Newsdesk Archive
Britain's surveillance agency GCHQ, with aid from the US National Security Agency, intercepted and stored the webcam images of millions of internet users not suspected of wrongdoing, secret documents reveal.Related: British agents spied on Yahoo users' 'intimate' webcam images, Snowden files reveal
A black hole in a nearby galaxy is blowing a mighty wind. The black hole is about 100 times the mass of the sun but is causing the emission of millions of times more energy, breaking a long-accepted rule about the way black holes feed. The discovery suggests that even small black holes may play a larger role in galaxy evolution than previously realised.
Have signs of ancient Martian life been found inside a Red Planet meteorite?A team of scientists says that microscopic tunnels and carbon-rich spherules that stud the interior of a Martian meteorite known as Yamato 000593 may have been formed by Red Planet organisms long ago, NBC News reported today (Feb. 25).Related: Mars Meteorite with Odd 'Tunnels' & 'Spheres' Revives Debate Over Ancient Martian Life
In the last 20 years the search for Earth-like planets around other stars has accelerated, with the launch of missions like the Kepler space telescope. Using these and observatories on the ground, astronomers have found numerous worlds that at first sight have similarities with the Earth.
Do scientific papers ever seem like unreadable gibberish to you? Well, sometimes they really are.Some 120 papers published in established scientific journals over the last few years have been found to be frauds, created by nothing more than an automated word generator that puts random, fancy-sounding words together in plausible sentence structures.
You might be able to knit a pair of socks, but robots could one day knit you a pair of kidneys. Bioprinters with many arms could coordinate their limbs to knit together different types of human tissue and mass-produce replacement organs, cartilage or muscle. Bioengineer Ibrahim Ozbolat and his team at the University of Iowa have successfully used a 3D printer fitted with two robot arms to create tissue of two key types.
The first three-parent babies could be born by 2015 after the government set out new draft regulations which will allow donor DNA from a 'second mother' to be implanted into a defective egg.The procedure, which was developed British scientists, is currently banned, but ministers want to change the law to prevent children suffering debilitating conditions like muscular dystrophy.
Research has shown that children who were breastfed score higher on IQ tests and perform better in school, but the reason why remained unclear. Now a new study shows that two parenting skills deserve the credit. Responsiveness to children's emotional cues boosts kids' math and reading skills.
Today's economic environment demands that our children become the very best they can be. A lot of demands are placed upon us as parents, and whether we like it or not, we need to help our children navigate their way in today's fast-paced world and build their skills for the future. But not all methods, from flashcards to baby signing, actually boost a child's intelligence, language skills or other abilities for success.
Comfort foods get even more comforting if you eat them with the right kind of musical ambiance, according to a new study on the effects of different background music on the taste of foods.Previous research shows that genres of music can elicit different emotions, and that the enjoyment of some foods can be affected by emotions. The new work takes the next step and looks at how music affects the perception of food.
It might seem too good to be true, but dark chocolate is good for you and scientists now know why. Dark chocolate helps restore flexibility to arteries while also preventing white blood cells from sticking to the walls of blood vessels.
Popcorn is a truly ancient snack. Archaeologists popcorn kernels that are 4,000 years old. They were so well-preserved, they could still pop.Dolores Piperno, a paleobotanist with the Smithsonian's Tropical Research Insitute, says corn, and specifically popcorn, helped lay the foundations for the Aztec empire.
A mysterious mummy that languished in German collections for more than a century is that of an Incan woman killed by blunt-force trauma to the head, new research reveals.A new analysis shows that the mummy was once an Incan woman who also suffered from a parasitic disease that thickens the heart and intestinal walls, raising the possibility that she was killed in a ritual murder because she was already on the brink of death.
A rare example of prehistoric rock art has been uncovered in the Highlands.Archaeologists made the discovery while moving a boulder decorated with ancient cup and ring marks to a new location in Ross-shire.
