Newsdesk Archive
MIT researchers are currently working what they see as the next phase of robotics: bakable robots. In two recently released papers, the scientists outline how specially designed, self-folding components could be produced using 3D printers, which could then be baked in order to form working robot parts.
One day, my research team and I were following a school of bottlenose dolphins near shore as we do on a regular basis in the waters off Los Angeles, California. We just wrapped up our photo-identification work and were moving on to take video of dolphin social interactions and enter data on behavior.
I've been wondering lately, do animals invent names? As in names for themselves? Names for each other? I've always thought that what we do when we call ourselves "Ralph" or "Laura" is unique, something exclusively human. But it turns out that's wrong. Other animals have name-like calls that they use much like we do.
To hide themselves from deadly flies, crickets on two Hawaiian islands have evolved an inability to sing.Ten years ago, two years apart, males appeared on Kauai and Oahu with altered wings, which they would normally rub together to chirp and attract females.
One of the best ways to avoid being bothered is to masquerade as something unsavory, reports a new study identifying a spider whose web and body resemble bird droppings.The orb-web Cyclosa ginnaga adds to the growing list of spiders that are nearly indistinguishable from avian excrement.In this case, the spider sells the look via additions, otherwise known as "decorations," to its web, which may include carcasses, egg sacs, plant detritus or silk.
Open wide, this won't hurt a bit. That might actually be true if the dentist's drill is replaced by a promising low-powered laser that can prompt stem cells to make damaged hard tissue in teeth grow back. Such minimally invasive treatment could one day offer an easy way to repair or regrow our pearly whites.When a tooth is chipped or damaged, dentists replace it with ceramic or some other inert material, but these deteriorate over time.
Why are some 75-year-olds downright spry while others can barely get around? Part of the explanation, say researchers is differences from one person to the next in exposure to harmful substances in the environment, chemicals such as benzene, cigarette smoke, and even stress.
A traditional Chinese martial art and sport may be able to slow down the aging process, according to a recent study.Researchers found that Tai Chi is beneficial in raising the numbers of a cluster of differentiation 34 expressing (CD34+) cells, a stem cell important to a number of the body's functions and structures.
Women who sleep in rooms with too much light are more likely to be overweight, a new study has suggested.A team at the Institute of Cancer Research in London found women who slept in a bedroom with enough light to see across it at night had bigger waistlines than those who slept in darker rooms.
A website set up by a student at Harvard teaches us to look carefully at statistics. And it's fun at the same time."Margarine consumption linked to divorce." If you saw that headline on a newspaper or website, what would you think?What if you read a little further and found a compelling graph showing the rates of divorce and margarine consumption tracking each other closely over almost 10 years.
We might think of quirky fruit beers made in small, independent breweries as a modern trend.But in fact the practice goes back 9,000 years when high-ranking cavemen drank brews which included fruit and strange ingredients such as pine resin.Unlike in modern times, alcohol was considered to be sacred and was used in ritual ceremonies, new research suggests.
The Antiquities Authority announced Tuesday that it unearthed a rare 800-year-old lead seal from the Monastery of St. Sabas in Jerusalem.The seal, stamped by the Monastery of St. Sabas, bears a Greek inscription; the find is noted for importance Christian history in the Holy Land.
Gardaí are investigating vandalism to the Lia Fáil - the standing stone at the top of the Hill of Tara in Co Meath.A garda spokesman confirmed that green and red paint was poured over the stone overnight.More: The famous standing stone on the Hill of Tara was vandalised last night
Tough and tiny zircon crystals have helped researchers rule out an enormous volcanic blast as the source of ash used to make Maya pottery, deepening this long-running archaeological mystery."While we're a little sad not to have solved the mystery, we're really confident we can say the most likely source quite conclusively isn't a match," said lead author Kevin Coffey, a geology master's student at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Scientists working with data from NASA's Cassini mission have developed a new way to understand the atmospheres of exoplanets by using Saturn's smog-enshrouded moon Titan as a stand-in. The new technique shows the dramatic influence that hazy skies could have on our ability to learn about these alien worlds orbiting distant stars.
In some ways, it's an ominous pitch. By measuring the "magnetic fingerprint" of any building in the world, the Finnish company IndoorAtlas can conjure up a startlingly precise indoor map of any building. It's technology that sci-fi has dreamt of for decades. But instead of surveillance, it's being used for shopping.
