Newsdesk Archive
Crouched in a shallow square grid dug into the red African earth, American graduate student Sarah Edlund uses a hand brush to scrape soil into a dustpan.
She is uncovering scraping tools of a different kind -- implements fashioned from quartz that were used 100,000 years ago to prepare animal hides.
New research reveals that some of the earliest civilizations in the Middle East and the Fertile Crescent may have been affected by abrupt climate change. These findings show that while socio-economic factors were traditionally considered to shape ancient human societies in this region, the influence of abrupt climate change should not be underestimated.
At the end of the Pleistocene period, approximately 12,800 years ago—give or take a few centuries—a cosmic impact triggered an abrupt cooling episode that earth scientists refer to as the Younger Dryas.
New research by UC Santa Barbara geologist James Kennett and an international group of investigators has narrowed the date to a 100-year range, sometime between 12,835 and 12,735 years ago.
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.
Two fossilised thigh bones with bite marks on them, discovered at a site in central China, have been dated to 100,000 years ago and have sparked speculation among researchers that the bite marks may be signs of cannibalism. The bones most probably belong to a young representative or representatives of the Xuchang Man species, a predecessor of modern man.
Teenagers facing the ire of parents over their exam results may have found the perfect excuse after a new study concluded that exam success is largely inherited.
Scientists at King’s College London discovered that up to 65 per cent of the difference in pupil’s GCSEs grades was down to genetics.
Babies learn language best by interacting with people rather than passively through a video or audio recording. But it's been unclear what aspects of social interactions make them so important for learning. New findings demonstrate for the first time that an early social behavior called gaze shifting is linked to infants' ability to learn new language sounds.
Oftentimes we have innumerable distractions at work competing for our attention. Luckily, music can help put us back on a more productive track.
Studies out of the University of Birmingham, England, show that music is effective in raising efficiency in repetitive work - so if you’re mindlessly checking email or filling out a spreadsheet, adding some tunes will make your task go by that much faster.
When people with very high IQs are given moderately difficult task, their brains work more efficiently compared to people with slightly above-average IQs.
To describe the effect, Elsbeth Stern, a professor at ETH Zurich, uses the analogy of a more and less efficient car: “When both cars are traveling slowly, neither car consumes very much fuel. If the efficient car travels at maximum speed, it also consumes a lot of fuel. At moderate speeds, however, the differences in fuel consumption become significant.”
As NASA once put, space is no trip to the spa. Changes in skin occur during spaceflight. According to recent reports, scientists have found that skin of astronauts who spend a lot of time in space gets thinner.
New photos of Pluto released by Nasa reveal flows of nitrogen ice filling up craters, an atmosphere that could be on the verge of collapse, and a mysterious reddish haze extending 100 miles above the surface.
Scientists of the space agency’s historic New Horizons mission on Friday announced the discoveries with visible delight, with lead investigator Alan Stern declaring the Pluto system a “scientific wonderland”.
NASA’s Kepler team announced the discovery of the most Earth-like planet yet. It may be larger than Earth, but this exoplanet is situated firmly within its star’s habitable zone—and it’s been there for a while. So could it actually sustain life?
Related: What would it be like to live on Earth's planetary 'cousin'?
The search for alien life is moving to the icy moons orbiting Jupiter following the discovery of organic materials hailed as the “building blocks of life”.
In September 2016, NASA plans to launch its first-ever asteroid sample return mission loaded with tasks that will help us better understand the composition of asteroids, their origin, and possibly even Earth's origin. The Origins-Spectral Interpretation-Resource Identification-Security-Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) mission designed to study asteroids, which are the leftover debris from the solar system formation process, could teach us a lot about the history of the sun and planets.
Could the United States afford a permanent settlement on the Moon? According to a study commissioned by NASA, the answer is yes, if we're willing to go commercial.
Related: University of Essex in world's deepest 'space' pool plan
It's a common trope in science-fiction novels: Astronauts travel back in time by zooming through space at speeds faster than light (usually getting into trouble in the process).
Most physicists think that scenario is impossible.
