Newsdesk Archive
Bees get a perfect touchdown by detecting how fast their landing site 'zooms in' as they approach, new research has found.The findings, reported today in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science, are being used to develop landing systems for robotic aircraft that don't depend on expensive radar and sonar.
The survival of the struggling bee population could soon be doubly important to agriculture.While bees pollinate crops, Canadian researchers have found they can also be used to control pest insects and manage disease by dropping off pest control agents while they work.
For the first time, researchers have been able to map the true extent of gold mining in the biologically diverse region of Madre De Dios in the Peruvian Amazon.
A Brazilian judge has ordered that work on the controversial Belo Monte dam in the Amazon be halted on grounds that environmental commitments were not met, the court said Monday.
Nearly 17,000 kilometres of road were built in the Brazilian Amazon rainforest every year between 2004 and 2007.Although road-building is a major contributor to deforestation and habitat loss, the way in which road networks develop is still poorly understood.
A nearly 9,000-year-old mural of a village with a backdrop of an erupting volcano has now been geochemically pinned to a specific eruption of the Hasan Dağ twin-peaks volcano located about 130 km (70 miles) northeast of the ancient Çatalhöyük town site in Turkey.The mural, painted in ocher on an adobe wall that was long buried, has long been considered the world's earliest depiction of an eruption, as well as the earliest known landscape painting, the first historical news event and the first urban plan.
New research published in JAMA Psychiatry reveals that topiramate, a drug approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to treat epilepsy and migraine headaches, also could be the first reliable medication to help treat cocaine dependence.
Washington (AFP) - A Texas hunting club said Friday it aims to raise up to a million dollars for endangered black rhinoceroses by auctioning off a permit to kill one in Namibia."First and foremost, this is about saving the black rhino," said Ben Carter, executive director of the Dallas Safari Club, which is hosting the auction early next year.Black rhinos are internationally considered an endangered species and the World Wildlife Fund says about 4,800 are alive in the African wild.
Here's a mystery: A golden retriever gives birth to a litter of puppies. It's not her first birth, and something's weird about these adorable little pups: Though the entire litter is female, some carry Y-chromosomal DNA in their blood, normally present only in males. The explanation? Male cells from one of the mother's earlier pregnancies stayed in her womb, eventually being passed on to the younger siblings of the dog they came from originally.
As the largest predator in Africa, the lion has earned its place at the top of the food chain and the title "king of beasts." But the reign of the noble lion could be coming to a close in parts of Uganda, a new study suggests.One of the reasons for the lion's decline in this part of Africa is poisoning by local ranchers, whose livestock are frequently killed by lions, and other human-related conflicts.
An expedition to a remote part of northern Australia has uncovered three new vertebrate species isolated for millions of years, with scientists Monday calling the area a "lost world".Conrad Hoskin from James Cook University and a National Geographic film crew were dropped by helicopter onto the rugged Cape Melville mountain range on Cape York Peninsula earlier this year and were amazed at what they found.
Two pre-Columbian mummies more than a thousand years old were found in a pre-Incan cemetery in a suburb of Lima, archeologists said Thursday."This is one of the most important finds in more than three decades of excavation, because both mummies are intact," Gladys Paz told AFP at the foot of the Huaca Pucllana tomb, an ancient religious complex in the Miraflores neighborhood.
Around 1.8 million years ago, human evolution passed a milestone. Our ancestors before then were little more than bipedal apes. Those so-called hominids had chimpanzee-size bodies and brains, and they still had adaptations in their limbs for climbing trees. But the fossils of hominids from 1.8 to 1.5 million years ago are different. They had bigger brains, flatter faces and upright bodies better suited to walking.
Turkey will on Tuesday unveil the world's first sea tunnel connecting two continents, fulfilling a sultan's dream 150 years ago, but also fuelling recent anti-government sentiment for such mega projects."Our ancestors worked on (the project). It fell to us to realise it," said Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of the rail tunnel under the Bosphorus linking the European and Asian sides of the bustling city of Istanbul.
Extreme heat kills somewhere between 600 and 1,300 people each year in the United States, according to various estimates. It's well established that such deaths, often caused by heat waves, outnumber those from all other natural disasters combined. Therefore, having a better way to predict when heat waves might occur could help people beat the heat and, in turn, save lives.
