Newsdesk Archive
It took 50 million years of continual shrinking to turn massive, lumbering dinosaurs into the first small flying birds."No other dinosaur group has undergone such a long and extended period of miniaturisation," says Mike Lee of the South Australian Museum in Adelaide. "Statistically this trend was far stronger than by chance, analogous to flipping a coin a dozen times and getting all heads.".
Africa is splitting in two. The reason: a geologic rift runs along the eastern side of the continent that one day, many millions of years in the future, will be replaced with an ocean. Scientists have argued for decades about what is causing this separation of tectonic plates. Geophysicists thought it was a superplume, a giant section of the earth's mantle that carries heat from near the core up to the crust. As evidence, they pointed to two large plateaus (one in Ethiopia and one in Kenya) that they said were created when a superplume pushed up the mantle. Geochemists were not able to confirm that theory.
Ants may be some of Earth's most powerful biological climate brokers, a provocative new study claims.The average ant lives and dies in less than a year, but a long-term experiment tracking the insects' effects on soil suggests they cooled Earth's climate as their numbers grew.
They have poor vision, bad hearing and no teeth. And yet, anteaters can be deadly.In a new case report, scientists detail a gruesome anteater attack that left one hunter dead in northwestern Brazil, just two years after another man was killed in a similar confrontation with one of the long-nosed creatures. While such incidents are rare and anteaters usually avoid contact with humans, the attacks should serve as a warning to humans encroaching on anteater turf, the authors wrote in the journal Wilderness and Environmental Medicine this month.
Researchers have created see-through mice and rats using a new technique for so-called tissue clearing.In a paper published Thursday in the journal Cell, a California Institute of Technology professor and her colleagues said they had turned a dead mouse transparent in a week's time, while a rat specimen took two weeks to treat.
Scientists examining a taxonomically confused group of marine mammals have officially named a species new to science: the Australian humpback dolphin, Sousa sahulensis, according to the Wildlife Conservation Society and Clymene Enterprises.The study describing the newly named species is the culmination of a 17-year long systematic examination of all available historical records, physical descriptions, and genetic data of humpback dolphins -- a widespread group of coastal cetaceans ranging from the coast of West Africa to the northern coast of Australia.
When it comes to flight, nature just has the edge on engineers.This is according to a study comparing hummingbirds with one of the world's most advanced micro-helicopters.Researchers found that - in terms of the power they require to lift their weight - the best hummingbird was over 20% more efficient than the helicopter.
Yesterday, I flew over downtown San Francisco. I swooped past the Transamerica Pyramid, taking care not to get speared, and winged it out towards the water. A heavy fog covered the bay, as usual, so I decided to head back into the city. I dove sharply, and the wind started whipping across my face. I slipped under the Bay Bridge, banked hard and promptly slammed into a warehouse. The wind died, and my screen went black.
3-D printers can create all kinds of things, from eyeglasses to implantable medical devices, straight from a computer model and without the need for molds. But for making spacecraft, engineers sometimes need custom parts that traditional manufacturing techniques and standard 3-D printers can't create, because they need to have the properties of multiple metals.Related: Man 3D-Prints Castle In Back Garden Using Concrete Printer He Invented
Nasa's next Martian rover will attempt to make oxygen on the surface of the red planet when it lands there in 2021.The rover will carry seven scientific projects, aimed at paving the way for future manned missions, seeking evidence of life and storing samples to be brought back in the future.
Scientists are searching through an extremely large collection of 20-million-year-old amber unearthed in the Dominican Republic over 50 years ago; the effort is displaying new insights into ancient tropical insects and the world they lived in.When the collection is fully curated, a task that is estimated to take many years, it will be the largest unbiased Dominican amber collection in the world, researchers report.
Otzi the Iceman, a well-preserved mummy discovered in the Alps, may have had a genetic predisposition to heart disease, new research suggests.The new finding may explain why the man who lived 5,300 years ago, stayed active and certainly didn't smoke or wolf down processed food in front of the TV nevertheless had hardened arteries when he was felled by an arrow and bled to death on an alpine glacier.
