Newsdesk Archive
The biological world around us is dominated by multicellular plants and animals. All of these intricate forms have evolved from far simpler, single celled ancestors.What could explain the transition from single cells to cooperative groups, to groups of cells that put the prosperity of the whole group before the one? This is the essential question of how organisms evolved from single celled types and it is one of life's greatest mysteries.
The mummified brain of a well-preserved woolly mammoth found in the Siberian permafrost is the only mostly intact mammoth brain known to science, which has been described in a new study.The mummified carcass of the 39,000-year-old woolly mammoth, which included the brain with folds and blood vessels visible, was found in August 2010 on the Laptev Sea coast near Yukagir, Russia. The mammoth, named Yuka, was 6 to 9 years old when it died, the researchers found.
A bearded deity has been discovered with astral symbols. Archaeologists excavated the unique Roman relief depicting an unknown god in an ancient sanctuary in Turkey. According to a first assessment, the one and a half meter (five foot) high basalt stele which was used as a buttress in the wall of a monastery shows a fertility or vegetation god, as classical scholar and excavation director said.
Just as physical adaptations help populations prosper in inhospitable habitats, belief in moralizing, high gods might be similarly advantageous for human cultures in poorer environments. A new study from the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent) suggests that societies with less access to food and water are more likely to believe in these types of deities."When life is tough or when it's uncertain, people believe in big gods," says Russell Gray, a professor at the University of Auckland and a founding director of the Max Planck Institute for History and the Sciences in Jena, Germany. "Prosocial behavior maybe helps people do well in harsh or unpredictable environments.".
During the 1970s, while bell-bottoms roamed the earth and The Dark Side of the Moon played on records, scientists were communicating images directly to the brains of blind people. What's more, they were intelligible images.Related: Entrepreneur, 13, gets Intel funding for low-cost Braille printer
Many manufacturers are at an early stage of discovering the benefits of 3D printing, but one of the clearest strengths is customization.At Normal, consumers can use a mobile app to photograph their ear, transmit the shots to the New York startup's 3D printing facility and then receive customized earphones within 48 hours.
One of the biggest gambles in space history comes to a climax on Wednesday when Europe attempts to make the first-ever landing on a comet.Speeding towards the Sun at 65,000 kilometres (40,600 miles) per hour, a lab called Philae will detach from its mothership Rosetta, heading for a deep-space rendezvous laden with risk.
A huge radio telescope in Chile has captured the best-ever image of planets forming around a distant star, researchers say.The spectacular view of planet birth, taken by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in northern Chile, shows numerous concentric rings in the disk of dust and gas surrounding HL Tau, a sunlike star found about 450 light-years away from Earth.
Could astronauts one day be printing rather than building a base on the Moon? In 2013 ESA, working with industrial partners, proved that 3D printing using lunar material was feasible in principle. Since then, work continues to investigate the technique. The shielding against radiation provided by a 3D-printed block of simulated lunar regolith was measured, providing important inputs for next-stage designss.Alt: A home of our own - on the MOON: Esa reveals plans for first human settlement outside Earth - and says inflatable base will be made by 3D printing robots
Decreasing solar activity could make the journey to Mars and back riskier for astronauts, a new study warns.The sun's magnetic field acts as a barrier to high-energy galactic cosmic rays, which originate outside the solar system in supernova explosions. The magnetic field is stronger when the sun is more active, deflecting more of this potentially dangerous radiation.
Insects developed wings before any other animals so they could keep up with the growing height of land plants, a new study suggests.The discovery, by an international team of researchers, comes from a massive new analysis of insect genes which has provided the clearest picture yet of how and when insects evolved.
A virus that infects human brains and makes us more stupid has been discovered, according to scientists in the US.The algae virus, never before observed in healthy people, was found to affect cognitive functions including visual processing and spatial awareness.
Being shown pictures of others being loved and cared for has been linked to a reduction in the brain's response to threat, according to a recent study.Researchers from the University of Exeter found that when individuals are briefly presented pictures of others receiving emotional support and affection, the brain's threat monitor, the amygdala, subsequently does not respond to images showing threatening facial expressions or words. This occurred even if the person was not paying attention to the content of the first pictures.