Residents of a remote village nestled in a steep-sided valley in southern Norway are about to enjoy winter sunlight for the first time ever thanks to giant mirrors.The mountains that surround the village of Rjukan are far from Himalayan, but they are high enough to deprive its 3,500 inhabitants of direct sunlight for six months a year.
Planets rich in carbon, including so-called diamond planets, may lack oceans, according to NASA-funded theoretical research.Our sun is a carbon-poor star, and as result, our planet Earth is made up largely of silicates, not carbon. Stars with much more carbon than the sun, on the other hand, are predicted to make planets chock full of carbon, and perhaps even layers of diamond.
In a cinematic showdown from the sixties, King Kong knocks Godzilla out in an underwater battle. But in reality, giant reptiles still trump terrestrial mammals on size.Large, plant-eating dinosaurs, including one group known as sauropods, were much more common than giant land-based mammals, which were also herbivores. The largest sauropods frequently weighed more than 30 tons and included massive species such as Diplodocus and Apatosaurus.
MIT students have developed Wristify, a thermoelectric bracelet that can alter human body temperature and cut down on air conditioning and heating costs.Wristify has the ability to change an individual's temperature by several degrees and can work at a rate of 0.4 degrees a second.
Some of Britain's most endangered wildlife has fallen under further threat through shrinking populations during the last 40 years, new figures have shown.An audit of more than 200 native species - including birds, bats, moths, butterflies, hares and dormice - shows that priority species have declined on average by 58% since 1970.
Male spiders have been documented wrapping flies and other "gifts" in their silk and presenting the package to a female with the hopes of mating. New research suggests that these gifts give the males a better chance at fathering offspring.
At least 441 new species of animals and plants have been discovered over a four year period in the vast, underexplored rainforest of the Amazon, including a monkey that purrs like a cat.Found between 2010 and 2013, the species include a flame-patterned lizard, a thumbnail-sized frog, a vegetarian piranha, a brightly coloured snake, and a beautiful pink orchid, according to World Wildlife Fund (WWF).
A population of false killer whales, Pseudorca crassidens, in waters off northeastern New Zealand developed a relationship with bottlenose dolphins to defend themselves from predation, according to a 17-year study reported in the journal Marine Mammal Science.
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's government is planning a state secrets act that critics say could curtail public access to information on a wide range of issues, including tensions with China and the Fukushima nuclear crisis. The new law would dramatically expand the definition of official secrets and journalists convicted under it could be jailed for up to five years.Related: Fukushima whistleblower exposes yakuza connections, exploitation of cleanup workers
It sounds like the setup for an episode of "The X-Files." A satellite records evidence of a mysterious cluster of lights in the Atlantic ocean, far from human civilization. Could it be the reappearance of all the lost ships from the Bermuda Triangle? Could it be a secret alien headquarters hidden in plain sight on the ocean's surface?The actual answer is a little more mundane, but still fascinating.
Some pieces of rock that fell to Earth from space are indeed from Mars, new measurements reveal.New data collected by NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has pinned down the exact ratio of two forms of the inert gas argon in the Martian atmosphere. These new measurements will not only help confirm the origins of some meteorites, they could also help researchers understand how and when Mars lost most of its atmosphere, transforming from a warm, wet planet to the red desert it is today.
An operation with potentially "apocalyptic" consequences is expected to begin in a little over two weeks from now - "as early as November 8" - at Fukushima's damaged and sinking Reactor 4, when plant operator TEPCO will attempt to remove over 1300 spent fuel rods holding the radiation equivalent of 14,000 Hiroshima bombs from a spent fuel storage tank perched on the reactor's upper floor.Fukushima Reactor 4 While the Reactor 4 building itself did not suffer a meltdown, it did suffer a hydrogen explosion, is now tipping and sinking and has zero ability to withstand another seismic event.Related: 7.1-Magnitude Earthquake Hit Off The Coast Of Japan
Just 13 days in space may be enough to cause profound changes in eye structure and gene expression, report researchers from Houston Methodist, NASA Johnson Space Center, and two other institutions in the October 2013 issue of Gravitational and Space Research.The study, which looked at how low gravity and radiation and oxidative damage impacts mice, is the first to examine eye-related gene expression and cell behavior after spaceflight.