Today the Brazilian Indian affairs department, FUNAI, posted an 8-minute video (also above) of a complex contact episode between members of an isolated tribe and outsiders, some of whom appear to be Brazilian officials.The video shows young tribesmen, all male, interacting with what appears to be the Brazilian government contact team and local villagers.Related: 'Massacre' of Uncontacted Tribe in Peru Revealed in New Reports
How do you keep them down on the farm, once they've seen Paris? You don't, suggests a study of 150,000 historical figures that shows cities have long acted as cultural magnets.The brainy headed away from the hinterlands in the same migratory patterns centuries ago as they do today, finds a Science journal study released on Thursday.
The UK government has announced that driverless cars will be allowed on public roads from January next year.It also invited cities to compete to host one of three trials of the tech, which would start at the same time.In addition, ministers ordered a review of the UK's road regulations to provide appropriate guidelines.
The magnets cluttering the face of your refrigerator may one day be used as cooling agents, according to a new theory. A magnetically driven refrigerator would require no moving parts, unlike conventional iceboxes that pump fluid through a set of pipes to keep things cool.
Engineers have taken a step towards having machines that can operate when damaged by developing a robot that can teach itself to walk, even with a broken leg.Using "intelligent trial and error", their six-legged robot learned how to walk again in less than 2 minutes."This new technique will enable more robust, effective, autonomous robots," the engineers behind the robot said.
PARTICLES on opposite ends of the universe can link quantum mechanical hands. The phenomenon hints at an entirely new aspect of the quantum reality underlying all matter.The effect is a sort of inversion of one of the most famous and profound quantum properties, called entanglement. Two entangled particles share a single quantum state: they behave as one and cannot be described individually. Measuring one instantaneously affects the other, no matter how far apart they become, an oddity that prompted Einstein to describe entanglement as "spooky action at a distance".
African penguins communicate feelings such as hunger, anger and loneliness through six distinctive vocal calls, according to scientists who have observed the birds' behaviour in captivity.The calls of the "jackass" penguin were identified by researchers at the University of Turin, Italy. Four are exclusive to adults and two are exclusive to juveniles and chicks.
They've been described as walking artichokes and the most trafficked mammals in the world. Now, conservationists warn that pangolins, or scaly anteaters, could be eaten out of existence if illegal hunting and poaching continue.
Call it extreme parenting: Scientists announced the discovery of a deep sea octopus mom that faithfully guarded the same clutch of eggs for a record-breaking 4-1/2 years."This is the longest brooding or gestation of any animal on the planet," said Brad Seibel, an animal physiologist at the University of Rhode Island.
Experts say the world's first malaria vaccine could be approved for use in 2015.Reporting in PLOS Medicine, researchers found that for every 1,000 children who received the vaccine, an average of 800 cases of illness could be prevented.
Johns Hopkins researchers say they have discovered a chemical alteration in a single human gene linked to stress reactions that, if confirmed in larger studies, could give doctors a simple blood test to reliably predict a person's risk of attempting suicide.The discovery, described online in The American Journal of Psychiatry, suggests that changes in a gene involved in the function of the brain's response to stress hormones plays a significant role in turning what might otherwise be an unremarkable reaction to the strain of everyday life into suicidal thoughts and behaviors.
New research from Macquarie University in Australia reveals that intimate couples become part of an interpersonal cognitive system where each is dependent on the other to fill in certain memory gaps.On the face of it, it seems obvious that we should work with other people when trying to recall shared information. But research shows this isn't always the case; individual recall tends to be more efficient compared to social remembering.
Nearly 40 percent of women in prison in Ontario, Canada, have suffered a traumatic brain injury (TBI), according to a study published this month in the Journal of Correctional Health Care.The study, the first to look at the rate of TBIs among prison populations in Canada, contributes to a growing body of evidence associating blows to the head with a multitude of long-term, negative health outcomes, from homelessness and substance abuse to risky behavior and incarceration.
