Newsdesk Archive
When parents spend hours poring over baby name books they may imagine that their choice will have a major impact on their child's life. But do names make a difference? Two recent books put this idea under the microscope.
Stone Age children may have played with toy axes and gone to school, researchers believe.Archaeologists have studied Neanderthal sites across Europe, collecting bones and artefacts, building a picture of everyday life in prehistoric communities.
It is already known as the eternal city, and if new archaeological findings prove correct Rome may turn out to be even more ancient than believed until now.Next week, the city will celebrate its official, 2,767th birthday. According to a tradition going back to classic times, the brothers Romulus and Remus founded the city on 21 April in the year 753BC.
The scenes are haunting. A video camera strapped to the nose of a drone aircraft first shows only a spinning, sunlit horizon in the barrens of southern Jordan. Then the camera swoops, low and slow, over a hilltop whose surface recalls photographs of the lunar battlefields of World War I Europe. Crater after crater gouge the hill's stony surface. It looks like the aftermath of a murderous artillery barrage.But the holes aren't the result of explosions. Each has been dug, laboriously, one spadeful at a time, by an army of looters.
NASA's LDSD project aims to develop the capacity to land larger payloads on Mars, perhaps even humans. But first, NASA needs a way to decelerate capsules traveling at supersonic speeds.
The first humans to land and explore Mars will certainly have to bring their food with them. However, if a permanent settlement on Mars is to be both physically and economically sustainable, eventually settlers will have to grow most, if not all of their food on the Red Planet.
There has been a lot of interest recently in an upcoming series of lunar eclipses that begins April 15. These are usually described as "four blood moons" and taken by some to prophesy upcoming disasters.The total lunar eclipse of April 15 will begin a so-called tetrad series of eclipses that is making the rounds online as a potential harbinger of doom, due in part to a recent book on the four blood moons that makes the dubious claim.
This rock's got some bling. A star that is about to wink out over Africa will give us a good look at the first known asteroid with rings.Last month, astronomers described icy rings around the asteroid 10199 Chariklo. They were found during an occultation, when the asteroid crossed in front of a star from Earth's perspective. Seen from South America, the star's brightness dipped in a distinctive pattern, indicating a set of sharply defined rings.
Titan, Europa, Io and Phobos are just a few members of our solar system's pantheon of moons. Are there are other moons out there, orbiting planets beyond our sun? Researchers have spotted the first signs of an "exomoon," and though they say it's impossible to confirm its presence, the finding is a tantalizing first step toward locating others.
Because Russia hasn't been accused of imperial behaviour quite enough lately, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin announced on Friday that the nation plans to carve out an area of operations on the moon.
Amazon has plenty of issues to resolve before its Prime Air delivery drones stand a chance of getting in the air, but CEO Jeff Bezos says the company is rapidly testing more prototypes. In a letter to shareholders published with the SEC, Bezos said that the Prime Air team is "already flight testing our fifth and sixth generation aerial vehicles, and we are in the design phase on generations seven and eight.".
The days of drones needing to return to base to top up their batteries could soon be over.An MIT student has shown off a prototype system allowing a craft to land on a power line and recharge itself.
Scratches in the car finish or cracks in polymer material: Self-healing materials can repair themselves by restoring their initial molecular structure after the damage. Scientists of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and Evonik Industries have developed a chemical crosslinking reaction that ensures good short-term healing properties of the material under mild heating.
A group of Korean researchers have turned their focus on supplying a reliable, efficient power source for wearables. Professor Byung Jin Cho of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) and his team, recognizing that supplying power that is stable and reliable is critical to the successful commercialization of wearables, have come up with a wearable power band that made technology news this week.
Washington (AFP) - The US Navy believes it has finally worked out the solution to a problem that has intrigued scientists for decades: how to take seawater and use it as fuel.The development of a liquid hydrocarbon fuel is being hailed as "a game-changer" because it would signficantly shorten the supply chain, a weak link that makes any force easier to attack.
A RESCUE mission is underway on the Scottish coast north of Edinburgh. Jonathan's Cave, with its rare trove of 1500-year-old rock art, risks being flooded by the sea or buried in a landslide. But rather than fight the elements researchers have opted to save the cave by putting the whole thing on the internet.
Stunning images of a 305-million-year-old harvestman fossil reveal ancestors of the modern-day arachnids had two sets of eyes rather than one. The researchers say their findings add significant detail to the evolutionary story of this diverse and highly successful group of arthropods, which are found on every continent except Antarctica.