Quantum theory is one of the great achievements of 20th century science, yet physicists have struggled to find a clear boundary between our everyday world and what Albert Einstein called the "spooky" features of the quantum world, including cats that could be both alive and dead, and photons that can communicate with each other across space instantaneously.
A new theory says dark matter acts remarkably similar to subatomic particles known to science since the 1930s.
We owe a lot to dark matter – it is the thing keeping galaxies, stars, our solar system, and our bodies intact. Yet no one has been able to observe it, and it has often been regarded as a totally new exotic form of matter, such as a particle moving in extra dimensions of space or its quantum version, super-symmetry.
Alt: Have we got dark matter all wrong? New theory says mysterious substance acts like a particle discovered in the 1930s
On 3 June this year, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN began delivering particle collisions at an energy 63% higher than previously achieved. This week in Vienna, first physics results were presented. Here are some highlights
Researchers in the US have developed a new drug that can be delivered directly into the eye via an eye dropper to shrink down and dissolve cataracts - the leading cause of blindness in humans.
While the effects have yet to be tested on humans, the team from the University of California, San Diego hopes to replicate the findings in clinical trials and offer an alternative to the only treatment that’s currently available to cataract patients - painful and often prohibitively expensive surgery.
Each year, scientists create an influenza (flu) vaccine that protects against a few specific influenza strains that researchers predict are going to be the most common during that year. Now, a new study shows that scientists may be able to create a 'universal' vaccine that can provide broad protection against numerous influenza strains, including those that could cause future pandemics.
It is not often that humanity can take pride in driving an organism toward extinction but today we can do just that. As of July 24 Nigeria has gone an entire year without a single case of endemic polio, an incurable and highly infectious disease that attacks the nervous system and can cause life-threatening paralysis.
The Peruvian government plans to make its first contact with the Mashco Piro, an isolated tribe that live in the Amazon rainforest.
Reaching out to "uncontacted" tribes is controversial, particularly because isolated tribes lack immunity to common diseases, which can quickly turn deadly.
Be careful when choosing your next passport photo or profile image as a new study suggests we are so poor a picking good likenesses of our face that strangers make better selections.
We recognize words as pictures
As your eyes scan these words, your brain seems to derive their meaning instantaneously. How are we able to recognize and interpret marks on a page so rapidly? A small new study confirms that a specialized brain area recognizes printed words as pictures rather than by their meaning.
As much as you think your tastes are unique, psychologists say they can guess your favorite color. It’s likely to be blue. And it’s especially unlikely to be yellow—unless you’re colorblind. Men with red-green colorblindness have preferences that are essentially opposite from everyone else’s. The finding could help scientists understand why humans like what they like, and how colorblind people see the world differently.
Changing the color of light would give solar technology a considerable boost. A traditional solar cell can only absorb light with energy above a certain threshold. Infrared light passes right through, its energy untapped.
However, if that low-energy light could be transformed into higher-energy light, a solar cell could absorb much more of the sun's clean, free, abundant energy.
A Senate committee representing all Australia’s major parties is preparing a Regulator of Medicinal Cannabis Bill to legalize medical marijuana, despite warnings of regulatory complications with both Australian and international law, a report says.
Alt: Cannabis petition forces UK MPs to consider debating legalisation
Scientists testing experimental drugs to prevent or reverse Alzheimer's disease have for years endured a drumbeat of inconclusive and disappointing trial results. But dementia researchers meeting in Washington, D.C., this week got some unexpectedly good news on the benefits of a therapy that is readily available, inexpensive to deliver and free of unwanted side effects.
Plants can sense parasitic roundworms in the soil by picking up on their chemical signals, a team of researchers at the Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research (BTI), on the Cornell University campus, has found.
When plants detect pheromones given off by nematode worms, they activate their immune system for protection.
Related: Gut worms protect babies' brains from inflammation
The serpentine columbine has found an elaborate way to protect itself from predators. The sticky herb is a favorite snack of Heliothis phloxiphaga moth larvae, which munch its buds, flowers, and fruits. But instead of trying to attack the creepy-crawlies directly, the columbine sends out a chemical signal that attracts dragonflies, beetles, and other insects.