We know that Ouija boards are still a popular method of communicating with the spirit world, but practitioners may be missing out on some messages from more technically savvy spirits and demons. A priest in Poland found this out when he began getting strange texts after performing an exorcism on a young girl.
PLYMOUTH experts say a teenager's snaps of what appears to be a large cat could indicate they are breeding.Henry Warren, 19, was taking pictures in fields when the huge cat-like creature leapt out in front of him.There has been speculation the animal in the images could be the mythical 'Beast of Bodmin'.
A mysterious giant crop circle has appeared overnight in a field belonging to a German farmer.It has attracted thousands of visitors from far and wide who have flocked to the scene to sing, dance and meditate within the ornate design.Measuring 75 metres in diameter (246 feet), it was discovered by a balloonist flying over the wheat field near Weilheim.
Scientists have worked out the reasons for the distorted shape of our Moon.A US team calculated the effect on the shape of the early Moon of tidal and rotational forces.They say its own spin and the tidal tug of the Earth created a "lemon-shaped" satellite.
Isolated pockets of liquid water may have existed on the infant Earth even while it was being smashed by giant asteroids that boiled the oceans and created vast seas of magma, a new study suggests.This means there could have been habitable regions on the Earth during its violent early period, say the authors in today's issue of the journal Nature.
Denmark attracted international attention in 2012 when archaeological excavations revealed the bones of an entire army, whose warriors had been thrown into the bogs near the Alken Enge wetlands in East Jutland after losing a major engagement in the era around the birth of Christ. Work has continued in the area since then and archaeologists and experts from Aarhus University, Skanderborg Museum and Moesgaard Museum have now made sensational new findings.
Farming, including raising cows and consuming dairy products, reached far northern Europe much earlier than thought, according to new research.Agriculture first took hold about 11,000 years ago in resource-rich, mild climate lands stretching between the Eastern Mediterranean and Persian Gulf. Researchers agree farming and animal husbandry spread northwest through Europe from the Fertile Crescent.
Years ago, this experiment got written up a few places with headlines like, "Your tax dollars at work!" But that's what happens when your experiment gives rats cocaine and makes them listen to jazz.Of course, the experiment wasn't about seeing if cocaine helped rats enjoy jazz (although it does).
Genetically modified corn seeds are no longer protecting Brazilian farmers from voracious tropical bugs, increasing costs as producers turn to pesticides, a farm group said on Monday.Producers want four major manufacturers of so-called BT corn seeds to reimburse them for the cost of spraying up to three coats of pesticides this year, said Ricardo Tomczyk, president of Aprosoja farm lobby in Mato Grosso state.
Pregnant women residing near green spaces deliver babies with higher birth weights, according to a new study by the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel.Previous studies have found that every 10 percent increase in green space is associated with a reduction in diseases - equivalent to an increase of five years of life expectancy. It also helps to keep depression at bay.
Exercise may leave people feeling less anxious because they perceive their environments as less threatening, a new study suggests.In the study, researchers asked students to watch an animation of a figure that could be perceived as moving toward or away from the viewer, and found that the students who exercised viewed the figure as less threatening. This finding suggests that exercise could reduce anxiety by fostering the perception of a more positive environment, the researchers said.
Workers should meditate or take a yoga class or at the end of the day because watching mindless television programmes drives feelings of guilt and failure, experts have warned.Researchers have found that slumping in front of the box to wind down after a difficult day can actually leave people feeling more anxious and unhappy.
Fascia is a web of fibrous tissue that permeates the body, but is it really the "Cinderella Tissue" that new age therapists, Rolfers, and yoga instructors suggest? The fascial system is still a medical mystery. But that could soon change, thanks to an unlikely alliance between researchers and alternative therapists.