The La Brea Tar Pits are famous for the amazing array of Ice Age fossils found there, such as ground sloths, mammoths, and predators like saber-toothed cats and powerful dire wolves. But the climate during the end of the Ice Age (50,000-11,000 years ago) was unstable, with rapid warming and cooling.
UK scientists have challenged the idea that the Titanic was unlucky for sailing in a year when there were an exceptional number of icebergs in the North Atlantic.The new analysis found the iceberg risk was high in 1912, but not extreme, as has previously been suggested.
As a specialist in prehistoric underwater archaeology, Dr Jonathan Benjamin looks at rising sea levels differently from most people and his fascination with this global phenomenon began when as a PhD candidate at Edinburgh University he came across the work of the Danish archaeologists Anders Fischer and Søren H Anderson.In the 1970s and 1980s, Fischer and Anderson recovered some of the most well preserved material ever seen from sites such as the 6,500-year-old settlement at Tybrind Vig.
Known as Vada Volaterrana, it has been identified as a key port system located in present-day Tuscany, Italy, used anciently by the Romans of the city of Volaterrae (today's Volterra) for the import and export of trade goods throughout the Mediterranean. The main harbor was located north of the mouth of the Cecina river, at S. Gaetano di Vada.
A 4,500-year-old log boat is among 12 early Bronze Age, Iron Age and medieval craft that have been located in Lough Corrib, along with several Viking-style battle axes and other weapons.The vessels were discovered by marine surveyor Capt Trevor Northage while mapping the western lake to update British admiralty charts.
As the child of an alcoholic father, Robert Dudley long wondered what caused the destructive allure of alcohol. Then while working in the Panamanian forest as a biologist, Dudley saw monkeys eating ripe fruit, which likely contained small amounts of the stuff, and an answer occurred to him: Maybe alcoholism is an evolutionary hangover.
A new study reported in the Oxford Journal of Archaeology challenges the traditional view that Neanderthal childhood was short, difficult and dangerous.The traditional perception of the toughness of Neanderthal childhood is based largely on biological evidence, but archaeologists led by Dr Penny Spikins from the University of York also studied cultural and social evidence to explore the experience of Neanderthal children.
Humans are unique in their ability to acquire language. But how? A new study shows that we are in fact born with the basic fundamental knowledge of language, thus shedding light on the age-old linguistic 'nature vs. nurture' debate.
In the push for batteries that store more energy and cost less, many researchers are chasing diminishing performance returns with exotic materials and chemistries, including lithium air, liquid metal and molten salt.
Yesterday, the team that produced the first solar-powered aircraft that could fly around the clock unveiled its successor, Solar impulse 2, a craft that it hopes will be able to fly around the world. The airplane is a large collection of impressive feats of engineering: it's large enough to have a wingspan similar to a 747's, yet it weighs just a bit more than the average automobile.
A volcanic island in the Pacific Ocean has merged with its neighbour to form one landmass, the US space agency says.The merged island lies some 1,000km (621mi) south of Tokyo, the result of eruptions on the seafloor that have spewed enough material to rise above the water line.
A team of researchers in France has successfully demonstrated small-scale reflection of seismic waves around a desired geological area. In their paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters, the researchers describe an experiment they conducted at an outdoor site to test whether lessons learned in creating cloaking devices using metamaterials (and other techniques) might be applied to seismic waves generated by earthquakes.
UC Santa Barbara physicist Tarun Grover has provided definitive mathematical evidence for supersymmetry in a condensed matter system. Sought after in the realm of subatomic particles by physicists for several decades, supersymmetry describes a unique relationship between particles.
If desert mirages occur on Mars, "Lake Gusev" belongs among them. This come-and-go body of ancient water has come and gone more than once, at least in the eyes of Mars scientists.Now, however, it's finally shifting into sharper focus, thanks to a new analysis of old data.
Eat your heart out, Marvin the Martian: NASA is building its own flying saucer as part of a project to get bigger payloads to Mars. The disk-shaped object is called a Low Density Supersonic Decelerator, and it's due to fly for the first time this June.
An antimicrobial agent found in common household soaps, shampoos and toothpastes may be finding its way inside human noses where it promotes the colonization of Staphylococcus aureus bacteria and could predispose some people to infection.
A centuries-old Stradivarius, or a shiny new violin? Aficionados often say that older instruments sound better, but a scientific study has found that actually, expert players preferred new ones.Soloists were also unable to tell the difference between new and old violins at any better rate than simple chance.
