Newsdesk Archive

Whether you've heard yourself talking on the radio or just gabbing in a friend's Instagram video, you probably know the sound of your own voice -- and chances are pretty good that you hate it.Your voice as you hear it when you speak out loud is very different from the voice the rest of the world perceives. That's because it comes to you via a different channel than everyone else.

Germany agreed Thursday to turn more than 60 former military bases into nature preserves, with the aim of creating vast new green oases and sanctuaries for rare species of birds.Environment Minister Barbara Hendricks said an ongoing overhaul of the German armed forces had made it possible to set aside more than 31,000 hectares (76,600 acres) of forests, marshes, meadows and moors.

Mysterious earthquakes that sound like cannon blasts have been puzzling people for decades, and now their origin has been traced way back to a giant block of volcanic rock hundreds of millions of years old, researchers say.Related: Fluid Injection's Role in Man-Made Earthquakes Revealed

Researchers at Monash University have found physical differences in the brains of people who respond emotionally to others' feelings, compared to those who respond more rationally, in a study published in the journal NeuroImage.

Like homing pigeons, humans have a nose for navigation because our brains are wired to convert smells into spatial information, new research from the University of California, Berkeley, shows.While humans may lack the scent-tracking sophistication of, say, a search-and-rescue dog, we can sniff our way, blindfolded, toward a location whose scent we've smelled only once before, according to the UC Berkeley study published today (June 17) in the journal PLOS ONE.

A new analysis of ancient wolf DNA has shed new light on the murky early history of man's best friend, suggesting that dogs split from wolves as many as 27,000 to 40,000 years ago -- not 11,000 to 16,000 years ago, as earlier genome research had proposed."Dogs may have been domesticated much earlier than is generally believed," Love Dalen, a researcher at the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm and coauthor of a study describing the discovery in the journal Current Biology, said in a statement.

In ancient Egypt, so many people worshiped Anubis, the jackal-headed god of death, that the catacombs next to his sacred temple once held nearly 8 million mummified puppies and grown dogs, a new study finds.The catacomb ceiling also contains the fossil of an ancient sea monster, a marine vertebrate that's more than 48 million years old, but it's unclear whether the Egyptians noticed the existence of the fossil when they built the tomb for the canine mummies, the researchers said.

The barren, desolate Timna Valley in modern southern Israel is one of the areas where archaeology first exposed the world of ancient mining and metallurgy. Here, archaeological remains dating to the late second millennium BCE were widely regarded as evidence of the copper mining exploitation managed by ancient Egypt, the empire that ruled the Levant at that time. Not only Timna did become a perfect case of a desert peripheral region ruthlessly exploited by an ancient Near Eastern superpower, but it eventually came to be regarded an archetypal Egyptian mining centre supervised by Egyptian stewards and even featuring an Egyptian temple.

The (right) image was taken by NASA astronaut Terry Virts during his final day aboard the International Space Station. Not an easy feat, considering how --contrary to popular thinking-- man-made structures like Egypt's pyramids and even the Great Wall of China are incredibly difficult to detect from space with the naked eye, as they tend to blend themselves with the surrounding landscape --but that's where that shiny Quartz pyramidion came in, right?Now, what's interesting is that our astronauts are not only on the lookout of famous historical landmarks, but that some of them seem to also be interested in the more alternative theories related to those structures.

It's a whodunit that dates back 430,000 years.Deep in a cave in northern Spain, archaeologists have uncovered fragments of a skull with protruding eyebrow ridges and a smaller brain area than you would find in a modern-day human. Researchers say it belongs to an early human relative that predates even the Neanderthals.

People in the Middle Ages considered healthy, white teeth a sign of beauty and wrote of sweet smelling breath as a desirable attribute. So, not surprisingly, we have extensive evidence that people liked to keep their teeth clean and a large amount of evidence of tooth pastes, powders and treatments, as well as mouth washes and treatments for halitosis.Contrary to the depiction of medieval peasants with blackened and rotting teeth, the average person in the Middle Ages had teeth which were in very good condition.

We can alter our facial features in ways that make us look more trustworthy, but don't have the same ability to appear more competent, a team of New York University psychology researchers has found.The study, which appears in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, a SAGE journal, points to both the limits and potential we have in visually representing ourselves--from dating and career-networking sites to social media posts.

