Newsdesk Archive
The Chauvet cave was painted approximately 30,000 years ago and the dreams were buried and sealed for 20,000 years by a land slide. The site and its contents were discovered in 1994 and rocked the world!Now, other images that appear to have been hidden within the paintings have been found that seem to reveal specific designs and intentional masking which may tell a story, or message, that could be massively important from an artistic and historical point of view.What could these images be telling us?
For more than a million years, the simple stone hand axe was one of our most important tools, but in the age of smartphones and virtual reality it can be hard to understand how revolutionary it really was. In their design series "Man Made," Dov Ganchrow and Ami Drach use 3D printing to make the tool's importance a little more clear.
Magnesium chloride, the chemical used to make tofu and bath salts, could become a key ingredient in the production of solar cells, according to a University of Liverpool study.Researchers said that Cadmium chloride is currently an important part of solar cell technology, used to manufacture solar panels around the world. Due to the substance's high toxicity, workers practise elaborate safety measures to protect themselves during production. They also implement special disposal measures when discarding the panels.
A new "supercooling" technique keeps rat livers alive three times longer than before, boosting hopes for easing shortages of human transplant organs, report scientists.The method involves cooling the livers while flushing them with oxygen and nutrients and preserving them in a solution containing a form of antifreeze.
A saucer-shaped NASA vehicle testing new technology that could one day help humans land on Mars made a successful rocket ride over the Pacific, but its massive descent parachute only partially unfurled.The space agency hopes that the technology used in the 150 million dollar (£88 million) experimental flight will one day replace the current parachute design, which has been used since 1976.
A US space agency (Nasa) experiment on Saturday to test future Mars landing technologies proved largely successful.A flying saucer-shaped vehicle was sent high into the atmosphere via a balloon to trial a new type of parachute and an inflatable Kevlar ring that could help slow down a spacecraft as it approaches the Red Planet's surface.
A mysterious X-ray signal has been found in a detailed study of galaxy clusters using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA's XMM-Newton. One intriguing possibility is that the X-rays are produced by the decay of sterile neutrinos, a type of particle that has been proposed as a candidate for dark matter.While holding exciting potential, these results must be confirmed with additional data to rule out other explanations and determine whether it is plausible that dark matter has been observed.
A challenge has been thrown down to the consistency of the speed of light, based on an anomaly from the most closely observed supernovae of all time.In 1987 astronomers witnessed the only supernova in 400 years close enough to Earth to see with the naked eye. The first hint of the event came not from telescopes, but neutrino detectors.
Archaeologists working in Peru have discovered 25 well-preserved quipus, an ancient string-based device used to solve mathematical problems and to assist in record-keeping.The find was made in the archaeological complex of Incahuasi, south of Lima, Alejandro Chu, reports Peru This Week. The items were found in ancient warehouses, or kallancas, and not in a funerary context as is the norm, making this a rather unique find. The placement of the quipus suggests they were used for administrative purposes. Incahuasi was one of the most important strategic cities built by the Incas in the valley of Lunahuana.
By Deepak Chopra, MDWhen public perception is skewed and distorted, it's important to push back. I've found myself doing this in the arena of skepticism. Without a doubt we live in a skeptical age, and it affects everyone. To doubt is a tool for finding truth, but like every positive value, there are pitfalls. Skepticism, of the kind advanced by characters as diverse as James "The Amazing" Randi, Richard Dawkins, Laurence Krauss, and Jerry Coyne, does far more harm than good.
We may think that trolling is a modern phenomenon, but the Romans wrote vile messages wishing ill on others, centuries before social media was invented.A collection of 130 ancient 'curse tablets' featuring gruesome messages of revenge has been added to the World Heritage register.They include wishes that thieves should go blind and mad, while cheaters become as 'liquid as water.'.
The discovery of a schistosomiasis parasite egg in a 6200-year-old grave at a prehistoric town by the Euphrates river in Syria may be the first evidence that agricultural irrigation systems in the Middle East contributed to disease burden, according to new research published in Lancet Infectious Diseases.Schistosomiasis is a disease caused by several species of flatworm parasites that live in the blood vessels of the bladder and intestines.