Aside from air, water and fresh vegetables, what would need to survive on the moon? One thing that would likely of feature high on the list is a decent, reliable wireless internet. And thanks to a group of researches from MIT and Nasa this kind of connectivity could be within the realms of possibility.
Microsoft's Skype will eventually be able to translate voice calls between people. In an on-stage demo at the Code conference today, Microsoft's CEO Satya Nadella showed off Skype Translator, an upcoming version of the service that is capable of translating voice conversation in "near real-time".
People with high levels of cynical distrust may be more likely to develop dementia, according to a new study. Cynical distrust, which is defined as the belief that others are mainly motivated by selfish concerns, has been associated with other health problems, such as heart disease. This is the first study to look at the relationship between cynicism and dementia.
Parenting a small child requires the forethought of a crisis planner, the reflexes of a professional goalkeeper, the energy of a cheerleader and the empathy of a therapist.After eons of practice at such caregiving, it's clear that mothers have evolved some brawn in those parts of the brain that weave together these many skills, and that practice strengthens them. But fathers can clearly develop the same cognitive and emotional muscle, and a new study finds that the more he cares for his offspring, the more a father's brain looks and behaves like that of a mother engaged in the everyday care of a child.
In school, we learned that our brains make humans a unique species. But a new study shows that human muscle may have evolved even more than the brain.Researchers found that the metabolome (products of metabolism such as sugars, vitamins, amino acids and neurotransmitters) of the human brain has evolved four times faster than the chimpanzee brain. Intending to use muscle as a control.
A fossilized tooth dredged from the bottom of the English Channel near Dorset, England, belonged to a formidable Jurassic marine predator and is the largest known tooth of its kind found in the U.K., according to a new study.The 2.36-inch-long tooth has a broken tip, and would have been even bigger when new, suggests the paper, published in the journal Historical Biology.
Dozens of nearly complete skeletons of prehistoric marine reptiles have been uncovered near a melting glacier in southern Chile.Scientists found 46 specimens from four different species of extinct ichthyosaurs. These creatures, whose Greek name means "fish lizards," were a group of large, fast-swimming marine reptiles that lived during the Mesozoic Era, about 245 million to 90 million years ago.
A new study describes the characteristics of agriculture at its beginnings by comparing kernel and wood samples from ancient Near East sites, with present day samples. It is the first time that direct evidence is able to reveal humidity and fertility conditions of crops, as well as the process of cereal domestication developed from the Neolithic (12,000 years ago) to early Roman times (around 2,000 years ago).
When electrical pulses are applied to the ventral tegmental area of their brain, macaques presented with two images change their preference from one image to the other. The study is the first to confirm a causal link between activity in the ventral tegmental area and choice behavior in primates.
The origin of metallurgy in the ancient Near East is well attested in the southern Levant, with rich assemblages of copper artefacts from the Nahal Mishmar cave and the unique gold rings of the Nahal Qanah cave, confirming this as the main centre during the second half of the 5th millennium CalBC. However many important questions about Chalcolithic metallurgy in the southern Levant remain unanswered...
A new study describes the characteristics of agriculture at its beginnings by comparing kernel and wood samples from ancient Near East sites, with present day samples. It is the first time that direct evidence is able to reveal humidity and fertility conditions of crops, as well as the process of cereal domestication developed from the Neolithic (12,000 years ago) to early Roman times (around 2,000 years ago).
Two years ago, a Google balloon launched to test the feasibility of delivering the Internet to people around the world achieved notoriety when it was identified as a UFO in Pike County, Kentucky.Turns out, the balloon responsible for the mass UFO sightings was not only a prototype, but one that wasn't following the plans of its designers."This is a balloon that went rogue...
Preliminary approval was given Thursday for SpaceX to build a spaceport on an isolated stretch of South Texas coastline.In a major step for the proposal, the Federal Aviation Administration found that construction of a spaceport and launching of rockets would not have deleterious environmental effects on the coast near Brownsville."The proposed action is consistent with existing national environmental policies and objectives...
A massive peat bog covering some 40,000 to 80,000 square miles has been discovered in the central African nation of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, reported the BBC.After satellite images suggested what could be a huge tropical peatland -- about the size of England, according to the BBC -- in a remote area of Congo-Brazzaville, a research team from the University of Leeds, the Wildlife Conservation Society-Congo, and Congo-Brazzaville's Marien Ngouabi University ventured into the soggy area and confirmed its presence.