A genome taken from a 36,000-year-old skeleton has helped scientists shed new light on interbreeding between humans and Neanderthals.The ground-breaking study of DNA recovered from a fossil of one of the earliest known Europeans - a man who lived in western Russia - shows that the genetics of the earliest inhabitants of the continent survived the last ice age, helping form the basis of the modern-day population.
An Egyptian family recently found the remains of a 3,400 year-old temple underneath their home. So they did what any would-be archaeologists would do: They started digging. They've now been arrested by the police for illegal excavation.As Egyptian newspaper Al Ahram reports, the find was made two weeks ago. But instead of reporting it to the proper authorities, the seven residents of the Giza district started to conduct their own excavation.
In Roman Egypt, 14-year-old boys were enrolled in a youth organisation to learn to be good citizens.This is according to social historian and historian of idea, Ville Vuolanto, of the University of Oslo, who has joined Dr. April Pudsey, from the University of Newcastle to delve deep into the vast array of material of about 7,500 ancient documents written on papyrus. The texts include literary texts, personal letters and administrative documents. Never before has childhood been researched so systematically in this type of material.
When an English archaeologist named George Smith was 31 years old, he became enchanted with an ancient tablet in the British Museum. Years earlier, in 1845, when Smith was only a five-year-old boy, Austen Henry Layard, Henry Rawlinson, and Hormuzd Rassam began excavations across what is now Syria and Iraq. In the subsequent years they discovered thousands of stone fragments, which they later discovered made up 12 ancient tablets. But even after the tablet fragments had been pieced together, little had been translated. The 3,000-year-old tablets remained nearly as mysterious as when they had been buried in the ruins of Mesopotamian palaces.
Our genetic makeup influences whether we are fat or thin by shaping which types of microbes thrive in our body, according to a new study. Scientists identified a specific, little known bacterial family that is highly heritable and more common in individuals with low body weight.Related: High-fat diet postpones brain aging in miceRelated: Vegan Diets Are Best for Weight Loss
Air pollution seems to have a direct and negative impact on grain production in India, a US study warned on Monday, with recent increases in smog decreasing projected yields by half.Analysing 30 years of data, scientists developed a statistical model suggesting that air pollution caused wheat yields in densely populated states to be 50% lower than what they could have been in 2010.Related: ADHD-air pollution link: Breathing dirty air during pregnancy raises odds of childhood ADHD-related behavior problems
Putting an algae farm on top of a busy highway might sound bizarre, but this thriving farm in Switzerland is actively filtering pollution from the air.Plant-like microorganisms called algae are pretty interesting little creatures - some species form expansive 'algal blooms' that harm the environment, whereas others can be used to produce biofuel and food sources. Some can even infect humans and mess with their brains.
A protein found in sugar beet could be used as a blood substitute to help tackle the shortage of blood, researchers in Sweden suggest.Haemoglobin is the protein that carries oxygen in blood and the team say plant and human versions are very similar.
Epidemiologist want to forecast disease like meteorologists forecast rain. And the way people browse Wikipedia could be the key, they say.This time last year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta launched a competition to find the best way to forecast the characteristics of the 2013-2014 influenza season using data gathered from the internet. Today, Kyle Hickmann from Los Alamos National Laboratories in New Mexico and a few pals reveal the results of their model which used real-time data from Wikipedia to forecast the ground truth data gathered by the CDC that surfaces about two weeks later.
Researchers have successfully replicated a direct brain-to-brain connection between pairs of people as part of a scientific study following the team's initial demonstration a year ago. In the newly published study, which involved six people, researchers were able to transmit the signals from one person's brain over the Internet and use these signals to control the hand motions of another person within a split second of sending that signal.
Pope Francis recently expressed his approval of a group of exorcists meeting at the Vatican this week. While exorcisms, in which demonic spirits are driven out of a supposedly possessed person, may seem a dark practice relevant only on TV screens, they have long been recognized by the Catholic Church and several religions.This week, more than 300 members of the International Association of Exorcists are attending the convention, which is focused on the impact of the occult and Satanism on people today, The Catholic Sun reported.
