Newsdesk Archive

Listening to icebergs could help to assess the extent of glacier melt, scientists report.Researchers in Poland, the UK and US have found different types of icebergs have their own acoustic signature as they calve away from the ice.

A new species of plant has been found in the Blue Mountains in New South Wales, Australia, and it sure does not smell like roses. Identified by local botanist Greg Steenbeeke from the NSW Office of Environment and Heritage, this little sunset-coloured, 2-centimetre-tall flower has been named Thismia megalongensis.T. megalongensis belongs to a genus of plants commonly known as 'fairy lanterns', because their shape and warm, glowing colour make them look like you could just pick one up and light a room with it - if you were the height of an iPhone.

Biologist Josh Grinath seized a rare chance to study an ecosystem from top to tiny bottom when a black bear blundered through his Rocky Mountain meadow research plot, gobbling up ants and gnawing on equipment.When the hungry bear appeared, wreaking havoc on ant nests for a high-protein snack, Grinath decided to track the cascading effects of this top predator.Related: Polar bear penises are getting weaker

A biologist and an engineer have published a study in the journal PLOS ONE that suggests the skulls of baleen whales have evolved the ability to feel sound in their bones.Related: Ageing whales: Scars reveal social secrets - "By following them over four years and cataloguing them based on each individual's numerous scars, the scientists were able to reveal new social insights.Most striking were the long-term relationships the whales appeared to form."Related: A rare megamouth shark just washed up in the Philippines

A new study found that chicks associate the left side with smaller numbers and the right side with higher numbers. To see how this relates to you, let's begin with our own, short experiment. Imagine the numbers 1-10 in a horizontal line.Alt: Bird brain? Study says chicks count like we do

Hats off to researchers in California. They've taken what appears to be a big step toward the development of a cure for hair loss, a condition that affects 50 million men and 30 million women in the U.S. alone.The scientists, working at the Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif., showed that stem cells derived from human skin can be used to grow hair--at least in mice.

Four thin, black lines, stacked on top of each other, bring the total number of tattoos on Ötzi, a 5,300-year-old mummified iceman, to 61, according to an exhaustive new study.Finding the new body art, located on the lower side of Ötzi's right ribcage, "was a big surprise because we didn't expect to see a new tattoo," said Albert Zink, the study's senior researcher and head of the Institute for Mummies and the Iceman at the European Research Academy in Italy.

A once-thriving Mesoamerican metropolis dried up about 1,000 years ago when below-average rainfall triggered centuries-long droughts that largely prompted people to abandon the city for greener opportunities, a new study finds.Scientists have long debated whether it was drought or cultural forces that led to the abandonment of Cantona, a once-fortified city located just east of modern-day Mexico City.

Despite a lack of archaeological evidence, the first North Americans have often been depicted hunting with spear-throwers, which are tools that can launch deadly spear points at high speeds. But now, a new analysis of microscopic fractures on Paleo-Indian spear points provides the first empirical evidence that America's first hunters really did use these weapons to tackle mammoths and other big game.

A woman's menstrual cycle may have an effect on her nicotine cravings, according to a recent study.Researchers from the University of Montreal and its affiliated Institut universitaire en santé mentale de Montréal found that women crave cigarette more strongly during their periods.

Just as only the jester can tell the King the truth, satire performs a vital function in democratic society by using humor to broach taboo subjects, especially in times of crisis, according to a book by Penn State researchers."Robust satire is often a sign of crisis and the ability to share and consume it is a sign of a free society," said Sophia McClennen, professor of international affairs and comparative literature and director of Penn State's Center for Global Studies. "We see satire emerge when political discourse is in crisis and when it becomes important to use satirical comedy to put political pressure on misinformation, folly and the abuse of power.".

Atmospheric physicists predict that global warming will not lead to an overall increasingly stormy atmosphere, a topic debated by scientists for decades. Instead, strong storms will become stronger while weak storms become weaker, and the cumulative result of the number of storms will remain unchanged.Related: 'World can cut carbon emissions and live well'

Asteroid mining may become a multispecies affair.The asteroid-mining firm Deep Space Industries (DSI) is investigating the feasibility of injecting bioengineered microbes into space rocks far from Earth, to get a jump on processing their valuable resources.