An ice age site said to be one of the last known places Neanderthals lived is being studied to assess storm damage.La Cotte in St Brelade, Jersey, was hit by south-westerly storms including winds of up to 100mph in February.
Are these images posted to a Russian blog evidence for one of the greatest megalithic constructions ever discovered, or are they just a geological quirk of nature, like the Japanese site of Yonaguni seems to be? My votes on the latter, but I look forward to further investigation.
Mysterious flashes of lightning sometimes herald earthquakes, and now scientists may have discovered why: Shifting grains surrounding faults in the Earth may generate an electric charge.This strange flickering, known as earthquake lights, can occur before or during quakes. Recent findings suggest earthquake lights seem to happen at rifts where pieces of the Earth are pulling apart from each other.
It sounds like an idea for a niche movie aimed at sci-fi anoraks: a floating magnetic net that harnesses tonnes of wayward space junk and makes the overcrowded orbital lanes above Earth's atmosphere safe for future exploration.
The science team sifting data from the US space agency's (Nasa) Kepler telescope says it has identified 715 new planets beyond our Solar System.This is a huge new haul.In the nearly two decades since the first so-called exoplanet was discovered, researchers had claimed the detection of just over 1,000 new worlds.
Construction of a massive telescope triple the size of the world's largest current optical telescopes is set to begin on Hawaii's Mauna Kea volcano this year.The Thirty-Meter Telescope (TMT), which will consist of interlocking, segmented mirrors with a diameter totaling 30 meters (98 feet), has raised 83 percent of its funding, and builders could break ground by this summer, the project's leaders say.
Large-scale human engineering of the Earth's climate to prevent catastrophic global warming would not only be ineffective but would have severe unintended side effects and could not be safely stopped, a comparison of five proposed methods has concluded.
For the past 24 years, Mark Z. Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford, has been developing a complex computer model to study air pollution, energy, weather and climate. A recent application of the model has been to simulate the development of hurricanes. Another has been to determine how much energy wind turbines can extract from global wind currents.
Although they spew tons of heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the air, volcanic eruptions may have slowed global warming during the past two decades, as volcanic gases form mirror-like particles in the air. Recent research is improving climate models by accurately incorporating the effects of these eruptions.Along with CO2, volcanoes churn out sulfur dioxide gas. That gas turns into tiny droplets of sulfuric acid in the upper atmosphere. Those acid particles act like tiny mirrors to reflect sunlight back into space.
Children born to fathers over the age of 45 are at greater risk of developing psychiatric problems and more likely to struggle at school, according to the findings of a large-scale study.
See Spot run. See Lassie save Timmy from a well. See Tibetan Mastiffs climb 4,500 meters above sea level on the Tibetan Plateau. The ever-so-fluffy Tibetan Mastiff, which commonly serves as a guard dog for the plateau's residents, is able to breathe comfortably at high altitudes. Like the Tibetan people, Tibetan Mastiffs have adapted to air with less oxygen.
An underground chamber containing 130 ancient Greek statues was discovered in Athens 25 years ago. But no one, apart from the finders, has cared enough to battle the bureaucracy that has prevented the hatch from being opened and the remarkable treasures from being recovered. So what has stopped the Ministry of Culture from retrieving such precious relics of the past? Apparently the obstacle is as simple as the fact that the mysterious underground chamber lies on private property and no one wants to get involved.
Scientists have found the exact source of Stonehenge's smaller bluestones, new research suggests.The stones' rock composition revealed they come from a nearby outcropping, located about 1.8 miles (3 kilometers) away from the site originally proposed as the source of such rocks nearly a century ago. The discovery of the rock's origin, in turn, could help archaeologists one day unlock the mystery of how the stones got to Stonehenge.
Immediately after birth on many dairy farms, baby cows are separated from their mothers and housed in their own pens to protect them from getting sick. Two months later, they join the herd.But early-life isolation may be depriving baby cows of the opportunity to reach their full potential, found a new study. Compared to calves raised in pairs, isolated calves were much slower to learn new things and had a harder time adapting to changes in their environment.
