Newsdesk Archive

Among all the strange things about Saturn's rings one of the strangest are the mysterious radial "spokes" in its B Ring.At first thought to be caused by the same sort of gravitational interactions between Saturn, its moons and the ring material that create the myriad divisions in the rings, information gathered by the Cassini spacecraft in 2005 established that the spokes are caused by the planet's magnetic field.

One sign we're on our way not just to visit, but to colonize, Mars is that people are talking about what sort of governance the first settlers will implement and adhere to. If an international group, will each remain a citizen of his/her nation on Earth and live according to that nation's laws? If sent there by private enterprise, will the new Mars settlers remain forever beholden to the company that sent them? Will they arrive with a pre-written code or will they form a new tribal council-of-the-whole for TCB and keeping themselves on the straight and narrow?

In the South Pacific there is a place so remote that few people have ever heard of it, let alone seen it: the Trobriand Islands. The Trobriands are located off the east coast of Papua New Guinea, and no white man had set foot there until the late 1700s. During World War I, however, the islands were visited by a man who would one day become a legend in the field of anthropology, Bronislaw Malinowski.

Going on a first date? The chance that it leads to wedding bells may depend, in part, on how similar his or her DNA is to yours.New research finds that people tend to pick spouses whose genetic profile shares similarities with their own. The effect is subtle (other similarities, such as similarity in education, have a larger influence), but it's important to understand that mating isn't truly genetically random, researchers report today (May 19) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

A new phase in the study of planets beyond the solar system is about to begin.Two new cameras designed to directly image Jupiter-class planets orbiting other stars and gather data on extrasolar-planet atmospheres have been brought on line at two of the world's major observatories located on arid mountaintops in Chile's Atacama Desert.

A small asteroid buzzed Earth Saturday (May 10), coming well within the orbit of the moon.The near-Earth asteroid 2014 JG55 missed our planet by just 60,000 miles (96,560 kilometers), or about one-quarter of the distance between Earth and the moon. The flyby marked the third-closest asteroid near miss of 2014, researchers said.

Residents of northeastern Australia have reported seeing a flaming object plummeting to Earth, police said Friday, adding that the incident remains a mystery as no evidence of a crash has been found.Queensland state police said they received several reports from the northern city of Townsville on Thursday evening about a burning object falling from the sky, possibly hitting the ground near Ross River Dam.

NASA's bold plan to park an asteroid near the moon may also test out a new way to protect Earth from dangerous space rocks.Last year, the agency announced that it intends to tow a near-Earth asteroid into a stable lunar orbit, where it could be visited repeatedly by astronauts for research and exploration purposes. NASA officials are still ironing out the details of the mission, which may bag up an entire small space rock or snag a boulder off the surface of a large asteroid.

University of Leicester researchers have captured stunning images of Saturn's auroras as the planet's magnetic field is battered by charged particles from the Sun.The team's findings provide a "smoking gun" for the theory that Saturn's auroral displays are often caused by the dramatic collapse of its "magnetic tail.".

Geologist Erin Argyilan's concept of sand dunes was shattered last July when she heard the parents of a 6-year-old boy frantically shouting that their son had been buried alive after falling into a hole.Argyilan initially thought Nathan Woessner's parents must have simply lost sight of him on Mount Baldy at the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore along Lake Michigan, which draws thousands of visitors annually.

The fresh waters of the Colorado river reached the Gulf of California at high tide on Thursday, the first time in decades that the river has flowed all the way to the sea.The reunion of the Colorado with its natural outlet is the result of years of negotiation between Mexican and US water authorities that allowed for a huge pulse of water to be released from a dam on the US-Mexico border starting on 23 March.

Sea turtles are likely to be beneficiaries of a warming climate as hotter incubation conditions trigger a rising share of female hatchlings that could lift natural rates of population growth, new research to be published in Nature Climate Change on Monday shows.But gains will be temporary if temperatures keep rising and nudge populations towards becoming all female, or exceed levels at which developing embryos die, the study found.