An incredibly small and fantastically strange theoretical feature of the universe is too microscopic to see directly, so a team of scientists has instead looked for it by studying some of the brightest galaxies in the universe.As light travels to Earth from distant galaxies, its road through the cosmos may not be smooth. A theoretical characteristic of the universe called "quantum foam" could make space and time rough and chaotic at very small scales.

They wouldn't float like balloons or give you the chance to talk in high, squeaky voices, but planets with helium skies may constitute an exotic planetary class in our Milky Way galaxy. Researchers using data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope propose that warm Neptune-size planets with clouds of helium may be strewn about the galaxy by the thousands."We don't have any planets like this in our own solar system," said Renyu Hu, NASA Hubble Fellow at the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and lead author of a new study on the findings accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal.

SOMETIME between the demise of the dinosaurs and the rise of primates, Earth suffered a one-two punch from two unrelated asteroids. The double whammy could signify chaos in the inner solar system, triggering a cascade of events that perhaps plunged Earth into the recent ice age.The impacts that made the Popigai crater in Siberia and the Chesapeake Bay crater on the US East Coast were two of the largest asteroid strikes since the one that killed the dinosaurs, so big that their dust left thin layers of debris all over the globe.

Methane, a potential sign of primitive life, has been found in meteorites from Mars, adding weight to the idea that life could live off methane on the Red Planet, researchers say.This discovery is not evidence that life exists, or has ever existed, on Mars, the researchers cautioned. Still, methane "is an ingredient that could potentially support microbial activity in the Red Planet," study lead author Nigel Blamey, a geochemist at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada, told Space.com.

The high seas of Mars may never have existed, according to a new study that looks at two opposite climate scenarios of early Mars and suggests that a cold and icy planet billions of years ago better explains water drainage and erosion features seen on the planet today.For decades, researchers have debated the climate history of Mars and how the planet's early climate led to the many water-carved channels seen today. The idea that 3 to 4 billion years ago Mars was once warm, wet and Earth-like with a northern sea -- conditions that could have led to life -- is generally more popular than that of a frigid, icy planet where water is locked in ice most of the time and life would be hard put to evolve.

Six scientists who were living under a dome on the slopes of a dormant Hawaii volcano for eight months to simulate life on Mars have emerged from isolation.The crew stepped outside the dome 2,400m (8,000ft) up the slopes of Mauna Loa to feel fresh air on their skin on Saturday. It was the first time they left without donning a space suit.

Are black holes the ruthless killers we've made them out to be? Samir Mathur says no. According to the professor of physics at The Ohio State University, the recently proposed idea that black holes have "firewalls" that destroy all they touch has a loophole.In a paper posted online to the arXiv preprint server, Mathur takes issue with the firewall theory, and proves mathematically that black holes are not necessarily arbiters of doom.

The European Space Agency (Esa) says its comet lander, Philae, has woken up and contacted Earth.Philae, the first spacecraft to land on a comet, was dropped on to the surface of Comet 67P by its mothership, Rosetta, last November.

The face of a killer constructed from DNA left at the scene of a crime: it sounds like science fiction. But revealing the face of a criminal based on their genes may be closer than we think.Today scientists are using genetic markers from DNA to build up a picture of an offender's face, a process known as molecular photo fitting.

A team of scientists and engineers at The University of Texas at Austin has identified the first sensor of the Earth's magnetic field in an animal, finding in the brain of a tiny worm a big clue to a long-held mystery about how animals' internal compasses work.Animals as diverse as migrating geese, sea turtles and wolves are known to navigate using the Earth's magnetic field. But until now, no one has pinpointed quite how they do it. The sensor, found in worms called C. elegans, is a microscopic structure at the end of a neuron that other animals probably share, given similarities in brain structure across species.

Most dentists recommend a proper teeth cleaning every six months to prevent, among other things, the implacable buildup of calculus or tartar -- hardened dental plaque. Routine calculus buildup can only be removed through the use of ultrasonic tools or dental hand instruments. But what of 400,000-year-old dental tartar?

From low-cost housing to life-saving implants, 3D printing technology is having a growing influence on our lives, and the latest innovation to be announced is a full-sized 3D-printed bridge.Industry experts MX3D are planning to create a steel bridge in Amsterdam in the Netherlands using independent robot arms. These arms will start on one side of the river and cross over to the other bank, building the structure as they go.

