Newsdesk Archive
The Man in the Moon appeared when meteoroids struck the Earth-facing side of the moon creating large flat seas of basalt that we see as dark areas called maria. But no "face" exists on farside of the moon and now, Penn State astrophysicists think they know why."I remember the first time I saw a globe of the moon as a boy, being struck by how different the farside looks," said Jason Wright, assistant professor of astrophysics. "It was all mountains and craters. Where were the maria? It turns out it's been a mystery since the fifties."
Look closely at the outermost set of Saturn's rings in this picture from the Cassini orbiter, and you'll see a series of swoopy streamers pointing inward.Those faint streamers are created in Saturn's F ring when a 53-mile-wide (86-kilometer-wide) moon called Prometheus dips into it. As Prometheus pulls back, the moon draws out some of the ring's icy material, leaving bright streamers and dark channels in its wake.
In the mid-1970s, theoretical astrophysicist Kip Thorne, working with collaborator Anna Zytkow, postulated the existence of a bizarre form of star. Now known as Thorne-Zytkow objects (TZOs), these bodies were the product of the merger of two separate stars: one a giant star, the second a neutron star. They were able to calculate several likely properties of these stars, making predictions for what they might look like. But in the intervening years, none have been discovered.
The question of why humans, the Earth and the universe exist will have to wait, at least for a little while.A massive underground particle detector has so far failed to find evidence that mysterious subatomic particles, known as neutrinos, can act as their own antiparticles and annihilate each other.
A team of researchers at Delft University in the Netherlands is reporting in a paper they have had published in the journal Science, that they have successfully used entanglement as a means of communication, over a distance of ten feet (three meters). Furthermore, they note, they did so with 100 percent reliability and without altering the spin state of the quantum bits (qubits) involved.
Archaeologists says they have discovered an "incredibly important" medieval convent, cemetery and Tudor mansion in Ceredigion.The location of Llanllyr nunnery in the Aeron Valley had been a mystery until now.
Forensic scientists looking for the body of Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes say they have found five possible sites at a Madrid church.The author of Don Quixote died in 1616 and is considered one of Spain's most important literary figures.
Spanish archaeologists have discovered a 4,000-year-old pharaonic tomb belonging to a leader from the 11th dynasty of Egypt in Luxor, the antiquities ministry said on Monday.The wide surface of the tomb showed it was that of "someone from the royal family or a high-ranking statesman," the antiquities minister, Mohamed Ibrahim, said.
An analysis of the birth dates of all 736 footballers at the World Cup reveals that a surprisingly large number of teammates share the same birthday, and that seven were born on Valentines' Day.The birthday paradox is the surprising mathematical result that you only need 23 people in order for it to be more likely than not that two of them share the same birthday.
What if we could make the Great Pacific Garbage Patch just disappear? What if plastics didn't accumulate in landfills? What if we could reduce greenhouse gas emissions while replacing up to 30 percent of the world's plastics with a biodegradable substitute?Researchers have tried for decades to achieve those goals.
Antarctica is a land of ice. But dive below the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, and you'll find fire as well, in the form of subglacial volcanoes.Now, a new study finds that these subglacial volcanoes and other geothermal "hotspots" are contributing to the melting of Thwaites Glacier, a major river of ice that flows into Antarctica's Pine Island Bay. Areas of the glacier that sit near geologic features thought to be volcanic are melting faster than regions farther away from hotspots, said Dustin Schroeder, the study's lead author and a geophysicist at the University of Texas at Austin.
Before the sprawling Texas city of Houston and its suburbs were built, a dense forest naturally purified the coastal air along a stretch of the Gulf Coast that grew thick with pecan, ash, live oak and hackberry trees.It was the kind of pristine woodland that was mostly wiped out by settlers in their rush to clear land and build communities. Now one of America's largest chemical companies and one of its oldest conservation groups have forged an unlikely partnership that seeks to recreate some of that forest to curb pollution.
Daily intake of lycopene supplements - a compound found in tomatoes and other foods - improves blood vessel function in patients with cardiovascular disease, according to a new study by the University of Cambridge.Researchers found that blood vessel function improved by 53 percent in cardiovascular disease patients, who popped a 7-milligram oral lycopene supplement daily for two months.
Just as humans lament not pursuing a lover or bemoan having eaten that extra slice of chocolate cake, rats may experience feelings of regret, too, new research suggests.When rats were given the option of visiting rooms that contained different foods, and they skipped a good deal for a worse one, they glanced back at the former room, rushed through eating the snack and were more likely to tolerate longer wait times for what they considered the more desirable food , researchers found.