Astronomers say they have discovered a planet with a gigantic ring system that is 200 times larger than that around Saturn.It is the first such structure detected around a planet beyond our Solar System.

Five Earth-sized planets have been identified around a distant star in the Milky Way galaxy in a discovery that raises the possibility of eventually finding another rocky planet where water-based life may exist, scientists said.Alt: Ancient planets are almost as old as the universeAlt: Oldest Planetary System Discovered, Improving the Chances for Intelligent Life Everywhere

Skull fractures can lead to an early death, even if the victims initially survived the injuries, according to a new study that looked at skulls from three Danish cemeteries with funeral plots dating from the 12th to the 17th centuries.This is the first time that researchers have used historical skulls to estimate the risk of early death among men who survived skull fractures, experts said.Related: The mystery of shellshock solved: Scientists identify the unique brain injury caused by war

Paleontologists have discovered a new species of a long-necked dinosaur from a skeleton found in China. The new species belongs to a group of dinosaurs called mamenchisaurids, known for their extremely long necks sometimes measuring up to half the length of their bodies. Most sauropods, or long-necked dinosaurs, have necks only about one third the length of their bodies.

According to research published Tuesday in Nature Communications, we may need to slither back the clock on snake evolution.In fact, we may have been pretty wrong about just how snakes evolved from the common ancestors they share with modern lizards. Until now, the oldest-known snake fossils were only about 100 million years old.Alt: Snakes crawled among Jurassic dinosaurs, new timeline says

Golden orb-web spiders (Nephila clavipes) are sit-and-wait hunters that accumulate prey larders on their webs. These larders are sometimes stolen by other spiders. If prey items are removed from their webs, golden orb-web spiders search for them. They search longer when they have lost more prey items as well as when they have lost larger prey items.

Many people live among animals that inspire affection, even admiration: bluebirds and hawks, beavers and bobcats. The fortunate might glimpse a fox or, if they live in the country, an eagle or a bear. But I live in New York City, where the star of the show is the rat.Rats are guides to emerging questions of evolution and cognition. Foremost among these is empathy, widely considered a defining human characteristic. Yet rats may possess it too.

For chimpanzees, just like humans, teasing, taunting and bullying are familiar parts of playground politics. An analysis of twelve years of observations of playground fights between young chimpanzees in East Africa finds that chimps with higher-ranked moms are more likely to win.

A small team of researchers with the University of Ulm's Institute of Experimental Ecology in Germany has found an evolutionary explanation for same-sex sexual behavior (SSB) in burying beetles. In their paper published in the journal Biology Letters, the team describes how they tested what is known as Reeve's acceptance threshold theory in male beetles and found that the evolutionary cost of possibly rejecting females was overridden when there were few of them to choose from.

Psychopathic violent offenders have abnormalities in the parts of the brain related to learning from punishment, according to an MRI study led by Sheilagh Hodgins and Nigel Blackwood. "One in five violent offenders is a psychopath. They have higher rates of recidivism and don't benefit from rehabilitation programmes. Our research reveals why this is and can hopefully improve childhood interventions to prevent violence and behavioural therapies to reduce recidivism," explained Professor Hodgins of the University of Montreal and Institut universitaire en santé mentale de Montréal. "Psychopathic offenders are different from regular criminals in many ways. Regular criminals are hyper-responsive to threat, quick-tempered and aggressive, while psychopaths have a very low response to threats, are cold, and their aggressively is premeditated,".

More than 800 million men living today are descended from just eleven men, including the ruthless Mongolian leader Genghis Khan, according to new research.Geneticists have been able to find eleven distinctive sequences in Y-chromosomes - the chunk of DNA that is only carried by men - that are persistent in modern populations in Asia.By systematically analysing the DNA of more than 5,000 men, they have been able to trace these male lineages to their approximate 'founding fathers'.

From rashes to irritable bowels, people today face certain health challenges because our ancestors evolved the genetic variations associated with these conditions in order to benefit human health, a new study has found.It's ironic that the genes responsible for certain health problems evolved to help us, but it's a reminder that physical traits are not always all good or bad. There are some cases, as the study published in Molecular Biology and Evolution points out, where the line is not so clear.