Antarctica is rising unusually quickly, revealing that hot rock in the Earth's mantle hundreds of miles below the icy continent is flowing much faster than expected, researchers say.Antarctic ice is more than 2.6 miles (4.2 kilometers) thick on some parts of the continent, a reminder that glaciers that were miles thick once covered many parts of Earth's surface. When these ice sheets shrink, as is happening now in the world's polar regions due to climate change, the underlying Earth rebounds upward, like how mattresses typically decompress after people get off them.

Never before has anyone seen mummy hair, muscles and bone at such fine resolution.It is enabling scientists for the first time to tell their age of the mummies, what they ate, the diseases they suffered from, and how they died.Each mummy was put into a state-of-the-art CT scanner. Researchers probed them layer by layer to build up a high-definition 3D picture of each one.

Rock drawings spotted by a tourist reveal ancient Egyptian art "drew upon cultural influences from Africa", archaeologists have claimed.The Neolithic pictures are 1,000 years older than the pyramids and were discovered in a cave in eastern Sahara.

Some historical mysteries have lain forgotten for centuries by man, buried by the sands, or snow, of time. Be it the remoteness of the location or the danger involved in reaching it, for whatever reason, these places have kept their mysteries to themselves over the ages, hidden in their dark corners of the world from the outside as time marches on around them. It is often pure accident that saves these historical oddities from eternal obscurity and dredges them into the light for us to finally take a look at.

A 300-million-year-old shark, dubbed "Godzilla shark," has been found in the Monzano Mountains east of Albuquerque, New Mexico, paleontologist John-Paul-Hodnett informed Discovery News.Hodnett is an independent researcher with institutional ties to Northern Arizona University and the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science. He serendipitously came across the tip of the shark's nose, embedded in rock, while on a trip to the mountains. Its size, anatomy, age, and state of preservation make it a noteworthy discovery, in addition to the shark's resemblance to the fictional Godzilla.

It is an incredible view of how the world looked during the ice age.An online mapmaker has revealed a unique map showing the world as it would have looked 14,000 years ago, when the last ice age was at its harshest.Designers worked with geologists to accurately map the massive landbridges and ice sheets that made the world a very different place.

Fossilised bones of a dinosaur believed to be the largest creature ever to walk the Earth have been unearthed in Argentina, palaeontologists say.Based on its huge thigh bones, it was 40m (130ft) long and 20m (65ft) tall.Related: Have we reached peak dinosaur?

Now that anyone can buy Google Glass, you can expect the upcoming months to be filled with first-person videos of the oddest sort. But with all the unexpected uses people are sure to find with their new glasses, perhaps none will be as cool as Aki Watanabe's.Watanabe is a paleontologist and graduate student at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

The UK will run out of its own gas, coal, and oil within the next five years, according to a report released by the Global Sustainability Institute at Anglia Ruskin University. And France, which continues to rely heavily on nuclear energy, could run out of its remaining fossils fuels within the next year, reports the BBC.

A new plastic that "heals itself" has been designed, meaning your cracked phone screen or broken tennis racquet could mend its own wounds.The polymer automatically patches holes 3cm wide, 100 times bigger than before.

Sharks and humans last shared a common fishy ancestor about 500 million years ago. Ever since, the two lineages have been making life difficult for one another. There has been an unhappy history of killing and eating. Recently humans have been doing most of the harm. Yet sharks are now lending us a helping hand, aiding in the design of proteins that help us fight disease.

When a single fish gets tipsy, it swims faster than usual. This was already known. But what happens when it is thrown into a tank with sober fish? The fish swims even faster than when it is alone, and, furthermore, the whole school speeds up. The sober fish may take the soused swimmer's speed and uninhibited fin-flapping for leadership.

Chickens are coming home to roost in U.S. cities, near pens for goats and hives for bees. In urban yards and on once-vacant lots, planting beds brim with herb plants, pea vines, and the ubiquitous kale."There's been tremendous growth in the number of urban farms in cities dealing with an excess of land and not enough people living [there]".

