Newsdesk Archive

Professor in Astronomy and Astrophysics at the Astronomic Observatory at the University of Valencia, Martínez explains that the range of cosmic distances achieved is "impressive and, therefore, it allows us to scan the cosmic evolution. In astronomy, looking away is looking at the past. We can get to know how galaxies were in early stages of the universe history."

A dense crystalline "rain" falling into Earth's mantle could explain how a mysterious seismic boundary forms beneath the crust, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature.The model, based on rock evidence from volcanic islands that smashed into Asia and Alaska, confirms long-standing ideas about how continents are born.

Scientists have discovered that some ring-tailed lemurs in Madagascar regularly retire to limestone chambers for their nightly snoozes, the first evidence of the consistent, daily use of the same caves and crevices for sleeping among the world's wild primates.

The home of Egypt's mummies and King Tutankhamun's treasures is trying to make the best out of the worst times of political turmoil. But the Egyptian Museum is taking a hammering on multiple levels, from riots on its doorstep to funding so meager it can't keep up paper clip supplies for its staff.

Multiple tombs lay hidden in Egypt's Valley of the Kings, where royalty were buried more than 3,000 years ago, awaiting discovery, say researchers working on the most extensive exploration of the area in nearly a century.The hidden treasure may include several small tombs, with the possibility of a big-time tomb holding a royal individual, the archaeologists say.

An analysis of the femur of one of the oldest human ancestors reveals the six-million-year-old "Millenium Man" was bipedal but lived in the trees. The research, led by Stony Brook University researchers and their team of international paleoanthropologists, could provide additional insight to the origins of human bipedalism and is published in Nature Communications.

Scientists have found that Neanderthals organized their living spaces in ways that would be familiar to modern humans, a discovery that once again shows similarities between these two close cousins.

Bizarrely, many species of animals, such as the carp and platypus, lost their stomachs in the evolutionary past, and new research suggests they may never evolve the organs back.The stomach is the part of the gut where the main part of digestion takes place. Glands in this organ secrete enzymes known as pepsins, which break down proteins, and strong acids that soften food and help the enzymes work.

Like a Disney movie gone horribly wrong, the U.S. Department of Agriculture just airdropped 2,000 mice attached to tiny cardboard parachutes into Guam. The mice are dead and contain a key ingredient: painkillers. The objective: bring down invasive brown tree snakes that have all but taken over.Brown tree snakes have been a scourge of the U.S. territory since arriving there during the 1940s to 1950s, probably on cargo ships.

Enormous herds of rhino-like animals turned parts of what is now Argentina into minefields of dung, new fossils reveal.These massive herbivores were dicynodonts, mammal-like reptiles that looked something like a cross between a rhinoceros and the demon dogs from "Ghostbusters." Argentine researchers have now found that these dicynodonts pooped in communal latrines, designated areas for depositing dung.

Hydrogen is a "green" fuel that burns cleanly and can generate electricity via fuel cells. One way to sustainably produce hydrogen is by splitting water molecules using the renewable power of sunlight, but scientists are still learning how to control and optimize this reaction with catalysts. At the National Synchrotron Light Source, a research group has determined key structural information about a potential catalyst, taking a step toward designing an ideal material for the job.

Comet ISON, a "shining green candle in the solar wind," is no longer with us, NASA declared Monday morning in a tribute to what many hoped would be the "comet of the century."On NASA's Comet ISON Observing Campaign website, that ISON was "born 4.5 billion BC, fragmented Nov. 28, 2013 (age 4.5 billion yrs old).".

The hyper-local food trend is really big right now. And apparently, NASA wants to make sure astronauts don't miss out. The agency plans to grow cress, turnips and basil on the moon.And to protect the plants from the harsh cosmic radiation and the moon's lack of atmosphere, NASA researchers will be sending them off inside a seriously high-tech terrarium.

