Newsdesk Archive
At least some astronauts who spend six months aboard the International Space Station come back to Earth with stiffer arteries than before their flights, a new study reveals.Stiff arteries in seniors here on Earth can lead to higher blood pressure and, potentially, problems with blood flow to the brain. But no blood pressure changes in astronauts have been noted so far, scientists said.
Ever wondered what the center of the galaxy smells like? Depending on your preference, the answer could be raspberries or rum.As improbable as this sounds, the discovery was made when astronomers from the Max Plank Institute used the IRAM radio telescope in Spain to study Sagittarius B2, a dust cloud near the center of the galaxy. The announcement was made at the time in Astrophysics and has since been confirmed with studies of similar dust clouds.
A Japanese robot-maker on Wednesday showed off suits that the wearer can control just by thinking, as it said it was linking up with an industrial city promoting innovation.Cyberdyne founder Yoshiyuki Sankai said he was allying with Kawasaki, a city south of Tokyo, to explore ways to expand real-life applications for his robo-suits, which are often used for physical therapy.
Fruit flies show a mark of intelligence in 'thinking' before they act, suggests a study by researchers from the University of Oxford's Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour.In experiments asking fruit flies to distinguish between ever closer concentrations of an odour, the researchers found that the flies don't act instinctively or impulsively. Instead they appear to accumulate information before committing to a choice.
The science shows that fish use tools, feel pain, have long memories, and deserve better treatment from us.Whether they're caught in the wild or raised in captivity, fish are a major food souce worldwide. Nearly 5 billion people worldwide got 15 percent of the animal protein in their diets from fish in 2011; for another 2.9 billion it was 20 percent. In 2011, that added up to about 132.3 million metric tons of fish.
Scientists at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have made the first structural observations of liquid water at temperatures down to minus 51 degrees Fahrenheit, within an elusive "no-man's land" where water's strange properties are super-amplified.
Scientists say it would have been a catastrophe of unprecedented proportions. If the Glen Canyon Dam had failed, it would have changed the lives of millions of people and reshaped the history of the American West.Only a lucky break in the weather spared the dam in June 1983, as floodwaters coursed through the Colorado River and its tributaries. They pooled in Lake Powell, causing water levels to creep upward at a rate of 3 inches per day.
The "boring billion," the long evolutionary pause when slime ruled the Earth, might be due to a planetary cooling-off period that stalled plate tectonics, a new study suggests.The so-called boring billion refers to the span from 1.7 billion years to 750 million years ago when algae and microbes had the run of Earth. Why boring? The long pause comes after these single-celled creatures mastered photosynthesis.
When we hear the word 'mummy' we immediately think of Egypt, pyramids & ancient pharaohs seeking to preserve their mortal remains for all eternity. But the truth of the matter is that, either by pure chance or on purpose, corpses showing an incredible state of preservation can be found all around the world.
Researchers at McGill University have excavated the first fossil evidence of forest fire ecology, revealing forests still recover from wildfires the same way today as they did during the reign of the dinosaurs.66 million years ago, just before the last great mass extinction on Earth, a great fire ravaged what is now southern Saskatechwan, Canada.
Sauropods are best known for being the largest dinosaurs ever to roam Earth. But a new study of these ancient creatures focuses on a surprising fact: Some sauropods were actually quite small.The conclusion is based on the discovery of the fossil remains of the smaller-than-average sauropod dubbed Europasaurus holgeri in 2006 in a quarry in northern Germany.The specimens were approximately 20 feet (6 meters) long and are believed to have supported dinosaurs weighing less than a ton each.
A treasure trove of bronze and marble statues, gold jewelry and ancient scientific instruments may be buried in sand, hundreds of feet below the Aegean Sea, and a team of explorers is going after the 2,000-year-old hoard using the most advanced diving suit ever built.Later this year, scientists and divers plan to explore the so-called Antikythera shipwreck, which settled on the seafloor around 50 B.C. off the coast of Antikythera, a Greek island. The team's secret weapon is a 6.5-foot-tall (2 meters), 530-pound (240 kilograms) metal diving suit equipped with 1.6-horsepower thrusters that can reach the extreme depths where the ship came to rest.