Extreme weather may have played a major role in the fall of Rome and also helped aid the spread of the Vikings, experts claim.Scientists studied limestone stalagmites in a remote Scottish cave to produce a unique 3,000 year-long record of climatic events in Europe.The study reveals there was a prolonged dry spell in the Mediterranean when the Roman Empire collapsed and fair conditions while the Vikings expanded their control.

British researchers on Monday began collecting the DNA of residents from Normandy in northern France in search of Viking heritage, but the project has raised concerns amongst some local anti-racism activists.Around a hundred volunteers from the Cotentin Peninsula area are giving DNA samples to academics at the University of Leicester, who are trying to find descendants of the Vikings who invaded what is now Normandy in the 9th century.

If you get a warm, fuzzy feeling after watching cute cat videos online, the effect may be more profound than you think.The Internet phenomenon of watching cat videos, from Lil Bub to Grumpy Cat, does more than simply entertain; it boosts viewers' energy and positive emotions and decreases negative feelings, according to a new study by an Indiana University Media School researcher.The study, by assistant professor Jessica Gall Myrick, surveyed almost 7,000 people about their viewing of cat videos and how it affects their moods.

General relativity theory can explain why one of the spooky properties of quantum mechanics works at the subatomic scale, but not in everyday life, say scientists.Quantum theory predicts a weird phenomenon called 'quantum superposition' in which an object is in different states at the same time, and only by observing the object do you force it to adopt a single state.

Something is out there in the cosmos. We can't see it, we can't touch it and we know it's there only by the gravitational pull it exerts on cosmic objects. For decades the story of dark matter has been one revelation after another about what this mysterious material is not, a gradual winnowing of possibilities that has made physicists increasingly nervous. What happens when the last candidate gets crossed off the list? Will we be doomed never to glimpse the nature of the stuff that contributes about 25 percent of all mass in the universe?

Chemists at Tufts University's School of Arts and Sciences, collaborating with PerkinElmer and UCL (University College London), have witnessed atoms of one chemical element morph into another for the first time ever -- a feat that produced an unexpected outcome that could lead to a new way to safely treat cancer with radiation.The research appears in Nature Materials, June 15, online in advance of print. Scientists led by E. Charles H. Sykes, Ph.D., a professor of chemistry at Tufts and senior author on the paper, worked with iodine-125 -- a radioactive isotope that is routinely used in cancer therapies.

In "Jurassic World," kids visiting the Gentle Giants Petting Zoo get to ride on and feed a triceratops. Turns out that's not such a good idea: University of Florida researchers recently learned that the three-horned dinos had self-sharpening teeth.The discovery came about when UF mechanical engineer Greg Sawyer got a call from a paleontologist, who said that no matter how much he polished triceratops teeth before putting them under a microscope, he couldn't get them flat.

Raging fires, droughts, food shortages and extreme climate change help to explain why most dinosaurs failed to populate the tropics for more than 30 million years after these iconic prehistoric animals first emerged, according to a new study.Only a few small-bodied meat-eating dinosaurs eked out a living near the equator around 200 million years ago, reports the study, which is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

A new evolutionary theory explains how critically small populations of early humans survived, despite an increased chance of hereditary disabilities being passed to offspring.Anthropologists at the University of York and Newcastle University have studied how our earliest ancestors coped during periods when the population dwindled, and have developed a model of early hominins as 'Vulnerable Apes'.

Variations in the amount of oxygen in Earth's atmosphere significantly altered global climate throughout the planet's history. Efforts to reconstruct past climates must include this previously overlooked factor, a new University of Michigan-led study concludes.Oxygen currently comprises about 21 percent of Earth's atmosphere by volume but has varied between 10 percent and 35 percent over the past 541 million years.

JERUSALEM - Israel's antiquities authority says archaeologists have discovered a rare 3,000-year-old inscription of a name mentioned in the Bible.The name "Eshbaal Ben Beda" appears on a large ceramic jar. Eshbaal of the Bible was a son of King Saul.