The bananas in your kitchen are genetically vulnerable clones and, after years of threatening it, they might finally be heading towards extinction.
The latest banana to stock your shelves is a particularly bland variety known to banana geeks by its proper name: The Cavendish. But to everybody else it’s known more simply as the only banana readily available.
Rejected by scientists, dowsing is an ancient tradition that’s dying hard in the Central Valley’s parched fields
LINDSAY, Calif. — Vern Tassey doesn’t advertise. He’s never even had a business card. But here in California’s Central Valley, word has gotten around that he’s a man with “the gift,” and Tassey, a plainspoken, 76-year-old grandfather, has never been busier.
The 350-year-old mystery of why pendulum clocks hanging from the same wall synchronize over time may finally be solved, scientists say.
In 1665, Dutch physicist Christiaan Huygens, inventor of the pendulum clock, was lying in bed with a minor illness and watching two of his clocks hanging on a wall, said Henrique Oliveira, a mathematician at the University of Lisbon and co-author of a new study detailing the findings.
JAIPUR, India—“I saw a 5-year-old die in five seconds,” says Ajaita Shah, recalling the Indian girl enveloped by a kerosene fire at home. “There was nothing we could do.”
Not then. But since that 2008 disaster, Shah has helped cut the use of kerosene lamps in rural India by selling thousands of solar lanterns, street lights, and home lighting kits.
A new report by former NASA scientist James Hansen and 16 other experts says the already dire projections on rising sea levels are actually too optimistic, having underestimated the rate at which Earth’s ice sheets will melt in response to warmer sea temperatures.
This month there's been a hoopla about a mini ice age, and unfortunately it tells us more about failures of science communication than the climate. Such failures can maintain the illusion of doubt and uncertainty, even when there's a scientific consensus that the world is warming.
The story starts benignly with a peer-reviewed paper and a presentation in early July by Professor Valentina Zharkova, from Northumbria University, at Britain's National Astronomy Meeting.
Some people prefer Google when exploring the Web. Some like Yahoo or Bing. But now more than 2.5 million people a month are using Ecosia, because every time they click “Search” they help plant a tree.
A group of top chefs, food scientists and tech geeks have set up a lab in Belgium to master 3-D food printing. Their goal: to create nutritionally enhanced foods that appeal to the pickiest palates.
"We will cook again like our grandmothers did, but using new technologies" that give healthier ingredients a more appetizing form, Goffin explains in a TEDx talk.
A pair of cybersecurity experts has demonstrated to a writer for Wired magazine, an ability to remotely hack into a Jeep Cherokee and take over some of its functions, and at least in one case, to cause the vehicle to run into a ditch. The demonstration was staged by security hackers Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek and Wired writer Andy Greenberg—the purpose was to showcase the increasing vulnerability of modern cars and trucks to hacking.
Researchers are able to clone domestic animals using various techniques, including embryo splitting and nuclear transfer, but the expense and inherent inefficiencies of most cloning processes have limited procedures to research and certain agricultural activities. Carol L. Keefer of the Department of Animal and Avian Sciences of the University of Maryland has contributed a paper to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that provides a contextual overview of the innovations and contributions of cloning while seeking to answer an important question: If cloning is impractical and inefficient as a means of producing animals, and in the absence of societal acceptance for transgenic products, how is artificial cloning being used?
The ‘cock-a-doodle-doo’ crowing of roosters, which symbolizes the break of dawn in many cultures, is controlled by their internal biological clock. When one rooster announces the break of dawn, others in the vicinity immediately follow.
An intense conservation campaign has brought the Iberian lynx back to the south of Spain from the verge of extinction barely 10 years ago, Guy Hedgecoe reports from Spain.
A team of researchers with the University of Queensland in Australia has found that a group of kangaroos living along the Sunshine Coast in that country have some distinct genetic variations—they are not a separate species from the other kangaroos (they are still close enough that they can interbreed when given the chance) but instead have genes that show they evolved separately from others in other parts of the country.