For about the 6,554 time since 1264 B.C. the sunlight entered the Great Temple of Abu Simbel of the Egyptian King Ramses the Great, in Abu Simbel city, south Egypt.1,130 km south of Cairo on the west bank of Nasser Lake, Egyptians celebrate the scientifically-miraculous man-made solar phenomenon of the solar illumination of the innermost chamber of the 33m-tall Great Temple of Abu Simbel twice per year.The two temples of Abu Simbel city or Abshek city in the Ancient Egyptian Language were carved in the Nile mountains of South Egypt 3,277 years ago...
Peru's official UFO investigation department is now back in business, and its government is soliciting information from the public after an increase of sightings.The Peruvian Office of Anomalous Aerial Phenomena Research (OIFAA) -- which was shut down for the last five years -- will seek the expertise of air force personnel, sociologists, archaeologists and astronomers to analyze as much information as possible about UFOs, OpenMinds.tv reports.
Cosmochemists have solved a long standing mystery in the formation of the solar system: Oxygen, the most abundant element in Earth's crust, follows a strange, anomalous pattern in the oldest, most pristine rocks, one that must result from a different chemical process than the well-understood reactions that form minerals containing oxygen on Earth.
How life came about from inanimate sets of chemicals is still a mystery. While we may never be certain which chemicals existed on prebiotic Earth, we can study the biomolecules we have today to give us clues about what happened three billion years ago.Now scientists have used a set of these biomolecules to show one way in which life might have started.
New York City is transitioning its 250,000 street lights to energy-efficient LEDs in an upgrade that should be completed by 2017. CBS reports that Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced the time frame today, noting that the upgraded lights will save city taxpayers around $14 million a year once the transition is complete. The savings are two-fold: LEDs consume less power than their high-pressure sodium counterparts, resulting in around $6 million in savings, and they also have a much longer lifespan, lasting up to 20 years.
A scientist in the United Kingdom has found that compounds derived from marijuana can kill cancerous cells found in people with leukemia, a form of cancer that is expected to cause an estimated 24,000 deaths in the United States this year."Cannabinoids have a complex action; it hits a number of important processes that cancers need to survive," study author Dr. Wai Liu, an oncologist at the University of London's St. George medical school, told The Huffington Post.
During his Wednesday night interview with Jeremy Paxman on BBC Newsnight, comedian and actor Russell Brand said what no politician or pundit would ever dare say: that without dramatic, fundamental change, the prevailing political and economic system is broken, and hell-bent on planetary-level destruction.Watch the Interview here
Emergency experts say a learned helplessness has left Australians in major cities unprepared to cope in natural disasters.With the increasing impact of extreme heatwaves, storms, fires and floods, experts say traditional reliance on emergency services and recovery support such as cash handouts needs to be urgently reviewed if Australia is to better survive both the effects and escalating costs of such disasters.
A deadly earthquake that struck the Philippines last week created a spectacular rocky wall that stretches for kilometres through farmlands, astounded geologists said Thursday.Dramatic pictures of the Earth-altering power of the 7.1-magnitide quake have emerged as the government worked to mend the broken central island of Bohol, ground zero of the destruction.
A Dutch design studio wants to drag smog particles from the sky down to earth, scoop them up and turn them into saleable goods. It might sound a bizarre and lofty idea, but Studio Roosegaarde is the collective behind the proposed rechargeable, glow-in-the-dark road markings, so it's no stranger to fantastical design."These Dutch always have a tendency to hack nature with their windmills, and we're continuing that tradition," studio founder Daan Roosegaarde tells Wired.co.uk. "Now we want to start hacking air. It's a special project that really merges the worlds of poetry and pragmatism.".
Farmers in Colorado made history this month when they harvested a hemp crop -- the first in the United States since 1957 when the U.S. government banned hemp.Led by Springfield, Colo. farmer Ryan Loflin who planted the 55-acre hemp crop back in May, Loflin and hemp advocates across the nation came to his farm in October to harvest the historic crop.Technically, Colorado won't be granting hemp growing-cultivation licenses until 2014, but Loflin just couldn't wait.
Public opinion on pot legalization appears to have crossed a major threshold: For the first time, a Gallup poll found that a solid majority of American adults supports making marijuana legal.Fifty-eight percent of Americans say the drug should be legal, according to Gallup's latest survey, compared with 39 percent who oppose legalization. The other 3 percent had no opinion.
