s movements are unhurried rather than speedy, but you have to admit it’s consistent. In fact, Anderson says the real problem might be that it’s too consistent. “This is where the robot is a problem, intuition.”
The concept of walking on water might sound supernatural, but in fact it is a quite natural phenomenon. Many small living creatures leverage water's surface tension to maneuver themselves around. One of the most complex maneuvers, jumping on water, is achieved by a species of semi-aquatic insects called water striders that not only skim along water's surface but also generate enough upward thrust with their legs to launch themselves airborne from it.
For a whole lot of people, especially those in developing countries, science — and with it, medicine — isn’t readily available to the majority of citizens. But Manu Prakash wants to change that.
Prakash, an assistant professor of bioengineering at Stanford, is the proprietor of “frugal science,” a term he coined to explain the movement toward building cheap versions of high tech tools. His endeavour aims to make medical devices both affordable and available to the masses.
Leaping through the air with ease and spinning in place like tops, ballet dancers are visions of the human body in action at its most spectacular and controlled. Their brains, too, appear to be special, able to evade the dizziness that normally would result from rapid pirouettes. When compared with ordinary people's brains, researchers found in a study published early this year, parts of dancers' brains involved in the perception of spinning seem less sensitive, which may help them resist vertigo.
An 8-year-old boy who lost his hands and feet to a serious infection has become the youngest patient to receive a double-hand transplant, surgeons say.
A French student has found an adult tooth dating back around 560,000 years in south-western France, in what researchers are hailing as a major discovery.
During the dinosaur age, ichthyosaurs — large marine reptiles that look like dolphins — flourished in prehistoric oceans, living in all kinds of watery environments near and far from shore. But as competition in these areas grew, ichthyosaurs lost both territory and species before gradually going extinct, a new study finds.
Shipwreck divers have announced quite the anniversary present for the flagship of a 1715 Spanish treasure fleet, the Capitana: 52 gold coins, 40 feet of gold chain, and 110 silver coins and buttons all worth over one million dollars.
CAIRO, EGYPT—Ahram Online reports that Egypt’s Minister of Antiquities Mamdouh al-Damaty announced the discovery of two carvings by archaeologists from the Polish Center for Mediterranean Archaeology
A??kl? Höyük, a mound near the banks of the Melendiz River in southern Turkey, lies not far from the site of Çatalhöyük. Dated to about 7500 B.C., Çatalhöyük is famous for being one of the oldest and largest Neolithic sites ever found.
But A??kl? Höyük dates back even earlier, to about 8000 B.C. Though less known and considerably smaller than Çatalhöyük, archaeological excavations at A??kl? Höyük have revealed a richly informative window on small-town life about 10,000 years ago, long before the pyramids, ziggurats, palaces, and other monumental features of the emerging, more expansive ancient cities of Mesopotamia and Egypt emerged on the landscape.
It is often held aloft by environmental campaign groups as an example of one of the last remaining regions of unspoiled habitat left in the world.
But instead of being a pristine rainforest untouched by human hands, the Amazon appears to have been profoundly shaped by mankind.
An international team of researchers have published evidence that suggests the Amazon was once home to millions of people who lived and farmed in the area now covered by trees.
The world’s greatest archeologist may not be human, but it is human-made. Global warming, the explorer in question, has melted glaciers that have preserved and hidden many past lives. From a celebrity mummy to graveyards of fish-lizards, ancient remnants have begun to spill out of the disappearing ice—faster, even, than researchers can recover them. And as the artifacts emerge, so has the science. The fledgling field of glacial archaeology seeks to find and recover these relics before the glaciers disappear, a time that may come all too soon. “It’s a race against time,”
People who spend time in aquariums could improve their physical and mental wellbeing, a study has suggested.
As well as improving people's mood, the experiment showed "significant" reductions in participants' heart rates and blood pressure, the authors added.
Keepers at the Taipei Zoo were excited. Resident giant panda Yuan Yuan was exhibiting signs of pregnancy -- an all-too-elusive event among captive pandas.