One of the persistent challenges of manned space exploration is that pesky lack of oxygen throughout much of the universe. Here on Earth, trees and other plant life do us a real solid by taking in our bad breath and changing it back to clean, sweet O2.So what if we could take those biological oxygen factories into space with us, but without all the land, sun, water, soil, and gravity that forests tend to require?
Scientists have for the first time separated a particle from one of its physical properties - creating a "quantum Cheshire Cat".The phenomenon is named after the curious feline in Alice in Wonderland, who vanishes leaving only its grin.
In a chaotic world of downed planes, ethnic unrest and missile strikes, international observers settled their attention elsewhere earlier this month. They looked north to Siberia, a land covered in snow and layered in permafrost, where a strange and giant crater had just ripped open the earth. At the time, no one knew where exactly the crater had come from, what was at its bottom, or how it had come to be.There are sure to be even more questions now.
People who jogged or ran for as little as five minutes a day reduced their risk of premature death by nearly one-third and extended their lives by about three years, according to a new study.Researchers examined the exercise habits of more than 55,000 adults in the Dallas area who were monitored for six to 22 years. About 24% of the adults described themselves as runners.
The first explorer to ever set foot on the untouched South Pole did so over 100 years ago, in 1911. Although the area may have looked pristine, it had already been contaminated by lead.A group of research scientists led by Joe McConnell from the Desert Research Institute and Tom Neumann of NASA Goddard just published a new study in Scientific Reports detailing the results of an ice core sampling expedition that traces components found in the ice over the last 400 years.
Signs of ancient life could be littered across the moon, just waiting for an intrepid explorer to find them. That's according to physicists who tested what would happen if a chunk of rock containing microscopic fossils from Earth were to be launched into space and smash into the lunar surface. Finding one could give us a pristine glimpse into past life on Earth.
In July 2010, amid the gargantuan rebuilding effort at the site of the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan, construction workers halted the backhoes when they uncovered something unexpected just south of where the Twin Towers once stood.At 22 feet (6.7 meters) below today's street level, in a pit that would become an underground security and parking complex, excavators found the mangled skeleton of a long-forgotten wooden ship.
The world's largest solar boat, the catamaran PlanetSolar, is to embark on a Greek mission to find one of the oldest sites inhabited by man in Europe, an organiser said on Monday.Starting on 11 August, a team of Swiss and Greek scientists will seek a "prehistoric countryside" in the south-eastern Peloponnese peninsula, University of Geneva researcher Julien Beck told AFP. The month-long mission, jointly organised with the Swiss school of archaeology and the Greek culture ministry, will search around the Franchthi cave in the Argolic gulf, where early Europeans lived between the Palaeolithic and Neolithic periods.
Researchers report that they have taken a big step toward accomplishing what battery designers have been trying to do for decades -- design a pure lithium anode. All batteries have three basic components: an electrolyte to provide electrons, an anode to discharge those electrons, and a cathode to receive them.
A new method of building materials using light, developed by researchers at the University of Cambridge, could one day enable technologies that are often considered the realm of science fiction, such as invisibility cloaks and cloaking devices.
"In 2020 I would like to gather all of the world's robots and aim to hold an Olympics where they compete in technical skills," said Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe last week.It's about time!There have been, and are, all kinds of competitive robotics events that take place all over the world.
If recent octopus discoveries have taught us anything, it's that these eight-armed ocean dwellers are smart. They can use tools, change color in an instant, and commission their arms to solve problems. But they generally do all this as loners.Now, new research into a surprisingly social octopus is shattering even the most expansive ideas of known octopus behavior.
The eggshells of wild birds may act like "sunblock", scientists have said.A range of UK birds' eggs showed adaptations in pigment concentration and thickness to allow the right amount of sun to reach the embryos inside.