The average girl born in 2012 can expect to live to the age of 72; the average boy to 68, according to statistics released today (May 15) by the World Health Organization. People just about everywhere are living longer, and the average life expectancy has gone up by six years since 1990. In low income countries, the gains have been higher, with life expectancy up an average of nine years.

Scientists have worked out an easy way of turning light into matter, a process thought to be impossible when first proposed 80 years ago.The proposed experiment, reported in the journal Nature photonics, would recreate events that occurred in the first 100 seconds of the big bang, as well as in cosmic rays and gamma ray bursts.Related: Matter will be created from light within a year, claim scientists

Exploding stars act like cosmic cement mixers, according to an analysis that looks at how to spot this building material in space.Cement is made by mixing water with calcium silicates, which are molecules made of calcium, silicon and oxygen. When very massive stars die, they explode and litter space with a variety of elements. All the ingredients of cement have been found in such stellar remnants.

If the clock rewound, would organisms evolve the same way they did before? Humble stick insects may hold the answer to that long-running question in biology. Through studies of these bugs, whose bodies match the leaves the insects live on, researchers have found that although groups of the bug have evolved similar appearances, they achieved that mostly via different changes in their DNA.

Birds fly hundreds of kilometres every night when they migrate south for winter. Now it seems all North American land birds use one of just three routes when they seek out the sun.Different bird species often converge on the most efficient routes, resulting in clustered routes called "flyways", not that dissimilar to a human highway. The flyways of water birds are well-established, but land birds migrate at night and less is known about the paths they follow.

People distrust those who are mean with money, according to an Oxford University study.For the study, the researchers conducted two experiments involving 265 Oxford University students.In the first experiment, participants played the Dictator Game in pairs. Researchers gave $14 to one of the pairs and asked them to give either $2 or make a generous donation of $6 to their partners.

Can a little meditation before combat help a Marine fight better, while preventing post-traumatic stress disorder once the bullets stop flying? A new study suggests that "mindfulness training," a form of body and mind control based on Zen Buddhism, can help both during and after combat to lower breathing and heart rate levels, as well as returning the body to normal more quickly.

During the last ice age, an enormous stretch of fertile grassland connected Eurasia and the Americas. Known today as Beringia, this lost landscape was home to a small but important population of humans. Now, the discovery of one skull in an underwater cave tells an intriguing story about what happened to the Beringians when they came to America.Related: Flooded cave hides Naia, a 13,000-year-old American

According to a report from the website www.apsa2011.com, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) has destroyed Assyrian statues and artifacts believed to be 3000 years old.The Assyrian archaeological artifacts were illegally excavated from the Tell Ajaja site.

New analysis of ancient Jian wares reveals the distinctive pottery contains an unexpected and highly unusual form of iron oxide. This rare compound, called epsilon-phase iron oxide, was only recently discovered and characterized by scientists and so far has been extremely difficult to create with modern techniques."What is amazing is that the 'perfect synthesis conditions' for epsilon-phase iron oxide were encountered 1000 years ago by Chinese potters," says Catherine Dejoie, scientist at Berkley Lab's Advanced Light Source and ETH Zurich.

Curators at the British Library have compiled a list of the manuscripts in their collection which they believe are among the best examples of Ye Olde Comick Bookes, rife with superheroes, supervillains, origin stories, drama and, of course, blood and gore. Among the top candidates:Saint and Superhero: The Guthlac Roll (12th or 13th Century).

It takes a fair event to get me out of the house away from Daily Grail and family duties, but it wasn't a difficult decision last night when best-selling author Graham Hancock stopped into my hometown of Brisbane on his 'Magicians of the Gods' tour to talk about everything from consciousness to UFOs to lost megalithic cultures.

In a startling development Mahesh Keshavam, Gangadhar Yadav and Akbar Patel have announced that they've deciphered the Indus Valley script. Their task was made simple by the discovery of an Indian equivalent of the Rosetta Stone. For those who don't know, the Rosetta Stone, an ancient Pharaonic-Egypt decree discovered in the 18th century, helped decipher the ancient Egyptian script.