Australian researchers have found a possible key to a cure for people with potentially fatal peanut allergies.A Melbourne-based study has already transformed the lives of many of the children who took part in the clinical trial.

A body motion energy harvester, with the flexibility and elasticity to be applied to high-flexion joints and suitable for integration with fabrics, is being developed by researchers at Sogang University in Korea. The design is aimed at providing power for medical and consumer wearable devices.With growing interest in wearable electronic devices, there is a need to find different power sources, especially to alleviate the need for regular charging or battery changes.

After 2,000 years under the sea, three flat, misshapen pieces of bronze at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens are all shades of green, from emerald to forest. From a distance, they look like rocks with patches of mold. Get closer, though, and the sight is stunning. Crammed inside, obscured by corrosion, are traces of technology that appear utterly modern: gears with neat triangular teeth (just like the inside of a clock) and a ring divided into degrees (like the protractor you used in school). Nothing else like this has ever been discovered from antiquity. Nothing as sophisticated, or even close, appears again for more than a thousand years.

It was sealed off from humanity for 30,000 years before sewer workers accidentally shattered its high, vaulted ceiling and allowed Israeli searchers to rappel into its dark interior.Seven years after the discovery of Manot Cave in western Galilee, researchers argued in Nature on Wednesday that the 55,000-year-old skull cap may have belonged to a hypothesized group of modern humans who, after venturing out of Africa, associated and interbred with Neanderthals in the Middle East and then moved on to colonize Europe.Alt: Skull Fossil Offers New Clues on Human Journey From Africa

Archaeologists are excavating the vessel that served as the flagship of the pirate Blackbeard, and the medical equipment they have recovered from the shipwreck suggests the notorious buccaneer had to toil to keep his crew healthy.Blackbeard is the most famous pirate who ever lived. His real name was Edward Teach (or possibly Thatch).

Nature experts have discovered a remarkable submerged forest thousands of years old under the sea close to the Norfolk coast.The trees were part of an area known as 'Doggerland' which formed part of a much bigger area before it was flooded by the North Sea.Alt: Diver finds 10,000-year-old FOREST which originally stretched as far as Europe hidden under the North Sea (images)

Late last week it was revealed that the beard from King Tut's burial mask was hastily glued back on with epoxy after being accidentally knocked off by a maintenance crew. After inspecting the priceless artifact, a German restoration specialist says it can probably be fixed.We have some more information for you about this incident, both in terms of what happened and what's going to happen next.

Yoga has long been a popular form of exercise and meditation, but science is starting to confirm the ancient practice has the power to treat depression and anxiety.With one in five Canadians dealing with a form of mental illness at some point in their lives, physicians are beginning to look beyond traditional methods of treatment, such as therapy or medication. Some are turning to yoga.Related: Warped Brain Lobes Could Underlie Depression Symptoms

For many Facebook users, the urge to like a kitten video or snoop on a high-school flame is almost irresistible.As it turns out, this type of "Facebook addiction" may show up in the brain: A new study found that the brains of people who report compulsive urges to use the social networking site show some brain patterns similar to those found in drug addicts.Related: Why the modern world is bad for your brain

A group of ornithologists led by Dr Manuel Schweizer from the Natural History Museum of Bern in Switzerland has described a new cryptic species of owl that inhabits the desert areas of Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Oman and Yemen.The newly-discovered species, named the Desert Tawny Owl, belongs to the earless owl genus, Strix.

Researchers have for the first time provided strong evidence for what conspiracy theorists have long thought - oil is often the reason for interfering in another country's war.Throughout recent history, countries which need oil have found reasons to interfere in countries with a good supply of it and, the researchers argue, this could help explain the US interest in ISIS in northern Iraq.

Long before the Europeans arrived on Easter Island in 1722, the native Polynesian culture known as Rapa Nui showed signs of demographic decline. However, the catalyst has long been debated in the scientific community. Was environmental degradation the cause, or could a political revolution or an epidemic of disease be to blame? A collaborative study suggests that the island's native culture reacted to natural environmental barriers to producing sufficient crops.