For critically ill patients arriving at the emergency department, the drug ketamine can safely provide analgesia, sedation and amnesia for rapid, life-saving intubation, despite decades-old studies that suggested it raised intracranial pressure. A systematic review of 10 recent studies of what many emergency physicians regard as a 'wonder drug' has been recently published for review.
To fight the spread of germs, doctors should ditch the handshake and greet their patients with a fist bump instead, a new study says.Through a series of tests, researchers at the Institute of Biological, Environmental and Rural Sciences at Aberystwyth University in Wales documented that fist bumps are 20 times more hygienic than handshakes. They are also 10 times cleaner than high-fives.
Whether it's a curled lip or a keen cheekbone, we all make quick social judgements based on strangers' faces.Now scientists have modelled the specific physical attributes that underpin our first impressions.Small changes in the dimensions of a face can make it appear more trustworthy, dominant or attractive.
Russian space agency Roscosmos has confirmed that it has re-established communication with its Foton-M4 satellite, meaning there are no longer sexually experimental geckos drifting lost in space, possibly building their own government and conspiring to populate a planet.The satellite made headlines last week when ground lost control with it just days after launch and was no longer able to send it commands.
In late June 2013, an exceptional binary containing a rapidly spinning neutron star underwent a dramatic change in behavior never before observed. The pulsar's radio beacon vanished, while at the same time the system brightened fivefold in gamma rays, the most powerful form of light, according to measurements by NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope.
The power of Earth's gravity heats up a layer around the Moon's core keeping it liquid, suggests a new model of the lunar interior.The findings, reported in the journal Nature Geoscience, have implications for our understanding of how the Moon evolved over time.
Scientists have achieved an electrical current of 100,000 amperes, which is by far the highest in the world, by using the new idea of assembling the state-of-the-art yttrium-based high-temperature superconducting tapes to fabricate a large-scale magnet conductor.
A sweeping tower made from over 10,000 bio-waste bricks bound with fungal fibre has been growing in the courtyard of MoMA PS1, an offshoot of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. Looking like something between a three-headed grain silo, Zhang Huan's Three Legged Buddha and a Berlin flak tower, Hy-Fi is the winner of this year's MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program (YAP), and its organic aesthetic clashes hard with the museum's red-brick frontage and the green-glass Citicorp building behind.
The military has always looked toward new technologies to keep its soldiers fed while in the field. Canned food, for instance, was first created to provide sustenance for Napoleon's troops. Now the U.S. Army is investigating 3D printers as a way to produce more nutritious, and hopefully tastier, military rations.
In the first broad-scale estimate of air pollution removal by trees nationwide, scientists have calculated that trees are saving more than 850 human lives a year and preventing 670,000 incidences of acute respiratory symptoms. The study considered four pollutants for which the U.S. EPA has established air quality standards: nitrogen dioxide, ozone, sulfur dioxide, and particulate matter less than 2.5 microns (PM2.5) in aerodynamic diameter.
Birds of a feather flock together, but perhaps not in the way we thought. An analysis of flocking starlings suggests the decision to turn spreads through the birds like a rippling wave, rather than diffusing through the group like a gas.Asja Jelic of the Sapienza University of Rome, Italy, and her colleagues spend their nights watching starlings fly over the city.
The environment can produce sudden shocks to the life of our planet through impacting space rocks, erupting volcanoes and other events.But sometimes life itself turns the tables and strikes a swift blow back to the environment. New research suggests that the biggest extinction event on record may have been initiated by a small, but significant change to a tiny microbe.
A newly discovered Egyptian carving, which dates back more than 3,300 years, bears the scars of a religious revolution that upended the ancient civilization.The panel, carved in Nubian Sandstone, was found recently in a tomb at the site of Sedeinga, in modern-day Sudan. It is about 5.8 feet (1.8 meters) tall by 1.3 feet (0.4 m) wide, and was found in two pieces.