The island of Andros in the Bahamas is a mystical place. It is a tropical, sun-kissed land of clear blue seas and pristine, white sand beaches. Possessing immense biological and geographical diversity, with a wide range of habitats across an area approximately the size of the state of Delaware, many of which are unique on Earth, Andros is not only a tropical paradise but also a marvel of the natural world. This idyllic island getaway is also a place steeped in mystery, legend, and myth.
NASA is thinking hard about what the first boots to set foot on Mars will look like.Getting astronauts to the Red Planet is the chief long-term goal of the agency's human spaceflight program, so NASA is developing many technologies to help make that happen. For instance, there's the Space Launch System mega-rocket, the Orion crew capsule and a new line of prototype spacesuits called the Z-series.
Using ESA's Herschel space observatory, astronomers have discovered that a molecule vital for creating water exists in the burning embers of dying Sun-like stars.When low- to middleweight stars like our Sun approach the end of their lives, they eventually become dense, white dwarf stars. In doing so, they cast off their outer layers of dust and gas into space, creating a kaleidoscope of intricate patterns known as planetary nebulas.
NASA's Cassini mission flew past Titan early Wednesday morning, successfully completing a complex maneuver that will help scientists better understand one of the solar system's most intriguing moons.Beginning around midnight, a team of scientists and engineers guided the spacecraft into an orbit that allowed them to bounce a radio signal off the surface of Titan toward Earth, where it was received by a land-based telescope array 1 billion miles away.
New results from the particle detector attached outside the International Space Station show something else beside ordinary matter is generating cosmic rays, the lead researcher said Tuesday.More cosmic ray detections are needed before scientists will know for sure if they're seeing telltale fingerprints of dark matter colliding or if they've found particles generated by highly magnetized, rotating neutron stars known as pulsars.
It's an iconic scene in every dinosaur movie: the huge, conquering carnivorous theropod rears back and lets out a terrifying bellow. But how close to reality are these sounds? Do we have any ways of using science to figure out what dinosaurs and other stem-birds may have sounded like? Do we have evidence that they made sounds at all?
On a quest to learn more about fires in the Northern Rockies, Montana State University, Salish Kootenai College and federal researchers are looking to the trees, lakes and oral tradition for insights they can share with land managers.David McWethy of MSU is now leading a team of students sampling sediments from several lakes on the Flathead Indian Reservation. At the same time, Rick Everett of SKC is leading a group of students collecting tree rings and fire scars.
Across the edges of the Indian Ocean, the amount of rainfall differs greatly. If it rains particularly hard in the Sumatran rain forest, the already arid region of East Africa is onset with drought. Researchers have found that this cyclic, bipolar climate phenomenon has likely been around for 10,000 years. The pilot study sheds light on the climate system of a region whose rainfall patterns have a major impact on global climate.
A new study by scientists at the University of York has shed new light on the use of mollusc shells as personal adornments by Bronze Age people.The research team used amino acid racemisation analysis (a technique used previously mainly for dating artefacts), light microscopy, scanning electron microscopy and Raman spectroscopy, to identify the raw materials used to make beads in a complex necklace discovered at an Early Bronze Age burial site at Great Cornard in Suffolk, UK.
A study by Tibetan scholar Lobsang Yongdan revisits a long-ignored section of a historic text to reveal how Tibetans were engaging with western scientific knowledge two centuries ago.His research into a geography of the world, first published by a lama in 1830, challenges stereotypical views of Tibet as an isolated and inward-looking society.
A single dose of a century-old drug has eliminated autism symptoms in adult mice with an experimental form of the disorder. Originally developed to treat African sleeping sickness, the compound, called suramin, quells a heightened stress response in neurons that researchers believe may underlie some traits of autism. The finding raises the hope that some hallmarks of the disorder may not be permanent, but could be correctable even in adulthood.
Fuel cells, devices that react hydrogen with oxygen to produce water, using the electricity generated by the redox reaction to power a motor, need platinum catalysts to produce energy, which makes them extremely expensive. Scientists have been looking for alternatives to replace the transition metal with a cheaper option, such as carbon, but producing carbon nanostructures can be quite expensive too.
Ed Damiano's son was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes in 2000. He was 11 months old. Damiano, a biomedical engineer, decided to create a device that would help his child and millions of others better manage their disease. He set a goal of having it ready by the time his son went to college.Results from the latest clinical trials of his smartphone-linked artificial pancreas suggest he might just make that deadline.