In a world before the printing press, how did news of the famous document make the rounds?Related: Magna Carta, 'This Awful Thing' That Shaped Legal Rights, Turns 800Related: Q&A: the legal significance of Magna Carta

Humans are unlikely to be the only animal capable of self-awareness, a new study has shown.Conducted by University of Warwick researchers, the study found that humans and other animals capable of mentally simulating environments require at least a primitive sense of self. The finding suggests that any animal that can simulate environments must have a form of self-awareness.

Chimpanzees and bonobos are the two closest living relatives of the human species - the ultimate tool-using ape. Yet, despite being so closely related on the evolutionary tree, wild chimpanzees and bonobos differ hugely in the way they use tools.Chimpanzees show the most diverse range of tool use outside of humans. For example, chimpanzees use sticks to 'fish' for ants and termites, stones to crack nuts, as well as tools for grooming and communication. Bonobos rarely use tools and never to forage for food.

You may have noticed it the last time you went on a long journey -- by foot, by car or by plane: the outbound portion of your trip seemed to take a lifetime, while the (more or less identical) leg that brought you home felt like it flew by.Scientists have noticed this "return trip effect" too, and are beginning to hone their understanding of why we experience it.

Trying to do multiple things at once can have mixed results; you may accomplish more, or you may not get anything done. When it comes to exercising, though, multitasking may be a good idea, a new study suggests.In the study of older adults, researchers found that, when people completed easy cognitive tasks while they were cycling on a stationary bike, their cycling speed increased.

Hundreds of graffiti messages engraved into stone in the ancient city of Aphrodisias, in modern-day Turkey, have been discovered and deciphered, revealing what life was likethereover1,500 years ago, researcherssay.The graffiti touches on many aspects of the city's life, including gladiator combat, chariot racing, religious fighting and sex. The markings date to a time when the Roman and Byzantine empires ruled over the city.

The majestic aqueduct that fed water to ancient Rome carried less of the life-giving liquid than previously thought, new research suggests.The Anio Novus aqueduct carried water from the mountains into Rome at a rate of about 370 gallons of water per second, said lead author Bruce Fouke, a geologist and microbiologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Archaeologists have uncovered the 2,000-year-old grave of an elegant 'Sleeping Beauty'.The ancient grave was found in a six-week excavation of the city of Aksum alongside 'extraordinary' artefacts dating from the first and second centuriesThese included ornate items such as a necklace made of thousands of coloured beads, Roman glass vessels and a glass perfume flask.

Researchers in Peru have discovered a trio of statuettes they believe were created by the ancient Caral civilization some 3,800 years ago, the culture ministry said Tuesday.The mud statuettes were found inside a reed basket in a building at the ancient city of Vichama in northern Peru, which is today an important archaeological site.

The destruction of beautiful historic buildings in Yemen has provoked an online debate, with people asking if buildings are being valued more than human lives.Yemen's war is entering its third month, and on Friday Yemenis woke up to news that five houses in the old city of Sanaa, a UNESCO world heritage site, were allegedly hit by a Saudi-led coalition airstrike (Saudi Arabia has denied the claims).

The El Mirón Cave in the Cantabrian Mountains of northern Spain is yielding finds that are providing a rare glimpse of Ice Age life more than 18,000 years ago, say archaeologists.The cave, commanding a scenic view of the upper valley of the Ason River far below it, has been under intense investigation by Lawrence Straus of the University of New Mexico and colleague Manuel Gonzalez Morales of the Universidad de Cantabria, since 1996.

An international team of scientists has found a dramatic ice sheet collapse at the end of the ice age before last caused widespread climate changes and led to a peak in the sea level well above its present height.The team found the events 135,000 years ago caused the planet to warm in a different way to the end of the most recent ice age about 20,000 to 10,000 years ago.

Dogs are known to be excellent readers of human body language in multiple situations. Surprisingly, however, scientists have so far found that dogs do not follow human gaze into distant space. Scientists investigated how this skill of dogs is influenced by aging, habituation and formal training. The outcome: Gaze following to human gaze cues did not differ over the dogs' lifespan, however, formal training was found to directly influence gaze following in dogs.

Not only are they partial to a drink and have been proven to enjoy cooking, chimpanzees have also been found to share the human trait of communicating by smiling, according to University of Portsmouth researchers.Their study shows chimps and humans have even closer evolutionary ties than was previously believed.

Eating half a handful of nuts every day could substantially lower the risk of early death, a Dutch study suggests.Previous studies had already indicated a link with cardiovascular health, but this is the first to look at specific nuts and diseases.