Impact craters reveal one of the most spectacular geologic process known to human beings. During the past 3.5 billion years, it is estimated that more than 80 bodies, larger than the dinosaur-killing asteroid that struck the Yucatan Peninsula 66 million years ago, have bombarded Earth.
In a report co-authored by Michael Walker and colleagues of Spain's Murcia University, scientists suggest that early humans who lived in the Cueva Negra (Black Cave) rock-shelter of southeastern Spain about 800,000 years ago used fire, and that they exhibited behaviors that indicated a cognitively sophisticated late early Pleistocene use of resources and tools in their environment. The detailed report is published in the upcoming Volume 15 of Popular Archaeology Magazine.
London's international fish trade can be traced back 800 years to the medieval period, according to new research published today in the journal Antiquity.The research, led by archaeologists from UCL, Cambridge and UCLan, provides new insight into the medieval fish trade and the globalisation of London's food supply.
In prehistoric Eurasia, drugs and alcohol were originally reserved for ritual ceremonies, and weren't used merely to satisfy hedonistic motives, a new study suggests. What's more, given the sacred role of the substances, their use was likely highly regulated and only available to elite citizens.
Scientists at the University of Bristol in the UK insist that alcohol allows you to find people more attractive. This contradicts some previous research.One of the reasons science exists is to reassure us that we are not, in fact, crazy.
Doctors are set to recreate a sci-fi technique as they begin suspended animation by freezing trauma victims in the hope of keeping them alive.The technique will be used on ten patients who would otherwise be expected to die from their wounds, which will likely come from stabbings or shootings. The doctors on the project will be paged when a patient is likely to fit the procedure. There is around one such case every month, and they have a survival rate of less than 7 per cent.
Pilots of the future could be able to control their aircraft by merely thinking commands. Scientists have now demonstrated the feasibility of flying via brain control -- with astonishing accuracy.The pilot is wearing a white cap with myriad attached cables. His gaze is concentrated on the runway ahead of him.
A new method of space travel is about to get its moment in the sun.Several upcoming missions aim to harness the subtle push of sunlight, using gossamer "solar sails" to cruise through the heavens like boats through the sea. Such propellant-free propulsion could take craft cheaply and efficiently to a variety of destinations, from locations in near-Earth space to the edge of the solar system and beyond, advocates say.
Three researchers have been eating worms for 105 days, while living in a sealed laboratory in Beijing, to test whether astronauts could use them as their main source of protein.The volunteers fattened up the worms on plants grown inside the Moon Palace One biosphere at the Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, the South China Morning Post reports. They had various preparations for eating the worms - using a bean sauce and other seasonings to make the dish as appealing as possible.
Heat from a volcano erupting beneath an immense glacier would have created large lakes of liquid water on Mars in the relatively recent past. And where there's water, there is also the possibility of life. A recent paper by Brown University researchers calculates how much water may have been present near the Arsia Mons volcano and how long it may have remained.
Several months ago headlines were abuzz with the news that the ever mysterious Voynich Manuscript had at last been deciphered. They may have jumped the gun a bit, but the news was exciting nonetheless. A team of researchers from the American Botanical Council, led by botanist Arthur O. Tucker PhD. published a paper in the journal HerbalGram, wherein they declared that they had identified the language used in the manuscript, and thus solved the puzzle.
Santiago (AFP) - A group of students discovered a 7,000-year-old mummy during a trip to northern Chile, local media reported Monday.La Tercera newspaper reported that the find was made by chance Saturday during a visit to the Morro de Arica site by local students.
A Russian fisherman who expected nothing more than a haul of tench and carp ended up catching a 4,000-year-old pagan god statue from the bottom of a riverbed.Local archaeologists have hailed Siberian Nikolay Tarasov's finding as 'unique and amazing' as well as 'probably worth its weight in gold'.Mr Tarasov was fishing on a day off from his driving job in the village of Tisul in southern Russia.
For those of you who have only seen the Leonardo DiCaprio movie, the Man in the Iron Mask was an actual historical figure. He was a mysterious prisoner in the time of Louis XIV. Two centuries later, a cryptoanalyst finally discovered his probable identity.In 1698, the Man in the Iron Mask had gained quite a reputation for himself (some said herself) when he had been in a prison in Savoy.