ONE of our closest long-lost relatives may never have existed. The fossils of Australopithecus sediba, which promised to rewrite the story of human evolution, may actually be the remains of two species jumbled together.The first fossils of A. sediba were found at Malapa, South Africa, in 2008.
New research has added weight to the argument that Neanderthals interbred with the ancestors of Eurasians, thanks to a genome analysis method recently published in the journal Genetics. The technique can detect with greater precision and confidence the genetic signatures of interbreeding.The recent genome-wide analyses based on summary statistics sparked controversy about the possibility of interbreeding between Neanderthals and modern humans in Eurasia.
A new generation may see a moon landing broadcast on live TV in the next couple of years.Teams of engineers are rushing to put a robotic spacecraft on the moon in the Google Lunar X Prize competition, which is offering up to $30 million in prize money for the lunar feat. This week, the Science Channel and Discovery Channel announced that they will cover the moon race, from testing to the liftoff to the live lunar landing of the winning team.
There are numerous fascinating experiments taking place on the International Space Station (ISS) at any time, including efforts to monitor how plants grow in space.But a tree that was grown from a cherry pit that travelled into space five years ago and is now back in solid ground is baffling scientists after it bloomed far earlier than its terrestrial counterparts.
Astronomers have perhaps their best lead to date about the nature of dark matter, the strange and invisible stuff that dominates the material universe.The center of our Milky Way galaxy generates more high-energy gamma rays than can be explained by conventional sources such as supernova remnants and fast-spinning, super-dense neutron stars known as pulsars, a new study suggests.
The quest to find the most mysterious particles in the Universe is entering a critical phase, scientists say.An experiment located in the bottom of a gold mine in South Dakota, US, could offer the best chance yet of detecting dark matter.
Like its traveller god namesake, the planet Mercury is hard to pin down. It now seems that volcanic blasts have rocked it for aeons, and this doesn't mesh with theories of its birth. It even raises the prospect that Mercury may have formed further out in the solar system and migrated in.
An unusual structure with a hexagonal shape surrounding Saturn's north pole was spotted on the planet for the first time thirty years ago. Nothing similar with such a regular geometry had ever been seen on any planet in the solar system. Astronomers have now been able to study and measure the phenomenon and, among other achievements, establish its rotation period.
The Swiss team that flew a solar-powered airplane across America has unveiled the even bigger plane that they plan to take around the world a year from now."It's the most incredible airplane of its time," Bertrand Piccard, the president and co-pilot of the Solar Impulse venture, told VIPs who gathered at Switzerland's Payerne Air Field on Wednesday for the first public look at the 236-foot-wide (72-meter-wide) aircraft.
Dr. Steven Horng, working at Boston's Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, was wearing Glass last year while working on a man whose brain was bleeding. Dr. Horng knew that the patient was allergic to certain drugs that would arrest the bleeding, but didn't know which ones. With no time to leave the stricken patient, Horng says he called up the man's medical records on Google's wearable device, found the relevant information, and stabilized his condition.
They are highly coveted by the young and tech savvy. But Google Glass could hold the potential for improving the quality of life of more than 120,000 people suffering from Parkinson's disease in the UK.
A new analysis of rare leafcutter-bee fossils excavated from the Rancho La Brea Tar Pits in Southern California has provided valuable insight into the local environment during the last Ice Age.The La Brea Tar Pits, located in Los Angeles, contain the world's richest deposits of Ice Ace fossils, and are best known for their collection of saber-toothed cats and mammoths.
These days we freak out whenever some dinky bollide explodes in the sky over Russia. But scientists have now reconstructed the effects of an enormous 3.26-billion-year-old asteroid impact on Earth that boiled the oceans, turned the sky red hot, and generated a half-hour-long earthquake that shook the planet.
Archaeologists made a rare and unexpected discovery during a natural gas pipeline salvage excavation in Jezereel Valley, Israel, when they came across a 3,300-year-old Egyptian sarcophagus complete with human remains and numerous grave goods. It is the first time in around fifty years that an anthropoidal (person-shaped) coffin has been found in present-day Israel.
Lying on the northern outskirts of the city of Cusco in Peru, lies the remarkable walled complex of Saksaywaman (Sacsayhuaman), believed to have been built by the Inca. The site is famous for its remarkable large dry stone walls with boulders carefully cut to fit together tightly without mortar, displaying a precision of fitting that is unmatched in the Americas.
Primitive tools dug up by archaeologists in South Lanarkshire have been dated at 14,000 years old - making them the earliest evidence of humans in Scotland.The discovery follows a study of more than 5,000 flint artefacts recovered from fields at Howburn, near Biggar, from 2005 to 2009.