If clipping coupons and bargain hunting gives you a thrill, there's a good chance that at least one of your parents had the same enthusiasm. A Rutgers University-Camden marketing expert says "deal proneness" is a trait passed down from parent to child."Some people have a taste for getting a bargain," says Robert Schindler, a professor of marketing at the Rutgers School of Business-Camden. "It provides excitement. They seek out bargains and look through the ads for the best deals.".

Children who go on to develop autism have a heightened ability to pick up fine visual details from as early as nine months of age.The findings, by researchers from the Birkbeck Babylab at the University of London, are published today in Current Biology.

Sometimes it's cute when kids act self-centered. Yet parenting styles can make the difference between a confident child and a narcissistic nightmare, psychologists at the University of Amsterdam and Utrecht University in the Netherlands concluded from the first longitudinal study on the origins of intense feelings of superiority in children.Two prominent but nearly opposing schools of thought address how narcissism develops.

Researchers have discovered our position on the social pecking order can be betrayed by the music we listen to, as well as the music we hate.While they found some genres like opera and classical music - which have long been the preserve of the elite - were most enjoyed by the upper classes, they also found rock, reggae and pop were also more their taste.

Marriage has long been cited as a health booster, with couples living in wedded bliss more likely to live longer and have fewer emotional problems. Yet a new study suggests that women hardly benefit from tying the knot.Landmark research by University College London, the London School of Economics and The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine found that single women do not suffer the same negative health effects as unmarried men.

Thousands of stone tools from the early Upper Paleolithic, unearthed from a cave in Jordan, reveal clues about how humans may have started organizing into more complex social groups by planning tasks and specializing in different technical skills.The Journal of Human Evolution published a study of the artifacts from Mughr el-Hamamah, or Cave of the Doves, led by Emory University anthropologists Liv Nilsson Stutz and Aaron Jonas Stutz.

A unique modern-looking polished green-stone bracelet made out of the green mineral chlorite, and discovered together with a ring carved out of marble, inside an ancient Siberian cave, known as the Denisova cave, in the Altai Mountain range in 2008, has now been determined by Russian Scientists and Archaeologists to be around 40,000 years old, making it the oldest stone bracelet and the oldest piece of jewelry ever discovered, believed to have been crafted by our pre-historic human ancestors.

From 1500 until 2000, about a third of floods in southwestern Netherlands were deliberately caused by humans during wartimes, new research shows. Some of these inundations resulted in significant changes to the landscape, being as damaging as floods caused by heavy rainfall or storm surges.

In 1491, German cartographer Henricus Martellus created a map of the world that is thought to have helped Christopher Columbus navigate the Atlantic.Today, the map is finally revealing its secrets including hundreds of place names and more than 60 written passages.One example is information about Japan, which is marked in the wrong place on the 15th century map.Alt: Hidden secrets of 1491 world map revealed via multispectral imaging

Some people may roll their eyes at the idea of UFO sightings, while others are certain they have seen alien craft. Now a data visualisation expert has created a map of the US showing almost 90 years of official UFO sightings, including information such as the time of day they are typically noticed in different months.Related: Twin UFOs Seen Searching For Loch Ness MonsterRelated: Giant UFOs in World War Two

Scientists see ripples of a particle-separating wave in primordial plasma, a key sign of quark-gluon plasma and evidence for a long-debated quantum phenomenon that's called a "chiral magnetic wave" rippling through the soup of quark-gluon plasma created in energetic particle smashups.Scientists in the STAR collaboration at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, a particle accelerator shown above exploring nuclear physics and the building blocks of matter at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory, have new evidence the magnetic wave.

A grin without a cat" is how Lewis Carroll describes the Cheshire Cat's mysterious way of disappearing while leaving its grin behind in his 1865 classic, Alice in Wonderland. The fanciful character raises a question that has captured physicists' attention over the past few years: can an object be separated from its properties?In 2013, Yakir Aharonov and his coauthors conceived of an experiment suggesting that a photon can be separated from its polarization (a property that tells the direction in which a wave oscillates).