Dr Jim Leary, archaeologist at the University of Reading, is the author of a major new English Heritage monograph entitled Silbury Hill: The Largest Pre-historic Mound in Europe.On Saturday 21 June around 20,000 people descended on Stonehenge to mark the summer solstice sunrise. This ancient prehistoric site has been a place of worship and celebration since time immemorial. Theories abound on why the stones were erected but the reason remains a mystery.
An ancient reef that once teemed with primitive sea life has been unearthed in Africa.The reef, which dates to 548 million years ago, is the oldest animal-built reef ever found.The coral-like creatures, dubbed Cloudina, may have built the superstructures to protect themselves from predators or to soak up the nutrients from ocean currents, said study co-author Rachel Wood, a geologist at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.
A dramatic slowdown in deep ocean currents matches a major reset in Earth's ice ages about 1 million years ago, new evidence from the South Atlantic seafloor suggests.The discovery doesn't mean the ocean current stall-out is the only culprit behind the change in Earth's incessant ice ages, the study authors said. However, the findings provide new evidence that Earth's oceans can significantly alter its climate.
New research in the journal Nature's Scientific Reports has provided a major new theory on the cause of the ice age that covered large parts of the Northern Hemisphere 2.6 million years ago.The study, co-authored by Dr Thomas Stevens, from the Department of Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London, found a previously unknown mechanism by which the joining of North and South America changed the salinity of the Pacific Ocean and caused major ice sheet growth across the Northern Hemisphere.
Giant "whirlpools" in the ocean, up to 500 kilometres across, are driving the world's climate on a scale previously unimagined. We just don't know exactly how yet.The bodies of swirling water, called mesoscale eddies, are 100 km to 500 km in diameter. They form when patches of water are destabilised by obstacles like islands. The eddies carry huge volumes of water and heat across the oceans, until they slowly stop spinning over days or months and reintegrate with the surrounding water.
If you stop eating meat, your food-related carbon footprint could plummet to less than half of what it was. That is a much bigger drop than many previous estimates, and it comes from a study of people's real diets.As much as a quarter of our greenhouse gas emissions come from food production. But it's not clear how much would really be saved if people swapped their beef steaks for tofu burgers. On some estimates, going vegetarian could cut out 25 per cent of your diet-related emissions. But it all depends on what you eat instead of the meat. With some substitutions, emissions could even rise.
Humans have a well-documented tendency to see winning and losing streaks in situations that, in fact, are random. But scientists disagree about whether the "hot-hand bias" is a cultural artifact picked up in childhood or a predisposition deeply ingrained in the structure of our cognitive architecture.Now in the first study in non-human primates of this systematic error in decision making, researchers find that monkeys also share our unfounded belief in winning and losing streaks.
Near Earth Objects (NEOs) are asteroids (or comets) whose orbits sometimes bring them close to the earth's orbit. Thus they could potentially collide with the Earth, giving them considerably more parochial interest than most objects in astronomy. The 1908 Tunguska event, for example, that flattened over 2000 square kilometers in Russia was by some basic estimates caused by an asteroid about 60 meters in diameter.
For 50 years, scientists have wondered what annihilated the ancestor of L-chondrites, the roof-smashing, head-bonking meteorites that frequently pummel Earth.Now, a new kind of meteorite discovered in a southern Sweden limestone quarry may finally solve the mystery, scientists report. The strange new rock may be the missing "other half" from one of the biggest interstellar collisions in a billion years.
Life is messy. So to find aliens, why not look for their pollution?As part of its mission, NASA's upcoming James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will be able to look at starlight filtered through the atmospheres of Earth-sized planets and search for signs of life. Most proposed plans involve hunting for highly reactive gases such as oxygen that usually need a living source to replenish them. But these methods might only hint at relatively simple life such as plants and microbes.
With its solar panels their cleanest in years, NASA's decade-old Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity is inspecting a section of crater-rim ridgeline chosen as a priority target due to evidence of a water-related mineral.