The ancestors of Native Americans may have lived on and around the Bering Strait for about 10,000 years before streaming into the Americas, researchers argue.In the new Perspectives article, published today (Feb. 27) in the journal Science, the researchers compile existing data to support the idea, known as the Beringia standstill hypothesis.
A Chinese man in a smoggy northern city has become the first person in the country to sue the government for failing to curb air pollution, a state-run newspaper reported on Tuesday.
There have been heatwaves in Slovenia and Australia, snow in Vietnam and the return of the polar vortex to North America. Britain has had its wettest winter in 250 years but temperatures in parts of Russia and the Arctic have been 10C above normal. Meanwhile, the southern hemisphere has had the warmest start to a year ever recorded, with millions of people sweltering in Brazilian and southern African cities.
Living in Leicester, Leeds and Norwich is enough to give you nightmares according to dream research.Residents of these places reported having the most bad dreams, while people in Swansea, Hull and Nottingham had the most positive dreams.The data was taken from an online tool called Jar of Dreams that scans tweets for dream-related keywords.
Pope Francis on Monday revolutionized the Vatican's scandal-plagued finances, inviting outside experts into a world often seen as murky and secretive and saying the church must use its wealth to help the poor.
Researchers at the University of Liverpool have shown for the first time that WiFi networks can be infected with a virus that can move through densely populated areas as efficiently as the common cold spreads between humans.
Toxic chemicals found at high concentrations in fried and grilled meats may raise the risk of diabetes and dementia, researchers say.US scientists found that rodents raised on a Western-style diet rich in compounds called glycotoxins showed early signs of diabetes, along with brain changes and symptoms that are seen in Alzheimer's disease.
Sultan Moulay Ismaïl of Morocco, "The Bloodthirsty," reputedly sired hundreds of children and perhaps more than a 1,000. Now computer simulations suggest this could have been possible if the ruler had sex about once a day for 32 years.
Ancient Rome's gladiators lived and trained in fortress prisons, according to an international team of archaeologists who mapped a school for the famed fighters.Discovered at the site of Carnuntum outside Vienna, Austria, the gladiatorial school, or ludus gladiatorius, is the first one discovered outside the city of Rome. Now hidden beneath a pasture, the gladiator school was entirely mapped with noninvasive earth-sensing technologies.
King Richard III has been dead for more than 500 years, but his bones continue to ignite fresh controversy.The medieval king, unearthed from a Leicester parking lot in 2012, has been the center of debate over where and how his body should be reburied. Now, a plan to sequence the full genome of Richard III has brought new strife.
Scientists believe they have unravelled the mystery behind a graveyard of whales dating back five million years uncovered beside the Pan-American Highway in Chile.A report published today in the Royal Society Journal B suggests the animals, which are one of the most astonishing fossil discoveries in recent years, may have died in four mass strandings after ingesting toxic algae.
A suite of crystals that came into existence not long after the Earth's formation could shed light on how and when our planet became habitable.Collected from a sheep ranch in Australia in 2001, these "oldest bits of crust" are up to 4.4 billion years old, according to a paper titled "Hadean age for a post-magma-ocean zircon confirmed by atom-probe tomography," published this week in the journal Nature Geoscience. By comparison, the Earth itself is thought to be 4.54 billion years old, plus or minus 20 million years.
Ernest Rutherford, pioneer in studying the world inside atoms, famously remarked that all science is either physics or stamp collecting. But sometimes physics itself involves dutifully collecting the stats on the world, in the same way that a naturalist might capture and examine butterflies.
NASA's Galileo spacecraft arrived at Jupiter on December 7, 1995, and proceeded to study the giant planet for almost 8 years. It sent back a tremendous amount of scientific information that revolutionized our understanding of the Jovian system. By the end of its mission, Galileo was worn down. Instruments were failing and scientists were worried they wouldn't be able to communicate with the spacecraft in the future.