The Hindu holy sites in the Indian cities of Rishikesh and Haridwar attract millions of pilgrims each year - but they are now the destination for another group of devotees.Scientists trying to understand the rise of antibiotic resistance, considered by some to be the great health threat of our time, believe they could provide clues to the mechanisms behind its spread.
By leapfrogging from island to island across the northern Mediterranean, Neolithic people were able to quickly spread their farming lifestyle across southern Europe some 9,000 years ago, a new genetic study suggests.Archaeological investigations have shown that individuals in the Near East first developed farming and herding around 12,000 years ago.Related: Island-hopping odyssey brought civilisation to Europe
There are some 100 million other places in the Milky Way galaxy that could support complex life, report a group of university astronomers in the journal Challenges. They have developed a new computation method to examine data from planets orbiting other stars in the universe.Their study provides the first quantitative estimate of the number of worlds in our galaxy that could harbor life above the microbial level.
The kinds of alien planets that orbit distant stars may be revealed by taking a close look at the elements that make up those parent stars, researchers say.Astronomers have so far confirmed the existence of more than 1,000 planets beyond our solar system with the aid of NASA's Kepler spacecraft and other telescopes. They are investigating thousands more candidate worlds to see if they, too, are exoplanets, or extrasolar planets.
As salad ingredients go, romaine lettuce ranks somewhere between limp carrots and dried radishes on the excitement scale.But add a dash of outer space, and suddenly that frilly leaf is looking downright exotic, especially to astronauts used to food wrapped in plastic.Gardening in space could become a reality soon if NASA is able to grow its first crop of romaine lettuce on the International Space Station.
The sun has been acting strangely of late, prompting some solar physicists to suggest that once current sunspot activity peaked, which appeared to happen last fall, it could tank and remain that way for several decades.A prolonged period with few or no spots would have a slight, temporary cooling effect on Earth's climate and a general calming effect on space weather, which would be good news for astronauts and satellites.
Engineers have built a sperm-like robot that they can control with magnets.The simple design has a metal-coated head and a flexible body about six times longer than a human sperm.Using a magnetic field no stronger than a fridge magnet, the team made the robot "swim" forward and steered it towards a fixed point.
A chatty humanoid robot whose makers claim it can understand people's emotions made its first friends Friday as it struck up conversations with shoppers in Tokyo.And the device -- named Pepper by its designers -- proved an effective marketing tool for mobile carrier SoftBank, delighting managers who put it to work collecting customer opinions.
In the 1960s, Margaret Lovatt was part of a Nasa-funded project to communicate with dolphins. Soon she was living with 'Peter' 24 hours a day in a converted house. Christopher Riley reports on an experiment that went tragically wrong.Related YouTube video: Teaching a dolphin to speak English - The Girl Who Talked to Dolphins: Preview - BBC Four
A sharp dietary warning emerged from the Sharks International Conference taking place in Durban, South Africa this week, iol Scitech reported. According to a presenter at the gathering, eating shark meat could kill you.Southern Cross University researcher Jann Gilbert said that in three species of shark mercury and arsenic levels were found to be well above those considered safe by Australia and New Zealand's Food Standards Authority.
A new study describes how exposure to air pollution early in life produces harmful changes in the brains of mice, including an enlargement of part of the brain that is seen in humans who have autism and schizophrenia. The mice performed poorly in tests of short-term memory, learning ability, and impulsivity.
Scientists have reported a study that suggests that all human males can trace their roots to an ancestor with violent tendencies -- a hominin who was not a gentle, 'noble savage' whose descendents were later corrupted or changed by the onset of society, as depicted or suggested by many theorists.Related: Did violence shape our faces?
Blind cave-dwelling fish are able to discriminate between different quantities, scientists say.The fish, found beneath the deserts in Somalia, learned to identify the greater of two groups of sticks placed at opposite ends of a tank.
A new line of genetically modified pigs will host transplanted cells without the risk of rejection, opening the door for future stem cell therapy research. One of the biggest challenges for medical researchers studying the effectiveness of stem cell therapies is that transplants or grafts of cells are often rejected by the hosts.