A team of researchers with members from Mexico, the U.S. and Germany has found that the demise of the pre-Columbian Mesoamerican society centered around a city known as Cantona, was likely due to a combination of weather and politics.Alt: Early Mesoamericans affected by climate change

Nestled in a quiet forest in Belize, a deep aquamarine pool holds ruins from a time when the ancient Maya turned to a "drought cult," archaeologists suggest, and hurried sacrifices to a water god to try to stave off the fall of their civilization.At the Cara Blanca site in Belize, archaeologists report the discovery of a water temple complex: a small plaza holding the collapsed remnants of a lodge and two smaller structures.

The first known prehistoric human from Taiwan has been identified and may represent an entirely new species that lived as recently as 10,000 years ago, according to a new study.The newly discovered big-toothed human, "Penghu 1," strengthens the growing body of evidence that Homo sapiens was not the only species from our genus living in Europe and Asia between 200,000 and 10,000 years ago.

A mysterious crater that was discovered in East Antarctica last month likely formed beneath a leaky meltwater lake, rather than because of a meteorite impact, researchers now think.The ring of sunken ice, nearly 2 miles (3 kilometers) wide, was spotted a few days before Christmas on the Roi Baudoin Ice Shelf in East Antarctica.Related: Two lakes beneath the ice in Greenland, gone within weeks

Scientists working with NASA's 230-foot-wide (70-meter) Deep Space Network antenna at Goldstone, California, have released the first radar images of asteroid 2004 BL86. The images show the asteroid, which made its closest approach today (Jan. 26, 2015) at 8:19 a.m. PST (11:19 a.m. EST) at a distance of about 745,000 miles (1.2 million kilometers, or 3.1 times the distance from Earth to the moon), has its own small moon.Related: Asteroid narrowly scrapes past Earth: how to watch the closest space rock for decades as it flies by

Pluto, get ready for your close-up.After traveling nine years across more than 3 billion miles of space, a spacecraft the size of a grand piano is about to give humanity its first high-resolution view of the dwarf planet that's about two-thirds the size of our moon.Nobody knows what the rendezvous will reveal.

A swarm of tiny probes each with a different sensor could be fired into the clouds of Jupiter and grab data as they fall before burning up in the gas giant planet's atmosphere. The probes would last an estimated 15 minutes according to planetary scientists. Transmitting 20 megabits of data over 15 minutes would be sufficient to allows scientists to get a picture of a large part of the atmosphere of the planet.

Unlike Bilbo's magic ring, which entangles human hearts, engineers have created a new micro-ring that entangles individual particles of light, an important first step in a whole host of new technologies.Entanglement - the instantaneous connection between two particles no matter their distance apart - is one of the most intriguing and promising phenomena in all of physics.

Millions of genetically modified mosquitoes could be released in the Florida Keys if British researchers win approval to use the bugs against two extremely painful viral diseases.Never before have insects with modified DNA come so close to being set loose in a residential U.S. neighborhood."This is essentially using a mosquito as a drug to cure disease," said Michael Doyle, executive director of the Florida Keys Mosquito Control District.

Bernd Heinrich was on a hike through the woods of New England when he observed something which would go on to change our perception of animal psychology.A group of ravens had gathered to feed on a dead moose. But rather than choosing to keep the bounty for themselves, they were making a strange call, one which seemed to be deliberately attracting more ravens to the feast.

Science has not entirely ignored unusual interactions between species. Biologists have described relationships formed to achieve a specific goal, like the cooperative hunting between groupers and moray eels. And in the mid-1900s, Konrad Lorenz and other ethologists demonstrated that during critical periods after birth, certain birds and other animals would follow the first moving object they saw, whether animal, human or machine, a phenomenon known as imprinting.

A remarkable photograph of the live birth of a thresher shark has cast light on the lives of these elusive, vulnerable fish.Lead researcher Dr Simon Oliver from the University of Chester told BBC News that this was also "the first record of any oceanic species giving birth".

Pity the hadrosaur. The duck-billed dinosaur had no horns, armor or tusks for defense when Tyrannosaurus rex was on the hunt. And it was too big to escape by climbing a tree or burrowing into the ground. To top it all off, the herbivore was slow of foot. Luckily, the layout of a hadrosaur's leg and tail muscles may have helped it escape the massive jaws of tyrannosaur predators.T. rex would win in a sprint, but a hadrosaur would outrun it in a longer race, paleontologist W. Scott Persons argues in a study about the dinosaurs' caudofemoralis muscles.