A series of carvings found on a pillar of limestone in the mountains of southern Turkey could be the world's oldest written language.
The ancient pictograms, which were found at the ancient city of Göbekli Tepe in southeast Anatolia, Turkey, are thought to be around 12,000 years old.
The scene shows a human head on the wing of a vulture and a headless human body below.
A group of top chefs, food scientists and tech geeks have set up a lab in Belgium to master 3-D food printing. Their goal: to create nutritionally enhanced foods that appeal to the pickiest palates.
The 4,000-year-old skeleton of a Bronze Age teenager has been unearthed on the site of a prehistoric earthwork close to the site of Stonehenge.
The discovery was made during excavations of Wilsford henge, an ancient circular earthworks in the Vale of Pewsey, Wiltshire, just 15 miles from Stonehenge.
63 years since the discovery of the tomb of Mayan King Pakal located inside the Temple of Inscriptions in Palenque, Chiapas (southern state of Mexico), researchers have deciphered the T514 glyph meaning YEJ: "sharp edge".
A stone tablet depicting the reign of a mysterious king in the early days of the Mayan empire has been discovered in ancient ruins in the jungle of Guatemala. The 1,600-year-old tablet, known as a stela, is covered in hieroglyphic writing and dates from a time of great political upheaval in the central Maya area.
It was discovered at the site of El Achiotal, which dates to the 5th century AD and is about 12 miles (20km) east of the ruins of the Mayan royal palace of La Corona in Peten, Guatemala.
Two fragments of a prehistoric female figurine have been discovered in a cave at Hohle Fels in Germany. The figurine was carved from mammoth ivory and fit together to form an artifact measuring 23 mm by 22 mm by 13 mm in size. Other figurines found at this location date to 40,000 years ago and are therefore the oldest known depictions of humans.
Scientists have worked for many years to refine the technique of DNA origami. His aim is to compose new sets of design rules, vastly expanding the range of nanoscale architectures generated by the method. In new research, a variety of innovative nanoforms are described, each displaying unprecedented design control.
A metabolic imbalance caused by radiation from your wireless devices could be the link to a number of health risks, such as various neurodegenerative diseases and cancer, a recent study suggests.
"Oxidative Mechanisms of Biological Activity of Low-intensity Radiofrequency Radiation," a review article published in Electromagnetic Biology & Medicine, explores experimental data on the metabolic effects of low-intensity radiofrequency radiation in living cells.
Leafy, tree-lined streets aren't just good for property values; they may also be good for your health, according to a new report.
After analyzing two sets of data from the city of Toronto, researchers report that adding just 10 trees to a single city block could improve how healthy a person feels as much as if they made an additional $10,000 a year or if they were seven years younger.
Advertisers hoping to sway consumers might want to rethink running spots within media with violent or sexual themes, and might do better if the ads themselves have a G-rating, according to a study published by the American Psychological Association. Instead, violent and sexual media content may impair advertising's effectiveness and ultimately deter purchasing, the research found.
The images in food advertising are crafted with enough cunning to make any item, no matter its well-known deficiencies, appear tempting. The average American is bombarded with these visual seductions, and everything looks delicious.
No wonder, some say, we’re so fat. Now some scientists are proposing an antidote: harnessing our sense of disgust.
Alt: Got A Sugar Craving? Try Looking At A Photo Of A Cockroach
The brain is not the only part of the body that affects the way we respond to stress. New research shows that body fat can send a stress signal, too.
While the exact nature of those signals remains a mystery, researchers say simply knowing such a pathway exists and learning more about it could help break a vicious cycle.
Study of plant remains on shores of Sea of Galilee show crop cultivation may have developed 23,000 years ago
The Sea of Galilee in Israel.
Israeli archaeologists have uncovered dramatic evidence of what they believe are the earliest known attempts at agriculture, 11,000 years before the generally recognised advent of organised cultivation.
Alt: Evidence for plant cultivation at 23,000-year-old site in Galilee
Research by University of Reading scientists into climatic patterns from the past 1,000 years has improved our understanding of how the weather in Europe could respond to changes in the future.