A star in a neighboring galaxy might have swallowed another star. Sitting about 200,000 light-years away in the constellation Tucana, the star HV 2112 appears to be a red supergiant that has engulfed a neutron star. This strange pair, called a Thorne-Zytkow Object, or TZO, was largely theoretical until now.
Surrounding the sun is a vast atmosphere of solar particles, through which magnetic fields swarm, solar flares erupt, and gigantic columns of material rise, fall and jostle each other around. Now, using NASA's Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory, scientists have found that this atmosphere, called the corona, is even larger than thought.
Space may appear empty -- a soundless vacuum, but it's not an absolute void. It flows with electric activity that is not visible to our eyes. NASA is developing plans to send humans to an asteroid, and wants to know more about the electrical environment explorers will encounter there.
A distant galaxy containing three supermassive black holes, each millions to billions of times more massive than the Sun, has been discovered 4 billion light-years away.The trio of black holes is the tightest system known to date, reports an international team of astronomers in the journal Nature.
Dark matter is one of the universe's most befuddling, and elusive, components. It could make up roughly a quarter of the universe's total mass and energy, yet no one knows for sure because no one has actually seen it. Well, it may be showing itself at last. nasa's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has recorded high-energy gamma-ray light emanating from the center of the Milky Way that fits well with dark matter predictions.
In the past years, invisibility cloaks were developed for various senses. Objects can be hidden from light, heat or sound. However, hiding of an object from being touched still remained to be accomplished. KIT scientists have now succeeded in creating a volume in which an object can be hidden from touching similar to a pea under the mattress of a princess. The results are now presented in the renowned Nature Communications journal.
One of the Amazon rain forest's most elusive inhabitants, the short-eared dog, has been caught on video.About the size of a fox, these jungle canines are incredibly difficult to spot. In fact, a journey to the Amazon is far more likely to yield a jaguar sighting than a glimpse of a wild short-eared dog.
With bushy beards and funky blue, yellow or brown faces, guenon monkeys have some of the most colorful and quirky faces of all primates. A close study of more than 20 guenon monkey species reveals these sociable animals may rely on their distinctive patterns to prevent interbreeding."Animals use coloration and patterning for a whole host of different reasons, and we think guenons are using their patterns to recognize different species," said study lead author William Allen, of the University of Hull in the United Kingdom.
While preferring silence to music from the West, chimpanzees apparently like to listen to the different rhythms of music from Africa and India, according to new research published by the American Psychological Association. "Our objective was not to find a preference for different cultures' music. We used cultural music from Africa, India and Japan to pinpoint specific acoustic properties," said study coauthor Frans de Waal, PhD, of Emory University.
Near-death experiences are rare, but if you have one, it is likely to be overwhelmingly peaceful, however painful it might have been to get to that stage. This is the conclusion from the first study into how the cause of trauma affects the content of a near-death experience.Such episodes are often described as emotionally rich, involving out-of-body sensations, tunnels of light and flashbacks. They most often occur when a person has been resuscitated after a traumatic event.
While African wildlife often run afoul of ranchers and pastoralists securing food and water resources for their animals, the interests of fauna and farmer might finally be unified by the "Sodom apple," a toxic invasive plant that has overrun vast swaths of East African savanna and pastureland.
A breakthrough in the production of solar cells will make the next generation of solar panels cheaper and safer, and promises to accelerate the development of solar energy over the next decade, scientists said.A technical advance based on an edible salt used in the manufacture of tofu could revolutionise the production of future solar panels to make them less expensive, more flexible and easier to use than the current models seen on millions of roofs across Britain.
A self-powered artificial cardiac pacemaker that is operated semi-permanently by a flexible piezoelectric nanogenerator has been developed by researchers. The team's newly designed flexible piezoelectric nanogenerator directly stimulated a living rat's heart using electrical energy converted from the small body movements of the rat. This technology could facilitate the use of self-powered flexible energy harvesters, not only prolonging the lifetime of cardiac pacemakers but also realizing real-time heart monitoring.