Eighteen years after a Martian meteorite sparked a debate over alien-looking "nanofossils," researchers are reporting that different structures inside an even bigger space rock suggest biological processes might have been at work on the Red Planet hundreds of millions of years ago.
Water vapor has been detected in the atmosphere of one of the first alien planets ever identified by astronomers.Advances in the technique used to scan the atmosphere of this "hot Jupiter" could help scientists determine how many of the billions of planets in the Milky Way contain water like Earth, researchers said.
By the time Columbus arrived in the New World in 1492, bottle gourds had already conquered much of the globe. After evolving in Africa, one species, Lagenaria siceraria, made a break for East Asia around 11,000 years ago and eventually took up residence in Polynesia, China, Peru and beyond, earning the title of most widely distributed pre-Columbian domesticated plant.
Resurrecting ancient DNA that was around when dinosaurs walked the Earth could help scientists find a cure for gout.Researchers in Atlanta believe a 90 million-year-old version of an enzyme known as uricase could better treat the disease, which causes painful, swollen joints.
A vegetarian diet may help lower blood pressure, according to a recent study HealthDay reported.Researchers from the National Cerebral and Cardiovascular Center in Osaka, Japan found that eating a vegetarian diet could be a could way to treat high blood pressure without medication.
Computers will be cleverer than humans by 2029, according to Ray Kurzweil, Google's director of engineering.The entrepreneur and futurologist has predicted that in 15 years' time computers will be more intelligent than we are and will be able to understand what we say, learn from experience, make jokes, tell stories and even flirt.
Was the Nazi SS studying insects with the intent of launching a bug-based attack? A new analysis of archived documents concludes that, yes, they were.Scholars have known for decades the feared SS (Schutzstaffel or "protection squadron") in Nazi Germany had established an entomological research institute at the Dachau concentration camp. Documents that survived World War II describe experiments related to biological warfare.
Inscriptions on Indus seals give details about animals sacrificed and nature of ceremony. Some ceremonies were performed for obtaining remission of sins and others were for pleasing the souls of dead ancestors (Pithru Karma ceremony).
For nearly a decade, linguists and cryptologists have obsessed over the medieval Voynich manuscript, vigorously debating whether it represents a long-lost language, or gibberish. Now some of its symbols have been matched to sounds.Stephen Bax at the University of Bedfordshire, UK, has mapped only 14 symbols so far, but some linguists are following the development of his preliminary "Voynich alphabet" with interest.
Japanese archaeologists have unearthed a near-pristine tomb of a high-ranking Egyptian official who served as a temple's chief brewer 3,000 years ago.The site, on the west bank of the Nile near Luxor, dates from the 12th century B.C. and has beautifully preserved murals in vivid colors.
Western Europe may have undergone a population crisis during a cold stretch of the Neanderthal era, a new study of mitochondrial DNA sequences suggests."The fact that Neanderthals in Western Europe were nearly extinct, but then recovered long before they came into contact with modern humans came as a complete surprise to us," study co-author Love Dalén, associate professor at the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm, told Phys.org.
Top quarks are the heaviest of subatomic particles, and are prime components of all matter--everything from mayonnaise to your big toe. But while they are in virtually everything, they are impossible to isolate from matter under ordinary circumstances. To study them, you need to "make" them by running particles into each other at ultra-high speeds, billions or trillions of times.
Martian colonization is a risky proposition. So risky, in fact, that a group of Islamic leaders in the United Arab Emirates issued a religious ruling saying Muslims should not go to the Red Planet. The General Authority of Islamic Affairs and Endowment (GAIAE) ruling compares a Mars mission to suicide, and says that those who attempt it can expect the same consequences in the afterlife.
Scientists say they have observed a record-breaking impact on the Moon.Spanish astronomers spotted a meteorite with a mass of about half a tonne crashing into the lunar surface last September.They say the collision would have generated a flash of light so bright that it would have been visible from Earth.