I have just received results of a test that traced back my genome 67,000 years. The cutting edge test has jangled my identity, serving me breath-taking personal information on a petri-dish platter. The test covers "deep ancestry", and though it just takes a few seconds to conduct the cheek swab, the results take months, as a technology called single nucleotide polymorphism uses arrays on computer chips to probe for 150,000 different mutations.

Maybe you're not a gambler, but you probably have a grasp of the concept of a "hot hand" or a lucky streak. I've wondered before--is this a real phenomenon? My own experience suggests it could be, but one person's anecdotes are just that. Luck-ily, a new study of online betting shows that the concept of a "hot hand" is real, but perhaps not for the reasons you might expect. The study found that when a person wins a bet, they become increasingly likely to succeed after each win.

Astronomers have likely discovered the first sibling of the sun, a star born from the same cloud of gas and dust as the one that lights Earth's days.Finding more solar siblings could help shed light on how the solar system came to harbor life, researchers said, adding that life may even teem on the planets circling such sister stars.

Japanese beverage maker Otsuka is sending a 1 kilogram titanium can filled with powdered sports drink and children's dreams to the moon. The specially designed canister, which contains a shipment of Otsuka's Pocari Sweat powder, will mark a disturbing new frontier for humanity: the first commercial product delivered to another world for marketing purposes.

Human beings are causing mountains in California to rise, according to a new study published yesterday in scientific journal Nature. Geologists monitoring the mountains of the California Coast and Sierra Nevada ranges found that the vertical positions of more than 500 GPS sensors have been steadily increasing by between one and three millimeters every year. The authors of the study blame the rise on the huge amount of water extracted from the area by human hands. More than 160 cubic kilometers of water has been taken from the region for irrigation and other purposes in the last 150 years, a process that has contributed to a net raise in the height of the mountains, and may lead to more frequent earthquakes in the state.

Tropical storms appear headed for the Poles, peaking in ferocity at successively higher latitudes over the past three decades, according to a new study in the journal Nature.Climate scientists generally predict that tropical storms (called hurricanes, typhoons, or cyclones, depending on the ocean where they form) will increase in power but decline in frequency in coming decades due to global warming.

Honeybees could be on their way back, according to a new federal report.The collapse of bee populations around the country in recent years has led to warnings of a crisis in foods grown with the help of pollination. Over the past eight years, beekeepers have reported winter losses of nearly 30 percent of their bees on average.

Octopuses look like a tangle of squishy arms, and yet they never tie their limbs in a knot, finds a new study that determined octopus skin repels itself.The discovery, published in the latest issue of Current Biology, is helping researchers to design soft robots, such as for surgical use, that can reshape their bodies without becoming a jumbled mess.

Researchers have been able to grow new bone using a monkey's own skin cells.The US study is the first time such a development has been shown in an animal that is similar to humans.Professor Martin Pera, program leader of the ARC Stem Cells Australia, says the work, published today in Cell Reports, is "another step towards the development of safe stem cell therapies for human disease".

Mice severely disabled by a condition similar to multiple sclerosis (MS) were able to walk less than two weeks following treatment with human neural stem cells. The finding uncovers potential new avenues for treating MS. When scientists transplanted human stem cells into MS mice, they predicted the cells would be rejected, much like rejection of an organ transplant. Expecting no benefit to the mice, they were surprised when the experiment yielded spectacular results.

Mindfulness. Zen. Acem. Meditation drumming. Chakra. Buddhist and transcendental meditation. There are countless ways of meditating, but the purpose behind them all remains basically the same: more peace, less stress, better concentration, greater self-awareness and better processing of thoughts and feelings.

BLUE, a fluffy robot with cartoon eyes, is telling a little girl a story about a snowman. The tale plays out in pictures on a tablet that sits between the preschooler and Blue's soft plastic feet. Blue's eyes look down at the characters as it describes them, then up at the child to check that she's paying attention. The 5-year-old is one of the first children to learn language skills from a robot, and she is captivated.