Tokyo: Japanese scientists have unveiled what they say is the world's first news-reading android, eerily lifelike and possessing a sense of humour to match her perfect language skills.The adolescent-looking "Kodomoroid" - an amalgamation of the Japanese word "kodomo" [child] and "android" - delivered news of an earthquake and an FBI raid to amazed reporters in Tokyo.
For women, being able to have children naturally later in life may be a sign that they will live an unusually long time, according to new research.The link between the ability to give birth at older ages and longevity may be explained by genetic traits that facilitate both, the researchers said.
The monarch butterfly uses a magnetic compass to guide its extraordinary migration thousands of km across North America, scientists say.Monarchs are known to possess a Sun compass but even on cloudy days they still keep flying south towards Mexico.
2014 marks the 45th anniversary of the Skamania County Sasquatch Refuge. The closest thing to official government recognition the creature has ever had.The year was 1969. Man achieved its first landing on the moon, The Beatles released Abbey Road, and it became illegal to kill Sasquatch.
We all feel lonely from time to time. It is one of the fundamental aspects of human nature for us to desire to share time and space with others of our own kind. When devoid of this contact, we can be pulled down into the dark depths of despair. But can you imagine the extreme loneliness of not only being being truly, soul crushingly alone, but forgotten as well? Can you imagine being the very last of your people?
Consuming a plant-based diet results in a more sustainable environment and reduces greenhouse gas emissions, while improving longevity, according to new research. Based on findings that identified food systems as a significant contributor to global warming, the study focuses on the dietary patterns of vegetarians, semi-vegetarians and non-vegetarians to quantify and compare greenhouse gas emissions, as well as assess total mortality.
Scientists excavating an archaeological site in southern Spain have finally gotten the real poop on Neandertals, finding that the Caveman Diet for these quintessential carnivores included substantial helpings of vegetables. Using the oldest published samples of human fecal matter, archaeologists have found the first direct evidence that Neandertals in Europe cooked and ate plants about 50,000 years ago.
3,500 million years ago the Martian crater Gale, through which the NASA rover Curiosity is currently traversing, was covered with glaciers, mainly over its central mound. Very cold liquid water also flowed through its rivers and lakes on the lower-lying areas, forming landscapes similar to those which can be found in Iceland or Alaska. This is reflected in an analysis of the images taken by the spacecraft orbiting the red planet.
Astronomers aren't being poetic when they say this star is a diamond.Scientists have identified what is possibly the coldest white dwarf ever detected. In fact, this dim stellar corpse is so cold that its carbon has crystallized, effectively forming a diamond the size of Earth, astronomers said.
Just like on Earth, the sun has spells of bad weather, with high winds and showers of rain. But unlike storms on Earth, rain on the sun is made of electrically charged gas (plasma) and falls at around 200,000 kilometers an hour from the outer solar atmosphere, the corona, to the sun's surface. Now a team of solar physicists has pieced together an explanation for this intriguing phenomenon with imagery that shows a 'waterfall' in the atmosphere of the sun.
British cosmologists are puzzled: they predict that the universe should not have lasted for more than a second. This startling conclusion is the result of combining the latest observations of the sky with the recent discovery of the Higgs boson.
Two spacecraft have detected a possible signal of dark matter, the mysterious, invisible stuff that makes up most of the material universe.NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton satellite spotted a spike of X-ray emission coming from more than 70 different galaxy clusters. While the origin of the X-rays remains unclear at the moment, they could be generated by the decay of a certain type of dark-matter particle, scientists said.
Mysterious features that look like waves have been detected on the seas of Saturn's moon Titan, according to a new study.The authors believe the features, which only appeared for a short time, are driven by seasonal winds that are generated as Titan's northern hemisphere moves into summer.
Scientists have outlined their best explanations for a mysterious feature dubbed the "magic island", which has been spotted on Saturn's moon Titan.The Cassini spacecraft captured the "island" during a flyby, but it had vanished by the time of the next pass.The bright splodge is seen in Ligeia Mare, one of the seas of methane and ethane found at Titan's north pole.