The UBR-1 is a 4-foot tall, one-armed robot that could make warehouses and factories more efficient by performing tasks normally done by human workers.Unlike the industrial robots widely used in manufacturing today -- usually large machines isolated from people for safety reasons -- this robot can work alongside humans or autonomously in a workspace filled with people.
With the world population expected to rise from 7.2 billion to 9.6 billion by 2050, living space is becoming more and more of an issue. A student at Parsons has a vision of our future homes that is both clever and disquieting. Bernando Schorr's "Mixed Reality Living Spaces" project highlights how augmented reality can be used to make windowless 100-square-foot apartments hospitable.
Microalgae-based biofuel not only has the potential to quench a sizable chunk of the world's energy demands, say Utah State University researchers. It's a potential game-changer."That's because microalgae produces much higher yields of fuel-producing biomass than other traditional fuel feedstocks and it doesn't compete with food crops," says USU mechanical engineering graduate student Jeff Moody.
China plans to take more than five million ageing vehicles off the roads this year in a bid to improve air quality, with 330,000 cars set to be decommissioned in Beijing alone, the government said in a policy document published on Monday.Pollution has emerged as an urgent priority for China's leaders as they try to reverse the damage done by decades of breakneck growth and head off public anger about the sorry state of the nation's air, water and soil.
Ants are capable of complex problem-solving strategies that could be widely applied as optimization techniques. An individual ant searching for food walks in random ways, biologists found. Yet the collective foraging behaviour of ants goes well beyond that, as a mathematical study to be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reveals: The animal movements at a certain point change from chaos to order. This happens in a surprisingly efficient self-organized way. Understanding the ants could help analyze similar phenomena - for instance how humans roam in the internet.
The US government site that conspiracy theorists blame with some of the biggest natural disasters in recent history is set to close this summer. HAARP, a military site studying the atmosphere, is no longer needed by the country, it has said.Conspiracy theorists claim that the US can use the facility to modify weather, disable satellites and control minds. It has been blamed for causing freak weather, natural disasters and diseases, as well as industrial calamities such as the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster.
Beneath the calm waters of Lake Kivu lie vast but deadly reserves of methane and carbon dioxide, which Rwanda is tapping both to save lives and provide a lucrative power source.Plans are in place to pump out enough gas for power that would nearly double Rwanda's current electricity capacity, as well as reducing the chance of what experts warn could be a potentially "catastrophic" natural disaster.
Australian researchers are working on fighting out-of-control bushfires with explosives, likening the process of using the soundwave produced by a blast to blowing out a candle.Graham Doig of Sydney's University of New South Wales has been examining how blasts can extinguish fires, a technique sometimes used on oil well blazes.
A newly-discovered source of oceanic bioavailable iron could have a major impact our understanding of marine food chains and global warming. Scientists have discovered that summer meltwaters from ice sheets are rich in iron, which will have important implications on phytoplankton growth.
The epic dust bunnies lurking within our galaxy are so dark and dense that they cast the darkest shadows ever observed.Dust marks out cycles of galactic creation and destruction in our cosmos. Grains of carbon and silicon condense in the swollen outer layers of dying stars, or perhaps in the violence of supernova explosions. The grit is blasted out into the surrounding galaxy, where gravity encourages gas to condense around it, forming clouds that eventually collapse and ignite into new generations of stars.
Humans have long wondered whether we are alone in the universe. According to scientists working with the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute, the question may be answered in the near future."It's unproven whether there is any life beyond Earth," Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the SETI Institute, said at a House Committee on Science, Space and Technology hearing Wednesday (May 21). "I think that situation is going to change within everyone's lifetime in this room.".
RED lettuce is in the spotlight on the International Space Station. Last week NASA announced that it has activated a plant growth system on the orbiting lab.The first fresh-food production system on the ISS, the Veggie chamber provides lighting and nutrients for seeds. It relies on cabin conditions for temperature control and carbon dioxide, and on astronauts for water.
Billions of years ago, Mars suffered from numerous big impacts, and the resulting backwash ultimately scarred the surface of Phobos, one of the Red Planet's two tiny moons, researchers say.In 1976, images from NASA's Viking orbiter revealed that the surface of Phobos is covered in numerous parallel, channel-like grooves. Over the years, researchers have come up with many hypotheses to explain the odd features, but the origin of the satellite's grooves are still heavily debated today.