Tiny bits of plastic rubbish ingested by marine worms is significantly harming their health and will have wider impact on ocean ecosystems, scientists have found.

Archaeologists have uncovered more than 80 skulls of young women who may have been sacrificed 4,000 years ago in China.The skulls were discovered in what is being called a mass grave at the Shimao Ruins at the site of a neolithic stone city in the northern province of Shaanxi.

Deep under the streets and buildings of Rome is a maze of tunnels and quarries that dates back to the very beginning of this ancient city. Now, geologists are venturing beneath Rome to map these underground passageways, hoping to prevent modern structures from crumbling into the voids below.

The surprise discovery of traces of European ancestry in the 24,000-year-old bones of a boy unearthed in the heart of Siberia has caught the attention of Canadian experts, who say the find could rewrite the story of the people who first populated ancient Canada and the rest of the Americas.

It is a low, rumbling bellow that seems very incongruous coming from the mouth of a diminutive koala.And now scientists have found that these famously sleepy marsupials have evolved a vocal organ that allows them to produce very low-pitched sound.

High up in the Andes, numerous species of hummingbirds are thriving despite low levels of oxygen.Hummingbirds have the highest metabolic rates among vertebrates, and have heart rates of up to 1,260 beats per minute, so it's difficult to imagine them flitting about in an environment where oxygen is scarce.

A single dose of the hormone oxytocin, delivered via nasal spray, has been shown to enhance brain activity while processing social information in children with autism spectrum disorders, Yale School of Medicine researchers report in a new study published in the Dec. 2 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The possibility of an effective male contraceptive pill that can be taken orally has been brought a step closer to reality, scientists have said.Currently, the use of a condom or a surgical vasectomy provides the only proven form of contraception available to men and previous attempts to develop an orally administrable male contraceptive have faced significant problems.

Scientists have drawn on nearly 1,000 brain scans to confirm what many had surely concluded long ago: that stark differences exist in the wiring of male and female brains.Maps of neural circuitry showed that on average women's brains were highly connected across the left and right hemispheres, in contrast to men's brains, where the connections were typically stronger between the front and back regions.

This morning, an animal rights group known as the Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP) filed a lawsuit in a New York Supreme Court in an attempt to get a judge to declare that chimpanzees are legal persons and should be freed from captivity. The suit is the first of three to be filed in three New York counties this week.

Memories can be passed down to later generations through genetic switches that allow offspring to inherit the experience of their ancestors, according to new research that may explain how phobias can develop.Scientists have long assumed that memories and learned experiences built up during a lifetime must be passed on by teaching later generations or through personal experience.

VALID research or vandalism? Egyptian authorities are in uproar after two German students scraped away some ancient writing to "prove" the Great Pyramids are 20,000 years old.Supporters of the popular story that the Pyramids are evidence of a lost civilisation from the dawn of time consider the reaction all part of an ancient conspiracy.The painted cartouche which named Pharaoh Khufu (Cheops) is scrawled in a small compartment above his burial chamber in one of the three Great Pyramids at Giza.

Stonehenge may have been built by Stone Age man as a prehistoric centre for rock music, a new study has claimed.According to experts from London's Royal College of Art, some of the stones sound like bells, drums, and gongs when they are 'played' - or hit with hammers.

From this year, up to 10% of chia seeds may be included in bread, breakfast cereals and bags of nuts sold in the European Union. The seeds of this herb, which the people of Central America have been consuming for centuries, are rich in omega-3, fibre, proteins, anti-oxidants, vitamins and minerals.

Sea coral could soon be used more extensively in bone grafting procedures thanks to new research that has refined the material's properties and made it more compatible with natural bone.

Up until a few years ago, the common school of thought held that the mammalian heart had very little regenerative capacity. However, scientists now know that heart muscle cells constantly regenerate, albeit at a very low rate. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Heart and Lung Research in Bad Nauheim, have identified a stem cell population responsible for this regeneration. Hopes are growing that it will be possible in future to stimulate the self-healing powers of patients with diseases and disorders of the heart muscle, and thus develop new potential treatments.