In a letter published in Nature, Dr Pablo Ortega from the National Centre for Atmospheric Science (NCAS), based in the University of Reading's Department of Meteorology, and other European colleagues present an unprecedented annually resolved reconstruction of the NAO evolution during the past millennium.
New research reveals that some of the earliest civilizations in the Middle East and the Fertile Crescent may have been affected by abrupt climate change. These findings show that while socio-economic factors were traditionally considered to shape ancient human societies in this region, the influence of abrupt climate change should not be underestimated.
Wildly fluctuating ice age temperatures made northern hemisphere megafauna vulnerable to the later impact of human hunting, say researchers.
The Australian-led team say regular periods of rapid warming during the last ice age caused repeated cycles of regional megafauna extinction and recolonisation.
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.
An "absolutely exquisite" fossil of a snake that had four legs has been discovered by a team of scientists and may help show how snakes made the transition from lizards to serpents.
It is the first known fossil of a four-legged snake, and the team -- led by Dr Dave Martill from the University of Portsmouth -- say that this discovery could help scientists to understand how snakes lost their legs.
Scientists think they may have finally discovered how boa constrictors kill their prey – and it is not by suffocation.
Researchers at Dickinson College, Carlise, in Pennsylvania, believe that constrictors kill by cutting off the blood supply, squeezing their prey until the animals’ circulatory system essentially short circuits and fails.
Scientists have unpicked how the skin of the Texas horned lizard funnels water towards its mouth - and copied the principles in a plastic version.
This reptile can collect water from anywhere, including the sand it walks on; the fluid then travels to its mouth through channels between its scales.
Move over, Bugs: There's a new bunny in town, and its name is Jorunna parva, a sea slug whose resemblance to a tiny rabbit has the Internet gushing, and clicking.
Even the world's hardest of hearts would have trouble not thinking gooey thoughts after watching it in action (video below, courtesy of a diver in Japan).
Alt: Who knew slugs could be CUTE? Tiny molluscs dubbed ‘sea bunnies’ thanks to their fluffy-looking bodies and ‘ears’
A 1,500-year-old parchment could be one of the oldest known copies of the Quran, possibly dating back to a time that overlapped with the life of the Prophet Muhammad, according to researchers who recently dated the manuscript fragments.
Alt: A Find in Britain: Quran Fragments Perhaps as Old as Islam
Neuroscientists have identified an area of the brain that might give the human mind its unique abilities, including language. The area lit up in human, but not monkey, brains when they were presented with different types of abstract information.
The idea that integrating abstract information drives many of the human brain's unique abilities has been around for decades.
For centuries it has been thought that culture is what distinguishes humans from other animals, but over the past decade this idea has been repeatedly called into question.
Cultural variation has been identified in a growing number of species in recent years, ranging from primates to cetaceans. Chimpanzees, our closest living relatives, show the most diverse cultures aside from humans, most notably, in their use of a wide variety of tools.
You've heard the news about honeybees. "Beepocalypse," they've called it. Beemageddon. America's honeybees are dying, putting honey production and $15 billion worth of pollinated food crops in jeopardy.
Carbon Engineering has an ambitious plan to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and turn it into fuel. The company is aiming the facility at areas where reforestation isn't an option, such as deserts.
Air flows in through the series of fans you see in the picture, which feed into a carbon dioxide rich solution, helping pluck carbon compounds from the air.
Hair ice -- a type of ice shaped like fine, silky hairs that resembles white cotton candy -- grows on the rotten branches of certain trees when the weather conditions are just right, usually during humid winter nights when the air temperature drops slightly below the freezing point. Now scientists have identified the missing ingredient, a fungus, that gives hair ice its peculiar shape.
Deep in the Aegean Sea, shimmering pools of white water meander through the caldera of the Santorini volcano.
Never seen before, these opalescent pools — called Kallisti Limnes, from ancient Greek for "most beautiful lakes" — appear in a new video taken by underwater vehicles in July 2012. They contain high levels of carbon dioxide, which may make the water dense and prone to pooling.