Genetically Engineering Humans by Sergey BaranovShem, Ham and Japheth by David MathisenSee the articles page for more.
People who grow tomatoes want varieties that produce as much saleable crop as possible. People who eat tomatoes are less interested in yield, and more in taste. The tension between taste and yield can get pretty intense. What's a poor tomato plant to do?Enter Zach Lippman, a plant geneticist from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York. "Our interest is in how we can boost productivity, yield, fruit production, without compromising any of the fruit quality traits such as size and flavor," he says.
Bats were "jammed" the moment they were about to hone in on their insect prey, making them miss their target.The rival that emitted the call was then able to capture and eat the insect for itself.This is the first time scientists have witnessed this behaviour in one species - the Mexican free-tailed bat - a team reports in Science journal.
Individuals show great diversity in their ability to identify scents and odors. More importantly, males and females greatly differ in their perceptual evaluation of odors, with women outperforming men on many kinds of smell tests.Sex differences in olfactory detection may play a role in differentiated social behaviors and may be connected to one's perception of smell.Related: How To Make 'Noise-Cancelling Headphones' For Your Nose
The flavors we savor are never just about taste.Our taste buds allow us to distinguish the basic characteristics of food, like sweet, salty, bitter and sour. But we use our noses to sense more subtle flavors. Our sense of smell is what allows us to savor fine wines, delicately seasoned broths and complex curries.So is it possible to trick our brains into thinking we're tasting something, when we're only just smelling it?
Hidden away under frozen ground for nearly 10,000 years, an extremely well-preserved bison mummy is finally ready to give up its secrets.In 2011, members of the Yukagir tribe in northern Siberia discovered the remains of a steppe bison (Bison priscus), an extinct ancestor of the modern bisonthat still roam the plains of North America and northern Europe. The almost perfectly preserved bison was transported to the Yakutian Academy of Sciences in Siberia, where researchers made plans to perform a necropsy, an autopsy performed on animals.
Remarkable new details about giant moose released as archaeologists confirm stone structure is world's oldest.Children were involved in the construction of a geoglyph in the Urals which was only discovered thanks to images taken from space. It predates Peru's famous Nazca Lines by thousands of years, archaeologists have announced. But they are no nearer answering why ancient man made it, nor can they yet fathom which group built the geoglyph; archeological traces found so far in the area do not show a culture with sufficient refinement.
The earliest humans to live in Europe managed to survive the last Ice Age, a ferocious change in the climate that covered much of the continent in a thick layer of ice, a study has found.Scientists analysing the genetic makeup of the fossilised bones of a man who lived about 37,000 years ago in what is now western Russia found that his DNA is similar to modern-day Europeans suggesting they have a longer, continuous history than previously supposed.
In order for vertebrates to evolve from the sea to the land, some drastic evolutionary changes were needed.Their ancient sea-dwelling ancestors had no need for external sex organs whereas their land relatives did.Alt: Genesis of genitalia: We have one. Lizards have two. Why?.
Large plant-munching dinosaurs used a number of tactics, including kicking, biting and running for their lives, to avoid becoming the dinner of a dino like T. rex, a new study finds.The study, published this week in the Indiana University Press compendium "Hadrosaurs," helps to explain why the fossils for these and other plant-eating dinosaurs often outnumber those for carnivores. Many outwitted, outfought and outlasted the big carnivores.Some even resorted to karate-style kicks and tail whacks.
A century ago, scientists unearthed fossils of a gigantic carnivorous dinosaur bigger than Tyrannosaurus rex in the Sahara desert, but until recently, paleontologists thought the fearsome beast was lost to history.Known as Spinosaurus, the colossal predator sported a massive finlike sail on its back and a 3-foot-long (0.9 meters) jaw full of jagged teeth. Bigger than both T. rex and Gigantosaurus, it lived in the swamps and rivers of North Africa during the Cretaceous Period, about 112 million to 97 million years ago.
Feelings of a ghostly presence - the sense that someone is close-by when no-one is there - lie in the mind, a study has concluded.Scientists say that they have identified the parts of the brain that are responsible for generating these spooky sensations.