"Technically, chemistry is the study of matter, but I prefer to see it as the study of change", said the fictional chemist Walter White on the hit television show Breaking Bad. "Electrons change their energy levels. Molecules change their bonds. Elements combine and change into compounds. But that's all of life, right? It's the constant, it's the cycle. It's solution, dissolution.
Chester Nez, the last original Navajo Code Talker, has passed away in his Albuquerque home.Nez was recruited with 28 other Native Americans by the U.S. Marines to create a code the Japanese couldn't crack during World War II.Nez went into kidney failure Wednesday morning. He was 93.
Shedding some light on the age-old question of whether creativity is a question of nature or nurture, researchers have identified "brain integration" as a recurring characteristic among creative people in a small new study.Brain integration is also referred to as mind-brain development, marked by openness to learning and to broader understanding without letting negative emotions obstruct interests.
Sleep's role in improving memory has been discovered by scientists in the US and China. Using advanced microscopy, researchers witnessed the formation of new connections between the brain's synapses during sleep, proving the key role of sleep in creating memories.Although it is well known that sleep plays an important role in memory, what actually happens inside the brain was unknown.
Infants exposed to rodent and pet dander, roach allergens and a wide variety of household bacteria in the first year of life appear less likely to suffer from allergies, wheezing and asthma, according to results of a recent study. Those who encounter such substances before their first birthdays seem to benefit rather than suffer from them.
See three new articles recently posted on GrahamHancock.com:Odin and Gunnlod: the celestial shamanic message of the world's ancient sacred mythology by David MathisenThe Old Man and his Daughter by David MathisenTrashmageddon: Living in a Dying World by Sergey Baranov
Like an underwater Iron Man, a diver will fly around the wreck of an ancient Greek ship later this year, looking to shed light on the Antikythera mechanismTHE world's most advanced robotic diving suit is getting ready to help search for one of the world's oldest computers.Called Exosuit, the suit has a rigid metal humanoid form with Iron Man-like thrusters that enable divers to operate safely down to depths of 300 metres.
Snuggle up, Pluto. The cold and distant dwarf planet may share a thin cloak with its largest moon.Simulations show that nitrogen from Pluto's atmosphere could be flowing over to its moon Charon. If this is confirmed, Pluto and Charon would be the first known example of a planet and its moon sharing an atmosphere.
In a discovery decades in the making, scientists have detected the first of a "theoretical" class of stars first proposed in 1975 by physicist Kip Thorne and astronomer Anna Zytkow. Thorne-Zytkow objects (TŻOs) are hybrids of red supergiant and neutron stars that superficially resemble normal red supergiants, such as Betelguese in the constellation Orion. They differ, however, in their distinct chemical signatures that result from unique activity in their stellar interiors.
Ok, so there are lot of weird UFO/lights in the sky videos but this one is especially baffling.Katie Real, 11, and her sister Macie filmed the weird dancing light as it hovered above a house.
China's campaign to bulldoze mountains to create land to build on could cause extensive environmental problems, scientists say.Researchers from Chang'an University in China have warned that dozens of mountains have already been flattened - and this is causing air and water pollution, soil erosion and flooding.
Rising sea levels have disturbed the skeletons of soldiers killed on the Marshall Islands during World War Two.Speaking at UN climate talks in Bonn, the Island's foreign minister said that high tides had exposed one grave with 26 dead.
In contests drawn from game theory, chimpanzee pairs consistently outperform humans in games that test memory and strategic thinking.A new study, conducted with chimps at the Kyoto University Primate Research Institute, involved a simple game of hide-and-seek that researchers call the Inspection Game.
Picture a paleontologist and you probably imagine someone in a rocky desert digging up dinosaur bones, or hunched over a slab of rock in a lab, slowly chipping away ancient sediment layers to reveal the fossilized remains of a bygone epoch.But according to a new paper penned by University of Bristol paleontologists, that image of solitary, dusty dinosaur scientists is sorely out of date.
4,000-year-old pottery from the early Bronze Age, the remains of timber roundhouses and evidence of Iron Age smithing are among the discoveries made by archaeologists investigating a proposed park and ride site near Aberdeen.
The story of the medieval plumbers who maintained a complex water supply system, which was centuries ahead of its time, has been revealed by a historian. A unique network of subterranean tunnels, partly dating back to the 14th century, still lies beneath the streets of Exeter, Devon. These once channeled fresh drinking-water from springs outside the town-walls to public fountains at the heart of the city.