Carrying liquids up a hill usually involves a pump, or a lot of buckets. But now it seems water can do some of the heavy lifting itself.Kesong Liu of Beihang University in Beijing, China, and his colleagues have developed a way to lift water with no need for an external source of energy. Although the technique only works over short distances at the moment, it could be useful for microfluidic lab-on-a-chip devices that shift small amounts of water around to analyse diseases.Related: Stanford has created a water-droplet computer

Clean, drinkable water is unfortunately out of reach for hundreds of millions of people around the world, contributing to a vicious cycle of poverty and disease. People who have to spend large amounts of time finding safe water to drink don't have time for other things like education or work, and contaminated water often harbors deadly diseases. But there is hope, in the form of nanotech filters, light-based water purifiers, and an ancient Egyptian seed.

It's technically possible for each state to replace fossil fuel energy with entirely clean, renewable energy, experts say. A new report is the first to outline how each of the 50 states can achieve such a transition by 2050. The 50 individual state plans call for aggressive changes to both infrastructure and the ways we currently consume energy, but indicate that the conversion is technically and economically possible through the wide-scale implementation of existing technologies.

Can trees cause pollution? Short answer: yes -- mismanaged forests can cause nutrient pollution. Cypress and cedar trees in Japan are causing massive amounts of nitrogen runoff into local streams, resulting in harmful algae blooms.But, it's not exactly their fault. The trees are planted in massive, commercial plantations, many of which have mostly fallen into a state of disrepair since their establishment half a century ago, during a period of high demand for wood within Japan.

Tiger sharks are among the largest and most recognizable sharks on the planet, yet many of their habits remain mysterious because they are long-distance travelers that are hard to track. But a new study, reported in the June 9 issue of the journal Scientific Reports, has yielded the first ever continuous, two or more-year satellite tagging tracks for the animals. This study reveals remarkable, and previously unknown, migration patterns more similar to birds, turtles and some marine mammals than other fishes.

Having a hierarchical social structure with just a few well-connected leaders enables pigeon flocks to navigate more accurately on the wing, new research shows.Hierarchical organisation also enables flocks to cope better with navigation errors made by individual birds.Researchers from Oxford University and the Zoological Society of London created 'virtual flocks' of homing pigeons to test how different social networks affect the navigation performance of these groups.

An organic wine producer is growing indigenous grapes near famed pharaonic tombs in central Egypt, vintners in the Nile Delta have modernized a long-neglected 19th century winery, and in Cairo's hotels, tourists can now enjoy Egyptian wine described by an expert as "eminently drinkable."

Security measures at the ancient pyramids of Giza are being heightened ahead of an expected Islamist terror attack in the wake of a suicide bombing in Luxor.At least three militants were stopped by police as they assaulted the Temple of Karnak in the southern tourist city late on Wednesday morning, prompting fears of further coordinated attacks.

The making of modern Europe began in earnest about 5,000 years ago when a mass migration of people from what is now southern Russia and Georgia introduced new technology, languages and dairy farming to the continent, a study has found.Thousands of Bronze Age migrants from the Caucuses came to northern Europe in a major movement of prehistoric people in the third millennium BC, according to the largest research project of its kind that analysed the genetic makeup of more than 100 ancient skeletons from the period.

African elephants are crossing borders to escape lawlessness and fighting. They seem to be heading to Botswana, Gabon, Namibia and Uganda. These countries are bucking the trend of elephant declines elsewhere, due in part to their political stability, relatively sparse populations and low levels of government corruption.With about 100 elephants slaughtered for ivory every day in Africa, they could disappear within decades across much of their range.

Researchers studying banded mongooses in Uganda have discovered that these small mammals are able to discriminate between relatives and non-relatives to avoid inbreeding even when mating within their own closely related social group.Inbreeding can be a big problem for social species such as banded mongooses because they grow up in social groups consisting mainly of close relatives. This study is the first to suggest that social animals are able to avoid the costs of inbreeding without relying on un-related mating partners from other social groups.

The meek may, as the Bible says, inherit the Earth. But the spineless are going extinct. While vertebrate species like mammals and birds are mostly surviving the human-dominated epoch of Anthropocene better than expected, invertebrate species are disappearing in droves.Some 7 per cent of non-marine animals may already be gone, according to a new assessment.

Can computer software invent scientific theories and ideas as well as crunch numbers? That's the suggestion being put forward by Michael Levin and Daniel Lobo, two computer scientists at Tufts University, Massachusetts in the US, who have programmed a computer to come up with its own scientific hypothesis on one of biology's most well-known mysteries.