The hunt for planets in faraway solar systems has taken another step forward with the debut of a new planet-detecting instrument led by a Stanford physicist.The Gemini Planet Imager (GPI) has set a high standard for itself: The first image snapped by its camera produced the best-ever direct photo of a planet outside our solar system.
Michael Lewis's bestselling book "Flash Boys" describes how some brokers, engaging in high frequency trading, exploit fast telecommunications to gain fraction-of-a-second advantage in the buying and selling of stocks. But you don't need to have billions of dollars riding on this-second securities transactions to appreciate the importance of fast signal processing. From internet to video streaming, we want things fast.
An asteroid that exploded last year over Chelyabinsk, Russia, leaving more than 1,000 people injured, collided with another asteroid before hitting Earth, research by scientists shows.Analysis of a mineral called jadeite that was embedded in fragments recovered after the explosion showed that the asteroid's parent body had struck a larger asteroid at a relative speed of about 3,000mph (4,800km/h).
by Robert BauvalSix Egyptians (two inspectors of the Supreme Council of Antiquities and four others from the security personnel and a travel agent) have been jailed since February because they allegedly assisted German tourists in April 2013 to take a small sample of red paint from the Cartouche of King Khufu in the Great Pyramid. But now new official evidence has been found that the sample of red paint from the Cartouche was taken in 2006 during the time of Zahi Hawass, which proves the innocence of the six Egyptians.
A judicial review concerning the final resting place of King Richard III has determined that the University of Leicester has the right to reinter the King's remains at Leicester Cathedral in England.Richard III, who ruled England from 1483 to 1485, died at the Battle of Bosworth Field and was buried in a hasty grave in Leicester. The exact location was lost to history until 2012, when archaeologists on the hunt for the king's bones excavated a parking lot and found the skeleton, its spine bent with scoliosis and skull marred by battle wounds.
New techniques for visualizing fossils are transforming our understanding of evolutionary history according to a paper published by leading palaeontologists at the University of Bristol.Palaeontology has traditionally proceeded slowly, with individual scientists labouring for years or even decades over the interpretation of single fossils which they have gradually recovered from entombing rock, sand grain by sand grain, using all manner of dental drills and needles.
Notions of gods arise in all human societies, from all powerful and all-knowing deities to simple forest spirits. A recent method of examining religious thought and behaviour links their ubiquity and the similarity of our beliefs to the ways in which human mental processes were adapted for survival in prehistoric timesd.
It was more than 14 million years ago that ancient apes departed Africa and began radiating throughout Europe and Asia, according to scientists. So why don't we see apes in Europe today?Researchers in Spain argue that a variety of great apes went extinct in Europe about 7 million years ago because the qualities that allowed them to spread throughout the Old World were the same that sealed their fate.
The star of a new mammoth exhibition at London's Natural History Museum is 42,000 years old.She goes by the moniker, Lyuba, which means "love" in Russian. This diminutive mummified baby mammoth was found frozen in the Yuribei River in the Yamal Pennisula, Siberia.Professor Adrian Lister, the museum's mammoths expert, said according to a Press Association report."One question everyone asks is can you clone a mammoth?".
A case study of a family living in Denver, Colo. suggests that cannabis can help treat intractable seizures in children. The child in the family suffers from a severe form of epilepsy known as Dravet Syndrome and used to have as many as 50 convulsions a day.The mother started giving the child a strain of marijuana with high levels of cannabidiol (CBD), a compound in the plant that does not produce a "high," Live Science Reported. Soon after taking the drug along with her typical anti-epilepsy medication, the seizures decreased considerably and now the child suffers from just two to three seizures per month.
Logging in the Brazilian Amazon has had a devastating effect on the rainforest and its indigenous people. However, a new operation by the army, air force and military police is designed to save an endangered tribe - by keeping loggers off their land.It took Pira'I two small steps to get up into the helicopter, but those steps bridged two completely different worlds.
In less than a century, humanity destroyed the Aral Sea. It is one of the most emblematic environmental disasters. But now it seems the sea has collapsed at least twice before, and recovered both times.In 1961, the Aral Sea in central Asia was the world's fourth largest lake. But massive irrigation programmes begun during the Soviet era diverted water from the rivers that feed it, reducing the lake's volume to just 10 per cent of what it was and leaving large areas dry.