Ever wondered if your job really fits your personality? If you were a spider, there might be no doubt.Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh recently published a study showing that a species of social spider, Anelosimus studiosus, organizes colony duties by personality.
TAMBOPATA, PERU -- In a remote area of the Peruvian Amazon lives a type of spider with a peculiar habit: It builds a spider-shaped "decoy" in its web out of dead insects and other detritus, and which resembles an arachnid much bigger than itself. The idea is that these spider-shaped web additions scare away predators, but nobody knows for sure. Only discovered less than two years ago, scientists know little about these marvelously strange web-weavers.
Archaeologists have uncovered the remains of an epidemic in Egypt so terrible that one ancient writer believed the world was coming to an end.Working at the Funerary Complex of Harwa and Akhimenru in the west bank of the ancient city of Thebes (modern-day Luxor) in Egypt, the team of the Italian Archaeological Mission to Luxor (MAIL) found bodies covered with a thick layer of lime (historically used as a disinfectant). The researchers also found three kilns where the lime was produced, as well as a giant bonfire containing human remains, where many of the plague victims were incinerated.
Researchers at the University of Rochester discovered a way to trap light for a period of nanoseconds, longer than light has ever been confined to a small space. Using a nanostructure of silicon, the scientists produced an algorithm based on genetic principles to create a nanocavity (silicon wafer) 10 times more effective than other nanocavities in confining light.
Sites like Google and Bing Maps will be able to use higher-quality satellite images, thanks to US government restrictions being lifted.Companies had not been allowed to make use of images where features smaller than 50cm were visible.But one imaging firm, Digital Globe, said it would be able to sell images that showed features as small as 31cm.
A rare, 2000-year-old funeral shroud went on display at a museum in Lima, Peru. The pre-Incan, fragile textile is part of Paracas textiles that Sweden is returning to Peru.The Shroud of Gothenburg has over 80 hues of blue, green, yellow and red - which are woven in a pattern of 32 frames, according to BBC.
An archeological dig has revealed artefacts of early occupation so old they rival the dates of those found at sites of the earliest human settlement in Australia.The discovery of the artefacts of animal bone and charcoal at the Ganga Maya Cave (named by traditional owners meaning 'house on the hill') in the Pilbara region of Western Australia are the subject of a scientific paper not yet submitted to archaeological journals.
Teams of archaeologists, students and volunteers will return this month to the site of ancient Jaffa on the central coast of Israel to pick up where they left off in 2013, when they uncovered more of the sensational evidence of a fiery destruction at the site's ancient Amarna period New Kingdom Egyptian fortress gate.
The weather made me do it," as the saying might have gone for many, long-deceased and unnamed ancient Peruvians. Like some other populations throughout history, they were refugees of climate change who then flourished in their newly found home.This is the story told by a recent genetic study that suggests that the evidence indicates periods of migration in pre-Columbian Andean societies in Peru, spurred on by local climate changes.
The Western Caucasus, extending over 275,000 ha of the extreme western end of the Caucasus mountains and located 50 km north-east of the Black Sea, is one of the few large mountain areas of Europe that has not experienced significant human impact. Yet dotted within the pristine landscape are thousands of ancient megalithic structures built many millennia ago.
Popular beliefs about the influence of the moon on humans widely exist. Many people report sleeplessness around the time of full moon. In contrast to earlier studies, scientists from the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich did not observe any correlation between human sleep and the lunar phases. The researchers analyzed preexisting data of a large cohort of volunteers and their sleep nights.
NASA's decade old Opportunity rover has reached a long sought after region of aluminum-rich clay mineral outcrops at a new Endeavour crater ridge now "named 'Pillinger Point' after Colin Pillinger the Principal Investigator for the [British] Beagle 2 Mars lander", Prof. Ray Arvidson, Deputy Principal Investigator for the rover, told Universe Today exclusively. See above the spectacular panoramic view from 'Pillinger Point'...
Earth's gravitational pull is so powerful that it creates a small bulge on the surface of the moon. For the first time, scientists have observed this bump from orbit, using NASA satellites.The gravitational tug-of-war between Earth and the moon is enough to stretch both celestial bodies, so they each end up having a slight oval shape, with the tapered ends facing each other.