About a millennium ago, the ancestral Pueblo Indians in the Chaco Canyon in northwestern New Mexico obtained their precious turquoise using a large trade network spanning several states, new research reveals.In the new study, researchers traced Chaco Canyon turquoise artifacts back to resource areas in Colorado, Nevada and southeastern California.
The "astonishingly well preserved" Egyptian singer Tamut wore a glamorous wig, was adorned with amulets but suffered furred arteries and may have died of a heart attackFor a stylish Ancient Egyptian lady the thought of appearing in public without her wig may have proved horrifying.
Study rules out alternative explanation for genetic similarities between the archaic hominid and people in Europe and Asia todayTechnical objections to the idea that Neandertals interbred with the ancestors of Eurasians have been overcome, thanks to a genome analysis method described in the April 2014 issue of the journal GENETICS.
Human bones can serve as a historical record of their owners' lifestyles, and now ancient human skeletons from Central Europe may reveal how humans shifted from rugged nomads to plow-pushers, researchers say.Leg bones of people living in the Danube River valley became weaker after 5,300 B.C., around the time when agriculture emerged in Europe, a new study suggests.
Have you ever wondered why most natural languages invariably use the same spatial attributes -- high versus low -- to describe auditory pitch? Or why, throughout the history of musical notation, high notes have been represented high on the staff? According to neuroscientists, high pitched sounds feel 'high' because, in our daily lives, sounds coming from high elevations are indeed more likely to be higher in pitch.
It's a guessing game parents like to ponder: What will my child look like when she grows up? A computer could now answer the question in less than a minute.University of Washington researchers have developed software that automatically generates images of a young child's face as it ages through a lifetime. The technique is the first fully automated approach for aging babies to adults that works with variable lighting, expressions and poses.
Britain's first cloned dog has been born after a £60,000 test tube procedure, a television programme will reveal.The tiny dachshund puppy, weighing just over 1lb, was born in Seoul, South Korea, at the end of last month following a competition advertised in the UK offering the procedure free of charge.
Visiting Eric Horvitz at Microsoft Research headquarters in Redmond, Wash., is a full-service experience.At the building's first-floor bank of elevators, situated on a busy corridor, a "smart elevator" opens its doors, sensing that you need a ride.
Scientists have succeeded in regenerating a living organ for the first time. Researchers rebuilt the thymus -- an organ in the body located next to the heart that produces important immune cells. The advance could pave the way for new therapies for people with damaged immune systems and genetic conditions that affect thymus development.
Forget popular video game Plants Vs. Zombies, some plants are zombies and scientists have uncovered how bacterial parasites turn them into the living dead."For the first time, we can reveal how this remarkable manipulation takes place," says Professor Saskia Hogenhout from the John Innes Centre.
Mars, Earth, and the Sun all aligned last night, a rare 'opposition of the planets' that only happens once every 778 days. But what made this event so remarkable is that it occured precisely a week before everyone on earth will see the first of FOUR dark red 'blood moons', an extraordinary event some Christians believe represents the End of Days and the second coming of Christ.The King James Bible predicts: "The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the great and the terrible day of the LORD comes," [Joel 2:31].
Drugs including magic mushrooms and MDMA are being used to treat cancer patients and people suffering from social anxiety by scientists in the US, in a series of groundbreaking studies.In a recent study, cancer patient in New York were given magic mushrooms, which contain psilocybin, a powerful psychoactive drug with effects similar to LSD.
A study by researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder has found that a tendency to procrastinate is affected by genetic factors, which are also linked to a propensity to be impulsive.
PH2OG Water is a startup project coming out of Princeton University's eLab that harvests water from clouds in the mountains of the Caribbean island of St. Vincent and distills it into pure, premium drinking water. The idea originated in a social entrepreneurship class taught at the University in 2011.
You heard it last month, last week and most probably will hear the same message tomorrow: battery-bothered ordinary citizens wish that the best and brightest in labs could just take their hands off the next big things and turn to every person's need for an easier time powering up their devices and keeping them running when most needed.
Fragile things can be useful. Earth's surface is a lively place, made up of shifting plates of rock. Now it seems the surface only moves because it is partly made of flimsy rocks that have been damaged in the planet's heart.Uniquely in the solar system, Earth's crust is divided into several sections.