To put it mildly, this is one gem of a gem.Scientists using two different age-determining techniques have shown that a tiny zircon crystal found on a sheep ranch in Western Australia is the oldest known piece of our planet, dating to 4.4 billion years ago.
A rare, salamander-like amphibian has been spotted in its only known natural habitat, after researchers feared the creature had disappeared from the wild.Mexican biologists have seen, but not caught, two axolotls during a second attempt to find them in the Xochimilco network of lakes and canals of Mexico City.
From ecotourism to encouraging long-term research in critical lemur sites, researchers have proposed a three-year emergency action plan to prevent the wide-eyed prosimians from going extinct.
Dutch scientists have developed the world's smallest autonomous flapping drone, a dragonfly-like beast with 3-D vision that could revolutionise our experience of everything from pop concerts to farming."This is the DelFly Explorer, the world's smallest drone with flapping wings that's able to fly around by itself and avoid obstacles," its proud developer Guido de Croon of the Delft Technical University told AFP.
The work of the Greek polymath Plato has kept millions of people busy for millennia. A few among them have been mathematicians who have obsessed about Platonic solids, a class of geometric forms that are highly regular and are commonly found in nature.
Excavations at the Domskirke in Ribe, Denmark began in 2008 and analysis of the results lend new insight into early Christianity, where this may have been one of the first places in the country where a small enclave of Christians worshipped and died.Studies have now shown that there may have been Christian Vikings in Ribe around AD865. Denmark officially became a Christian country around the year AD965 when Harald Bluetooth announced his deed on the Jelling stone.
Scientists have found the exact source of Stonehenge's smaller bluestones, new research suggests.The stones' rock composition revealed they come from a nearby outcropping, located about 1.8 miles (3 kilometers) away from the site originally proposed as the source of such rocks nearly a century ago. The discovery of the rock's origin, in turn, could help archaeologists one day unlock the mystery of how the stones got to Stonehenge.
A researcher claims he's decoded 10 possible words in the famously unreadable Voynich manuscript, which has eluded interpretation for a century.The book's 250 vellum pages are filled with writings in an unknown alphabet and elaborate drawings depicting a range of subjects from female nudes to medicinal herbs to Zodiac symbols. The medieval text was discovered by an antique book dealer in 1912, and it has been rather stingy in giving up its secrets ever since.
You might think that a chirpy pop song or up tempo tune is just the thing to cheer someone up.But listening to sad but beautiful songs by the likes of Johnny Cash or Leonard Cohen really can help you beat the blues, scientists said.They found that depressed or sad people prefer to listen to beautiful music that triggers important memories.
New research shows that lying about performance on one task may increase creativity on a subsequent task by making people feel less bound by conventional rules.The findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
If you're 60 and older, every additional hour a day you spend sitting is linked to doubling the risk of being disabled -- regardless of how much exercise you get, reports a new study. The study is the first to show sedentary behavior is its own risk factor for disability, separate from lack of moderate vigorous physical activity.
Devoted dog owners often claim that their pets understand them. A new study suggests they could be right.By placing dogs in an MRI scanner, researchers from Hungary found that the canine brain reacts to voices in the same way that the human brain does.
Have you ever noticed that your best friends speak the same way? A new study finds we prefer voices that are similar to our own because they convey a soothing sense of community and social belongingness.
Whooping cough is evolving in response to its vaccine. Want proof? In a new study, researchers found 30 percent of whooping cough bacteria in Australia have evolved.We've reported on the evolution of whooping cough before. Researchers have found evolved pertussis, as whooping cough is scientifically known, in Finland, France, Italy, Japan and the U.S.
It's happening in Ukraine, Venezuela, Thailand, Bosnia, Syria, and beyond. Revolutions, unrest, and riots are sweeping the globe. The near-simultaneous eruption of violent protest can seem random and chaotic; inevitable symptoms of an unstable world. But there's at least one common thread between the disparate nations, cultures, and people in conflict, one element that has demonstrably proven to make these uprisings more likely: high global food prices.