Engineering students have created a roof tile coating that when applied to an average-sized residential roof breaks down the same amount of smog-causing nitrogen oxides per year as a car driven 11,000 miles makes. They also calculated it would cost only about $5 for enough titanium dioxide to coat an average-sized residential roof.
TALK about killing two birds with one stone. Every year we ditch millions of tonnes of chicken feathers, and pump climate-altering carbon dioxide into the air. But combine the two in the right way and you can make an otherwise-scarce fertiliser.More than 5 million tonnes of chicken feathers are produced globally every year. Most get thrown into landfill where they can sit for decades without breaking down.
A natural, non-toxic insecticide might be in your kitchen, a new study says.In what started out as a middle school science project, scientists discovered that erythritol, the main ingredient in the artificial sweetener Truvia, is toxic to fruit flies.This does not mean anyone using Truvia to sweeten their coffee or tea is in danger.
On a bright spring morning in Pasadena, California, the air is rich with the smells of cut grass and flowers. Photosynthesis seems effortless here: the fronds and blooms that line the walkways of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) bask in the sunlight, quietly using its energy to store sugars, stretch their leaves, deepen their roots and tend to their cellular processes.
Intense light from the enormous explosion of a star 12.1 billion years ago -- shortly after the Big Bang -- recently reached Earth and was observed by a robotic telescope. Known as a gamma-ray burst, these rare, high-energy explosions are the catastrophic collapse of a star at the end of its life. Astronomers can analyze the observational data to draw further conclusions about the structure of the early universe.
If NASA is to make great strides in its human spaceflight program, it needs to go big or go home -- and get to the Martian surface, says a new congressionally mandated report.But the 285-page report from the National Research Council goes on to say the agency won't succeed unless it does so in a smart, well-planned way, venturing far beyond the International Space Station in low-Earth orbit with the help of a clear, step-by-step plan.Related: US must play nice with China to put astronauts on Mars
Researchers have found evidence of the world that crashed into the Earth billions of years ago to form the Moon.Analysis of lunar rock brought back by Apollo astronauts shows traces of the "planet" called Theia.The researchers claim that their discovery confirms the theory that the Moon was created by just such a cataclysmic collision.
One of Leonardo da Vinci's masterpieces, drawn in red chalk on paper during the early 1500s and widely believed to be a self-portrait, is in extremely poor condition. Centuries of exposure to humid storage conditions or a closed environment has led to widespread and localized yellowing and browning of the paper, which is reducing the contrast between the colors of chalk and paper and substantially diminishing the visibility of the drawing.
Planners have launched a probe following claims that a rare site where early humans settled has been badly damaged without carrying out proper archaeological investigation.The Department of the Environment (DoE) said its planning department has launched an enforcement investigation to establish if a breach of planning control had taken place at Ballymaglaff in Dundonald in relation to archaeological matters.
The potato blight that caused the Great Irish Famine of the 1840s left families starving as their source of food was left rotting in their fields. Now, though, researchers have tracked the origin of this blight, and have found that the deadly plant disease actually first originated in an alpine valley in central Mexico.The potato is thought to have been first domesticated more than 7,000 years ago in parts of what are now Peru and Bolivia.
Ancient volcanic eruptions in Australia 510 million years ago significantly affected the climate, causing the first known mass extinction in the history of complex life. Scientists used radioactive dating techniques to precisely measure the age of the eruptions of the Kalkarindji volcanic province.
A team of researchers with Aarhus University in Denmark has concluded that the die-out of large mammals after the last ice-age was due more too human activity than a changing environment. In their paper published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, the team describes how they conducted a country by country survey of all known species extinctions from one thousand years ago to 132,000 years ago.
The viral spread of smartphones has jumped a species. African elephants are now also benefitting, thanks to new software algorithms developed by researchers and conservationists.A study published recently in the journal Ecological Applications by researchers at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Colorado State University, U.S. and Save the Elephants, Kenya reports on the use of advanced technology to help monitor and protect African elephants.
Hugging trees helps koalas to keep cool, a study has revealed.In a study published in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters, scientists used thermal cameras to reveal that, in hotter weather, the animals moved to the lower, cooler parts of the trees.They also pressed their bodies even closer to the trunks.
Spider silk transmits vibrations across a wide range of frequencies so that, when plucked like a guitar string, its sound carries information about prey, mates, and even the structural integrity of a web.The discovery was made by researchers from the Universities of Oxford, Strathclyde, and Sheffield who fired bullets and lasers at spider silk to study how it vibrates.