This week a massive quake off the coast of Chile killed six and forced hundreds of thousands to evacuate in fear of a tsunami. The shaking evoked memories of the events off the coast of Japan in 2011 that triggered meltdowns at a nuclear power plant that the country is still struggling with.
The decline in European bee populations is not as bad as feared, the European Union's executive says, as it published a report into bee health in 17 EU member states.'We can take some encouragement from the limited winter bee mortality in several major beekeeping countries,' said EU Health Commissioner Tonio Borg on Monday, adding however, that some states 'show high winter bee mortality'.
A newly-published comprehensive family tree for hummingbirds traces the rapid and ongoing birth of new species throughout this modern family's 22-million-year history. The findings indicate that hummingbird diversification is driven primarily by two elements: by their exploitation of new niches created by the Andean uplift and expansion into new geographic regions, and by their unique relationship to flowering plants.
A NASA camera on Mars has captured what appears to be artificial light emanating outward from the planet's surface.The photo, beamed millions of miles from Mars to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., was taken last week, apparently by one of two NASA rovers on the red planet.Although the space agency hasn't issued any official statement yet about the phenomenon, bloggers and NASA enthusiasts have started chiming in.
Wearing a fitness tracker on your wrist or clipped to your belt is so 2013. Engineers have demonstrated thin, soft stick-on patches that stretch and move with the skin and incorporate off-the-shelf electronics for sophisticated wireless health monitoring. The patches stick to the skin like a temporary tattoo and incorporate a unique microfluidic construction with wires folded like origami to allow the patch to bend and flex.
The next generation of wearable technology aims to embed sensors in your clothes, so you only need to get dressed to start monitoring your health."Wearable electronics are great but the only way they are going to take off is if you stick them on something people have to wear every day,".
Night vision contact lenses may be the stuff of science fiction movies, but new research points the way to how we could some day see in the dark with our own eyes. Electrical Engineers at the University of Michigan have found a new way to sense infrared light using two layers of an atom-thick layer of carbon, known as graphene.
Reconstructing the history of our Galaxy has just become a whole lot easier, thanks to a team of international astronomers led by Dr Luca Casagrande from the Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics.
In 520 million-year-old fossil deposits resembling an 'invertebrate version of Pompeii,' researchers have found an ancestor of modern crustaceans revealing the first-known cardiovascular system in exquisitely preserved detail. The organ system is surprisingly complex and adds to the notion that sophisticated body plans had already evolved more than half a billion years ago.
An ancient Egyptian mummy found with an intact brain, but no heart, has a plaque on her abdomen that may have been intended to ritually heal her, say a team of researchers who examined the female body with CT scans.The woman probably lived around 1,700 years ago, at a time when Egypt was under Roman rule and Christianity was spreading, according to radiocarbon dating.
Stonehenge has long been one of the world's most mysterious monuments. The massive rock circle has given up a few of its secrets to a digital scanning project led by historical-preservation organization English Heritage with an assist from the York Archaeological Trust. The 3D laser-scanning data collected last year has unveiled 72 hidden ax-head carvings in the surface of the stone.
A French writer and adventurer plans to explore one of the most remote parts of the Peruvian Amazon in search of a "lost" or "secret city" that may have been built by the Incas, but there are fears that the expedition could endanger the health of isolated tribes that have never been exposed to common human diseases.
Is it just pseudoscience, or something that will stand the test of additional research? According to one researcher's analysis, there was an astronomically-based purpose to the curious yet incredibly precise way the massive stones of the 600-year-old Sacsayhuamán terrace walls were constructed high above and overlooking the ancient Inca capital of Cusco in Peru.
The east coast of North America was once as wild as the West, with massive mountains rising between colliding tectonic plates, volcanoes belching lava and giant faults slicing the crust.That's because millions of years ago, eastern North America was part of Gondwana and Pangaea, the supercontinents that formed as Earth's tectonic plates collided, split apart, and then crashed together again before rifting and drifting toward the spots where they're located today.
That's a lot of clean power. Almost half of new electricity generation is now renewable, and the costs of wind and solar power are falling sharply. It "should give governments confidence to forge a robust climate agreement" next year, says Achim Steiner, director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).
The 'ancient' manuscript possibly penned by a bookseller and a spy.The puzzling - and thus far indecipherable - nature of an old manuscript has confounded some of the world's greatest cryptologists. Is there truly a code to break, or is it all an elaborate hoax?
Yellowstone bison are responding to a much deeper instinct, say Yellowstone officials.A viral video titled "ALERT! Yellowstone Buffalo Running for Their Lives!" has attracted over 1 million page views and has prompted hundreds of anxious inquiries via Facebook, Twitter, email, and phone calls to park officials.