There were tell-tale symptoms, like a loss of appetite and a thickening of the uterus. Yuan Yuan’s fecal progesterone concentration was also on the rise.
One of the last five northern white rhinoceroses in the world has died.
Nabiré, a 31-year-old female northern white rhino, died of a ruptured cyst, authorities at the Dv?r Králové Zoo in the Czech Republic announced today (July 28). Nabiré's death leaves only three females of this subspecies alive. One male, Sudan, survives on a reserve in Kenya.
A genet cat has been filmed riding the back of a rhino on a nature reserve in South Africa.
The genet, a cat-like animal with a long tail and spotted coat, was seen sitting on top of buffalo and rhinos in photographs last year but the act has now been caught on video for the first time.
Wild chimpanzees in the forests of Uganda are increasingly eating clay to supplement the minerals in their diet, according to a long-term international study published in the early version of the journal PLOS ONE.
From networks of tubes to running wheels and plastic balls, pet hamsters get all the best accessories. And, it turns out, they probably appreciate it.
A new study has found that hamsters with enriched living conditions – including cushy bedding, chewing sticks, and hiding places – are more optimistic and probably happier.
A capability once thought reserved for humans and some top-level animals — awareness of the self — also exists in fruit flies, new research finds.
The study reveals that studies of attention, both in humans and in animals, need to focus on how different areas of the brain communicate with each other, not just one area at a time.
While ants are well known for their ability to carry far more than their own body weight, they also employ a system to maximize their efficiency.
According to BBC News, authors of a study published in the journal Nature Communications observed as a team of ants divided various tasks among themselves. For example, when carrying a piece of food far too large for ant, a large group would share the load while a select few "scouts" directed them.
Sipping droplets changes ants’ brain chemistry, making them neglect the colony and defend the butterfly larva
Beware the caterpillar offering a juicy treat. Sips tweak ant brain chemistry, lulling the insects into neglecting their own colony in favor of hanging around the source of the marvelous droplets.
Alt: Caterpillar drugs ants to turn them into zombie bodyguards
Although plants do not have nervous systems, they respond to stress with chemical and electrical signals that are remarkably similar to those of animals, a new study has found.
The findings, published in the journal Nature Communications, could help to explain why certain plant-derived drugs work so well in humans.
Washington has its fair share of problems. Summer humidity can be intolerable. The traffic is maddening. And it's just crawling with mosquitoes and politicians. Now we can add "it's sinking" to this unfortunate list.
The nation's capital will drop 6 inches in the next 100 years, finds a new study. And faced with sea-level rise, it's likely Washington will see significant flooding throughout the city as global sea-level rise is projected to reach 3 feet by 2100.
Tonight’s blue moon will be easy to see, but the name has nothing to do with its colour and ‘once in a blue moon’ is probably based on a misunderstanding
If it is clear tonight, step outside and marvel at the full moon. Its heavy, illuminated orb will trace a path right across the sky from horizon to horizon during the twilight and nighttime hours.
Earth's magnetic field is 800 million years older than previously thought, new research suggests.
A new analysis of Western Australian zircon minerals has found the engine that generates the field started not long after the planet formed.
The fiery demise of ancient huts in southern Africa 1,000 years ago left clues to understanding a bizarre weak spot in the Earth's magnetic field — and the role it plays in the magnetic poles' periodic reversals.
Patches of ground where huts were burned down in southern Africa contain a key mineral that recorded the magnetic field at the time of each ritual burning. Those mineral records teach researchers more about a weird, weak patch of Earth's magnetic field called the South Atlantic Anomaly and point the way toward a possible mechanism for sudden reversals of the field.
Our ancestors were not a picky bunch. Overwhelming genetic evidence shows that Homo sapiens had sex with Neanderthals, Denisovans and other archaic relatives. Now researchers are using large genomics studies to unravel the decidedly mixed contributions that these ancient romps made to human biology — from the ability of H. sapiens to cope with environments outside Africa, to the tendency of modern humans to get asthma, skin diseases and maybe even depression.
A community of lizards from the Caribbean, preserved for 20 million years in amber, have been found to be identical to their modern cousins, say researchers.