They might be the odd couple of the bird world.Scientists on Thursday identified the closest relative of New Zealand's famed kiwi, a shy chicken-sized flightless bird, as the elephant bird of Madagascar, a flightless giant that was 10 feet (3 meters) tall and went extinct a few centuries ago.
Scientists have been left baffled after discovering female pigs may be able to tell whether a sperm will produce a boy or girl before it reaches the egg.The study, published in the journal BMC Genomics, shows different genes are active in female pigs' reproductive system cells depending on whether female (X) or male (Y) sperm are present.
A TWITCHING mass of European house crickets clings to a maze of meshed cardboard in a tent about the size of a minivan. They are inside their new home, an abandoned warehouse in Youngstown, Ohio, where they will prosper until being killed, ground into "flour" and baked into cookies and tortilla chips.These are the first insects in the US to be farmed for human consumption.
Western Australia astronomers have discovered a radio galaxy near Earth by accident. The previously unknown radio galaxy is considered quite close to Earth, and was discovered late last year.ICRAR astronomer Dr Natasha Hurley-Walker spotted the galaxy while in a team meeting last year looking at a digital image captured by the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA).
Some of the wind turbines generating electricity on Earth today grew out of technology developed in the 1990s for settlements on Mars.Back then at NASA's Ames Research Center, senior research scientist David Bubenheim and his colleagues worked on designing a complete ecological system to sustain astronauts on Mars. To generate electricity for the future Martians, they developed a hybrid concept combining two renewable sources: wind and sun.
For the first time, a massive solar flare revealed the process that created it, confirming new theories about flares and the explosive ejections of solar material often linked with them, a new study reports.Understanding how solar flares form brings scientists a step closer to predicting them, along with the dangerous space weather that has the power to damage satellites and power grids on Earth, researchers said.
After an eight-hour dance in microgravity, Dextre and the Canadarm became the first self-repairing robotic system in space, replacing a faulty camera without leaving orbit or relying on pesky astronauts.The Canadarm, Dextre, and mobile base stations work together as a robotic system attached to the International Space Station.
Over-sharing on Twitter might prove to be a boon for mental health services. Grabbing 750 tweets a second, a new tool can read the emotional state of a region in real time. The idea is to figure out exactly what kinds of events affect people's moods and tailor mental health treatments accordingly.
Many fans know that J.R.R. Tolkien created the fantasy languages in The Lord of the Rings, but fewer know that he was a linguist first, and an author second. Now, the New York Times reports that one of his earliest scholarly works, a translation of Beowulf, is being published for the first time.Beowulf is a 3,000-line story told in verse, written some time around the turn of the first millennium, and is one of the oldest written examples of Old English.
THINK of Earth as a giant supercomputer, with the moon as our backup hard drive. That's the vision behind plans to use the moon as off-planet storage for the religious, cultural and even genetic trappings of humanity.The movers and shakers behind this idea initially plan to hitch their wagons to privately funded firms vying to win millions in a Google-backed space flight competition, with the first of those missions scheduled to fly before the end of 2015.
The robot tank is moving rapidly through the scrub on its caterpillar tracks. It comes to a sudden halt and its machine gun opens fire with devastating accuracy.It may seem like science fiction but is actually a scene from a video featuring a robot being tested by the US Army.
On Tuesday, the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) officially approved rules to allow the testing of autonomous vehicles on public roads. The rules will take effect September 16, 2014.The move has been a long time coming, with the DMV promising back in December 2013 that it would post regulations for public use of self-driving cars and then holding a public hearing in January to address concerns about them. These new rules will set a statewide standard for all manufacturers.
According to a newly published study, wild mice frequently and voluntarily run on an exercise wheel if provided access to them in nature, even in the absence of a food reward. Further, the length of running bouts by wild mice matched those of captive mice. These findings dispel the idea that wheel running is a product of captivity, indicative either of neurosis or a mindless repetitive behaviour that may be associated with poor welfare or close confineme.
Comb jellies, which seem like a simple form of marine life, took a radically different path to neural complexity than the rest of the animal kingdom.The finding could have implications for synthetic and regenerative medicine, according to researchers.
Fruit flies 'think' before they act, a study by researchers from the University of Oxford's Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour suggests. The neuroscientists showed that fruit flies take longer to make more difficult decisions.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.