Thousands of UFO sightings are reported every year but not many countries are willing to spend money investigating them - there is just one dedicated state-run team left in Europe. Is France onto something?You don't need a time machine when you visit the French Space Centre headquarters in Toulouse - it's already a throwback to the 1970s. Green lawns sweep on to wide boulevards with stout long rectangular office blocks on either side.
Scientists who want to explore Jupiter's ocean-harboring moon Europa have some allies in high places.Several influential congresspeople are among those calling for a mission to Europa, which is regarded by many scientists as the best place to search for life beyond Earth.
China completed its first return mission to the moon early Saturday with the successful re-entry and landing of an unmanned probe, state media reported, in the latest step forward for Beijing's ambitious space programme.The probe landed safely in northern China's Inner Mongolia region, state news agency Xinhua said, citing the Beijing Aerospace Control Center.
The ability to build up knowledge over generations, called cumulative culture, has given humankind language and technology. While it was thought to be limited to humans until now, researchers have recently found that baboons are also capable of cumulative culture.
Childhood beliefs about the soul and afterlife stick with people as they age, shaping their views in adulthood, even if they say otherwise, a new study finds.The study is the first to examine explicit, or stated, and implicit, or longstanding but not consciously admitted, beliefs on the soul and afterlife, said researcher Stephanie Anglin, a doctoral student in psychology at Rutgers University. She examined how these personal beliefs develop, change and persist from childhood through adulthood.
NASA is adding a cosmic twist to Halloween with an unexpected find by the Hubble Space Telescope: eerie "ghost light" from the remains of a multi-galaxy massacre.As many as six galaxies roughly the size of our own Milky Way met their grisly deaths at the hands of gravity. The celestial bloodbath occurred over a period of 6 billion years in a group of galaxies 4 billion light-years away. NASA unveiled Hubble's false-color view of the "ghost light" Thursday (Oct. 30), just in time for Halloween.
Neutrinos are everywhere in the universe, but we cannot see them or feel them and can almost never stop them. They stream through our bodies by the trillions every second, flitting through the spaces between our atoms with nary a collision. These ghostly particles were created in abundance during the big bang, and stars like the sun pump out more all the time. Yet for all their plentitude, neutrinos may be the most mysterious particles in the cosmos.
Scientists working to create the perfect atomic clock have a fundamental problem: Right now, on the ceiling, time is passing just a bit faster than it is on the floor."My own personal opinion is that time is a human construct," says Tom O'Brian. O'Brian has thought a lot about this over the years. He is America's official timekeeper at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado.Related: "Time is Slowly Disappearing from Our Universe" (Or, is It Timeless?)
The vast jungles of the Amazon rainforest harbor tribes mostly isolated from the outside world, whose way of life, largely unchanged for millennia, is now increasingly threatened by intrusions from modern civilization.Now, scientists reveal they can monitor these "uncontacted tribes" using satellites, which would allow safe, inexpensive and noninvasive tracking of these tribes in order to protect them from outside threats.
The microbes living in people's guts are much less diverse than those in humans' closest relatives, the African apes, an apparently long evolutionary trend that appears to be speeding up in more modern societies, with possible implications for human health, according to a new study.Alt: Gut microbes changed rapidly as humans evolved
A British warship that sank off the coast of England 270 years ago may soon reveal its secrets.The U.K. Secretary of State for Defense has given the go-ahead to Odyssey Marine Exploration, Inc., a deep-ocean exploration company based in Tampa, Florida, to mine the HMS Victory for archaeological artifacts at risk of being damaged.Related: Wreck of 17th-Century Dutch Warship Discovered
An ancient story tells of the kamikaze, or "divine wind," that twice saved Japan from Kublai Khan's Mongol fleets. So powerful was the legend that centuries later thousands of World War II pilots known as kamikazes would sign up to protect Japan again, by crashing their planes in suicide missions.Now University of Massachusetts Amherst ecologist Jon Woodruff says he has uncovered evidence of some truth to the legend of the ancient kamikazes, typhoon-strength winds that saved Japan from Kublai Khan in the 13th century.