The writing is on the wall for smog as the University of Sheffield unveils the world's first air-cleansing poem, a new work by award-winning writer Simon Armitage.Simon, Professor of Poetry at the University, and Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Science Professor Tony Ryan, have collaborated to create a catalytic poem called In Praise of Air - printed on material containing a formula invented at the University which is capable of purifying its surroundings.

A handful of tree ring samples stored in an old cigar box have shed unexpected light on the ancient world, thanks to research by archaeologist Sturt Manning and collaborators at Cornell, Arizona, Chicago, Oxford and Vienna, forthcoming in the June issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science.The samples were taken from an Egyptian coffin; Manning also examined wood from funeral boats buried near the pyramid of Sesostris III.

Zoom! A star was recently spotted speeding at 1.4 million miles an hour (2.2 million km/hr), which happened to be the closest and second-brightest of the so-called "hypervelocity" stars found so far.Now that about 20 of these objects have been found, however, astronomers are now trying to use the stars beyond classifying them. One of those ways could be probing the nature of dark matter, the mysterious substance thought to bind together much of the universe.

An acclaimed "smoking gun" discovery explaining the unfolding of the early universe faces rumors of a cosmic misfire.In March the Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization 2 (BICEP2) team headed by Harvard's John Kovac announced a pioneering observation of cosmological "gravitational waves" first predicted by Einstein to headlines worldwide. The claim seemed to confirm the conventional cosmological view of the universe expanding exponentially in its earliest instant.

A gas giant has been added to the short list of exoplanets discovered through direct imaging. It is located around GU Psc, a star three times less massive than the Sun and located in the constellation Pisces.

A new study has suggested that the reason we yawn has nothing to do with tiredness or boredom, but actually works in order to cool down our brains and help us think a little clearer.Like any computer the brain has an optimal working temperature and when it becomes too hot yawning helps cool it down, increasing both the heart rate and blood flow while delivering a big gulp of air to the head, cooling the blood in that area.

Are your lectures droning on? Change it up every 10 minutes with more active teaching techniques and more students will succeed, researchers say. A new study finds that undergraduate students in classes with traditional stand-and-deliver lectures are 1.5 times more likely to fail than students in classes that use more stimulating, so-called active learning methods.

Our knack for language helps us structure our thinking. Yet the ability to wax poetic about trinkets, tools or traits may not be necessary to think about them abstractly, as was once suspected. A growing body of evidence suggests nonhuman animals can group living and inanimate things based on less than obvious shared traits, raising questions about how creatures accomplish this task.

A small, toothy fish, which researchers say resembles the terrifying creature from the movie "Alien," is turning out to be a big mystery for the scientists who study it.Kryptoglanis shajii is a tiny, subterranean catfish with a number of defining skeletal features, including a bulging lower jaw similar to a bulldog's. The fish's strange, bony face has baffled researchers, who have been unable to classify the odd species.

People have thought for decades that the rough skin of sharks may give them a swimming boost and now scientists from Harvard University have made the first ever realistic simulated shark skin. They also measured that the fish's sharp scales boost swimming by up to 6.6% while reducing the energy cost.

Google's vision of the future not only involves sticking tiny displays in front of your eyeballs, but also cars that can drive themselves around with you safely inside. If that sounds like something that's too far off, Google is trying to show the world otherwise. This week, the company invited press for a test drive inside the current development version of its driverless cars, which can maneuver through both backroads and freeways, sensing what's around them and automatically adjusting.

The USB flash drive is one of the most simple, everyday pieces of technology that many people take for granted.Now it's being eyed as a possible solution to bridging the digital divide, by two colourful entrepreneurs behind the start-up Keepod.

Systems able to process thoughts and translate them into a command to move objects are very useful for people who cannot speak or move, but have the disadvantage of causing mental fatigue. However, a Mexican researcher designed an intelligent interface that is capable of learning up to 90 percent of the user's instructions thus operate autonomously and reduce fatigue.