States that have dropped incarceration rates have also seen a drop in crime rates.The United States still has the highest incarceration rate in the world, but those few states that managed to significantly reduce their prison population over the last decade saw benefits other than reduced lock-up costs. They also saw their crime rate go down at a higher rate than the national average, according to a new report from the Sentencing Project.Related: The New York Times Calls for Marijuana Legalization
A Chinese city has been sealed off and 151 people have been placed in quarantine since last week after a man died of bubonic plague, state media said.The 30,000 residents of Yumen, in the north-western province of Gansu, are not being allowed to leave, and police at roadblocks on the perimeter of the city are telling motorists to find alternative routes, China Central Television (CCTV) said.
A man has died of ebola in Lagos, the first confirmed case of the highly contagious and deadly virus in Africa's most populous metropolis.Patrick Sawyer, a 40-year-old Liberian civil servant, collapsed on arrival in Nigeria's main airport on Sunday, health officials said. His condition rapidly deteriorated before he died, said Abdulsalami Nasidi, project director at the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control, who attributed his death to ebola.
Ouch! The bacterium that causes toothaches has become more diverse over the course of human history, a new study finds.Streptococcus mutans is a nasty little bacterium that lurks in the mouth, frequently causing tooth decay and cavities. Now, a new analysis of the bacteria's DNA extracted from human teeth dating back to the Bronze Age reveals the bug has been mutating randomly over the years, becoming more diverse as the human population grows, perhaps because it has more mouths to fill.
For the first time in three decades, scientists are about to revisit one of North America's most remarkable troves of ancient fossils: the bones of tens of thousands of animals piled at least 30 feet deep at the bottom of a sinkhole-type cave.
Scientists are back from a first exploration of the strange crater on the Yamal Peninsula in northern Siberia. Curiouser and curiouser.There is water flowing down the smooth crater walls. A Russian science team has returned from exploring the crater, and they still say it is a natural formation, but there are no easy answers as to what caused it.
The Moscow Times reported this week that reindeer herders in far northern Russia have found a second mysterious giant hole. According to these unconfirmed reports, the second hole is about 30 kilometers (20 miles) away from a first large and mysterious hole in the Russian permafrost, which made a big splash in social media after the Siberian Times reported it in mid-July 2014.
It might be possible to terraform Venus some day, when our technology gets good enough. The challenges for Venus are totally different than for Mars. How will we need to fix Venus?This planet has been the center of corny nerd fantasies and awful behavioral gender oversimplifications from days of yore.
The cloudier an alien planet is, the closer it can get to its star and still remain potentially life-friendly, researchers say.In fact, clouds might help Earth-like planets remain hospitable to life even when orbiting a sun-like star as closely as the hellish Venus circles the sun in our solar system, the scientists added.
Astronomers using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory to explore the Perseus Cluster, a swarm of galaxies approximately 250 million light years from Earth, have observed the spectral line that appears not to come from any known type of matter. The signal they received can not be explained by known physics but they say it shifts suspicion to the dark matter.Perseus Cluster a collection of galaxies and one of the most massive known objects in the Universe, immersed in an enormous 'atmosphere' of superheated plasma. It is approximately 768 000 light years across.
Blood-sucking insects may have been around for a lot longer than we thought. Newly discovered fossils show that bugs have been feeding on blood since the height of the dinosaur era. One of the fossilised bugs found seems to have died just after feasting on blood.
A probiotic that prevents obesity could be on the horizon. Bacteria that produce a therapeutic compound in the gut inhibit weight gain, insulin resistance and other adverse effects of a high-fat diet in mice, investigators have discovered. Regulatory issues must be addressed before moving to human studies, but the findings suggest that it may be possible to manipulate the bacterial residents of the gut to treat obesity and other chronic diseases.
For the first time, researchers have detected an unknown interaction between microorganisms and salt. When Escherichia coli cells are introduced into a droplet of salt water that is left to dry, bacteria manipulate the sodium chloride crystallization to create biomineralogical biosaline 3-D morphologically complex formations, where they hibernate.