Researchers have completed the first phase of the world's most extensive digital archive of Scottish Gaelic texts as part of a landmark project to revolutionise access and understanding of the language to public around the world.The Digital Archive of Scottish Gaelic (DASG) project is already the most comprehensive publicly accessible reference point for the Gaelic language and culture, having been worked on by researchers from Celtic and Gaelic at the University of Glasgow for the past eight years.
The shape of birds' eggs could have helped them survive the mass extinction event that killed off the dinosaurs, new research proposes.A team analysed the geometric properties of eggs from 250 million years ago (Mesozoic Era) to today.Before the extinction event about 65 million years ago, eggshells had notable differences to the lineage that survived.
For the first time, researchers have shown that practising mindfulness meditation or being involved in a support group has a positive physical impact at the cellular level in breast cancer survivors.Related: Meditation makes you more creative, study suggests
Scientists from the University of Bern have developed a novel substance for the treatment of severe bacterial infections without antibiotics, which would prevent the development of antibiotic resistance.Ever since the development of penicillin almost 90 years ago, antibiotics have remained the gold standard in the treatment of bacterial infections. However, the WHO has repeatedly warned of a growing emergence of bacteria that develop antibiotic resistance. Once antibiotics do no longer protect from bacterial infection, a mere pneumonia might be fatal.
Scientists from Harvard and the University of New South Wales say they have discovered how to reverse the ageing process.The research has focused on mice, but early clinical trials have also been conducted on humans.The scientists said they switched youthful genes on and older genes off, using naturally occurring proteins and molecules.
Feeding honey bees a natural diet of pollen makes them significantly more resistant to pesticides than feeding them an artificial diet, according to a team of researchers, who also found that pesticide exposure causes changes in expression of genes that are sensitive to diet and nutrition."Honey bees are exposed to hundreds of pesticides, while they are foraging on flowers and also when beekeepers apply chemicals to control bee pests".
A wayward gray wolf has been spotted several times this month around the North Rim of Grand Canyon National Park, according to conservationists.The wolf, which is wearing an inactive radio collar, could be the first of its species to roam Arizona in 70 years; gray wolves were exterminated from the state in the 1940s.
An endangered deer with vampirelike fangs was spotted for the first time in nearly 60 years, in a remote forest in northeastern Afghanistan.The fanged creature is known as the Kashmir musk deer, and it's native to the Himalayas of northern India, Pakistan's Kashmir region and northern Afghanistan. Only the male deer have fangs, and they use them during mating season to compete for females. A team of researchers scoured Afghanistan's Nuristan province during 2008 and 2009, and recorded five sightings of the animal.
The use of remotely operated rovers to study penguins and seals in their natural habitats is less invasive and stressful for the animals, according to a new study.The findings, published in Nature Methods, also suggest that the rover's lower impact on animal behavior results in the collection of more accurate scientific data.
North Carolina State University researchers have developed a suite of technologies that can be used to enhance communication between dogs and humans, which has applications in everything from search and rescue to service dogs to training our pets."We've developed a platform for computer-mediated communication between humans and dogs that opens the door to new avenues for interpreting dogs' behavioral signals and sending them clear and unambiguous cues in return."
Today, China revealed its first anti-drone laser weapon, on the heels of a similar deployment by the US military earlier this year. According to state media, the system can bring down a drone within five seconds of locating the target, and is operable within a 1.2 mile radius of the installation. The system is designed for drones flying at altitudes around 1600 feet and at speeds of just over 100 miles per hour, putting most military drones within reach of the device.
Hundreds of thousands of objects are orbiting in high-velocity swarms around the Earth. Many of these, in the event of a collision, could ignite catastrophic accidents junking the world's orbital telecommunications networks.Australian company Electro Optic Systems (EOS) is leading efforts to track this potentially killer debris 38,000km (24,000 miles) above our heads, and is at the forefront of a boom in Australian space research.
Ghostly arcs that haunt the sky may come from an expanding shock-wave shell that is pressing in on our solar system.Although they are invisible at optical wavelengths, looking at the sky in radio waves, X-rays or gamma rays turns up giant streaks across the heavens. Dubbed "radio loops", they have perplexed astronomers since their discovery in the 1950s.