Activity on the sun is sparking lightning strikes here on Earth, a study suggests.Scientists have found that when gusts of high-speed solar particles enter our atmosphere, the number of lightning bolts increases.

The asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs also caused a temporary but devastating "impact winter" -- darkening the sky, cooling the Earth and inhibiting photosynthesis, new research suggests.Sixty-six million years ago, a 6.2-mile-wide asteroid known as Chicxulub struck the Earth off the Yucatan coast, setting off a series of catastrophic events that led to one of the world's worst mass extinctions.

Sometimes, studying past technologies leads to remarkable discoveries that can help design better materials for the future. This is the little known science of Archaeomimetics, i.e. the development of new technologies and materials inspired by ancient crafts and cultures.The skillful potters of the Song dynasty (960-1279 CE) in the Fujian province of South East China have produced some of the most exquisite wares in the ancient world: the famous Jian bowls are characterized by their shiny black glaze exhibiting incredibly rich and variable brown or silvery surface patterns.

Bat poo may have preserved the world's oldest sperm, which has been found at a fossil site in north-western Queensland, say researchers.The discovery of giant sperm along with other internal reproductive organs in exceptionally well-preserved 17-million year old fossil ostracods is reported today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

RNA interference (RNAi), a technique that can turn off specific genes inside living cells, holds great potential for treating many diseases caused by malfunctioning genes. However, it has been difficult for scientists to find safe and effective ways to deliver gene-blocking RNA to the correct targets.

A team of biologists has discovered how plants use fungi to help them to gather vital nutrients from the soil. The researchers found that a protein, known as a proton pump, at the interface of fungus and root cells energises cell membranes creating a pathway into the plant cell for nutrients such as phosphorus.

Two weeks ago, at a conference in South Africa, scientists met to discuss how to contain a deadly banana disease outbreak in nearby Mozambique, Africa. At fault was a fungus that continues its march around the planet. In recent years, it has spread across Asia and Australia, devastating plants there that bear the signature yellow supermarket fruit.

Oldest siblings may be the conservatives of the family, according to new research from Italy.The new study finds that the eldest child of a family is more likely to be conservative than the second-born, which supports a controversial theory that has been kicking around the social science community since at least 1928. The question of whether and how much birth order really shapes a person's personality remains open and contentious, however.

In a decade, cognitive enhancement may have gone mainstream. Pills can already help you stay up longer, bring more focus to your work, and who knows what else. But what might sound good on an individual level could create societal disruptions, or so Palo Alto think-tank the Institute for the Future proposes in its latest Ten-Year Forecasts.

People who use mobile phones intensively appear to have a higher risk of developing certain types of brain cancer, French scientists have said, reviving questions about phone safety.Individuals who used their mobiles for more than 15 hours each month over five years on average had between two and three times greater risk of developing glioma and meningioma tumours compared with people who rarely used their phones, they found.

Scientists have discovered that it is possible to induce lucid dreaming in sleepers by applying mild electrical currents to their scalps, a study says.Lucid dreaming is when a sleeper recognises they are dreaming and may even be able to manipulate the dream's plot and control their behaviour.Related: Is Paranormal Experience the Result of Geomagnetic Energy Acting on our Brains?

As a name, Hessdalen may be more familiar to UFO watchers than scientists. The valley in Norway is prone to "strange, hovering, flashing balls of lights" best attributed, as some believe, to alien origins. Now scientists say they're on the verge of an explanation: The valley is a giant natural battery.Related: UFOs in Norway: Are the 'Hessdalen Lights' Sparks From a Giant Geological Battery?

Among the most sought-after prizes in astronomy these days are "exomoons," or moons orbiting exoplanets. Although astronomers have detected more than a thousand exoplanets, any exomoons they might harbor have so far eluded capture. However, judging by our own Solar System, where moons greatly outnumber planets, scientists believe that hordes of exomoons are indeed out there.