For the first time, scientists have succeeded in transforming human stem cells into functional lung and airway cells. The advance, reported by Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) researchers, has significant potential for modeling lung disease, screening drugs, studying human lung development, and, ultimately, generating lung tissue for transplantation. The study was published today in the journal Nature Biotechnology.

The last time we caught up with Josiah Zayner, he was busy devising a musical instrument that produces melodies based on the reactions of plant proteins to light. Now Zayner, a biophysicist and incoming synthetic biology fellow at NASA, has set his sights on a project with the potential for greater public impact: one that aims to rapidly accelerate the discovery of new antibiotic compounds.

If you are tracing the roots of the relationship between GCHQ and the NSA, to understand why the agencies work so closely together, and why they seem so genuinely perplexed (and angry) by the furore now surrounding them, then it is to Turing and his contemporaries that you have to turn.Looking back is also the only way to appreciate how the intelligence agencies have ended up on the path to mass surveillance, and managed to travel a long way down it, without facing the kind of public scrutiny they are confronted with now.

Rescue crews arrive on the scene of a collapsed mine and drill a borehole several hundred meters down to a small cavern. They put a cylindrical, camera-equipped robot made of metal into the hole that will descend and search for survivors. As the robot crawls downward, the ground shifts, collapsing the borehole to half its diameter, crushing the bot. Now what? If the robot had been made of deformable polymers, it could have simply lengthened and narrowed its shape, like a worm, and continued on its mission.

At large-scale solar plants, keeping the surfaces of solar panels free from dust, sand and bird droppings is not just a matter of finicky housekeeping. It can be a matter of plant profitability. Dirty panels lower power generation efficiencies. Bird droppings on panels, for example, block the sunlight. A Tokyo-based company has a solution.

Rothamsted Research has obtained a high performance radio remote-controlled octocopter equipped with four distinct cameras, thanks to funding from The Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC). The custom-built equipment will enable high-throughput collection of data from experimental crop plots at each of the Institute's sites as well as at collaborating organisations' trials.

A hundred self-driving Volvo cars will roll onto public roads in and around the Swedish city of Gothenburg in 2017, the Chinese-owned car maker said Monday.

When Harry Potter walks around with a visible head but an invisible body, the performance seems strongly rooted in fantasy. But in a new study, scientists have designed and fabricated an invisibility cloak that may make such a feat possible. The new cloak can conceal some arbitrarily chosen parts of objects while leaving other parts visible, making it a localized invisibility cloak.

One of the world's strangest animals -- a legless, leaping fish that lives on land -- uses camouflage to avoid attacks by predators such as birds, lizards and crabs, new research shows.

The orchid mantis, which resembles a flower, takes on this appearance in order to lure in prey, researchers say.In fact, orchid mantises are even better at drawing in insects than some actual blossoms; they not only look like flowers, but they also beat the petally beauties at their own game, scientists added.

Why this claim is probably, almost definitely, wrongPZ Myers at Pharyngula discussed some of the reasons why this hypothesis can not be true, but I will just place the most obvious ones here:1) The only evidence that Dr. McCarthy offers in support of this claim are morphological and behavioural "similarities" between pigs and humans.

Scotland researchers have found a natural therapy to treat acne. Certain fatty acids produced from the marine algae were found to have cleansing qualities.The researchers at the University of Stirling's Institute of Aquaculture found the fatty acids could prevent the growth of Propionibacterium acnes - a bacterium which causes the common skin condition.

Has Comet ISON survived its suicidal flyby of the sun? Scientists expected the dirty snowball to break apart as it flew within 730,000 miles of the sun on Thanksgiving, but NASA reported Friday that its nucleus may have survived.

India's mission to Mars has embarked on its 300-day journey to the Red Planet.Early on Sunday the spacecraft fired its main engine for more than 20 minutes, giving it the correct velocity to leave Earth's orbit.