A star has been found that may be a sister of our Sun, born in the same cloud of gas and dust in our galaxy, the Milky Way. The Sun, the Earth and the other planets coalesced some 4.54 billion years ago within a such a cloud, probably with thousands of other stars. This age comes from radiometric measures of radioactive isotopes and their decay products in meteorites, the oldest rocks we can handle, while there is plenty of observational evidence for ongoing star formation elsewhere in the galaxy.
The story of this extraordinary bird might be more complicated than we thought.Once the most numerous bird species in North America, passenger pigeons went from numbering in the billions to being extinct in less than a century. Their decline has been mostly blamed on intensive hunting. But new research suggests that the human impact coincided with a natural decrease in population size, resulting in Martha, the last passenger pigeon, dying in 1914.
"The weather made me do it," as the saying might have gone for many, long-deceased and unnamed ancient Peruvians. Like some other populations throughout history, they were refugees of climate change who then flourished in their newly found home.This is the story told by a recent genetic study that suggests that the evidence indicates periods of migration in pre-Columbian Andean societies in Peru, spurred on by local climate changes. It supports the archaeologists, who for years have been saying that the excavated evidence hints of such shifts by the Nasca, Wari and Tiwanaku peoples.
Protulophila, a microscopic marine animal thought to have been extinct for 4 million years, has been found living in seas around New Zealand.First described by Italian biologist G. Rovereto in 1901, Protulophila is a genus of symbiotic hydrozoans. This small, predatory relative of corals and sea anemones was previously known only from marine deposits in Europe and the Middle East.
Two studies show that the movement rate of plates carrying the Earth's crust may not be constant over time. This could provide a new explanation for the patterns observed in the speed of evolution and has implications for the interpretation of climate models. The work is presented today at Goldschmidt 2014, the premier geochemistry conference taking place in Sacramento, California, USA.
Since its discovery in 1969 Los bebedores or The Drinkers, is a large pre-Hispanic mural that has remained hidden from public view. However, visitors can now see the mural at the Mexican archaeological zone of Cholula near Puebla for a limited period only.An initiative was instituted a decade ago by the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) to look into conservation of the mural.
The ancient Egyptians, who embalmed their deceased so carefully, must have had a profound knowledge of anatomy. This is shown in tomb reliefs depicting surgeons dealing with patients and in famous medical texts such as those in the ancient Egyptian Ebers and Edwin Smith papyri.The ancient Greek historian Herodotus who visited Egypt around 440 BCE wrote extensively of his observations of ancient Egyptian medical practices.
An archeological dig has revealed artefacts of early occupation so old they rival the dates of those found at sites of the earliest human settlement in Australia.The discovery of the artefacts of animal bone and charcoal at the Ganga Maya Cave (named by traditional owners meaning 'house on the hill') in the Pilbara region of Western Australia are the subject of a scientific paper not yet submitted to archaeological journals.
Archaeologists know it as Renegade Canyon, a lava gorge in desert badlands with more than 1 million images of hunters, spirits and bighorn sheep etched in sharp relief on cliff faces and boulders.But this desert is in the heart of the China Lake Naval Air Weapons Station, and it is where the Navy and Marines develop and test advanced bomb and missile systems.
A herpes virus that infects humans originated in chimpanzees before it jumped into our early human ancestors, according to a new study.Researchers found that herpes simplex virus 1 (HSV-1) infected hominids before their evolutionary split from chimpanzees 6 million years ago, whereas herpes simplex 2 (HSV-2) was transferred from ancient chimpanzees to human ancestors such as Homo erectus about 1.6 million years ago, long before the rise of early modern humans about 200,000 years ago.
From the air, the Namibian desert looks like it has a bad case of chicken pox. Spread across 1,100 miles of a narrow strip sit a smattering of barren polka dots, otherwise known as fairy circles. These sizable craters measure 10- to 65-feet in diameter, and represent one of nature's greatest mysteries.
It may surprise you to learn that common citrus trees like oranges and lemons are actually Schedule I substances, in the same legal category as heroin. I know it sounds absurd, but it is absolutely true. Recent analysis published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry (Servillo et al. 2013) found that several citrus plants, including lemons and oranges, contain N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT) and 5-hydroxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine (bufotenine).
Playing 'sweet' sounding music over dinner could allow you to lower the amount of sugar in food without changing the taste in a phenomenon dubbed 'sonic seasoning' by experimental psychologists at Oxford UniversityBanishing excess sugar and salt from diets is a goal for many but the thought of bland, tasteless food often puts off people from ditching the additives.