Scientists have digitally reconstructed the scene of a dinosaur chase - preserved in the mud of an ancient river bed in Texas.The tracks were left by two dinosaurs more than 110 million years ago.
A team of law-enforcement officials including FBI agents has swooped down on a rural home in Indiana that houses a bizarre collection of artifacts from around the world."I have never seen a collection like this in my life except in some of the largest museums," Larry Zimmerman, professor of anthropology and museum studies at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, told The Indianapolis Star. Zimmerman added that he is "frankly, overwhelmed.".
As a specialist in prehistoric underwater archaeology, Dr Jonathan Benjamin looks at rising sea levels a little bit differently from most people.His fascination with them began when as a PhD candidate at Edinburgh University he came across the work of the Danish archaeologists Anders Fischer and Søren H Anderson.
Before Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 went missing, sea trash was not a global headliner.But as hundreds of objects sighted off the Australian coast as possible aircraft debris turn out to be discarded fishing equipment, cargo container parts, or plastic shopping bags, a new narrative is emerging in the hunt for the missing plane: There's more garbage out there than you think. Most of it is plastic. And marine life ingests it, with catastrophic consequences.
Drexel University researchers are turning some of the basic tenets of chemistry and physics upside down to cut a trail toward the discovery of a new set of materials. They're called "polar metals" and, according to many of the scientific principles that govern the behavior of atoms, they probably shouldn't exist.
WOULD you dare to let a 3D printer ink your next tattoo?During a recent electronics workshop at the ENSCI-Les Ateliers design school in Paris, a group of students decided to swap a MakerBot's extruder for a pen.
An international team of researchers headed by Potsdam scientist Dr. Markus Rex from the Alfred Wegener Institute has discovered a previously unknown atmospheric phenomenon over the South Seas. Over the tropical West Pacific there is a natural, invisible hole extending over several thousand kilometres in a layer that prevents transport of most of the natural and humanmade substances into the stratosphere by virtue of its chemical composition.
Volcanology has come a long way since the days of Pompeii. Now, satellite-based systems offer a way of measuring whether a volcano is likely to erupt soon.Satellite radar maps show that volcanoes usually deform before an eruption. Measuring that deformation from space could make it possible to forecast when volcanoes will erupt, especially in remote areas that can't be accessed easily by scientists on the ground, researchers say.
Scientists at the University of Virginia School of Medicine have overcome one of the greatest challenges in biology and taken a major step toward being able to grow whole organs and tissues from stem cells. By manipulating the appropriate signaling, the U.Va. researchers have turned embryonic stem cells into a fish embryo, essentially controlling embryonic development.
The first UK study to give ketamine to severely depressed patients has found that it had dramatic positive effects on some long-standing sufferers who had not responded to other treatments.
For the first time astronomers have detected stars in an enormous stream of gas shed by the Magellanic Clouds, the two brightest galaxies that orbit our own.Sought for decades, the newfound stars are young, which means they formed recently, while the Magellanic gas collided with gas in the Milky Way.
The mystery of whether antimatter falls up or down could be solved with a new experiment to weigh matter's odd cousin, researchers say.Antimatter is identical to normal matter in some respects but the exact opposite in others. For instance, although the antiproton has the same mass as its counterpart the proton, it is negatively charged instead of positively charged.
A new study of gamma-ray light from the center of our galaxy makes the strongest case to date that some of this emission may arise from dark matter, an unknown substance making up most of the material universe.
The most active volcano in Peru is living up to its explosive reputation.Ubinas volcano has been rumbling and occasionally venting gas over the past six months, but on Monday it erupted a 1,000-foot pillar of ash. In addition, a dome of red-hot lava has welled up over the past week, reaching almost 400 feet across, completely filling the pit left by the explosions in 2006, during the volcano's last active period.
The release of new photographs of an indigenous group living in extreme isolation in the Amazon rain forest has stirred fresh controversy and new concerns over the fate of the region's so-called uncontacted tribes.
For lovers of fatty tuna belly, canned albacore and swordfish kebabs, here's a question: Would you be willing to give them up for several years so that you could eat them perhaps for the rest of your life?If a new proposal to ban fishing on the open ocean were to fly, that's essentially what we might be faced with.
Planting a variety of flowers on farmland could boost the number and diversity of pollinating insects, according to new research.The paper, published in the journal Biological Conservation, says the vital bugs would also benefit from a summer rest period, where fields are left to grow without cutting or grazing.