This suggests the different niches inhabited by the lizards have - incredibly - changed little over the past 20 million-year, report the team, in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Tyrannosaurus rex and other large meat-loving dinosaurs had deeply serrated teeth that let them tear through the flesh and bone of victims.
Only one animal living today has this same tooth structure, according to new research, published in the journal Scientific Reports. The Komodo dragon, which is the world’s largest lizard, holds that distinction.
Alt: Structural secret of T. rex's bone-crushing teeth
Once thought to be terrifying, scaly lizards, it now seems dinosaurs were actually more like birds. But not everyone's ready to accept their new image, writes Mary Colwell.
Besides just throwing back your handsome reflection, in the near future your mirror might tell you a lot about what lies beneath the surface.
That’s the goal of researchers who are developing a high-tech mirror that can deliver a health assessment just by analyzing your facial features.
If someone has a damaged kidney, a donor can give them a spare organ so both people can live. Now, what if you could do something similar for a friend with a failing brain?
In recent lab experiments, Miguel Nicolelis and his colleagues melded together the brains of multiple monkeys and rats to function as “brainets”—shared networks able to cooperatively manipulate a virtual arm and make calculations and decisions
Over 1,000 high-profile artificial intelligence experts and leading researchers have signed an open letter warning of a “military artificial intelligence arms race” and calling for a ban on “offensive autonomous weapons”.
The Philae comet lander has fallen silent, according to scientists working on the European Rosetta mission.
The fridge-sized spacecraft, which landed on Comet 67P in November, last made contact on 9 July.
China has started assembling the world's largest radio telescope, which will have a dish the size of 30 football pitches when completed, state media reported as Beijing steps up its ambitions in outer space.
The five-hundred-metre Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST) nestles in a bowl-shaped valley between hills in the southwestern province of Guizhou, images posted online show.
NASA's Mars rover Curiosity went out of its way to investigate a rock the likes of which it has never seen before on the Red Planet.
Measurements by Curiosity's rock-zapping ChemCam laser and another instrument revealed that the target, a chunk of bedrock dubbed Elk, contains high levels of silica and hydrogen, NASA officials said.
Pluto would appear to have glaciers of nitrogen ice, the latest pictures from the New Horizons probe suggest.
Scientists believe they see evidence of surface material having flowed around mountains and even ponding in craters.
The scientific search for extraterrestrial civilisations has languished for more than a decade, as the hunt for habitable planets and simpler forms of life has thrived. Nasa’s stunningly successful Kepler mission has discovered a thousand new worlds orbiting other stars. Astrobiology is a burgeoning field. But the search for intelligent life, begun in 1960 by astronomer Frank Drake, somehow fell off the funding radar.
While most humans are right-handed, our proteins are made up of lefty molecules. In the same way your left and right hands mirror one another, molecules can assemble in two reflected structures. Life prefers the left-handed version, which is puzzling since both mirrored types form equally in the laboratory. But a new study suggests that this may be because the star-forming cloud that created the first-ever biological molecule, before our sun was even born, made it left-handed.
In a new blow for the "supersymmetry" theory of the universe's basic anatomy, scientists have detected new evidence of subatomic activity consistent with the mainstream Standard Model of particle physics.
New data from ultra high-speed proton collisions at Europe's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) showed the bottom quark, also known as the 'beauty quark' behaves as predicted by the Standard Model.
Scientists and engineers at Arizona State University, in Tempe, have created the first lasers that can shine light over the full spectrum of visible colors. The device’s inventors suggest the laser could find use in video displays, solid-state lighting, and a laser-based version of Wi-Fi.
Over the past year, there's been a whole lot of excitement about the electromagnetic propulsion drive, or EM Drive - a scientifically impossible engine that's defied pretty much everyone's expectations by continuing to stand up to experimental scrutiny.
Alt: 'Impossible' rocket drive works and could get to Moon in four hours
Alt: No, German Scientists Have Not Confirmed the “Impossible” EMDrive
The Standard Model is the mainstream theory of all the fundamental particles that make up matter, and the forces that govern them. But the model has weaknesses: it doesn't explain dark matter or dark energy, which jointly make up 95 percent of the universe. Nor is it compatible with Einstein's theory of general relativity the force of gravity as we know it does not seem to work at the subatomic quantum scale.