The explosions that damaged a crippled Japanese nuclear plant during a disaster that forced mass evacuations in 2011 show what can happen when nuclear fuel overheats.In response to the Fukushima Dai-ichi accident, the U.S. government dramatically increased funding to develop tougher protective skins for nuclear fuel, hoping to spur innovation in designs that hadn't changed much in years. While the U.S. Department of Energy was spending $2 million before the accident on future fuel designs, the funding reached as much as $30 million afterward.
Hawaii has a problem, one that the whole world is likely to face in the next 10 years. And the solution could be a metal that you've probably never heard of - vanadium.Hawaii's problem is too much sunshine - or rather, too much solar power feeding into its electricity grid.
Where volcanoes meet glaciers, lakes often form. This happens in many places on Earth and in at least one place off it: Arsia Mons, Mars.Arsia Monsis one of the largest mountains in the solar system. Wispy water-ice clouds gather near its peak during the Martian afternoon. While it is only the third tallest volcano on Mars, Arsia Mons is 300 km (186 miles) wide and twice as tall as Mount Everest.
Soon you'll be able to send a friend not just a picture of a pizza, but the scent of a pizza, using your phone. Yes, really.Harvard engineering professor David Edwards has invented a device called an oPhone that sends and receives photos and scents. You can mix-and-match 32 basic scents to create more than 300,000 unique aromas, according to the oPhone website.
Russian scientists are claiming palm readers may have been onto something when trying to predict the future.A group of university professors recently unveiled a scanner they believe can detect the perfect job for anyone - simply by looking at their fingerprints.The device bases its results on a database of how fingerprint shapes correlate to job selection.
Researchers find that being in a group makes some people lose touch with their personal moral beliefs. When people get together in groups, unusual things can happen -- both good and bad. Groups create important social institutions that an individual could not achieve alone, but there can be a darker side to such alliances: Belonging to a group makes people more likely to harm others outside the group.
Speculation that a great white shark that went missing off Australia may have been devoured by another great white is making the Internet rounds this week, raising the question of whether it was an instance of shark cannibalism.The shark that disappeared was wearing a research tag, which a beachcomber found 2.5 miles (four kilometers) away from where it had been affixed to the shark.
It's generally believed that Earth's earliest animals were not very big, but discovery of a huge new fish that lived around 423 million years ago has scientists rethinking what life was like close to 200 million years before the first dinosaurs emerged.The fish, named Big Mouth Blunt Tooth (Megamastax amblyodus), is described in the latest issue of Scientific Reports. For its time, the toothy and lobe-finned fish was in the number one spot on the food chain.
A critical building block for creating the first life on Earth was found in 3.8-billion-year-old rocks from Isua, Greenland, researchers reported this week here at the annual Goldschmidt geochemistry conference.For the first time, rich concentrations of the element boron have been found in Isua's ancient marine rocks, study author Takeshi Kakegawa, a professor at Tohoku University in Japan, said Monday (June 9). The discovery signals that boron was circulating in seawater and was absorbed by marine clays, which eventually became tourmaline, he said.
A fly larva discovered among the remains of an Italian Renaissance princess -- often credited to be the true Mona Lisa -- has a produced a zoological puzzle, raising questions about the origins of the insect.Widely believed to be a native of the Americas, the black soldier fly (Hermetia illucens) thrives on decaying organic material. It was thought to have first reached Europe in the early 1900s.
New evidence implicates one of Earth's biggest impact craters in a mass extinction that occurred 33.7 million years ago, according to research presented here Wednesday (June 11) at the annual Goldschmidt geochemistry conference.Researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles precisely dated rocks from beneath the Popigai impact crater in remote Siberia to the Eocene epoch mass extinction that occurred 33.7 million years ago. Popigai crater is one of the 10 biggest impact craters on Earth, and in 2012, Russian scientists claimed the crater harbors a gigantic industrial diamond deposit.
When NASA's New Horizons probe streaks past Pluto, scientists will be looking for cracks in the surface of its biggest moon, Charon, to figure out whether it was ever warm enough to maintain a subsurface ocean.It seems hard to believe, considering that the surface temperature on Pluto and its moons is thought to be 380 degrees below zero Fahrenheit (-229 degrees Celsius). But scientists say it's theoretically possible for Charon to have had a hidden sea of liquid water.