A combined NASA and European Space Agency (ESA)-funded study has found firm evidence that nitrogen in the atmosphere of Saturn's moon Titan originated in conditions similar to the cold birthplace of the most ancient comets from the Oort cloud. The finding rules out the possibility that Titan's building blocks formed within the warm disk of material thought to have surrounded the infant planet Saturn during its formation.
This week, a developing field of research that merges astronomical techniques with the study of ancient man-made features and the surrounding landscapes will be highlighted at the National Astronomy Meeting (NAM) 2014 in Portsmouth. From the 'Crystal Pathway' that links stone circles on Cornwall's Bodmin Moor to star-aligned megaliths in central Portugal, archaeo-astronomers are finding evidence that Neolithic and Bronze Age people were acute observers of the Sun, as well as the Moon and stars, and that they embedded astronomical references within their local landscapes.
An ancient burial containing chariots, gold artifacts and possible human sacrifices has been discovered by archaeologists in the country of Georgia, in the south Caucasus.The burial site, which would've been intended for a chief, dates back over 4,000 years to a time archaeologists call the Early Bronze Age, said Zurab Makharadze, head of the Centre of Archaeology at the Georgian National Museum.
During ongoing excavations of prehistoric settlements at Syltholm east of Rødbyhavn in Denmark, archaeologists have been investigating an area of land located on the periphery of a settlement. In the Mesolithic and Neolithic, the area was overgrown with reeds, but excavation has identified numerous tools and bones that prehistoric people had deliberately placed into this liminal zone.
Four marble maidens from ancient Greece have just gotten a facelift. Using a specially designed laser, conservators have labored since 2011 to strip away the black grime that encrusted the statues. Today the final figure to undergo the treatment is being revealed in all her splendor in the new Acropolis Museum in Athens, which celebrates its fifth anniversary this Friday, June 20.
The Harappan civilization dominated the Indus River valley beginning about five thousand years ago, its massive cities sprawling at the edges of rivers that still flow through Pakistan and India today. But its culture remains a mystery. Why did it leave behind no representations of great leaders, nor of warfare?Archaeologists have long wondered whether the Harappan civilization could actually have thrived for roughly 2,000 years without any major wars or leadership cults.
Fukushima: A Race to Extinction by Sergey BaranovGobekli Tepe and its Connection to France... by Trebha Cooper
Plans to build a new road in Iceland ran into trouble recently when campaigners warned that it would disturb elves living in its path. Construction work had to be stopped while a solution was found.From his desk at the Icelandic highways department in Reykjavik, Petur Matthiasson smiles at me warmly from behind his glasses, but firmly.
The law of unintended consequences may have a longer history than we thought. At a Neolithic settlement in the region where early farmers pioneered crop irrigation systems, a team has found the oldest example of a water-borne disease that today affects 210 million people worldwide.Schistosomiasis is caused by parasitic flatworms, contracted when humans wade in warm freshwater inhabited by snails that carry the parasite. It can lead to anaemia, kidney failure and death.
Chance events may profoundly shape history. What if Franz Ferdinand's driver had not taken a wrong turn, bringing the Duke face to face with his assassin? Would World War I still have been fought? Would Hitler have risen to power decades later?Historians can only speculate on what might have been, but a team of evolutionary biologists studying ancient proteins has turned speculation into experiment.
Ancient skulls discovered in a Spanish cave exhibit a mix of Neandertal and more primitive characteristics, implying that Neandertals developed their defining traits in stages.From studying a collection of skulls in a Spanish cave researches have identified both Neandertal-driven features as well as features linked with more primitive humans in these bones.
The bones of ground sloths, saber-toothed cats and other creatures of the Ice Age have been discovered in a deep underwater cavern on Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, but the exploration of the site is actually happening on the surface, hundreds of miles away, in a lab in San Diego.Spelunkers first discovered the cave, called Hoyo Negro, seven years ago, but it was accessible only to specially trained cave divers.