Elon Musk's SpaceX has officially asked for permission to build a constellation of 4,000 satellites capable of beaming the Internet to the most remote regions of the earth. The plan, outlined in a request to the Federal Communications Commission, would transform Musk's rocket company into a new Internet service provider to compete with the likes of Verizon and Comcast. And you thought you were having a productive day.

A new study has revealed that chimpanzees have the same types of smiles as humans when laughing, which suggests these smile types evolved from positive expressions of ancestral apes.The new findings from the University of Portsmouth suggest that chimpanzees' communication is more similar to humans than was previously known.

Everyone loves cuddling with kittens. But there can be a little-known danger lurking behind that furry little face and that innocent-sounding meow: a parasite called Toxoplasma gondii (T. gondii).T. gondii is the most common parasite in developed nations, according to Schizophrenia Bulletin. The cat-carried parasite can infect any warm-blooded species, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates more than 60 million people in the U.S. may have it.

The genetic underpinnings of psychosis are elusive and diffuse. There are hundreds of common genetic mutations scattered throughout the human genome that each bump up by just a tiny bit the risk of developing a mental illness like schizophrenia. Many people carry some set of those genes, but most don't end up with a psychotic disorder. Instead, a study suggests, they might be getting a small creative boost.Alt: New study claims to find genetic link between creativity and mental illness

Can you eat your way to an anxiety-free existence?It might sound outlandish, but the idea that your diet can have a huge effect on your emotions has become the focus of an exciting new area of psychological research. The latest addition to this growing body of research comes from psychologists at the College of William & Mary, and finds a link between a diet high in fermented foods and reductions in neuroticism and social anxiety.

Children who received general anesthesia for surgery before age 4 had diminished language comprehension, lower IQ and decreased gray matter density in posterior regions of their brain, according to a new study. The authors of the study recommend additional studies to determine anesthesia's precise molecular effects on the brain and contribution to diminished brain function and composition.

A solar-powered boat has been successfully created by four farmers in Dong Thap Province in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam.The idea to start making the boat came from the need to save money on fuel costs.

Large magnetic storms from the Sun, which affect technologies such as GPS and utility grids, could soon be predicted more than 24 hours in advance.Coronal mass ejections (CMEs) are eruptions of gas and magnetised material from the Sun that have the potential to wreak havoc on satellites and Earth-bound technologies, disrupting radio transmissions and causing transformer blowouts and blackouts.

The US space agency has released a new picture of the brightest spots on the dwarf planet Ceres.Nasa's Dawn probe has just retuned the image - one of the first snapshots to come down from the satellite since getting into its latest mapping orbit, which is now just 4,000km above the surface.

It turns out that giant deer were still present in Britain at the end of the last Ice Age. While many animal species became extinct, the giant deer, or Irish elk, was still around during that time period.Researchers still don't the precise reasons for the extinction of so many species; it probably took place due to a combination of climate change and hunting by humans. However, some species of animals survived the end of the last glacial period somewhat longer than others.Related: Giant deer were still present in Southern Germany after the Ice Age

From ancient Egyptians roasting a dripping cut of beef next to the Great Pyramid of Giza to a Boy Scout learning to build a log cabin fire in his backyard, everyone builds fires with the same general shape. And now we know why.In a study published in Scientific Reports on June 8, Adrian Bejan, the J.A. Jones professor of mechanical engineering at Duke University, shows that, all other variables being equal, the best fires are roughly as tall as they are wide.

The Copacabana Peninsula may be a magnet for adventurous holiday makers today, but it was a far more bloodthirsty place more than 1,000 years ago.The landmass jutting out into Lake Titicaca in Bolivia was home to a group of people who seem to have fought with each other frequently.Skeletons in the region have revealed signs of violence such as broken bones, but holes in the skulls also suggest the ancient culture conducted cranial surgery in a bid to save lives.

In an elite Early Iron Age burial from central Kazakhstan, the remains of an early Scythian nomad came to light. The bones were scattered and some had disappeared over the millennia, but when archaeologists put the pieces back together, they noticed something few researchers have seen before: a metal arrowhead wedged into the spine.