Russia will reject a US request to use the International Space Station after 2020 in retaliation for trade sanctions imposed over Russia's aggressive annexation of Crimea, its deputy prime minister announced today.The space station is maintained by both American and Russian crews. But because NASA's shuttle program was decommissioned in 2011, the only way to get there is on board Russian spacecraft. The US currently pays Russia $60 million per person to ferry its astronauts to the space station, and had planned to continue working on it until 2024.

Conflicting results in measurements of how long neutrons live has physicists rethinking their experiments, because solving the riddle may point the way to exotic new physicsDespite decades of taking measurements, scientists cannot agree on how long neutrons live. Neutrons are stable inside atoms, but on their own they decay in about 15 minutes, more or less, into a few other particles. Exactly how much more or less is the sticking point. Each experiment seems to yield a different answer.

Next Monday, the World Health Organization (WHO) will decide whether or not to destroy the last remaining samples of the variola virus that causes smallpox, one of the deadliest diseases in human history. If they decide to destroy the samples, the consequences may be terrible. If they decide not to destroy the samples, the consequences may be terrible.

They may not have the easiest ride in life, enduring accusations of inferiority complexes and jokes at their expense, but it appears short men will have the last laugh after all.Scientists have found evidence that they are likely to live longer, with those under five foot two having a greater chance of surviving to old age.

Males have disproportionately larger noses than females (at least those of European descent) - not because they tend to be larger overall, but because of how muscle is distributed differently between men and women, NBC News reported.A study out of the University of Iowa found that male noses of European descent are 10 percent larger than female noses. Since men are generally composed of more lean muscle, which requires more oxygen and energy for growth and maintanence than fat, they've adopted a plus-size schnoz through the process of natural selection.

Cocaine use in the UK is now so common that traces of the drug have contaminated the drinking water supply, a report has shown.In a study to assess the dangers from pharmaceutical compounds appearing in the water we drink, scientists discovered traces of cocaine after it had gone through intensive purification treatments.

The effects of bullying in childhood can last a lifetime, both for the child who's bullied and for his or her tormenter.But according to a Duke University study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, while young adults show long-term ill effects of having been bullied in childhood, those who did the bullying might actually be healthier than their peers in one important measure.

Most products claiming to provide the benefits of exercise just by taking a pill should include the caveat that they only work if you drop the pills on the floor, bend over and pick them up 100 times before swallowing. That may not be the case with a newly-discovered natural molecule that appears to really offer some of the same benefits as a workout.

The West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which holds enough water to raise global seas by several feet, is thinning. Scientists have been warning of its collapse, based on theories, but with few firm predictions or timelines.University of Washington researchers used detailed topography maps and computer modeling to show that the collapse appears to have already begun.

At the surface, Antarctica is a motionless and frozen landscape. Yet hundreds of miles down the Earth is moving at a rapid rate, new research has shown.The study, led by Newcastle University, UK, and published this week in Earth and Planetary Science Letters, explains for the first time why the upward motion of the Earth's crust in the Northern Antarctic Peninsula is currently taking place so quickly.

Things were looking up for Earth about 12,800 years ago. The last Ice Age was coming to an end, mammoths and other large mammals romped around North America, and humans were beginning to settle down and cultivate wild plants. Then, suddenly, the planet plunged into a deep freeze, returning to near-glacial temperatures for more than a millennium before getting warm again.

Rice farming still shapes the personalities of people in southern China, according to new research from a group of psychologists. The cooperation required to plant, tend and harvest rice grown paddy-style makes those born in southern China think more communally than those born in northern China, where the primary crop is easier-to-farm wheat. The study purports to help explain why some Asian cultures remain more communal despite growing as rich as their European and more individualistic peers.

Did the ancient Egyptians eat like us? If you're a vegetarian, tucking in along the Nile thousands of years ago would have felt just like home.In fact, eating lots of meat is a recent phenomenon. In ancient cultures vegetarianism was much more common, except in nomadic populations. Most sedentary populations ate fruit and vegetables.