The biggest sunspot to grace the face of the sun in more than two decades just rotated out of Earth's view, but it was responsible for kicking up some truly amazing solar activity this week.The sunspot (called Active Region 12192 or AR 2192) shot off four powerful flares in four days recently, with many more smaller flares sprinkled in as well. The sunspot region was about the size of the planet Jupiter and is the largest solar flare observed in 24 years.
For years, astronomers have been puzzled by a bizarre object in the center of the Milky Way that was believed to be a hydrogen gas cloud headed toward our galaxy's enormous black hole.Having studied it during its closest approach to the black hole this summer, UCLA astronomers believe that they have solved the riddle of the object widely known as G2.
Technology developed during World War Two is to be used as a back-up for GPS.The General Lighthouse Authorities (GLA) have announced that they have installed a system called eLoran in seven ports across Britain.
This image of children munching gloomily on carrot sticks because there was no ice-cream during World War 2 is a bleak reminder of how rationing dulled eating habits in Britain.But what these children did not realise is that the enforced austerity actually made them smarter.
Human intelligence is thought to improve with each generation and a unique study of people born and raised in Aberdeen has proved that those in north-east Scotland are getting smarter.The research by scientists at the University of Aberdeen and NHS Grampian has been published in the academic journal Intelligence.
Reading bedtime stories, engaging in conversation and eating nightly dinners together are all positive ways in which parents interact with their children, but according to new research, none of these actions have any detectable influence on children's intelligence later in life. A criminology professor examined a nationally representative sample of youth alongside a sample of adopted children and found evidence to support the argument that IQ is not the result of parental socialization.
Monkeys, much like young children, can work out abstract properties of objects by looking at them, according to the latest research.In a new study by scientists at the University of St Andrews, it was found that non-human primates share the same basic knowledge as a three-year-old child in their understanding of objects.The researchers behind the study, of capuchin monkeys, chimpanzees and bonobos, say that the results suggest that there is more to their world than meets the eye.
Yeast, worms and mice: all have lived longer when treated with various chemical compounds in laboratory tests. But many promising leads have failed when tried in humans. This week, researchers are proposing a different approach to animal testing of life-extending drugs: trials in pet dogs. Their target is rapamycin, which is used clinically as part of an anti-rejection drug cocktail after kidney transplants and which has also been shown to extend the lives of mice by 13% in females and 9% in males.
Move over Marty McFly - time travel, invisibility cloaks and teleporting could all happen within today's schoolchildren's lifetimes, experts agree.Children could be travelling between centuries as soon as the year 2100, while teleportation could become a regular occurence by around 2080, professors from Imperial College London and the University of Glasgow have said.
Earlier this week, a cultural center in Red Hook, Brooklyn played host to the sort of debate that's usually reserved for smoke-filled dorm rooms: do we live in a multiverse and, if so, is there another you out there?But rather than mind-altered undergrads, the debate took place among three physicists, one of whom happens to have a Nobel Prize sitting back home.
Though I've never had the pleasure to visit Egypt and contemplate the massive splendor of the Great Pyramid (yet), modern tourists will never truly grasp why sheer size and geometric perfection weren't the only things that made this monument the biggest wonder of the Ancient World.That's because what remains of the pyramid attributed to the pharaoh Khufu is now almost completely devoid of its outer layer of highly polished limestone blocks.
Teens who spend some time thinking about situations in which their peers thought well of them, no matter what they did, may have an easier time coping with setbacks, new findings show.Adolescents in the study who wrote an essay about a time when they felt "unconditional regard" from their peers had fewer negative feelings about themselves after getting a bad report card than kids who wrote about a time when they felt their peers' regard was "conditional," the researchers found.
SHEETS of gold one nano-particle thick have been folded into tiny origami. Dubbed plasmene, the material has some of the weirdest optical properties around. It could someday enable things like invisibility cloaks and super-efficient solar cells.Plasmonic materials, such as gold and silver, capture light and transmit it along their surfaces as waves of electrons called plasmons. They can squeeze light into spaces smaller than the laws of physics normally allow.