Hydrogen peroxide - commonly used as hair bleach - may have provided the energy source for the development of life on Earth, two applied mathematicians have found.
The heat from ancient geothermal vents may have triggered the varying acidity that was vital for early life to form and spread throughout the oceans.
Airplane crews at high altitude are exposed to potentially harmful levels of radiation from cosmic rays.
“Neutrons which don’t reach the ground do reach airline altitude,” says Adrian Melott, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Kansas. “Flight crews get a lot more radiation dose from neutrons. In fact, during solar particle events, airplanes are diverted away from the North Pole, where a lot more cosmic rays come down.”
Could these cosmic rays pose hazards even at sea level?
Alt: Can the sun cause birth defects on Earth? Study finds 'strange link' between cosmic rays and mutant cell changes in humans
Ceres, the biggest asteroid in the Solar System, has a haze that appears occasionally in a crater above some of its mysterious white spots.
The phenomenon, observed by NASA’s Dawn spacecraft, suggests that the bright spots “could be providing some atmosphere in this particular region of Ceres”, says Christopher Russell, a planetary scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles.
The Curiosity rover on Mars has turned its cameras skyward and found sunspots brewing on the far side of the sun, a view that's impossible to get from Earth.
Sunspots can often spawn into solar flares or massive eruptions, known as coronal mass ejections, which can pose a hazard to astronauts and satellites in space, and disrupt satellite navigation and communications systems on Earth.
Nasa has released the first picture of the Earth that it has taken in 43 years.
The picture, which has come from a camera on board the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR), is the first picture of the whole Earth that has been seen since 1972. All of the pictures since then have been produced by stitching together different pictures into a full image of the globe.
Pluto and Charon have captured our hearts and imaginations. But how did these adorably strange worlds form, and what consequences could that have on what we see now? Researcher Amy Barr Mlinar chatted with us about catastrophic collisions, subsurface oceans, and Pluto’s lack of craters.
Sen—NASA’s New Horizons team revealed fresh findings about Pluto today including a close-up of a vast “cracked” and icy plain and the existence of a tail caused by the escaping atmosphere.
Opening a press conference, Jim Green, director of Planetary Science at NASA Headquarters in Washington, said: “What a historic week!” And the mission’s principal investigator Alan Stern said: We’ve just had the most fun.
The latest images from the New Horizons spacecraft have revealed another range of ice mountains on Pluto.
The frozen peaks were found on the lower-left edge of the dwarf world's "heart" and are 1-1.5km-high.
Alt: Pluto's vast icy plains and gentle hills emerge in new images
Ancient Mars might have looked more like an icy snowball than the warmer, wetter planet that many researchers have suggested, according to a new study. The study suggests that channels seen on the Red Planet’s surface are better explained by erosion from ice and snow runoff — and not by flowing water — in the ancient past.
Extending his idea of philanthropy beyond the Earth and even the human species, Yuri Milner, the Russian Internet entrepreneur and founder of science giveaways like the annual $3 million Fundamental Physics Prizes, announced in London on Monday that he would spend at least $100 million in the next decade to search for signals from alien civilizations.
Alt: Stephen Hawking launches $100m search for alien life beyond solar system
The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project got a $100 million boost this week from Russian billionaire Yuri Milner. While this may seem like a lot of money to spend on a nearly impossible task, many astronomers welcome the investment. The cash will go some way to help save some observatories from closure and allow astronomers to continue to use the facilities for astrophysics research alongside SETI.
NASA is teasing space enthusiasts, hinting that it may have some big news to announce about other Earth-like planets in the Milky Way.
The space agency said it plans to share a new discovery from its Kepler Space Telescope at a news conference scheduled for 9 a.m. PDT on Thursday.
Alt: 'Another Earth?': NASA hints at planetary discovery
Among designers of robotic probes to explore the planets, there is certainly no shortage of clever ideas. There are concepts for robots that are propelled by waves in the sea. There are ideas for tumbleweed bots driven by wind, rolling across Antarctica or Mars. Recently a team of engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, wondered if a probe could be buoyant in the clouds of Earth or a distant gas giant planet, like Jupiter.