Behold, a material so water-repellent that liquid drops just bounce off the surface.Two scientists at the University of Rochester, Chunlei Guo and Anatoliy Vorobyev, have created a metal surface that is so hydrophobic that it makes Teflon look like superglue by comparison.Related: Scientists Turn Pure Metal into Glass

An experiment that creates the illusion of an object traveling faster than the speed of light could be a real-world tool for studying the cosmos, according to research presented this month at the 225th American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle.Related: Scientists slow the speed of light

I don't want to alarm you, but there's a massive galaxy heading our way and will collide with us in a few billion years. But aren't most galaxies speeding away? Why is Andromeda on a collision course with the Milky Way?I don't want to freak you out, but you should be aware that there's a gigantic galaxy with twice our mass headed right for us.

Exotic metallic frost and crusts loaded with crystals might shroud the highlands and mountains of Venus, researchers say.Venus has long been mysterious to scientists because dense clouds hide its surface. Any probes that have landed on the planet survived only a few hours before getting destroyed, because Venus is the hottest world in the solar system: Surface temperatures reach 870 degrees Fahrenheit (465 degrees Celsius), more than hot enough to melt lead.

MI5 spent years trying to decipher crop circles amid fears they were being used to guide Nazi bombers, secret documents from the Second World War have revealed.The files, held in the National Archives, show how British spies suspected Nazi sympathisers were sending secret messages to the enemy using ground markings.

An investigative organization has kick-started the creation of a worldwide UFO database, which will allow people around the globe to report their supposed extraterrestrial encounters.A new tool from the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) promises to help demystify the mystique that rides along with skywatchers' interpretations that extraterrestrial intruders are cruising Earth's airspace.Related: Project Blue Book: US Air Force UFO documents revealed

For many years we've been warning that intellectual property wars over things like music and movies were just a preview to the sort of insanity that would come about when 3D printing goes mainstream. We've seen some copyright takedowns of 3D printed objects in the past, but here's an absolutely crazy one.Jerry Fisher, a photographer in Sioux Falls South Dakota, was interested in 3D printing and 3D image capture. So he went and photographed two local bronze casts of Michelangelo statues, one of Moses which is on display at Augustana College and is co-owned by Augustana and the City of Sioux Falls, and another of David, which is in a local city park.

Authorities on Wednesday unveiled what they said was a record haul of rare antiquities illegally looted from Italy and discovered during raids on Swiss warehouses belonging to a Sicilian former art dealer. Police estimated the value of the 5,361 vases, kraters, bronze statues and frescoes at about 50 million euros ($58 million).Related: Ancient water distribution system found under Union Pacific Railroad tracksRelated: Experts excavate 3 unidentified graves in Madrid chapel as Spain hunts for Cervantes' remains

An Egyptian conservation group said Friday it will sue the antiquities minister over a "botched" repair of the mask of King Tutankhamun that left a crust of dried glue on the priceless relic.The golden funerary mask, seen Friday by AFP at the Egyptian Museum, showed the sticky aftermath of what appears to have been overzealous use of glue to fix the mask's beard in place.A museum official, who spoke anonymously to avoid repercussions, told AFP the beard had fallen of accidentally when the mask was removed from its case last year to repair the lighting.

Ancient warriors could have suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) as far back as 1300 BC, according to new research.It had been thought that the first record of PTSD was in 490 BC, during the Greco-Persian Battle of Marathon, but researchers at Anglia Ruskin University have found that it could have existed more than 3,000 years ago.

Scientists have long known that sleep, memory and learning are deeply connected but how has remained a mystery. The question is, does the mechanism that promotes sleep also consolidate memory, or do two distinct processes work together? In other words, is memory consolidated during sleep because the brain is quiet or are memory neurons actually putting us to sleep? In a recent paper, researchers make a case for the latter.Related: How Sleep Keeps You Healthy, Helps You Heal

The island nation most closely associated with marijuana in the popular mind is about to decriminalize it. The Jamaican cabinet Monday approved a bill that would do just that, as well as allow for the creation of medical marijuana and hemp industries.The bill, the Dangerous Drugs (Amendment) Act of 2015, goes to the Senate tomorrow and will be debated there next Friday.