Astonishing new findings reveal Amesbury is now the longest continuous settlement in the UK. Previously it was thought that Stonehenge was conceived by European immigrants but this shows that British settlers were behind its construction.Carbon dating from an archaeological dig by the University of Buckingham shows that the parish of Amesbury, which includes Stonehenge, has been continually occupied for every millennia since 8820BC.

Thanks to Pantone, the contemporary authority on all things color, we have a way of documenting the chromatic flow -- all 2,100 hues it's gleaned from the visible ends of the rainbow. But artists have been recording the depths of color for much longer than Pantone's lifespan, mixing and melding pigments to create the violets, turquoises and ambers we ogle in art history books.

Nighttime dreams in which you show up at work naked, encounter an ax-wielding psychopath or experience other tribulations may become a thing of the past thanks to a discovery reported on Sunday.Applying electrical current to the brain, according to a study published online in Nature Neuroscience, induces "lucid dreaming," in which the dreamer is aware that he is dreaming and can often gain control of the ongoing plot.

Dengue fever infects millions and kills tens of thousands of people around the world each year. But an Australian-led program is showing positive signs of turning this brutal disease into a bite-sized issue.Hungry mosquitoes float out into the steamy air as soon as Sularto snaps open the container lid. Blowing the insects on their way, as gently as he might blow on a spoonful of hot soup, the stocky Indonesian waits for a minute before hitching his denim bag more securely onto his shoulder and setting off to the next release point.

A new study from Harvard implicates two neonicotinoid pesticides, imidacloprid and clothianidin, in the ongoing plague of honeybee Colony Collapse Disorder. Imidacloprid is the most widely used pesticide in the world, and both are approved by the EPA.A team of Harvard biologists has come closer to cracking the mystery of honeybee Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), eight years after its appearance.

Research from North Carolina State University shows that blueberries produce more seeds and larger berries if they are visited by more diverse bee species, allowing farmers to harvest significantly more pounds of fruit per acre."We wanted to understand the functional role of diversity," says Dr. Hannah Burrack, an associate professor of entomology at NC State and co-author of a paper on the research. "And we found that there is a quantifiable benefit of having a lot of different types of bees pollinating a crop.".

Sixty years ago today, Roger Bannister accomplished something humans had only dreamed of decades earlier.As he's described it, the first two laps felt easy, and black-and-white BBC footage of the event corroborates this. He looks at ease, his spikes hardly touching the track before springing another step. When he hit the final lap, the British medical student knew he had to run those last 400 meters in 59 seconds if he was to break the world record.

Lasting feelings of pain or anxiety after an injury may seem perplexing, but they serve an evolutionary purpose, research suggests.Squid that behave more vigilantly after even a minor injury are more likely to survive than their more brazen counterparts, a new study reveals. The findings suggest that persistent pain may be more useful than once thought, according to the study published today (May 8) in the journal Current Biology.

Humans and their primate cousins are well known for their intelligence and social abilities. You hear them called bird-brained, but birds have demonstrated a great deal of intelligence in many tasks.However, little is known about their social skills. A new study shows that ravens are socially savvier than we give them credit for. They are able to work out the social dynamics of other raven groups, something which only humans had shown the ability to do.

A new plant species with an unusual lifestyle - it eats nickel for a living - has been discovered, according to a recent study.Scientists from the University of the Philippines, Los Baños have discovered Rinorea niccolifera, a plant species that accumulates up to 18,000 ppm of the metal in its leaves without poisoning itself, according to Edwino Fernando, lead author of the report and professor, said in a statement.

Oxygen is a signal of life on our own planet, but that's not necessarily the case elsewhere. Particularly when it comes to young planets, signs of oxygen do not necessarily indicate the presence of biological processes, new research argues.Water vapor in the upper atmosphere of a young planet could break into hydrogen and oxygen by incoming ultraviolet and extreme ultraviolet rays from the parent star.