Conservationists want to turn parts of Europe back into wilderness, teeming with wild horses, lynxes and native bison. But there are varying interpretations of what "wilderness" means and conflict over how much it should be managed.
The Australian Aboriginal practice of using fire to hunt sand goannas increases rather than reduces the numbers of this important species, a new study has found.The research, which was conducted on the lands of the Martu Aboriginal people in the Western Desert of Australia, further supports the idea that 'patch' burning is beneficial to the Australian environment.
The sting of the Arizona bark scorpion is so fierce that humans say the pain is like being hit by a hammer. But the tiny grasshopper mouse shakes off the sting like it's nothing.Now, researchers have found for the mouse, the sting really is nothing. Instead of causing pain, the scorpion venom blocks it, a fact that could lead to the development of new pain-blocking drugs for people.
British engineers have taken inspiration from dolphins for a new type of radar device that could easily track miners trapped underground or skiers buried in an avalanche.The device sends out two pulses in quick succession to locate a semiconductor device, while at the same time cancelling any background "noise" from other objects.
People's tendency to communicate with similar people is stronger than earlier believed, which restricts the flow of information and ideas in social networks. These are the findings that an Aalto University research group will publish this week in an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences publication series.
A lead curse tablet, dating back around 1,700 years and probably written by a magician, has been discovered in a collapsed Roman mansion in Jerusalem, archaeologists report.The mansion, which is being excavated by the Israel Antiquities Authority in the Givati Parking Lot, is located in what is known as the "City of David," an area that holds at least 6,000 years of human occupation. The mansion itself covers at least 2,000 square meters (about half an acre) and contains two large open courtyards adjacent to each other. It was in use between the late third century and the year 363, when it was destroyed in a series of earthquakes on May 18 or 19.
Researchers have started to figure out how DNA fine-tunes faces. In experiments on mice, they have identified thousands of regions in the genome that act like dimmer switches for the many genes that code for facial features, such as the shape of the skull or size of the nose.Specific mutations in genes are already known to cause conditions such as cleft lips or palates.
Astronomers may have identified one of the richest planetary systems yet.The discovery of a seventh planet around the dwarf star KIC 11442793 could be a record, according to two separate teams of researchers.The system bears some similarities to our own, but all seven planets orbit much closer to their host star, which lies some 2,500 light-years from Earth.
An alien planet declared a super-Earth by NASA might not be so habitable after all. New measurements flag the planet (called Kepler-69c) as more of a "super-Venus" that would likely be inhospitable to life.The planetary status change is part of a larger struggle over how to define the habitable zone of a star. In recent years, scientists determined that the distance between a planet and its type of star is just one metric that hints at the likelihood of liquid water on its surface, which could fuel life. Other factors include the planet's atmosphere and even how the star behaves.
Were Neanderthals merely lumbering oafs? Not at least as far as dental hygiene is concerned, archaeologists suggest.Toothpicks likely were on the menu after a hearty Neanderthal meal.Our long-lost Homo neanderthalensis cousins used the toothpicks to clean their teeth and even relieve the pain of gum disease, suggests a team at Spain's Institut Català de Paleoecologia Humana i Evolució Social (IPHES).
When a ship arrived at an island in the North Pacific in the late 1700s, it brought more than cargo and splintered wood. It brought rats.These invasive mammals thrived on the island, eating up local birds and their eggs. As a result, the spot took on the moniker "Rat Island," and it was known for its eerie silence and lack of birdsong.
There is a lot of folklore and wives' tales associated with animal and insect winter prognostication. Maybe the most famous on a yearly basis is Punxsutawney Phil, the world-renowned groundhog prognosticator from north-central Pennsylvania.AccuWeather.com meteorologists have weighed in with their forecast for the winter of 2013 and 2014, but what about the forecasters from the animal world? .
Neonicotinoid insecticides have developed a bad reputation for their unintended and potentially harmful effects on pollinating insects such as bees. A study in New Zealand now shows that the chemical can also change how native and invasive ants interact.