Young lovers walking down the aisle may dream of long and healthy lives together, but close friends in the wedding party may have a better sense of whether those wishes will come true, suggests new research on personality and longevity from Washington University in St. Louis.

Scientists have recruited a new ally in their battle to fight disease: domestic moggies. They believe the genetic profiles of cats contain crucial clues about diseases to which humans and felines are both susceptible. These illnesses include diabetes, asthma and some causes of blindness.

Bacteria communicate by means of chemical signals and can develop common characteristics through this "agreement" and also develop their potential pathogenic effects in this way. Scientists have now described a hitherto unknown communication pathway that appears to be widely distributed.

There has been a significant increase in the amount of water "pouring" out of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, the comet on which the Rosetta mission's Philae lander touched down in November 2014. The 2.5-mile-wide (4-kilometer) comet was releasing the earthly equivalent of 40 ounces (1.2 liters) of water into space every second at the end of August 2014.

The weather impacts not only upon our mood but also our voice. An international research team including scientists from the Max Planck Institutes for Psycholinguistics, Evolutionary Anthropology and Mathematics in the Sciences has analysed the influence of humidity on the evolution of languages. Their study has revealed that languages with a wide range of tone pitches are more prevalent in regions with high humidity levels. In contrast, languages with simpler tone pitches are mainly found in drier regions.

Jellyfish can sense the ocean current and actively swim against it, according to a study that involved tagging and tracking the creatures.The research, by an international team, could help scientists work out how jellyfish form "blooms".

In a cold and dark underwater world, where a never-ending rain of rocks keeps the seafloor barren, researchers were startled to find fish, crustaceans and jellyfish investigating a submersible camera after drilling through nearly 2,500 feet (740 meters) of Antarctic ice.Alt: Fish Under Ice-Cap Suggest Europa Life May Be Possible | Video

A strange, flickering white blotch found on the dwarf planet Ceres by a NASA spacecraft has scientists scratching their heads.The white spot on Ceres in a series of new photos taken on Jan. 13 by NASA's Dawn spacecraft, which is rapidly approaching the round dwarf planet in the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. But when the initial photo release on Monday (Jan. 19), the Dawn scientists gave no indication of what the white dot might be.

A rare celestial event that appears to show three suns in the sky has been filmed in the skies above Mongolia.The phenomenon, scientific name parhelion, was visible in areas across Mongolia on Sunday and shows the sun flanked by two reflections on either side.

A favourite theory to explain the sudden demise of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago has been debunked by an experiment suggesting that it would have been unlikely for a giant asteroid impact to cause a global firestorm.It is known that a massive asteroid collided with the Earth at around the same time that the dinosaurs went extinct and it was thought that the impact generated high enough temperatures to ignite vegetation around the world in a global conflagration.

US scientists say they have taken the first step towards making "safer" GMOs that cannot spread in the wild using synthetic biology.They have re-written the genetic code of bacteria to use only synthetic chemicals to grow. The GM bacteria would die if they escaped into nature.

The trade in bees used for honey or to pollinate crops could have a devastating impact on wild bees and other insects, say scientists.Related: Only 60 Years of Farming Left If Soil Degradation ContinuesRelated: State puts limits on a pesticide used for strawberries, other crops

British company Satellite Applications Catapult has launched a satellite tracking system aimed at putting a stop to the costly, global problem of illegal "pirate" fishing.The system, named Project Eyes, will allow authorities to monitor, detect and respond in real time to illegal fishing activity from a "virtual watch room". Pirate fishing is valued at $23.5bn (£15.5bn) annually, which is equivalent to one in every five caught in the wild.

People may have to "turn on" their memories in order to remember even the simplest details of an experience, according to Penn State psychologists. This finding, which has been named "attribute amnesia," indicates that memory is far more selective than previously thought."It is commonly believed that you will remember specific details about the things you're attending to, but our experiments show that this is not necessarily true,".