China's state media and people eagerly awaited the launch early Monday of the country's first lunar rover mission, the next step in an ambitious space programme.The Chang'e-3 rocket carrying the "Jade Rabbit" rover to explore the moon is set to blast off at 1:30 am (1730 GMT Sunday).

Huge electric fields in the radiation belts around Earth may help explain how electrons surrounding the planet can be accelerated to speeds near that of light, researchers have found in a new study.

The 2013 Atlantic hurricane season officially ended on Saturday as the quietest since 1982 and the sixth least active since 1950, the US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration said.Thirteen tropical storms formed since early June in the Atlantic but only two, Ingrid and Humberto, reached hurricane strength. While the number of named storms topped the historical average of 12, the number of hurricanes was well below the historic average of six medium-strength category one or two storms and three major category three storms and above.

Body piercings have been used to control wheelchairs and computers in a move scientists believe could transform the way people interact with the world after paralysis.The movement of a tiny magnet in a tongue piercing is detected by sensors and converted into commands, which can control a range of devices.

Are you both bald AND lost? Then the new "SmartWig" from Japan might be just what you need. The techno-toupe, which can read the wearer's brainwaves and direct them to their destination with onboard GPS, is the latest -- and possibly the wackiest -- addition to the world of wearable computing.The country that brought us world-changing hits like the Walkman and the pocket calculator, as well as instantly-forgettable misses like the walking toaster, now offers a hi-tech hairpiece.

Archaeologists said fortifications of the largest neolithic Chinese city ever discovered were excavated on Wednesday and Thursday in northwest China's Shaanxi Province.The ruins of two square beacon towers, once part of the city wall of the 4,000-year-old Shimao Ruins in Shenmu County, have been uncovered, according to Shaanxi Provincial Institute of Archaeology.

When Professor Robin Coningham's youngest son Gus was five, he was asked at school what his father did. "He works for the Buddha," said the boy. Which led to a bit of confusion, recalls Coningham.But it turns out Gus was not that far off the mark. Last week it emerged that a team led by Coningham, a professor of archaeology and pro-vice-chancellor at Durham University, had made a startling discovery about the date of the Buddha's birth, one that could rewrite the history of Buddhism. After a three-year dig on the site of the Maya Devi temple at Lumbini in Nepal, Coningham and his team of 40 archaeologists discovered a tree shrine that predates all known Buddhist sites by at least 300 years.

As a medical resident 30 years ago, Ava Kaufman remembers puzzling over some of the elderly patients who came to the primary-care practice at George Washington University Hospital. They weren't really ill, at least not with any identifiable diseases. But they weren't well, either.They were thin and weak. They had no energy. They tired easily.

Researchers have discovered a gene that regulates alcohol consumption and when faulty can cause excessive drinking. They have also identified the mechanism underlying this phenomenon.The study showed that normal mice show no interest in alcohol and drink little or no alcohol when offered a free choice between a bottle of water and a bottle of diluted alcohol.

Using a video game in which people navigate through a virtual town delivering objects to specific locations, a team of neuroscientists from the University of Pennsylvania and Freiburg University has discovered how brain cells that encode spatial information form "geotags" for specific memories and are activated immediately before those memories are recalled.

During an epoch of dramatic climate change 200,000 years ago, Homo sapiens (modern humans) evolved in Africa. Several leading scientists are asking: Is the human species entering a new evolutionary, post-biological inflection point? Paul Davies, a British-born theoretical physicist, cosmologist, astrobiologist and Director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science and Co-Director of the Cosmology Initiative at Arizona State University, says that any aliens exploring the universe will be AI-empowered machines. Not only are machines better able to endure extended exposure to the conditions of space, but they have the potential to develop intelligence far beyond the capacity of the human brain.