Crustaceans may be able to experience some emotions, a study published in the journal Science suggests. Researchers in France have found that crayfish seem to show anxiety, a feeling previously thought to be too complex for these primitive animals.It follows a number of studies that suggest that crustaceans can also feel pain.
The Jamaican government has decided to decriminalize the possession of small amounts of marijuana, joining the trickle of countries moving to soften laws on the drug known on the Caribbean island as "ganja."Minister of Justice Mark Golding made the announcement at an afternoon news conference on Thursday saying that Jamaica's Dangerous Drugs Act would be formally amended this summer.
The war on drugs could get a boost with a new method that analyzes sewage to track levels of illicit drug use in local communities in real time. The new study could help law enforcement identify new drug hot spots and monitor whether anti-drug measures are working.
The following is excerpted from Return to the Return to the Brain of Eden: Restoring the Connection between Neurochemistry and Consciousness by Tony Wright and Graham GynnIn the forest the human brain was expanding and expanding at a phenomenal rate. Sometime at around 200,000 to 150,000 years ago, this process came to an end. The brain stopped expanding and started to shrink. This key point in our evolutionary journey has been noted but rarely addressed, and its significance comprehensively ignored.
Human language builds on birdsong and speech forms of other primates, researchers hypothesize in new research. From birds, the researchers say, we derived the melodic part of our language, and from other primates, the pragmatic, content-carrying parts of speech. Sometime within the last 100,000 years, those capacities fused into roughly the form of human language that we know today.
It's too small. That's the problem that many see with the head of the Great Sphinx at Giza in Egypt: proportionately, it's much too small for the massive leonine body that it sits upon. Does this suggest that once, way back in antiquity, it originally had a different head...like that of a lion?English geologist Colin Reader is one who thinks so, and in the video he cites another strange fact about the Sphinx's head as evidence for the theory.
Dwarf galaxies that orbit the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxies defy the accepted model of galaxy formation, and recent attempts to wedge them into the model are flawed, reports an international team of astrophysicists. A new study pokes holes in the current understanding of galaxy formation and questions the accepted model of the origin and evolution of the universe.
In Arthur C Clarke's 2010 A Space Odyssey, the supercomputer HAL issues a last instruction to the Discovery crew ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS EXCEPT EUROPA ATTEMPT NO LANDING THERE. Now, NASA scientists have a better idea.Related: Radio signals from Jupiter could aid search for life
The monsters are multiplying. Just months after astronomers announced hints of a giant "Planet X" lurking beyond Pluto, a team in Spain says there may actually be two supersized planets hiding in the outer reaches of our solar system.When potential dwarf planet 2012 VP113 was discovered in March, it joined a handful of unusual rocky objects known to reside beyond the orbit of Pluto.
Scientists investigating one of the greatest riddles of the Earth's past may have discovered a mechanism to help determine how oxygen levels in the atmosphere expanded to allow life to evolve.High concentrations of atmospheric oxygen have been essential for the evolution of complex life on the Earth. Over the 4.5 billion years of Earth history, oxygen concentration has risen from trace amounts to 21% of the atmosphere today. However, the mechanisms behind this rise are uncertain, and it remains one of the biggest puzzles in geochemistry.
Predatory reptiles that trawled the oceans during the age of the dinosaurs used a rowing motion to scoop up prey, new track marks uncovered in China reveal.The newly discovered tracks are from creatures called nothosaurs, the top predators of the seas during the Triassic period, which lasted from 251 million to 199 million years ago. The findings settle a long-standing debate about how the ancient sea creatures swam, said study co-author Michael Benton, a paleontologist at the University of Bristol in England.
Dinosaurs fit in an intermediate class between warm and cold blooded animals, a study in the journal Science claims. Scientists compared the growth rates of hundreds of living and extinct species, using growth rings and bone size to calculate the rates for dinosaurs.They linked growth rate to metabolic rate, the measure of energy use that divides warm and cold blooded animals.
In a petri dish in the bowels of Harvard Medical School scientists have tweaked three genes from the cells of an Asian elephant that help control the production of hemoglobin, the protein in blood that carries oxygen. Their goal is to make these genes more like those of an animal that last walked the planet thousands of years ago: the woolly mammoth.
A meteorite found in the remains of a Neolithic hut in Bolkow, north west Poland, may have been used for shamanic purposes, academics have argued.The meteorite was discovered among a large group of sacral objects in a hut on the banks of Swidwie Lake in the West Pomeranian region.