The oceans are full of plastic. Now, research finds that even barnacles are feeling the consequences.A third of barnacles caught in the North Pacific gyre, a region of the ocean notoriously littered with scraps of plastic, have microfragments of the plastic material in their digestive systems at a given time, a new study finds. Researchers aren't sure whether ingesting the non-food harms the barnacles, but it could crowd out real nutrition.
A flying drone the size of a shoebox has captured astonishingly detailed images of 300-year-old coral living beneath the waters off American Samoa in the South Pacific.The new technology could allow scientists to map the world's coral reefs, enabling scientists to predict their health and the health of the ecosystems that the reefs anchor.
Good news for parents: Those pricey piano lessons or random toy parts littering your floors may one day lead to the next scientific breakthrough.That's according to new Michigan State University research linking childhood participation in arts and crafts activities to patents generated and businesses launched as adults.
NImagine the brain's delight when experiencing the sounds of Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata" while simultaneously taking in a light show produced by a visualizer.A new Northwestern University study did much more than that.
The music of ancient Greece, unheard for thousands of years, is being brought back to life by Armand D'Angour, a musician and tutor in classics at Oxford University. He describes what his research is discovering."Suppose that 2,500 years from now all that survived of the Beatles songs were a few of the lyrics, and all that remained of Mozart and Verdi's operas were the words and not the music.
A 300-year drought may have caused the demise of several Mediterranean cultures, including ancient Greece, new research suggests.A sharp drop in rainfall may have led to the collapse of several eastern Mediterranean civilizations, including ancient Greece, around 3,200 years ago. The resulting famine and conflict may help explain why the entire Hittite culture, chariot-riding people who ruled most of the region of Anatolia, vanished from the planet, according to a study published in August in the journal PLOS ONE.
The heat is on, at least in the Arctic. Average summer temperatures in the Eastern Canadian Arctic during the last 100 years are higher now than during any century in the past 44,000 years and perhaps as long ago as 120,000 years, says a new University of Colorado Boulder study.
Scientists have long known that the Arctic is warming faster than the rest of the globe, even as they had less of a grasp of how recent trends compare to thousands of years ago.Now, a new study aims to fill the knowledge gap by concluding that recent summer warming in the eastern Canadian Arctic is unprecedented in more than 44,000 years. Prior research documented melt and temperature dynamics going back about 2,000 to 4,000 years in comparison, said study lead author Gifford Miller, associate director of the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
If you're happy and you know it, clap your hands! That's easy enough for children to figure out because the emotion matches the movement. But when feelings and reactions don't align, can kids tell there's something wrong? New research from Concordia University proves that they can - as early as 18 months.
A Mississippi baby born with HIV and treated in the early hours of her life remains free of the infection three years later, despite being off of medications for 18 months, according to a new report.Researchers first reported the baby's case in March of this year, when the baby had been off medications for 10 months.
Researchers from Australia and the United States have documented a massive extinction among bee populations, concurrent with an event that wiped out dinosaurs and many flowering plants 65 million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous and beginning of the Paleogene eras.
There's gold in them thar trees. Eucalyptus trees, that is. Australian researchers have found that microscopic gold particles from underground ore deposits are present in tree leaves.Eucalyptus tree roots can delve more than 130 feet (40 meters) deep underground in a thirsty search for water.
The wildfires that are now threatening Sydney and other parts of New South Wales, Australia, are burning out of control, despite intensive firefighting efforts.Hundreds of homes have been destroyed by fires raging along a 190-mile (306 kilometers) front, and much of the region is blanketed by thick, choking smoke. Dry, windy conditions are expected to worsen through Wednesday (Oct. 23), making the task of battling the infernos even more demanding, according to the Associated Press.
Descending by plane into the Maldives offers a panoramic view of azure seas and coral-fringed islands, but as the tarmac nears, billowing smoke in the middle distance reveals an environmental calamity.Thilafushi Island, a half-hour boat trip from the capital, is surrounded by the same crystal clear waters and white sand that have made the Indian Ocean archipelago a honeymoon destination for the rich and famous.
A pollutant that killed thousands of birds off the coast of Britain earlier this year will no longer be dumped at sea after a worldwide ban was agreed.More than 4,000 birds were killed or injured by the chemical polyisobutene (PIB) between Cornwall and Sussex, and on the Channel Islands.