The hot and energetic Universe and the search for elusive gravitational waves will be the focus of ESA's next two large science missions, it was announced today.Both topics will bridge fundamental astrophysics and cosmology themes by studying in detail the processes that are crucial to the large-scale evolution of the Universe and its underlying physics.

Talk about taking a dim view of things. Researchers have obtained ultrasharp images of weakly illuminated objects using a bare minimum of photons: mathematically stitching together information from single particles of light recorded by each pixel of a solid-state detector.The achievement is likely to support studies of fragile biological materials, such as the human eye, that could be damaged or destroyed by higher levels of illumination.

Scientists have long suspected that corvids -- the family of birds including ravens, crows and magpies -- are highly intelligent. Now, Tübingen neurobiologists Lena Veit und Professor Andreas Nieder have demonstrated how the brains of crows produce intelligent behavior when the birds have to make strategic decisions.

Excavations at Kanie (Mazovia Voivodeship) in Poland have uncovered the second largest centre of iron production in this area, dating back 2000 years.Finds that were of greatest interest to the archaeologists were a timber well of unusual design, a number of bloomery furnaces for smelting iron and according to the researchers, the site fits well into the pattern of other known ironworks settlements located in the Blonie Plains.

Nestled beneath a stretch of earth in a quiet Swedish village, archaeologists have uncovered a treasure trove of hand-carved figurines.No less than 29 of these so-called guldgubbars, which means 'Gold Old Men', were unearthed in the southern region of Blekinge and each are thought to have been made using 6th Century Roman coins.

We are a step closer to understanding how life began, and we can thank the humble lemon.For the first time, genetic information has been copied inside a simple cell designed to mimic primordial life. Until now, such copying had the unfortunate side effect of destroying the cell, but researchers have found that the cell can be stabilised by adding a dash of citrate. The substance is synthesised from citric acid, a chemical found in lemons and oranges.

New research from North Carolina State University shows that iron may play a role in preserving ancient tissues within dinosaur fossils, but also may hide them from detection. The finding could open the door to the recovery of more ancient tissues from within fossils.Mary Schweitzer, an NC State paleontologist with a joint appointment at the N. C. Museum of Natural Sciences, first announced the surprising preservation of soft tissues in a T. rex fossil in 2005.

A new image has captured the birth and death of stars in one of our closest galactic neighbours - the Large Magellanic Cloud. It also shows the remnants a supernova explosion caused by the death of a massive star that has run out of fuel. Located about 163,000 light-years away, the LMC is visible with the naked eye from the Southern Hemisphere.The detailed image was taken by the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile. Its nebulae - the thick clouds of gas around young and old stars - house active star-forming regions.

China will land its first probe on the moon in early December which will deploy a buggy to explore its surface, an official said on Tuesday, marking a major milestone in the country's space ambitions.China has already photographed the surface of the moon to prepare for the landing, said a spokesman for the State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense.In 2007, China launched its first moon orbiter, the Chang'e One orbiter, named after a lunar goddess...

China's campaign against online rumors, which critics say is crushing free speech, has been highly successful in "cleaning" the Internet, a top official of the country's internet regulator said on Thursday.China has the world's most sophisticated online censorship system, known outside the country as the Great Firewall. It blocks many social media websites, such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and others, along with many sites hosted in Taiwan and those of rights groups and some foreign media agencies.The crackdown on online rumors is really intended to quash anti-government discourse, activists say.

Excavations at Kanie (Mazovia Voivodeship) in Poland have uncovered the second largest centre of iron production in this area, dating back 2000 years.Finds that were of greatest interest to the archaeologists were a timber well of unusual design, a number of bloomery furnaces for smelting iron and according to the researchers, the site fits well into the pattern of other known ironworks settlements located in the B³onie Plains.The site also increases further understanding of mass production of iron in the territories inhabited by the Przeworsk culture...