Fifty years ago, Bob Dylan had only just gone electric, mankind had yet to take its great leap and many people thought the Big Bang was something that happened when you burst a Big Balloon.
But in July 1965, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson made a discovery that would cement our understanding of how the universe came into being. Their detection of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), the radiation left over from the birth of the universe, provided the strongest possible evidence that the universe expanded from an initial violent explosion, known as The Big Bang. Today, the CMB is still one of the most important signals that helps us understand the cosmos.
Using advanced computers and a computational technique to simulate physical processes at the atomic level, researchers at Brown University have predicted that a material made from hafnium, nitrogen, and carbon would have the highest known melting point, about two-thirds the temperature at the surface of the sun.
Traveling to other star systems is a big dream, but achieving it may require going ultrasmall.
Blasting tiny, waferlike sailing spacecraft with powerful lasers could slash interstellar flight times from thousands of years to mere decades, one researcher says.
Osaka University scientists said they fired the world's most powerful laser beam.
It instantaneously concentrated energy equivalent to 1,000 times the world's electricity consumption and entered the record books as the most powerful laser beam ever emitted.
Related: Alien swarm? 10 UFO-like objects filmed flying over Osaka, Japan (VIDEO)
When I arrived in San Jose last night, the newspaper on the front desk at the hotel had this headline splashed across the front page: "Drones Putting Lives at Risk." At least five times this year, fire departments trying to battle wildfires in California were unable to fly their helicopters close enough to assist teams on the ground because small drones flown by ordinary citizens were in the airspace capturing footage of the blaze.
The test flight of two small electric aircrafts earlier this month across the English Channel has got us wondering about when we'll get to ride in one of these clean, green planes.
While it may be a while before we board a cross-country electric flight, a short hop to the islands off Cape Cod may be more realistic.
In an attempt to harvest the kinetic energy of airflow, researchers have demonstrated the ability to harvest energy directly from the vibrations of a flexible, piezoelectric beam placed in a wind tunnel. While the general approach to harvesting energy from these "aeroelastic" vibrations is to attach the beam to a secondary vibrating structure, such as a wing section, the new design eliminates the need for the secondary vibrating structure because the beam is designed so that it produces self-induced and self-sustaining vibrations.
The light-sensing molecules that tell plants whether to germinate, when to flower and which direction to grow were inherited millions of years ago from ancient algae, says a new study released in the journal Nature Communications.
Taste, the sense that allows us to appreciate the beauty of good food, is something scientists understand fairly well. The sensation we feel when eating a piece of cake, chewing on a hamburger or taking the first bite of a piping hot piece of pizza is triggered when chemicals in our food interact with receptors in our mouths.
Anxiety and depression could be linked to the presence of bacteria in the intestines, scientists have found.
A study on laboratory mice has shown that anxious and depressive behaviour brought on by exposure to stress in early life appears only to be triggered if microbes are present in the gut.
The pygmies of West Africa evolved their short stature independently, and very differently, from their cousins in East Africa, French researchers said Tuesday.
The finding is evidence for the theory that dwarfism is an adaptation to environmental conditions—in this case life in an equatorial rain forest, they wrote in the journal Nature Communications.
One man was thought to be the first Anglican minister in the Americas. Another, an early explorer of the Mid-Atlantic region, was a rival of Capt. John Smith’s. And two of them, kin of Sir Thomas West’s, the governor of Virginia, helped save a colony on the brink of collapse.
All four, some of European America’s earliest leaders, died in colonial Jamestown from 1608 to 1610 and were long thought lost to history.
Related: Reburial of woman in native Ireland highlights 183-year-old murder mystery
Sibudu, a rock shelter above the uThongathi River in KwaZulu-Natal, is one of South Africa’s most important archaeological sites. Its recent nomination for World Heritage status demonstrates that it is of universal value, with heritage that belongs to all humanity.