Archaeologists are now onsite at Tel Megiddo, in northern Israel, to continue large-scale excavations at what has often been called the "crown jewel" of archaeological sites of the Levant, or Eastern Mediterranean region.Led by well-known archaeologists Israel Finkelstein of Tel Aviv University and Eric Cline of the George Washington University, a team of archaeologists, students, volunteers and other specialists.
Enigmatic archaeological sites in Costa Rica dotted with mysterious stone spheres are among six new spots newly designated as UNESCO World Heritage Sites.The stone sphere sites, on the Diquis Delta in southern Costa Rica, join places like the Great Wall of China and Yellowstone National Park on the list of 1,007 sites designated as World Heritage Sites by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). The organization lists places that are "of outstanding universal value," based on criteria such as representing a masterpiece of creative genius, recording testimony of a vanished civilization, or containing exceptional natural beauty.
Southern California residents are baffled by a grouping of mysterious lights seen hovering in the sky late Thursday evening.The lights, which have yet to be explained, were seen in the sky above southern Orange County, Riverside County, and San Diego County.Rancho Santa Margarita resident Ranaye Kahn reported seeing the lights at about 10:30 p.m.
Two Riverside County, CA, witnesses reported watching strange lights in the sky they could not explain three hours and 10 miles apart from each other on June 18, 2014, according to testimony in cases 57165 and 57166 from the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) witness reporting database.At 7:30 p.m., a witness in Menifee stepped out into her backyard and noticed a cylinder-shaped object in the sky.
The hay-vens opened up over Gloucestershire last weekend as clumps of grass fell from the sky all over the county.Bewildered people were left clutching at straws after the strange phenomenon over Cheltenham on Saturday when they saw it raining hay.The weather forecast had predicted dry weather with clear blue skies on the day.
Three American friends have been taken to hospital after reportedly becoming 'possessed' by evil spirits while playing with a Ouija board.Alexandra Huerta, 22, was playing the game with her brother Sergio, 23, and 18-year-old cousin Fernando Cuevas at a house in the village of San Juan Tlacotenco in south-west Mexico.But minutes into it, she apparently started 'growling' and thrashing around in a 'trance-like' state.
Babies whose moms lived within a mile of crops treated with widely used pesticides were more likely to develop autism, according to new research.The study of 970 children, born in farm-rich areas of Northern California, is part of the largest project to date that is exploring links between autism and environmental exposures.
The rise of oxygen is one of the biggest puzzle in Earth's history. Our planet's atmosphere started out oxygen-free. Then, around 3.5 billion years ago, tiny microbes called cyanobacteria (or blue-green algae) learned out to carry out photosynthesis. They began using energy from sunlight to make their food from carbon dioxide and water, giving off oxygen as waste.
Scientists are investigating a mystery object that appeared and then vanished again from a giant lake on Titan, the largest moon of Saturn.They spotted the object in an image taken by Nasa's Cassini probe last year as it swung around the alien moon, more than a billion kilometres from Earth. Pictures of the same spot captured nothing before or some days later.
Astronomers have developed a powerful new tool that could boost the search for extraterrestrial life.To date, that search has been largely limited to the search for water. We look for exoplanets at the correct distances from their stars for water to flow freely on their surfaces, and even scan radiofrequencies in the "water hole" between the 1,420 MHz emission line of neutral hydrogen and the 1,666 MHz hydroxyl line.
The first set of high-resolution results from ESA's three-satellite Swarm constellation reveals the most recent changes in the magnetic field that protects our planet.Launched in November 2013, Swarm is providing unprecedented insights into the complex workings of Earth's magnetic field, which safeguards us from the bombarding cosmic radiation and charged particles.
At the dawn of civilization, settlers on the Nile River made use of an everyday material to do something amazingThe history of Egypt boggles the mind. By any standard the scale of achievement was enormous, but through it all, it seems clear that the economy remained rooted in agriculture. It was the everyday business of the ancient Egyptians to produce food. This they did using a system that was the envy of all.