Children who are physically fit have faster and more robust neuro-electrical brain responses during reading than their less-fit peers, researchers report. These differences correspond with better language skills in the children who are more fit, and occur whether they're reading straightforward sentences or sentences that contain errors of grammar or syntax.
Scientists will be ready to create babies from three people in around two years, if it is made legal, a review says.The technique, using eggs from two women and one man's sperm, would be used to prevent deadly mitochondrial diseases.The UK fertility regulator said there was no evidence that it would be unsafe, but called for extra checks.
Mycenae -- the ancient city of the legendary King Agamemnon, best known from Homer's Iliad and Odyssey and its iconic Lion Gate and cyclopean defensive walls, has long fascinated scholars and site visitors alike with the epic proportions of its imposing citadel remains. Located about 56 miles southwest of Athens in Greece, it is a World Heritage site.But there is another Mycenae -- one known for centuries from ancient historical documents -- which has nevertheless eluded the eyes of archaeologists, historians, and tourists.
Looters will strip Egypt of most of its archaeological heritage within the next quarter century, an archaeologist warned at a U.S. State Department hearing this week."Wholesale looting is occurring all over Egypt, and we are seeing a big spike that came after the revolution," says archaeologist Sarah Parcak, who testified on Monday, opening a three-day hearing at the State Department. "If we don't do something to stop it, most sites in Egypt will be gone in 25 years."
Capay heirloom tomatoes at Slow Food NationThe organic food lobby should be all over this study. Who wants pesticides in their bodies after all? From MedicalXpress:Eating an organic diet for a week can cause pesticide levels to drop by almost 90% in adults, research from RMIT University has found.
A new study suggests that blue-enriched light exposure immediately before and during the evening meal may increase hunger and alter metabolism.Results show that blue-enriched light exposure, compared with dim light exposure, was associated with an increase in hunger that began 15 minutes after light onset and was still present almost two hours after the meal. Blue light exposure also decreased sleepiness and resulted in higher measures of insulin resistance.
New research reveals that bilingualism has a positive effect on cognition later in life. Findings published in Annals of Neurology, a journal of the American Neurological Association and Child Neurology Society, show that individuals who speak two or more languages, even those who acquired the second language in adulthood, may slow down cognitive decline from aging.
Imagine being able to carry all the juice you needed to power your MP3 player, smartphone and electric car in the fabric of your jacket?Sounds like science fiction, but it may become a reality thanks to breakthrough technology developed at a University of Central Florida research lab.
Silk Road, the now-shuttered underground website where people could buy and sell illegal goods, was often referred to as the "eBay for drugs," implying that end users were the ones buying the drugs in small amounts.But Silk Road also facilitated dealer-to-dealer transactions, according to an unpublished but thorough study by two researchers at the University of Manchester and University of Lausanne. The volume of these dealer-level sales may have been large enough to reduce drug violence on the street and raise the quality of products.
The promise of affordable transportation fuels from biomass -- a sustainable, carbon neutral route to American energy independence -- has been left perpetually on hold by the economics of the conversion process. Researchers have overcome this hurdle allowing the direct conversion of switchgrass to fuel.
A team of international scientists led by Professor Jagadese J Vittal of the Department of Chemistry at the National University of Singapore's (NUS) Faculty of Science has successfully unraveled the chemical reaction responsible for propelling microscopic crystals to leap distances up to hundreds of times their own size when they are exposed to ultraviolet (UV) light.
A bio-pesticide made from spider venom that kills pests but spares honeybees could help save the precious pollinators, scientists say.Researchers have created a novel bio-pesticide using spider venom and a plant protein which is highly toxic to a number of key insect pests - but safe for honeybees.Related: Spider venom takes the sting out of pesticides for honeybees
Google's plans for satellite-based internet access just got a little more concrete. The Wall Street Journal hears that the search firm is preparing to build 180 "small, high capacity" satellites (not pictured here) that will go into low orbit and provide internet connections to underserved areas. While details aren't forthcoming about the machines, there may be more on the way; reportedly, the company could "double" its vehicle count if all goes well.
NASA is just waiting to see which way the wind is blowing before it sends up a flying saucer to test technologies on Earth that could someday come into play for landings on Mars.The Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator, or LDSD, is at the U.S. Navy's Pacific Missile Range Facility in Kauai, Hawaii, ready to rise up on a high-altitude balloon, fire a rocket booster and open up a cushion shaped like an inner tube to ease its descent into the Pacific Ocean.