Women rate emotional images as more emotionally stimulating than men do and are more likely to remember them. However, there are no gender-related differences in emotional appraisal as far as neutral images are concerned. These were the findings of a large-scale study that focused on determining the gender-dependent relationship between emotions, memory performance and brain activity.Related: Emotion may improve ability to recall memories, study finds

Women are more almost two thirds more likely to believe in God or life after death than men, a new poll highlighting a deep gender divide in religious beliefs has found.The study published by the UCL Institute of Education (IOE) found 60 per cent of women but only 35 per cent of men believed in some form of afterlife.

Researchers looking into the use of horse tranquiliser and 'party drug' ketamine say they have had a 75 per cent success rate in using it to treat long-term depression."The results are startling," says Melbourne University neuroscientist Associate Professor Graham Barrett, who has been studying depression for 30 years.Related: Depression Tweaks the Brain's Disappointment Circuit

Classic psychedelics, such as LSD, mushrooms and mescaline might be protective with regard to suicidal thoughts and behaviors, according to a recent study led by University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Public Health.Previous studies suggests that psychedelics have lasting improvements in mental health.Related: Is pot as bad as LSD? Heroin? Judge to rule on 1970 law

In their decades-long search for vaccines against drugs of abuse, scientists have hit upon a new approach to annul cocaine's addictive buzz. They report that their strategy, which they tested on mice, harnesses a bacterial protein to trigger an immune system attack on the drug if it enters the body. This response could dull cocaine's psychotropic effects and potentially help users of the drug kick the habit.

The famed 3,000-year-old mask of Tutankhamun has been damaged, after conservators attempted to glue the ancient Egyptian pharaoh's distinctive blue beard back on with epoxy.The blue and gold braided beard on the burial mask of famed pharaoh Tutankhamun was hastily glued back on with epoxy, damaging the relic after it was knocked during cleaning, conservators at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo said Wednesday.

The medieval Dunluce Castle, located on the craggy rocks of Northern Ireland's coast, is neighbors with a mysterious stone settlement, according to a recent excavation.The castle dates back to the 15th century, and once housed the powerful MacQuillan family, which controlled a large amount of territory in Northern Ireland. On a recent dig, the Northern Ireland Environment Agency planned to uncover part of the lost 17th century town of Dunluce near the castle. But instead, archaeologists stumbled upon an earlier settlement that dates back to the 15th and 16th centuries.

A study by the University of Florida published in the International Journal of Paleopathology claims to have discovered the first ever evidence for ancient bone surgery found in Peru.Dr. J Maria Toyne details that two skeletons (dated 800-1535 CE) from the pre-Colombian site of Kuelap demonstrate pathology similar to trepanation. Trepanation is the surgical practice of drilling holes into bones and is the oldest example of surgical intervention.

A dark cave thousands of feet up the side of a remote mountain in the Philippines is the final resting place of these curious corpses known as 'fire mummies'.The Ibaloi people, an ancient race from the Philippines, smoked their dead dry for months to mummify them - giving them their firey nickname.The preserved remains lie in dark caverns 4,000ft up the side of Mount Timbac, near Kabayan in the province of Benguet, 200 miles north of capital Manila.

A rare frilled shark, whose species dates back 80 million years, was caught in a fishing trawler off Australia's coast."It's a freaky thing," Simon Boag, the chief executive officer at South East Trawl Fishing Association, told Australia's ABC Rural. "I don't think you would want to show it to little children before they went to bed."The association said the frilled shark is often referred to as a "living fossil.".

A new prehistoric giant reptile has been found. The giant crocodile-like animal was 9 feet long, had huge teeth like steak knives and roamed the world before dinosaurs took over it.It has bony plates on its back, like a crocodile, and legs that lie underneath the body.The new animal, known as Nundasuchus, was found by a researcher at Virginia Tech. It is not a dinosaur, but one of the large reptiles that roamed the Earth before dinosaurs took over it.

The ominous hands of the "Doomsday Clock" have been fixed at 5 minutes to midnight for the past three years. But they could move tomorrow.Tomorrow (Jan. 22), at a news conference in Washington, D.C., The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists will announce where the hands will rest for 2015.