When is the Summer Solstice? That time of the year when the Northern Hemisphere is angled toward the sun? When the day is the longest and when the night is the shortest? When the season changes into Summer? June 21st? Such astronomical knowledge is taught in grade school. However, observers in the Stone Age had no idea about the tilt of the Earth.
A "mystery coin" has been uncovered as part of work to discover the secrets of the world's largest Celtic coin hoard.The hoard of some 70,000 coins and jewellery pieces was found by two metal detector enthusiasts in 2012.
No one will forget the amnesiac Henry Molaison.An epileptic who had his hippocampus removed in 1953, Molaison lost the ability to record episodic memory. He had no idea if he'd eaten lunch. He greeted acquaintances each time as if it were the first.
Many BPA-free plastics may leach BPA-like chemicals that are potentially damaging to human health, a dilemma Mother Jones explored in our exposé on the plastics industry earlier this year. But consumers have had no way of knowing which of the items lurking in their pantries might wreak havoc on their hormones. Until now. A new paper in the journal Environmental Health identifies specific plastic products that leach estrogen-mimicking chemicals. Perhaps more importantly, it also names a few options that are hormone-free.
A daily broccoli sprout drink helped people in a heavily polluted area of China rid their bodies of an airborne cancer-causing chemical and lung irritant, scientists report.In a clinical trial, researchers used the broccoli beverage to get nearly 300 Chinese men and women to consume sulforaphane, a plant compound already demonstrated in animal studies to have cancer-preventive properties.
Crows like to select mates that look alike. In a large-scale genomic study a team of researchers found that this behavior might be rooted in their genetic make-up, revealing a likely common evolutionary path that allows for separating populations into novel species.
The Neanderthals knew how to make an entrance: teeth first. Our sister species' distinctive teeth were among the first unique aspects of their anatomy to evolve, according to a study of their ancestors. These early Neanderthals may have used their teeth as a third hand, gripping objects that they then cut with tools.
It is one of the greatest archaeological mysteries of all times: the disappearance of a Persian army of 50,000 men in the Egyptian desert around 524 BC. A professor has now unearthed a cover-up affair and solved the riddle.
An enigmatic box from a bygone era, filled with pottery, seeds and animal bones, has been discovered in the University of Bristol's Department of Archaeology and Anthropology. The box was found while researchers were emptying current laboratory spaces in preparation for the installation of a new state-of-the-art radiocarbon dating facility.
MOSUL Iraq (Reuters) - Militant Sunni Islamists who seized swathes of northern Iraq last week have destroyed symbols of Iraq's heritage in the city of Mosul, including statues of cultural icons and the tomb of a medieval philosopher.Witnesses said militants from the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) had destroyed a statue of Othman al-Mousuli, a 19th Century Iraqi musician and composer, and the statue of Abu Tammam, an Abbasid-era Arab poet.
The dwarf planet Pluto and most of its moons were named after the Roman god of death and his grim entourage, so it would be ironic if they turned out to be the only objects in the solar system outside of Earth that contained life. It would also be a little surprising, considering their distance from the Sun, but several recent scientific studies have indirectly raised the possibility.
Desirable destinations at the fringes of the solar system can be hard to find. So NASA has enlisted its famous Hubble Space Telescope to search for a celestial body that its New Horizons spacecraft can visit once the craft has passed Pluto.New Horizons is due to fly past the dwarf planet and its moons in July 2015.
A UFO research organization in Israel has sent out a report regarding a wall painting in a 14th century church in Romania that may depict a UFO. It is similar to objects seen in paintings and coins ranging from the 4th century to the 17th century. One UFO investigator feels that the objects in the images may have an explanation that is more down to earth.
King Richard III of England will be laid back to rest in a wooden coffin sealed inside a tomb made of Swaledale fossil stone in Leicester Cathedral, the dean of the cathedral announced Monday (June 16).Michael Ibsen, a descendant to King Richard III's sister Anne of York, will make the king's coffin.The announcement comes on the heels of a judicial verdict that concluded the University of Leicester has the legal right to reinter Richard III's bones.