The ancestors of humans and chimpanzees may have begun genetically diverging from one another 13 million years ago, more than twice as long ago as had been widely thought, shedding new light on the process of human evolution, researchers say.Scientists also discovered that male chimps pass on far more genetic mutations to their offspring than male humans do, revealing previously unknown evolutionary differences between the species.
Marked by their kindness to strangers, bonobos are helping scientists solve the mystery of a particularly human quality: our altruistic nature.It's a cruel irony, then, that the very bonobos that are shedding light on how our humanity toward others arose are the orphans of mothers killed by, you guessed it, humans.
Without any pre-training or restrictions in partner choice among chimpanzees, researchers at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, Emory University, found for the first time that chimpanzees housed in a socially complex, contained setting spontaneously cooperate with multiple partners of their choosing. This finding, which addresses long-standing doubt about the level of cooperation chimpanzees are able to spontaneously achieve or understand, is published in the June 12 issue of PeerJ.
Today's prosthetic limbs restore many of the functions of missing limbs, but technology for overcoming blindness remains limited. Now, a team of researchers hopes to change that, by developing high-tech clothing that could help visually impaired people navigate.The New York-based company Tactile Navigation Tools is developing a hands-free wearable device that uses sensors to detect obstacles and can alert the wearer to them with vibrations.
A reservoir of water three times the volume of all the oceans has been discovered deep beneath the Earth's surface. The finding could help explain where Earth's seas came from.The water is hidden inside a blue rock called ringwoodite that lies 700 kilometres underground in the mantle, the layer of hot rock between Earth's surface and its core.Related: Earth may have underground 'ocean' three times that on surface
Bowerbirds love discarded plastic. The males use colorful pieces to woo mates in an elaborate courtyard outside their nests. New research shows that another animal is putting our plastic waste to good use: two species of city-living bee have started building bits of plastic into their nests.The bees that J. Scott MacIvor, an ecologist at York University, studies aren't social and don't build hives.
Insects play a key role in the pollination of cultivated plants, and a new study suggests that they can be even more important than fertilizer. In the study, fertilization and watering only had an effect on harvest yield in combination with pollination manipulations. Results led the scientists to the conclusion that an almond tree can compensate for a lack of nutrients and water in the short term by directing stored nutrients and water to the fruits but cannot compensate for insufficient pollination.
Humans and corals are about as different from one another as living creatures get, but a new finding reveals that in one important way, they are more similar than anyone ever realized.A biologist at San Diego State University has discovered they share the same biomechanical pathway responsible for triggering cellular self-destruction. That might sound scary, but killing off defective cells is essential to keeping an organism healthy.Related: Marine scientist's quest to save coral
Keeping mobile phones in trouser pockets can significantly affect fertility in men, lowering their chances of becoming a father, according to a University of Exeter study.Researchers said that 14 percent of couples in high and middle income countries find it difficult to conceive and they believe that mobile phones have a role to play. Previous studies showed that Radio Frequency Electromagnetic Radiation (RF-EMR) emitted by the devices can have a harmful effect on male fertility.
Scientists have observed that reading ability scales with socioeconomic status. Yet music might help close the gap, according to Nina Kraus and her colleagues at Northwestern University.Kraus's team tested the auditory abilities of teenagers aged 14 or 15, grouped by socioeconomic status (as indexed by their mother's level of education, a commonly used surrogate measure). The researchers recorded the kids' brain waves with EEG as they listened to a repeated syllable against soft background sound and when they heard nothing.
Nearly everyone who plays video games has had to fight off the perception that gamers are just loser loners who set up in their parents' basements. But while armchair debaters have long pointed out that just isn't the case -- citing the rise of social gaming, mobile gaming, the fact that the U.S. spent $13.5 billion on gaming in 2013 -- there hasn't been a lot of hard data on hand.Until now.
When you meet someone who trips up their sentences with 'likes' and 'you knows' and 'I means' your might pre-judge them as unintelligent or someone who has difficulty expressing themselves, but in fact the opposite may be true.The filler word 'like' brings to mind airheaded characters like Cher from Clueless and sentences such as 'And now I, like, shop every day on Rodeo Drive,' but psychologists claim it is in fact an attempt to convey something in a more nuanced way and signals a conscientious person with complex thoughts to express.