For astronomers, planets around other stars tend to come in two basic types: rocky worlds and gas giants. Now, scientists have identified a third class of exoplanets, called "gas dwarfs," that fall in between the others.These gas-dwarf alien planets have thick atmospheres like their larger gas-giant cousins but never quite made it to the size of the planetary behemoths found in the Earth's the outer solar system, researchers said.
In a first-of-its-kind study, researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign looked at 90 years of hurricane fatality data collected by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and found that powerful hurricanes with female names were more deadly than hurricanes of the same strength with male names.The reason, they say, is tied up with a lingering and subconscious sexism that continues to permeate our society.
Which came first: life or habitability? Although this question seems at first sight contradictory, a new paper by Colombian researchers is bringing to the attention of astrobiologists a classical conundrum: Is life also required for habitability? On Earth it is almost a matter of fact that in the same way as habitable conditions on our planet are mandatory for life, the existence of life could also be determinant at making our world permanently habitable.
Weather officials in Albuquerque say a mysterious presence that showed up on its radar the last few nights has turned out to be of the insect variety.The National Weather Service says a swarm of grasshoppers were detected over Albuquerque's West Mesa for the fourth night in a row on Friday.
Bees, like birds and butterflies, use the Sun as a compass for navigation, whereas mammals typically find their way by remembering familiar landmarks on a continuous mental map. However, the latest research suggests that bees also use this type of map, despite their much smaller brain size. The work adds a new dimension to complex bee-navigation abilities that have long captivated researchers.
In South Africa, local legend has it that the elephants like to get drunk. They seek out the marula tree, overindulge on its sweet fruits, and enjoy the intoxicating effects of the slightly fermented juice.Tales of the tipsy pachyderms go back at least two centuries. In the 1830s, a French naturalist called Adulphe Delegorgue described stories from his Zulu guides of mysteriously aggressive behaviour in male elephants after they fed on the marula fruits.
Coffee lovers have a new way to ensure they are getting the perfect brew - by listening to it roast.New research by coffee aficionado and underwater acoustics expert Associate Professor Preston Wilson from the University of Texas, Austin has shown that the cracking sounds emitted during the bean roasting process could provide the foundations of an automated roast monitoring technique.
For our size, we humans have the biggest brains in the animal kingdom, but physically we appear pretty mediocre.Surprisingly, it turns out that your average fit human can outrun a deer. In fact, a theory claims that we humans evolved the ability to be good endurance runners, so we could chase animals for hours, run them to a standstill, and kill them. The theory continues that their high-density protein and energy helped our brains evolve bigger and bigger.
Scientists says they have obtained the best evidence yet for an important quantum physics phenomenon inside a $15m computer built by a Canadian firm.D-Wave claims it has built the first practical quantum computer, a type of machine that could solve complex problems faster than is possible today.
The National Security Agency (NSA) is collecting millions of images a day for facial-recognition purposes.The documents reveal that the NSA is using new software to mine social media, emails, text messages and other digital communications for images. They also show the agency is capable of and interested in intercepting forms of communication beyond text and audio.
A solar-powered plane that will be taken on a round-the-world journey in 2015 is set to make its inaugural flight on Monday.The Solar Impulse 2 will take off from Payerne airfield in Switzerland.It is a larger, upgraded version of the aircraft that flew across America last year with adventurers Bertrand Piccard and Andre Borschberg at the controls.
THE future looks curvy. A spate of gadgets sporting concave displays has already been launched, and the big manufacturers will soon be hurling yet more TVs and smartphones with curved screens on to the shelves. Rumours continue to swirl that even Apple's forthcoming iPhone 6 will bend to the craze later this year.There's more to the trend than just a novel shape, though.
While Amazon may deliver your new book via drone, the continued study of Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) could increase the amount of weather data collected to better predict storm intensities and save lives in the path of severe weather.According to experts, warnings for violent storms such as tornadoes could increase from 20 minutes to 60 minutes, an increase that could save thousands of lives and give people more time to protect their property.
A new study shows that drowsiness alters awareness in much the same way as a common form of brain damageDamage to certain parts of the brain can lead to a bizarre syndrome called hemispatial neglect, in which one loses awareness of one side of their body and the space around it. In extreme cases, a patient with hemispatial neglect might eat food from only one side of their plate, dress on only one side of their body, or shave or apply make-up to half of their face, apparently because they cannot pay attention to anything on that the other side.