A multidisciplinary engineering team at the University of California, San Diego developed a new nanoparticle-based material for concentrating solar power plants designed to absorb and convert to heat more than 90 percent of the sunlight it captures. The new material can also withstand temperatures greater than 700 degrees Celsius and survive many years outdoors in spite of exposure to air and humidity. Their work, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy's SunShot program, was published recently in two separate articles in the journal Nano Energy.
A Swiss research and development company said Tuesday it had discovered a way to make white solar modules, which can blend with a building's "skin" to become virtually invisible.The Swiss Center for Electronics and Microtechnology (SCEM), a non-profit company for applied research, said it had developed a new technology paving the way to making the world's first white solar modules with no visible cells and connections.
Since the Pharaohs, people have been using keys to lock things up. The metal key has proved remarkably resilient, but as electronic locking devices become ever-more popular, are the days of the humble key numbered?More than 80% of vehicles now use some form of electronic key fob or keyless ignitions, Avery says. In five years time there will be no new cars being produced that rely solely on a metal key, he predicts.
HAS someone burned the toast and stunk out the kitchen again? Fire up the smell canceller and sniff freely. That's the proposal from two researchers who are applying the principle behind noise cancelling headphones to noses.Aural and visual signals are easy to manipulate because they are both based on waves, which can be described mathematically, leading to a huge variety of ways to manipulate a signal, like compression, filtering, and so on.
We may be capable of navigating a familiar space in the dark without any sensory cues, such as sight, smell, touch and sound, says an Australian computational neuroscientist.Dr Allen Cheung of the University of Queensland says research in animals suggests this is possible as long as we have a mental map of the space obtained from previous experience.
New research offers a novel insight into the nature of dark matter and dark energy and what the future of our Universe might be.Scientists have found hints that dark matter, the cosmic scaffolding on which our Universe is built, is being slowly erased, swallowed up by dark energy.
Overwhelmed by speculators trying to cash-in on a prized medicinal fungus known as Himalayan Viagra, two isolated Tibetan communities have managed to do at the local level what world leaders often fail to do on a global scale -- implement a successful system for the sustainable harvest of a precious natural resource, suggests new research.
One of the world's most famous self-portraits is going on rare public display in the northern Italian city of Turin. Very little is known about the 500-year-old, fragile, fading red chalk drawing of Leonardo da Vinci but some believe it has mystical powers.There is a myth in Turin that the gaze of Leonardo da Vinci in this self-portrait is so intense that those who observe it are imbued with great strength.
A fragment of ancient Australia has been found under Vanuatu in the South Pacific, raising questions about how continents are formed, researchers say.Experts had believed that the volcanic islands, east of Australia, were isolated from continental influence.
Mimicking natural evolution in a test tube, scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have devised an enzyme with a unique property that might have been crucial to the origin of life on Earth.Aside from illuminating one possible path for life's beginnings, the achievement is likely to yield a powerful tool for evolving new and useful molecules.
A new analysis of geologic history may help solve the riddle of the "Cambrian explosion," the rapid diversification of animal life in the fossil record 530 million years ago that has puzzled scientists since the time of Charles Darwin.A paper by Ian Dalziel of The University of Texas at Austin's Jackson School of Geosciences, published in the November issue of Geology, a journal of the Geological Society of America, suggests a major tectonic event may have triggered the rise in sea level and other environmental changes that accompanied the apparent burst of life.
Academics are challenging the foundations of quantum science with a radical new theory on parallel universes. Scientists now propose that parallel universes really exist, and that they interact. They show that such an interaction could explain everything that is bizarre about quantum mechanics.
Human beings are, in general, a superstitious lot. Our tendency to see patterns where they don't exist, and to falsely apply cause to effect, may have helped keep us alive back when we were little more than a band of frightened critters scurrying about the savanna. Those tendencies linger to the present day, reflected in our stubborn belief in completely irrational things: Rabbit's feet. Horoscopes. A return to the gold standard.Related: More People Believe in Aliens and Ghosts Than God
The Gulf Coast Bigfoot Research Organization (GCBRO) is convinced that not only is there a Bigfoot, but there are in fact bigfeet scattered across the countryside, even as many as 30,000 creatures (a number they admit is a "wild guess") from the Pacific Northwest and across the South from Texas to Georgia.Related: Bigfoot leaves an impression at expo
The extinction of the biggest shark known to science may have triggered whales to grow to their current hefty sizes, a study suggests.Megalodon, an ancient 14-18m-long predator that resembled a super-sized Great White, may have preyed on primitive baleen whales.