The first evidence of proto-agricultural activity in what is now the state of Nuevo Leon in northeastern Mexico, is estimated to date from 3500-3000 BC, based on new research by archaeologists from the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH).This proto-agriculture was practised by hunter-gatherers who collected wild variants of what later became the staple domesticated crops of the region. The evidence for this activity comes from seeds, corn cobs and husks found at the small rock shelter site of El Morro.

Comet Ison, or some part of it, may have survived its encounter with the Sun, say scientists. The giant ball of ice and dust was initially declared dead when it failed to re-emerge from behind the star with the expected brightness.All that could be seen was a dull smudge in space telescope images - its nucleus and tail assumed destroyed. But recent pictures have indicated a brightening of what may be a small fragment of the comet. Astronomers admit to being surprised and delighted...

Japanese construction firm Shimizu Corp. has unveiled a proposal that entails building a solar panel array around the moon's equator, then sending the power it collects back to Earth. They are calling the project LUNA RING.Since the earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan back in March 2011 (which led to closing the country's nuclear power plants) scientists there (and elsewhere) have been scrambling to find ways to create electricity for the country in other ways.

China is to start removing treasures from its greatest ever marine archaeological discovery, six years after the wreck was raised from the seabed in a giant metal box, reports said Friday.The wooden Nanhai 1 sank near Yangjiang in the southern province of Guangdong during the Southern Song Dynasty of 1127-1279, with an estimated 60,000 to 80,000 items on board.For centuries it was preserved under the sea by a thick covering of silt, and it was discovered accidentally by a British-Chinese expedition looking for a completely different vessel...

The properties of these lead bricks recovered from ancient shipwrecks are ideal for experiments in particle physics. Scientists from the CDMS dark matter detection project in Minnesota (USA) and from the CUORE neutrino observatory at the Gran Sasso Laboratory in Italy have begun to use them, but archaeologists have raised alarm about the destruction and trading of cultural heritage that lies behind this.Two thousand years ago, a Roman vessel with ingots of lead extracted from the Sierra of Cartagena sank across the waters from the coast of Sardinia.

In recent years, water-repelling materials have gotten better and better at their job of fearing water. But even the best hydrophobic surfaces still take their time when repelling water. This becomes an issue when the surfaces you want to keep water-free operate in freezing conditions. If water is not repelled quickly, it can freeze and end up stuck there.

European researchers have used a computer to design small synthetic molecules capable of attacking the deadly AIDS virus where it hurts the most: its ability to produce the genetic material required for replication. It's the first time in history this has ever been done.

Sex may be the secret to good health and a longer life, according to a recent study on insects.Research by the University of Michigan found that fruit flies with better sex lives live longer. The findings were published in the journal Science.

Research published today in the Royal Society journal Interface investigates how octopus suckers help them attach to surfaces and examines how artificial sucker-like materials compare.The team, led by Dr Francesca Tramacere have investigated the morphology and the mechanical features of characteristic suckers.

Oncillas are housecat-size felines found throughout much of South America, and are also known as little tiger cats, little spotted cats or tigrinas. But not all oncillas are the same: New research suggests that little tiger cats in northeastern Brazil belong to a different species from those elsewhere on the continent, although they look virtually identical.

Thousands of wildebeest have returned early from Tanzania's Serengeti National Park in a move park officials say is rare.The animals began migrating from Kenya to Tanzania in September and were not expected to return until April.

Only 23 percent of Bonobo territory in the Democratic Republic of the Congo remains habitable, according to a new study jointly conducted by University of Georgia, University of Maryland, Wildlife Conservation Society, World Wildlife Fund and other groups.Researchers said that the loss of functional habitat can be blamed on mushrooming human population, deforestation and widespread poaching.

TALK about an inauspicious beginning. For thousands of years our ancestors lived in small, isolated populations, leaving them severely inbred, according to a new genetic analysis. The inbreeding may have caused a host of health problems, and it is likely that small populations were a barrier to the development of complex technologies.