Wearing a Superman t-shirt or a white coat can improve exam performance, researchers have found.Students put through mental ability tests and found that those wearing plain t-shirts gained an average of 64 per cent compared with those in Superman t-shirts who scored an average of 72 per cent.Related: What you wear can change your brain
The tangled highway of blood vessels that twists and turns inside our bodies, delivering essential nutrients and disposing of hazardous waste to keep our organs working properly has been a conundrum for scientists trying to make artificial vessels from scratch. Now a team has made headway in fabricating blood vessels using a three-dimensional bioprinting technique.
On the Sunday before Memorial Day, when much of America was enjoying their holiday weekend, some vandals in Utah decided it would just be a swell idea to carve their initials and the date onto a rock. The problem? The rock was also home to a beautiful piece of rock art that had survived in the Utah wilderness for centuries.
A case of medieval identity theft might have allowed an unusually rare Pocket Bible from the 13th century to find a home at the University of South Carolina. If researchers can establish that the hand-lettered book was once part of the holdings of a pre-Reformation English monastery or friary, they'll bring to light a truth hidden nearly 500 years ago.
The closest comparison is Swiss cheese: holes in vast swaths of land where looters, armed with machine guns and bulldozers, take to ancient archaeological sites in search of loot. To the untrained eye, these holes, visible in satellite images, seem haphazard. But to experts, these deep pits, spanning hectares of land, are the work of sophisticated traffickers.
Two men whose remains were recently excavated from tombs in western China put their pants on one leg at a time, just like the rest of us. But these nomadic herders did so between 3,300 and 3,000 years ago, making their trousers the oldest known examples of this innovative apparel, a new study finds.With straight-fitting legs and a wide crotch, the ancient wool trousers resemble modern riding pants, says a team led by archaeologists Ulrike Beck and Mayke Wagner of the German Archaeological Institute in Berlin.
The family and followers of one of India's wealthiest Hindu spiritual leaders are fighting a legal battle over whether he is dead or simply in a deep state of meditation.His Holiness Shri Ashutosh Maharaj, the founder of the Divya Jyoti Jagrati Sansthan religious order with a property estate worth an estimated £100 million, died in January, according to his wife and son.However, his disciples at his Ashram have refused to let the family take his body for cremation because they claim he is still alive.
A new study that looks at the density and composition of newly discovered planets outside our solar system, could one day aid in highlighting those capable of supporting life.The study, led by Professor Geoffrey W Marcy, from the University of California, Berkeley and published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, analysed information collected from the Kepler spacecraft mission.
Assuming we one day contact aliens, how will we communicate with them? That's the subject of a new book from NASA called Archaeology, Anthropology and Interstellar Communication. The book steps outside astrophysics and computer science to explore how archeologists and anthropologists have approached cross-cultural communications between human cultures, and what those techniques and analytical frames could contribute to understanding a message from an alien culture.
Life on Mars could have flourished on the flanks of a giant Martian volcano in the relatively recent pastGeological landforms spotted on the flanks of a giant Martian volcano suggest that lakes could have existed there just 210m years ago. In geological terms, this is the recent past. On Earth at that time, the earliest dinosaurs were evolving as part of the late Triassic period.
You've never seen a solar eruption video quite like this before.After 11 months in space, NASA's Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) has captured video of a coronal mass ejection in unprecedented detail, and the results are spectacular.And while you watch the video, keep this dazzling detail in mind: The field of view for this imagery is five Earths wide and about seven and a half Earths tall, according to a NASA release.
A month-long research mission on the ocean floor, led by Fabien Cousteau, the grandson of famed oceanographer Jacques Cousteau, is slated to begin this weekend. Fabien Cousteau and a team of "aquanauts" will spend a record 31 days living and working underwater as part of the expedition, dubbed Mission 31.Cousteau and his team are expected to splash down on Sunday (June 1), at around 11 a.m. EDT (1500 GMT). The researchers will live aboard Aquarius Reef Base, a seafloor habitat located roughly 63 feet (19 meters) underwater in the Florida Keys.
It looks like just another rock, but what researchers are examining is a four-billion-year-old chunk of an ancient protocontinent that holds clues about how Earth's first continents formed. Continents today form when one tectonic plate shifts beneath another into Earth's mantle and cause magma to rise to the surface, a process called subduction.