The Antikythera Shipwreck, located at the edge of the Aegean Sea off the coast of Antikythera, near the northwestern coast of Crete, is one of the most celebrated archaeological finds in modern antiquity. Originally discovered by happenstance in 1900 by sponge divers that had decided to wait out a passing storm, the wreck has yielded some of the most fascinating finds over more than a decade of study.

A NEWLY UNVEILED CARVING OF A SEABIRD FOUND AT GÖBEKLI TEPE OPENS THE DEBATE OVER THE GEOGRAPHICAL ORIGINS OF ITS POWER ELITEA REPORT BY ANDREW COLLINSWith the opening of Sanliurfa's new archaeological museum full attention has been given to its incredible reconstruction of Göbekli Tepe's Enclosure D, complete with its twin monoliths standing an almighty 5.5 metres (18 feet) high, and its stone-by-stone reconstruction of Nevali Çori's cult building. This was saved from destruction in 1992 when the site was drowned by the rising waters of the Euphrates river following the opening two years earlier of the Ataturk dam.

Egyptian officials say a suicide bomber has blown himself up as part of a coordinated terror attack on the ancient Temple of Karnak, a hugely popular tourist destination.Police officials have said they foiled at attack and that at least two militants had been killed and a third wounded, while a car used by the attackers exploded.Alt: Suicide attack outside Karnak temple in Egypt's Luxor

Scientists have discovered what appear to be red blood cells and collagen fibres in the fossilised remains of dinosaurs that lived 75 million years ago.Traces of the soft tissues were found by accident when researchers at Imperial College in London analysed eight rather shabby fossils that had been dug up in Canada a century ago before finding their way to the Natural History Museum in London.

A woman in Belgium is the first in the world to give birth to a baby using transplanted ovarian tissue frozen when she was still a child, doctors say.The 27-year-old had an ovary removed at age 13, just before she began invasive treatment for sickle cell anaemia.

Getting through the pollen season can now become easier for some of the approximately 500 million people worldwide who suffer from sneezing and a runny nose, watery eyes and drowsiness during the allergy season (seasonal allergic rhinitis).This is indicated by a controlled trial carried out by researchers from Aarhus University. The trial, which took place over two days, included 65 people with grass pollen allergies who were not receiving any medical treatment at that time. They were either equipped with a nasal filter or a placebo device.

The vast quantity of planets and planetary candidates identified by NASA's Kepler spacecraft has revealed an array of systems. Some have Jupiter-sized planets close to the Sun, while others show only a handful of planets. Almost none resemble our solar system.In an effort to establish how the Sun and its planets compare to the newfound systems, a pair of astronomers suggest that our early solar system may have contained as many as four planets orbiting closer to the Sun than Venus, and that a series of cataclysmic collisions left Mercury as the last one standing.

A flying saucer has been spotted over the Pacific. Not a UFO, exactly, since it is identified. It belongs to NASA.After several delays, NASA on Monday initiated the test of a saucer-shaped craft that could hold the key to a future human mission to Mars.

Researchers have used satellite data to detect deposits of glass within impact craters on Mars. Though formed in the searing heat of a violent impact, the glasses could provide a delicate window into the possibility of past life on the Red Planet.Over the last few years, several research groups have shown that, here on Earth, ancient biosignatures can be preserved in impact glass. One of those studies, led by Brown University geologist Peter Schultz and published last year, found organic molecules and even plant matter entombed in glass formed by an impact that occurred millions of years ago in Argentina.

Scientists have developed a computational method to investigate the relationship between birth month and disease risk. The researchers used this algorithm to examine New York City medical databases and found 55 diseases that correlated with the season of birth. Overall, the study indicated people born in May had the lowest disease risk, and those born in October the highest.

Back pain is a tricky beast. Most Americans will at some point have a problem with their backs. And for an unlucky third, treatments won't work, and the problem will become chronic.Believe it or not, there are a few cultures in the world where back pain hardly exists. One indigenous tribe in central India reported essentially none. And the discs in their backs showed little signs of degeneration as people aged.

Merely art? Recreation? Dance may be the Cinderella of education. About 400 studies related to interdisciplinary 21st-century neuroscience lead to the discovery that there is a hidden value to dance education for young and old alike.Dance is a language of physical exercise that sparks new brain cells (neurogenesis) and their connections that are responsible for acquiring knowledge and thinking.