Who gets to name exoplanets? As efforts to officially christen alien worlds gets under way, it looks like Japanese astronomy fans will get the deciding vote.Currently, planets outside the solar system are saddled with dull scientific designations like GJ 667 Cc or HD 40307 g. Last year the International Astronomical Union (IAU), the scientific body that oversees cosmic naming rights, announced its NameExoWorlds contest to give the public a chance to choose more evocative names for a handful of exoplanets out of more than 1800 discovered so far.

Researchers have decoded ancient recordings from fragments of an asteroid dating back billions of years to the start of the Solar System.They found tiny "space magnets" in meteorites which retain a memory of the birth and death of the asteroid's core.

A trio of researchers in Germany has found levels of nitrogen in carlsbergite in two meteorite samples match levels found in the human body and the Earth's atmosphere. In their paper published in Nature Geoscience, Dennis Harries, Falko Langenhorst and Peter Hoppe with Universität Bayreuth, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena and Max-Planck-Institut für Chemie respectively describe their analyses of two primitive meteorites found in Antarctica in 1979, and offer theories as to how nitrogen levels found in them came to be there.

Solar flares can release the energy equivalent of many atomic bombs, enough to cut out satellite communications and damage power grids on Earth, 93 million miles away. The flares arise from twisted magnetic fields that occur all over the sun's surface, and they increase in frequency every 11 years, a cycle that is now at its maximum.

ABU DHABI (Reuters) - A plane powered by the sun will attempt an unprecedented flight around the world next month, the project's founders said, seeking to prove that flying is possible without using fossil fuel.Solar Impulse 2 is set to take off from Abu Dhabi with stopovers in India, Myanmar and China before crossing the Pacific Ocean and flying across the United States and southern Europe to arrive back in Abu Dhabi.

Researchers say they have developed a new technique that will get more kidneys to people who need transplants, but the method is sure to be controversial: The research shows that it is feasible to remove a kidney from an aborted human fetus, and implant the organ into a rat, where the kidney can grow to a larger size.It's possible that further work could find a way to grow kidneys large enough that they could be transplanted into a person, the researchers said, although much more research is needed to determine whether this could be done.

Baku-APA. Iraqi Minister of Tourism and Antiquities on Monday said that his country is seeking to restore the ancient ruin city of Babylon onto the UNESCO world heritage list, APA reports quoting Xinhua.The city was officially recognized as one of the first civilizations on earth.Related: Turkey: Ancient city put up for sale

US scientists are asking the public to join them in their quest to mine the Earth's soil for compounds that could be turned into vital new drugs.Spurred on by the recent discovery of a potential new antibiotic in soil, the Rockefeller University team want to check dirt from every country in the world.

California's drought crept in slowly, but it could end with a torrent of winter storms that stream across the Pacific, dumping much of the year's rain and snow in a few fast-moving and potentially catastrophic downpours.Powerful storms known as atmospheric rivers, ribbons of water vapor that extend for thousands of miles, pulling moisture from the tropics and delivering it to the West Coast, have broken 40% of California droughts since 1950, recent research shows.Related: The tides are changing: Sea levels rising at faster rate than predicted, study finds

Can a penalty kick simultaneously score a goal and miss? For very small objects, at least, this is possible: according to the predictions of quantum mechanics, microscopic objects can take different paths at the same time. The world of macroscopic objects follows other rules: the football always moves in a definite direction. But is this always correct? Physicists of the University of Bonn have constructed an experiment designed to possibly falsify this thesis. Their first experiment shows that Caesium atoms can indeed take two paths at the same time.

Researchers say that sleep paralysis happens when a person awakens during a stage of sleep known as rapid eye movement (REM). People in this stage of sleep are usually dreaming, but their muscles are nearly paralyzed, which might be an evolutionary adaptation that keeps people from acting out their dreams.It is harder to explain why a subset of people who experience sleep paralysis feel a menacing figure in their room or pressing on their chests.

Ancient scrolls that were burned black and buried in ash from the eruption of Mount Vesuvius nearly two thousand years ago have begun to give up their secrets.Researchers in Italy used a powerful x-ray procedure to read out the first words from two of the Roman scrolls, which belong to the only library to have survived from the ancient world.Alt: New Tech Could Reveal Secrets in 2,000-Year-Old Scrolls