Doing things such as travelling to another country or contracting a disease could change the makeup of the bacteria community living in the gut. But how much of a person's life story could be told by tracking such bacterial changes?In a new experiment, researchers studied gut and saliva bacteria in two people over a year, to investigate how microbial communities in people's bodies, called their microbiota, changed over time.
A virus that lives in the human gut has just been discovered, and to the surprise of scientists, it can be found in about half the world's population, according to a new study.While it's not yet clear exactly what the virus does, scientists are eager to find out whether it promotes health or influences susceptibility to certain conditions, said Robert Edwards, a bioinformatics professor at San Diego State University and one of the researchers who worked on the study.
Gadzooks! The world's largest aquatic insect has reportedly been found in China. This cute/terrifying little creature, which is definitely worth writing home about, was found in the the mountains of Chengdu in Sichuan province, Scientific American reports. It boasts a wingspan of 8.3 inches. That breaks the previous record held by a species of South American helicopter damselfly, with a wingspan of 7.5 inches.
Scientists have discovered that greater mouse-eared bats use polarisation patterns in the sky to navigate -- the first mammal that's known to do this.The bats use the way the Sun's light is scattered in the atmosphere at sunset to calibrate their internal magnetic compass, which helps them to fly in the right direction, a study published in Nature Communications has shown.
Humans aren't the only species to react strongly to actions they consider unfair. A similar drive for fairness in monkeys and some dogs may offer insight into people's desire for equity.Psychologists will talk about how studies of other species help explain how humans came to care so much about fairness and why they invest so strongly in actions that benefit others, rather than just themselves.
Barbados is an island in the Lesser Antilles of the southern Caribbean Sea and is best known as a sun-kissed, tropical island paradise popular among tourists and travelers aboard cruise ships. It is lesser known for its mysterious burial vault long known for the bizarre and unexplainable phenomena associated with it. In the early 19th century, starting from the year 1807, the Chase Family Vault in the Christ Church Parish cemetery of Barbados, quickly gained notoriety as a hotbed of supernatural activity, and has become one of the most enduring and enigmatic mysteries on the island.
Only months after Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 seemingly vanished off the face of the Earth, tragedy struck again last week as reports that another Malaysia Airlines flight had gone down, this time crashing near the Russian-Ukrainian border. The blame has largely been leveled against pro-Russian Ukrainian separatists, and Russian media was widely criticized immediately following the incident for taking obvious liberties with the facts they were reporting.
Reports of people having "near-death" experiences go back to antiquity, but the oldest medical description of the phenomenon may come from a French physician around 1740, a researcher has found.The report was written by Pierre-Jean du Monchaux, a military physician from northern France, who described a case of near-death experience in his book "Anecdotes de Médecine." Monchaux speculated that too much blood flow to the brain could explain the mystical feelings people report after coming back to consciousness.
British supermarket chain Sainsbury's has announced that it plans to power one of its grocery stores using only biogas generated from its own food waste. The store in Cannock, West Midlands is approximately one mile away from one of British based Biffa's waste management systems, and will get its power from a single dedicated line.
To reach one of the world's most secretive nuclear-fusion companies, visitors must wind their way through a suburban office park at the foot of the Santa Ana Mountains, just east of Irvine, California, until they pull up outside the large but unmarked headquarters of Tri Alpha Energy.This is as close as any outsider can get without signing a non-disclosure agreement; Tri Alpha protects its trade secrets so tightly that it does not even have a website. But the fragments of information that have filtered out make it clear that the building houses one of the largest fusion experiments now operating in the United States.
There have been one and a half machine ages already. The first began in the nineteenth century, with machines taking over manual labor. Then in the twentieth century machines began taking over mental labor (they still are). When the third age comes, says one sociologist, we're doomed.Sociologist Zeynep Tufekci has written an interesting article in response to the idea that we need robots to do "emotional labor" like caring for children and the elderly.