Why were dinosaurs covered in a cloak such a long time before the early bird species Archaeopteryx first took flight?The idea that birds and dinosaurs are close relatives dates back to the 19th century, when the father of evolutionary theory, Charles Darwin, was hard at work. However, it took more than 130 years for the first real proof to come to light with numerous discoveries of the remains of feathered dinosaurs, primarily in fossil sites in China. Thanks to these fossil discoveries, we now know that birds descend from a branch of medium-sized predatory dinosaurs, the so-called theropods.
Researchers have described a never-before-seen brain cell shape, which appears to have evolved to transmit signals more effectively.A strange new type of nerve cell, or neuron, has been observed in the brain that transmits information without involving the cell body - and, incredibly, it appears to be better at transmitting information than regular brain cells.
Scared of the dark? Terrified of heights? Spiders make you scream? For the first time, a person's lifelong phobia has been completely abolished overnight. Unfortunately, it required removing a tiny bit of the man's brain, so for now, most people will have to find another way to dispel their fears.The phobia was abolished by accident. A 44-year-old business man started having seizures out of the blue.
An app that can automatically recognise bird sounds is to be launched in time for spring, its creators have said.Warblr has been developed by two scientists using a grant from Queen Mary University of London.
A team of roboticists in China is behind Dexmo, a hand-capturing device that uses a mechanical exoskeleton. The exoskeleton is designed for the user to touch the digital world. It will transmit a person's finger movement on to several rotational sensors and the data is transmitted directly to a device or back to a host computer, where the team's SDK performs their special kinematics algorithm to regenerate a hand model.Related: Through 3D-printed prosthetic, Illinois students lending a hand in Ecuador
The latest innovation in medical 3D printing is a 3D printer that could one day make customized medicines on demand, currently under development by the University of Central Lancashire in Preston in the UK.The University of Central Lancashire (UCLan) team says that the machine - which is awaiting a patent application - can "print" a tablet with a precise quantity of medicine that can be taken by a patient.
The skeleton of a mammoth was discovered this month on the banks of a reservoir in Idaho. Paleontologists have rescued part of its skull and a tusk, but there could be a lot more buried below the surface."We may even have a complete mammoth," said Mary Thompson, a vertebrate paleontologist and senior collections manager at the Idaho Museum of Natural History. "This is very unique for us.".
Tulane University physical anthropologist John Verano has spent summers in Peru for the last 30 years, digging for ancient bones and solving their secrets. But his most recent work focuses on a unique archeological discovery: a ritual sacrifice of children and young llamas dating back 600 years."This is unusual, and not what we've seen before," Verano said, "especially on the coast of Peru.".
Back in 1704, in Torryburn on the south west Fife coast, they had a problem disposing of toxic material - it was what you might call a toxic witch problem.Lilias Adie, a poor woman who confessed to being a witch and having sex with the devil, died in prison before she could be tried, sentenced and burned.
The Amazons got a bum rap in antiquity. They wore trousers. They smoked pot, covered their skin with tattoos, rode horses, and fought as hard as the guys. Legends sprang up like weeds. They cut off their breasts to fire their bows better! They mutilated or killed their boy children! Modern (mostly male) scholars continued the confabulations. The Amazons were hard-core feminists. Man haters. Delinquent mothers. Lesbians.Drawing on a wealth of textual, artistic, and archaeological evidence, Adrienne Mayor, author of The Amazons, dispels these myths and takes us inside the truly wild and wonderful world of these ancient warrior women.
When charismatic Italian politician Umberto Bossi (pictured above) suffered a severe stroke in 2004, the disease changed his voice, and, strangely enough, his public image. He went from being seen as an authoritarian figure to a benevolent one. To figure out why, researchers collected sound clips of Bossi speaking before and after the stroke and analyzed various acoustic parameters. They discovered that the most prominent transformation was a narrowing of the range of frequency variation in his voice.