Exactly what happens when people wake up from anesthesia or a coma has long baffled scientists, but now new research on rats suggests the path the brain takes to regain consciousness may be even more sophisticated than thought."It is commonly assumed that waking from anesthesia is a simple thing: The drugs leave the brain, and the effects they produced in the brain get washed out, and the brain somehow recovers," said Dr. Alex Proekt, an assistant professor of anesthesiology at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York. "But that 'somehow' part is poorly understood.".
If you don't want to die of thirst in the desert, be like the beetle. Or have a nanotube cup handy. New research by scientists at Rice University demonstrated that forests of carbon nanotubes can be made to harvest water molecules from arid desert air and store them for future use.The invention they call a "hygroscopic scaffold" is detailed in a new paper in the American Chemical Society journal Applied Materials and Interfaces.
For the first time, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has approved the use of a commercial drone over land, authorizing it to fly over and inspect the largest oil field in the nation, the agency announced today (June 10).With a special certificate from the FAA, drone-maker AeroVironment is now allowed to fly an unmanned vehicle over a BP-operated oil field in Alaska's remote Prudhoe Bay, which yields about two-thirds of the oil produced in the state.
Carbon dioxide mysteriously dropped during the time of the ancient supercontinent Pangea despite conditions that seemingly would have caused CO2 to spike. Instead, the biggest drop in the last 500 million years occurred. The cause of the drop is uncertain, but a new study argues a massive mountain range was the cause.Normally rain is slightly acidic because CO2 dissolves into it forming weak carbonic acid.
Zunli Lu and Xiaoli Zhou, an assistant professor and Ph.D. student, respectively, in the Department of Earth Sciences, are part of an international team of researchers whose findings have been published by the journal Geology (Geological Society of America, 2014). Their research approach may have important implications for the study of marine ecology and global warming.
A stunningly preserved, soft-bodied fish that is more than 500 million years old could be the ancestor of almost all living vertebrates.The fossilized fish, called Metaspriggina, sports characteristic gill structures that later evolved into jawbones in jawed vertebrates, according to a new study.The primeval creature lived during a period from 543 million to 493 million years ago known as the Cambrian Explosion, the evolutionary "big bang" when almost all complex life appeared.
A team of archaeologists in Guatemala has discovered a council house dating back about 700 years with altars, incense burners and sculpted images of animals.Located at the site of Nixtun-Ch'ich' in Petén,Guatemala,the house has "two colonnaded halls constructed side by side. The halls were decorated with sculpted [reptile], parrot and turtle imagery," writes Timothy Pugh, a professor at Queens College in New York, in a summary of a talk he recently gave at the Society for American Archaeology annual meeting in Austin, Texas.
IT'S a mystery worthy of a Dan Brown cracker: a famous religious college on the brink of closure and a locked archive stripped of valuable treasures it hoped to sell to stave off financial disaster.But the trouble at All Hallows College in Dublin is far from fictional.The cash-strapped college founded by the Vincentians was targeted by a mystery art thief right up until March this year.
The sun unleashed two major solar flares early Tuesday (June 10) in amazing back-to-back storms from our nearest star.The first flare, a powerful X2.2-class solar flare, hit its maximum at about 7:42 a.m. EDT (1142 GMT). The second powerful X1.5-class flare, followed quickly behind, blasting out from the sun at 8:36 a.m. EDT (1236 GMT). Both flares could cause radio communication blackouts on Earth for about an hour, according to an alert from the U.S. Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colorado. NASA's sun-observing Solar Dynamics Observatory captured a video of the flares from space.
Space is not empty. A wind of charged particles blows outwards from the Sun, carrying a magnetic field with it. Sometimes this solar wind can break through the Earth's magnetic field. Researchers at the Swedish Institute of Space Physics (IRF) in Uppsala now have an answer to one of the questions about how this actually occurs.
We had a good run, us and the Moon. Grab your special edition NASA space tissues because today we're embarking on a tale of orbital companionship, childhood sweethearts and heartache.But now, tragedy. The Moon, OUR Moon, is moving on to brighter horizons. We used to be much closer when we were younger and time seemed to fly by much faster. In fact, 620 million years ago, a day was only 21 hours long. Now they've dragged out to 24 hours and they're just getting longer, and the Moon is already at a average distance of 384,400 km. It almost feels too far away.