The planet's current biodiversity, the product of 3.5 billion years of evolutionary trial and error, is the highest in the history of life. But it may be reaching a tipping point. Scientists caution that the loss and decline of animals is contributing to what appears to be the early days of the planet's sixth mass biological extinction event. Since 1500, more than 320 terrestrial vertebrates have become extinct.
Kids who spend time cuddling up with Fido or Fluffy are more likely to turn their noses up at meat later in life, a new study suggests.The reason? Those children who have formed attachments to their pets may develop empathy toward other animals, too, which can result in greater avoidance of eating meat, the researchers suggested.
One innovative company has created a vending machine that's dispensing help for both the environment and our furry friends.The Turkish company Pugedon recently introduced a vending machine in Istanbul that releases food and water for the city's stray dogs in exchange for recycled plastic bottles, Big Think reported. Once someone deposits their bottle at the top, food is released at the bottom. The Pugedon Smart Recycling Boxes operate at no charge to the city, and the recycled bottles cover the cost of the food.
In Aesop's fable about the crow and the pitcher, a thirsty bird happens upon a vessel of water, but when he tries to drink from it, he finds the water level out of his reach. Not strong enough to knock over the pitcher, the bird drops pebbles into it -- one at a time -- until the water level rises enough for him to drink his fill. New research demonstrates the birds' intellectual prowess may be more fact than fiction.
More than 90% of human DNA is doing nothing very useful, and large stretches may be no more than biological baggage that has built up over years of evolution, Oxford researchers claim.The scientists arrived at the figure after comparing the human genome with the genetic makeup of other mammals, ranging from dogs and mice to rhinos and horses.
A paper published last year in Icarus, the prestigious journal of planetary science, asked if it was possible that terrestrial life on Earth had been 'seeded' from beyond the Earth - and if so, does the building block of that life, DNA, contain any sort of message from our alien creators. Using mathematics, the authors of the paper - "The "Wow! signal" of the terrestrial genetic code" - looked for evidence of a statistically strong 'informational' signal in the genetic code, with surprising results.
Space debris is a serious problem, particularly in the heavily used Low Earth Orbits (LEO). As of 2013, NASA estimated a population of 500,000 pieces of space debris (between 1 and 10 cm in diameter); some 21,000 pieces of which are larger than 10 cm. Unfortunately, NASA estimates that there are more than 100 million pieces of debris smaller than 1 cm that cannot be seen.
The date of 23 July 2012 could have been the day the lights went out, along with suddenly not-so-smart phones, computers, satellite transmissions, GPS navigation systems, televisions, radio broadcasts, hospital equipment, electric pumps and water supplies.On that day an "extreme solar storm" did its best to end life on Earth as we know it.
Excavations at an archaeological site at Kathu in the Northern Cape province of South Africa have produced tens of thousands of Earlier Stone Age artifacts, including hand axes and other tools. These discoveries were made by archaeologists from the University of Cape Town (UCT), South Africa and the University of Toronto (U of T), in collaboration with the McGregor Museum in Kimberley, South Africa.
All dinosaurs were covered with feathers or had the potential to grow feathers, a study suggests.The discovery of 150-million-year-old fossils in Siberia indicates that feathers were much more widespread among dinosaurs than previously thought.Related: Siberian Discovery Suggests Almost All Dinosaurs Were Feathered
Former MEGADETH drummer Nick Menza has captured video footage of what he claims was an unidentified flying object (UFO) outside of his Studio City, California home on Monday, July 14. Check out the clip here.Says Menza: "I was standing in my front yard with my two boys and this is what we saw. [It had] the shape of a triangular object with rounded tips glowing yellow and white. [I am] not sure what it is, but it looked totally awesome.".
When people suffer from sleep deprivation, they tend to misremember details of events, a new study finds.Distorted memory can have serious consequences in areas such as criminal justice, where eyewitness misidentifications are thought to be the leading cause of wrongful convictions in the United States.