As part of ongoing experimentation at the University of Maryland, we have been flying small unmanned aerial vehicles in southern Africa for more than two years. We have found that they can be used in a number of practical ways in the medical field, agriculture, tourism and to protect the environment.
Drones have already shown their effectiveness in combating rhino and elephant poaching. Equipped with thermal imaging cameras and absolutely silent, drones can see animals and poachers in the bush at night.
Researchers from Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) have built the first computer program that can recognise hand-drawn sketches better than humans.
Known as Sketch-a-Net, the program is capable of correctly identifying the subject of sketches 74.9 per cent of the time compared to humans that only managed a success rate of 73.1 per cent.
A British man has become the first person in the world to receive a bionic eye implant that corrects for age-related macular degeneration (AMD)—the most common cause of vision loss in adults. The implant was a success: previously, the patient had no central vision at all; now, he has low-resolution central vision. The operation was carried out at Manchester Royal Eye Hospital; the recipient of the implant was Ray Flynn, aged 80.
Do you like your jazz to be Norah Jones or Ornette Coleman, your classical music to be Bach or Stravinsky, or your rock to be Coldplay or Slayer? The answer could give an insight into the way you think, say researchers from the University of Cambridge.
All those leftover pizza crusts you snatch from your kids' plates add up. Men gain weight after they become fathers for the first time whether or not they live with their children, reports a large, new Northwestern Medicine study that tracked the weight of more than 10,000 men from adolescence to young adulthood.
No one likes to lose a friend, especially adolescents. Adolescent friendships are fleeting. The majority dissolve after a year or two. But why do friendships end? Researchers sought to answer this question by examining whether adolescent friendships end because of undesirable characteristics of friends, because of differences between friends, or both. They tracked friendships over six years, measuring the effect of both dissimilarities and undesirable individual attributes in predicting when an adolescent friendship would end.
When the love of your life dumps you, you’re going to go a little nuts. But it’s a very specific form of crazy: There are actually conflicting neural systems active inside your brain. It’s like you’re falling in love all over again, only in reverse. Here’s how neuroscience explains it.
Taking antibiotics may increase the risk that a child will develop juvenile arthritis, according to new research.
Related: Microwaving food in plastic linked to diabetes, other problems: study
Lots of things influence how your dinner may taste to you: how it’s presented on a plate, how hungry you are and of course, your taste buds. But researchers wanted to know if early courses—appetizers—influence the taste of a meal, and truly do whet your appetite.
An ill-fated 19th-century expedition that became trapped in the Canadian Arctic ended in a particularly gruesome type of cannibalism, new research suggests.
The gory end was faced by the British navy on the Franklin expedition, the doomed 1845 voyage to discover a sea route through the Canadian Arctic to the Orient.
Recent controversies about human evolution — such as what the ancestor of the human lineage might have been, whether the mysterious "hobbit" was a different species and whether ancient humans were all one species — could find answers in new analyses of human fossils, researchers say.
The Amazon rainforest, often thought to have been pristine wilderness before the modern era, was once domesticated, and was reclaimed by the wild only in recent centuries, research increasingly suggests.
The Americas were the last great frontier to be settled by humans, and their peopling remains one of the great mysteries for researchers. This week, two major studies of the DNA of living and ancient people try to settle the big questions about the early settlers: who they were, when they came, and how many waves arrived.
Alt: Mysterious 'Population Y' May Have Bred with Amazonia Peoples
The most comprehensive dataset ever assembled on our early human ancestors provides evidence that the first humans emerged in South Africa, and that the first humans to migrate out of Africa came from a small-bodied species such as Homo habilis, aka "Handy Man."
Let’s say someone successfully cloned human ancestors. Then what? Are they like chimps, to be put in a zoo or a nature reserve? Do they need carers? Should we enroll them in kindergarten? What do fossils tell us about how early humans would fit in with modern ones?
Sahelanthropus tchadensis is, right now, our earliest known ancestral candidate.