BRAINTREE, Mass. -- Apartment and condo managers, dogged by complaints from those who've have experienced the squishy and smelly sensation of stepping onto a pile of dog doo, are turning to DNA testing to identity the culprits who don't clean up after their pets.It's the latest twist in the long-running struggle to keep canine waste off lawns, hallways, elevators and other common areas of animal-friendly community buildings.

It's an uncomfortable truth but scientists say most people have an ingrained racial bias. Now a team has shown that a short stint in a virtual world could reduce it, but could this have a longer lasting effect?Racism is an issue that still pervades many societies.

A gigantic "communal latrine" created at the dawn of the dinosaurs has been unearthed in Argentina.Thousands of fossilised poos left by rhino-like megaherbivores were found clustered together, scientists say.The 240-million-year-old site is the "world's oldest public toilet" and the first evidence that ancient reptiles shared collective dumping grounds.

Far from being drunken Iron Age louts, more than 2000 years ago the ancient Celts already had one of the most geospatially-advanced civilizations yet known.The Celts not only carried on the classical Greek traditions of geometry and mathematics but developed an unprecedented, complex system of geo-coordinates that aided them in long distance navigation and commerce.

A team of European astronomers has discovered a second solar system, the closest parallel to our own solar system yet found. It includes seven exoplanets orbiting a star with the small rocky planets close to their host star and the gas giant planets further away. The system was hidden within the wealth of data from the Kepler Space Telescope.

BEIJING - China will land its first probe on the moon in early December, which will deploy a buggy to explore its surface, an official said on Tuesday, marking a major milestone in the country's space ambitions.China has already photographed the surface of the moon to prepare for the landing, said a spokesman for the State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense.

A force that intricately links the rotation of the Earth with the direction of weather patterns in the atmosphere has been shown to play a crucial role in the creation of the hypnotic patterns created by the skirts of the Whirling Dervishes.This is according to an international group of researchers who have demonstrated how the Coriolis force is essential for creating the archetypal, and sometimes counterintuitive, patterns that form on the surface of the Whirling Dervishes skirts by creating a set of very simple equations which govern how fixed or free-flowing cone-shaped structures behave when rotating.Related: A celebration of a Persian mystic leads to better understanding of dynamics

As shoppers across the nation prepare to pounce on Black Friday sales, researchers at UC Berkeley are looking at what happens to commerce when there's no set price tag. In an exhaustive study of consumer behavior, they found that shoppers spend more money when engaged in a chain of goodwill known as "Pay-it-forward" than when they can name their own price.

An unknown organisation has crafted a seemingly unbreakable code. Dropping clues in different locations in cyberspace and meat space. A knowledge of the esoteric, math, cryptography, and who knows what else has been used to delve deeper into who knows where.One evening in January last year, Joel Eriksson, a 34-year-old computer analyst from Uppsala in Sweden, was trawling the web, looking for distraction, when he came across a message on an internet forum. The message was in stark white type, against a black background.

Research from the University of Kent has revealed that guarding dogs can significantly reduce conflict between livestock and large carnivores, such as cheetahs or leopards, helping to reduce unwarranted killing of endangered species in South Africa.

The gassy rumblings of ruminating cattle, along with the hisses and sloshes as natural gas is extracted, refined, and transported to communities across the United States, may release 50 percent more methane into the atmosphere than the government had estimated, according to a report published Monday by Harvard University scientists.

The Robot Safari in London Science Museum will see the world premiere of the underwater robot U-CAT, a highly maneuverable robot turtle, designed to penetrate shipwrecks.U-CAT's locomotion principle is similar to sea turtles.

The oldest known stone-tipped projectiles have been discovered in Ethiopia. The javelins are roughly 280,000 years old and predate the earliest known fossils of our species, Homo sapiens, by about 80,000 years.These javelins are some 200,000 years older than previous examples of similar weapons, suggesting that modern humans and their extinct relatives had the know-how to create these sorts of complex thrown projectiles much earlier than often thought.