Eavesdropping may be rude, but snooping on honeybee conversations could reveal a lot about the environment. Their unique mode of communication, the waggle dance, contains clues about the health of the landscape they live in. In effect, the bees are giving a thumbs-up or thumbs-down to different methods of conservation.
Here's one vision of the future of meat: We manufacture it from stem cells in giant "bioreactors" of the sort you might find in a modern pharmaceutical factory. The cells come from a contented pig that lives in the yard outside the village meat factory, where technicians sometimes poke it with a biopsy needle, and meat-eaters with quiet consciences give it a pat on their way to buy a cultured piece of it.
Water gave birth to life, and guarded it jealously. For billions of years, the land was barren, while life proliferated in the buoyant, nurturing bath of the seas, ignorant of such terrestrial concerns as falling down. The first invaders were plants, which began creeping upland from the streams and swamps some 450 million years ago, followed by arthropods and a few brave mollusks, which became the land snails.
Politics is one of the most complex areas of human thought. So when I heard the claim that scanning people's brains could predict political choices, I was naturally sceptical.Brain science is achieving extraordinary insights, but mapping what you can measure in a brain scanner on to human social interactions is a huge leap, like trying to find exact correlations between two bowls of soup - only one soup is made from vegetables, macaroni and stock, and the other soup is made up of abstract ideas like economics, equality and history.
Patients with pancreatic cancer have a different and distinct profile of specific bacteria in their saliva compared to healthy controls and even patients with other cancers or pancreatic diseases, according to research presented today at the annual meeting of the American Society for Microbiology. These findings could form the basis for a test to diagnose the disease in its early stages.
NFL players wear them to help them breathe, and so will racehorse California Chrome on June 7, when he attempts to win the Triple Crown.But there was some doubt as to whether the horse would be allowed to wear a nasal strip at the Belmont Stakes, where a first-place finish would make him the 12th horse in history to win the Triple Crown.
The world of 3-D home theater has slowly expanded over the last decade with many attempts to try and bring a real world environment and feel to televisions. Although it may not be fully achieved just yet, MIT Media Lab researchers are inching closer to an experience that will allow the viewer to move into different positions throughout the room and gain a completely different perspective from the other.
London-based firm OwnFone has released what it says is the world's first Braille phone.The front and back of the phone is constructed using 3D printing techniques and can be customised.
Research in Wales, Japan, Australia and the U.S. shows that between 40 and 53 per cent of the bereaved receive some kind of signal or visitation when someone close to them dies.Usually they sense a presence; sometimes they actually see or hear one.See also: Graham's facebook post on this article
In Namibia, at the boundaries between grassland and desert, a strange phenomenon has puzzled people for centuries. Mysterious circles of barren land form in the middle of rich, thick grasses. Dubbed "fairy circles," their formation has been attributed to everything from termites to poison gas. Now, a group of scientists has a new theory.
By evaluating the bacteria and fungi found in fossilized feces, microbiologists are providing evidence to help support archeologists' hypotheses regarding cultures living in the Caribbean over 1,500 years ago. They report their findings today at the annual meeting of the American Society for Microbiology.
A group of archaeologists from the Museum of London Archaeology digging at the site of the U.S. Embassy in Vauxhall, South London, has discovered flint tools dating to the Paleolithic period (before 10,000 BC).
Psychedelics may be illegal in most modern Western societies, but an archaeologist has concluded that these visionary substances have played an integral part in human history - and what's more, their role was initially a spiritual one, rather than being for pleasure.Related: Alcohol and drugs: Not just for modern humans
Archaeologists working on two small Caribbean islands have found artifacts intentionally buried beneath two 18th-century plantation houses.They appear to have been placed there for their spiritual power, protecting the inhabitants against harm, said John Chenoweth, a professor at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, in an interview with Live Science.
A team of researchers from Arizona State University has found that releasing excess heat from air conditioners running during the night resulted in higher outside temperatures, worsening the urban heat island effect and increasing cooling demands."We found that waste heat from air conditioning systems was maximum during the day but the mean effect was negligible near the surface.
Antarctica is now losing about 160 billion tonnes of ice a year to the ocean - twice as much as when the continent was last surveyed.The new assessment comes from Europe's Cryosat spacecraft, which has a radar instrument specifically designed to measure the shape of the ice sheet.