Some of the earliest evidence of a human parasite infection has been unearthed in an ancient burial site in Syria.The egg of a parasite that still infects people today was found in the burial plot of a child who lived 6,200 years ago in an ancient farming community.
Unlike most hunter-gatherer societies of the Bronze Age, the people of the Baikal region of modern Siberia (Russia) respected their dead with formal graves. These burial sites are a treasure trove for archaeologists and one particular specimen was so unique that bioarchaeologist Angela Lieverse traveled across the world just to bring it back to the Canadian Light Source synchrotron for examination.
Ancient skulls recovered from a deep cave in northern Spain are the oldest known remains to show clear signs of Neanderthal facial features, researchers claim.Scientists reconstructed 17 skulls from pieces of bone found in the mud at Sima de los Huesos, or the "Pit of Bones", in the Atapuerca mountains. The skulls had some Neanderthal-like features, but their appearance was otherwise far more primitive.
Scientists have discovered the bones of a dinosaur that appears to be a smaller relative of the Tyrannosaurus Rex that lived in Arctic Alaska.According to the Guardian, the pygmy tyrannosaur would have existed in the northernmost part of an ancient island continent known as Laramidia, which stretches across what is now the U.S. west coast.
Not all spiders catch their prey by spinning webs; a surprising number of arachnids quite literally fish for their meals, snatching scaly animals sometimes twice their size.In fact, a new scientific review found that fish-eating spiders lurk near rivers, ponds and swamps on every continent except Antarctica. They've lifted small catfish out of marshes in Ecuador; grabbed killifish out of nets in Cameroon; devoured dwarf fish in California aquariums; and stalked hatchery ponds in Oklahoma, continuing to kill fish even after eating their fill.
The club of fellatio-loving animals just gained a new member: bears.Scientists have observed a pair of male brown bears in captivity in Croatia that regularly engaged in oral sex over several years. While the creatures in this case study likely do it for pleasure, their fellatio habits might have started because they were forced to wean too early, the researchers suspect.
For some birds, recognising their own eggs can be a matter of life or death. In a new study, scientists have shown that many birds affected by the parasitic Common Cuckoo - which lays its lethal offspring in other birds' nests - have evolved distinctive patterns on their eggs in order to distinguish them from those laid by a cuckoo cheat.The study reveals that these signature patterns provide a powerful defense against cuckoo trickery, helping host birds to reject cuckoo eggs before they hatch and destroy the host's own brood.
LONDON: British scientists have discovered a technique which can make a decayed tooth repair itself.The technique, developed at King's College, London, effectively reverses decay by using electrical currents to boost the tooth's natural repair process.This path-breaking treatment could be available in three years, according to the British researchers who created it.
Scientists who claimed to have found a pattern in the sky left by the super-rapid expansion of space just fractions of a second after the Big Bang say they are now less confident of their result.The BICEP2 Collaboration used a telescope at the South Pole to detect the signal in the oldest light it is possible to observe.
Scientists studying more than 140,000 extremely bright galaxies have calculated the expansion of the universe with unprecedented accuracy.The distant galaxies, known as quasars, serve as a "standard ruler" to map density variations in the universe. Physicists were able to extend their calculations almost twice as far back in time as has been previously accomplished.
Shortly after lunch on Thursday afternoon the silence of the Atacama desert in Chile will be rudely broken by the dull crack of dynamite sending a rush of mountain rock skywards.The explosion, planned for 2pm local time (7pm BST), marks the start of a months-long project to lop the top off the 3,000m-high Cerro Armazones. Once the dust has settled and the rubble has been cleared, the mountain will be smaller, flatter, and ready to host the largest optical and infra-red telescope in the world.
NASA is proposing a mission study to open up the mysteries of Titan, the largest moon of Saturn. The reason is compelling enough. Titan would serve as a vast reservoir of information about one of the most earth-like worlds ever discovered. With its thick atmosphere and organic-rich chemistry, said NASA, Titan resembles a frozen version of Earth, several billion years ago, before life began pumping oxygen into our atmosphere.