Are we one outcrop closer to unraveling the mystery of Stonehenge?For years researchers have tried to pinpoint exactly where the enormous stones used in the English monument came from--and how they ended up on an otherwise grassy Salisbury Plain.

LOXAHATCHEE, Fla. -- The odds are astronomical, but 7-year-old Steven Lippard and his dad are convinced the boy was struck by pebbles from a meteorite Saturday while playing outside.Steven has a gash -- stitched up with three staples -- on his head to prove it. Initial testing at Florida Atlantic University indicates the little stones -- pea sized and smaller -- are metallic, a good sign they came from space. Other testing supports the meteorite theory.

In response to the alleged stealing of samples from the Great Pyramid by two German amateur archaeologists, Egypt's antiquities ministry issued a press release Wednesday discrediting all findings by the German pair.The archaeologists took a piece of Kufu's cartouche from a small compartment above his burial chamber and smuggled it to Germany for study, the Ancient Egyptian section of the Ministry of State of Antiquities (MSA) reported.The results announced by the two Germans cast doubt on the construction date of the Great Pyramid and consequently the Pharaoh for which it was built.

Many thousands of years ago, far away in the constellation Cassiopeia, a white dwarf star blew up with cataclysmic violence. Much, much later, in the year 1572 when good Queen Bess was on the throne, the light of the supernova reached Earth. Now, astronomers probing the vast cloud of slowly cooling gases left behind say they have made a remarkable series of discoveries.In particular, it seems that in addition to the regular outward-bound shockwave created when the dwarf star blew up...

Archaeologists digging at Buddha's birthplace have uncovered remains of the "earliest ever Buddhist shrine". They unearthed a 6th Century BC timber structure buried within the Maya Devi Temple at Lumbini in Nepal.The shrine appears to have housed a tree. This links to the Buddha nativity story - his mother gave birth to him while holding on to a tree branch. Its discovery may settle the dispute over the birth date of the Buddha, the team reports in the journal Antiquity.Every year thousands of Buddhists make a holy pilgrimage to Lumbini...

ISON, the most closely watched comet in recent years, may be falling apart as it nears its close encounter with the sun.Comets are giant snowballs of frozen gases, rock and dust that can be several miles in diameter. When they get near the sun, they warm up and spew out some of the gas and dirt, creating a tail that can stretch for thousands of miles. Most comets are in the outer part of our solar system. When they get close enough for us to see them, scientists study them for clues about how our solar system formed.

If life does exist anywhere else in the universe, it may only be fleeting. Now scientists are researching how signs of life might look on dying planets.Astronomers have discovered hundreds of distant alien planets in the past two decades. Future missions could detect potential signs of life called biosignatures on those worlds, such as oxygen or methane in their atmospheres.Astrobiologist Jack O'Malley-James at the University of St. Andrews in Fife, Scotland and his colleagues noted that biosignatures of life on Earth have not remained the same over time, but have altered considerably over its history.

One of the most effective predators in the animal kingdom is smaller than your thumb and won't win any races.The dwarf seahorse is just 2.5 centimetres long, and thanks to its S-shaped body and small dorsal fin, it's going nowhere fast. But oddly enough, it is this unusual body shape and lack of speed that makes the seahorse a menacing hunter.Unlike fish with protruding jaws, the seahorse has a long, thin snout that it rotates toward prey in a swift snatching motion called pivot feeding.

An archaeological excavation near Beit Shemesh has revealed a large prehistoric community that lasted for thousands of years. Conducted by the Israel Antiquities Authority, the dig discovered the oldest structure ever found in the Shfela region of the Judean Hills, dating back to the first permanent human settlement in the area some 10,000 years ago.The archaeologists also found remains from other prehistoric periods. Among them was evidence of a 6,000-year-old cultic temple, and a cluster of rare axes.