Most of us have heard of the famous double-slit experiment. Usually it's played out in a lab in seconds. But there's one version, dreamt up by physicist John Archibald Wheeler, that can be played out over much of the galaxy, over millions of years. His thought experiment suggests that we could retroactively determine the fate of ancient photons.
Agricultural hemp produces strong and decay-resistant fibers, a versatile oil, and requires little in the way of herbicides, since it outcompetes weeds. Hemp oil isn't widely used for cooking, though, partially because it turns rancid swiftly if not refrigerated.
A jug containing silver earrings and ingots has been discovered at the ancient biblical city of Abel Beth Maacah in Israel.Found to the north of a massive structure that may be a tower, the jug and its treasure appear to date back to about 3,200 years ago, long before minted coins were invented, archaeologists said. Curiously, they found no sign that the treasure was hidden, and no one appears to have gone back for it, they added.
A statue thought to be an ancient bronze of Apollo, Greek God of poetry and love, has dropped off the radar after being found in the sea off Gaza last summer and surfacing briefly on eBay. It is 2,500 years old and priceless.Jawdat Abu Ghurab used to be a builder but in 2007 Israel restricted the delivery of building materials to the Gaza strip, so he became a fisherman like his father.
Leonardo da Vinci made it his mission to sketch the male body with ideal human proportions in the late 1400s. But it turns out, his "Vitruvian Man" may not be so perfect after all.Dr. Hutan Ashrafian, a surgeon at the Imperial College London in the U.K., noticed something rather odd when he got up close and personal with the iconic drawing.
Despite general resistence, representatives of tribes in the US recently gave their blessing for DNA analysis of the remains of a Stone Age child. Research conducted on the boy's genes indicate that Native Americans have European roots.It must have been a pretty special child, otherwise the two-year old wouldn't have been buried in such a ceremonious manner.
Some of the world's greatest cities during the Middle Ages were on the eastern coast of Africa. Their ornate stone domes and soaring walls, made with ocean corals and painted a brilliant white, were wonders to the traders that visited them from Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. They were the superpowers of the Swahili Coast, and they've long been misunderstood by archaeologists.
A prehistoric forest, an eerie landscape including the trunks of hundreds of oaks that died more than 4,500 years ago, has been revealed by the ferocious storms which stripped thousands of tons of sand from beaches in Cardigan Bay.
It's no instant replay, but West Antarctica's Pine Island Glacier, one of the continent's fastest-changing ice streams, looks to be recreating 8,000-year-old history as it melts away, a new study suggests.
Infectious diseases linked to the colony collapse of honeybees appear to be spreading among wild bumblebees that pollinate crops worldwide, dealing a potential double blow to agriculture, according to a new study.
Farmland butterflies have flourished thanks to last year's hot summer, the charity Butterfly Conservation says.The annual Wider Countryside Butterfly Survey (WCBS) recorded almost double the number of insects compared with the previous year.
A string of Pacific islands have apparently "grown back" after they were devastated by a typhoon a century ago.A powerful typhoon in 1905 killed all but two inhabitants of the Nadikdik Atoll - part of the Marshall Islands - and washed away most of the islands' landmass. But the islands seem to have re-established themselves - one has become a fully vegetated, stable island again - while several smaller islands have reappeared and formed into a single, larger landmass, the New Zealand Herald reports.
You are a snail. You are a plant. You like where you are. The temperature's right. It suits you.But then, gradually, over the years, it gets warmer. Not every day, of course, but on more and more days, the temperature climbs to uncomfortable highs, drying you out, making you tired, thirsty.
By combining quantum mechanical quirks of light with a technique called photonic force microscopy, scientists can now probe detailed structures inside living cells like never before. This ability could bring into focus previously invisible processes and help biologists better understand how cells work.
For a little more than a decade, the food industry has been using nanotechnology to change the way we grow and maintain our food. The grocery chain Albertsons currently has a list of nanotech-touched foods in its home brand, ranging from cookies to cheese blends.Nanotechnology use in food has real advantages: The technology gives producers the power to control how food looks, tastes, and even how long it lasts.
The newest material used to make artificial muscle can lift more than 100 times more than the meaty stuff you have stuck to your skeleton. It forms a sinewy band that's flexible, dynamic, and can be reused millions of times. No, we're not talking about carbon nanotubes, shape-memory metal, or some hyper-strong liquid alloy. This super-material is ordinary fishing line.
Scientists have found neurons that prevent mice from forming fearful memories in an area of the brain called the hippocampus.These inhibitory neurons ensure that a neutral memory of a context or location is not contaminated by an unpleasant event occurring at the same time.
By the time most people are 25, they have made the most important memories of their lives, according to new research from the University of New Hampshire.
A team of researchers from the University of California, Riverside Bourns College of Engineering and Russian Academy of Science have demonstrated a new type of holographic memory device that could provide unprecedented data storage capacity and data processing capabilities in electronic devices
It would run to over a million pages, featuring more than four million articles by 20 million volunteers: an "record-breaking" new project to turn Wikipedia into 1,000 books has just launched on Indiegogo.Conceived by the team who work on the open source book tool for Wikipedia at publisher PediaPress, the Indiegogo fundraiser is looking to raise $50,000 (£30,000) to bring Wikipedia into print.
Researchers recently discovered that a common space weather phenomenon on the outskirts of Earth's magnetic bubble, the magnetosphere, has much larger repercussions for Venus. The giant explosions, called hot flow anomalies, can be so large at Venus that they're bigger than the entire planet and they can happen multiple times a day.
Researchers at UCL have studied the behaviour of the Sun's coronal mass ejections, explaining for the first time the details of how these huge eruptions behave as they fall back onto the Sun's surface. In the process, they have discovered that coronal mass ejections have a surprising twin in the depths of space: the tendrils of gas in the Crab Nebula, which lie 6500 light-years away and are millions of times larger.
Muslims have been warned in a Fatwa not to go and live on Mars because it would pose "a real risk to life", according to a Dubai news organisation.The General Authority of Islamic Affairs and Endowment (GAIAE) in the United Arab Emirates said that anyone making such a "hazardous trip" is likely to die for "no righteous reason".
New photos of the Martian landscape further rule out a meteorite impact as the culprit behind the "jelly doughnut" rock that mysteriously appeared in front of one of NASA's Mars rovers last month.
Two self-styled amateur archeologists from Germany, who filmed themselves scraping off pieces of Egypt's Great Pyramid in hopes of proving that the ancient wonder was built by people from the legendary city of Atlantis, are now facing possible criminal charges in their home country.
Talk about passing gas: Vast stores of helium are escaping from the steam vents and hot springs of Yellowstone National Park after being trapped within Earth's crust for up to 2 billion years, according to new research.In a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature, researchers with the U.S. Geological Survey determined that the famed national park was releasing hundreds -- if not thousands -- of times more helium than anticipated.
The appearance of farming, from its inception in the Near East around 12 000 years ago to the northwestern extremes of Europe by the fourth millennium BCE or shortly thereafter has led to various models being created to explain the Neolithisation of northern Europe; however, resolving these different scenarios has proved problematic due to poor faunal preservation and a need to have a quantitative methodology to examine disparate locations.
The European-Egyptian archaeological mission headed by famed Egyptologist Horig Sourouzian has unearthed a collection of quartzite blocks that had been missing since antiquity from Memnon colossi, at the entrance of King Amenhotep III's temple at Kom El-Hitan on Luxor's west bank.
The Islamist militant group Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis has told tourists to leave Egypt and threatened to attack anyone who stays in the country after a deadline of February 20.The Sinai-based group, which claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing that killed two South Korean tourists and an Egyptian on Sunday, made the statement on an affiliated Twitter account.