For the first time, scientists have fundamentally changed the genetic code of an organism, raising the possibility that researchers might be able to retool nature and create potent new forms of proteins to combat disease.
A purring monkey, a vegetarian piranha and a flame-patterned lizard are among more than 400 new species of animals and plants that have been discovered in the past four years in the Amazon rainforest, conservationists say.
A baby's sense of numbers at the age of 6 months predicts how good that child will be at math at the age of 3, new research finds.In the study, in which researchers looked at infants' "primitive number sense," or how well they can differentiate between groups of different numbers of items, suggests this skill is a building block for future math learning.
Teeth may have evolved from scales on the outside of animal bodies, before being trapped in the mouth by the evolution of the jaw, say scientists.For decades, it's been thought that bony materials originated as teeth in the mouths of predators, before spreading out over the body surface to form skeletal scales. But a new study, published in Nature, turns the inside-out theory, outside-in.
The number of observed exoplanets - worlds circling distant stars - has passed 1,000.Of these, 12 could be habitable - orbiting at a distance where it is neither "too hot" nor "too cold" for water to be liquid on the surface.The planets are given away by tiny dips in light as they pass in front of their stars or through gravitational "tugs" on the star from an orbiting world.
A meteorite reveals clues to how Mars lost its thick, carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere and became a cold, rocky desert, researchers say.They say the Lafayette meteorite shows signs of carbonation - where minerals absorb CO2 in a reaction with water.Mars lost its protective blanket about 4 billion years ago, perhaps because of the loss of its magnetic field, space impacts, or chemical processes.
Cairo: Archaeologists have unearthed a 4000-year-old tomb outside the Egyptian capital containing what they believe are the remains of a prominent doctor to the pharaohs.The tomb, part of a 21-metre by 14-metre plot, with four-metre high walls, was discovered at Abusir, southwest of Cairo, senior antiquities ministry official Ali al-Asfar said on Tuesday.
Scattered throughout Mexico and central America are pools where water surfaces from underground networks of caves, which the ancient Maya said were gateways to the underworld. Biologists have now found that these bodies of water are home to a mysterious real-world creature as well: the first venomous crustaceans known to science.
A man shooting time lapse video of a town in Iceland captured an eerie, glowing light that flew into town.YouTube user Bjarki Mikkelsen went back to the tape he filmed in Northern Iceland's Akureyri on Sept. 29, and noticed the fireball, he says. At the 1:18 mark in his video, the red glowing light falls from the heavens and straight into town."There comes a strange glowing ball that I catch on web camera," Mikkelsen writes. "I wonder about that.".
Black holes may not be bald after all. In a challenge to traditional models of the universe's gravitational monsters, new research suggests black holes could be quite "hairy," with more tangled features than previously believed.The gravitational attraction of black holes is so strong that even light cannot escape their pull, making these super-dense objects invisible to outside observers and almost indistinguishable from one another.
One key factor in maintaining a liquid water biosphere on a planet over billions of years is its distance from the Sun, or whatever star it may be orbiting. If it is in too close, then, like Venus, its oceans will boil away. At too great a distance a water world will at best have icy polar caps on the surface.
Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, is the most common childhood psychiatric disorder. Scientists do not know what causes it, but genetics play a clear role. Other risk factors have also been identified, including premature birth, low birth weight, a mother's use of alcohol or tobacco during pregnancy, and environmental exposures to toxins like lead.
The recent discovery of the skeleton of King Richard III has the citizens of the city of York, where the king spent much of his life, celebrating the storied ruler -- and feuding with the city of Leicester, where Richard III was buried and will be reinterred.Now, a nearly 600-year-old manuscript on display at the Yorkshire Museum reveals York's attitudes toward the medieval king while he was still alive. This is the first time the manuscript has been on display for the public, according to The Northern Echo.
Mongolia's nomads have roamed its sprawling grasslands for centuries, pitching their yurts wherever they find pasture for their animals, but now Tsogtsaikhan Orgodol is staying put as part of a scheme to tackle chronic overgrazing.The tanned 53-year-old still wears his nomad's riding boots, but he and his community have been given exclusive rights to 1,000 hectares (2,500 acres) of steppe in exchange for reducing their herds and remaining in the same place all year round, giving the land a chance to regenerate.
To confirm the theory that humans spread out from Africa tens of thousands of years ago, all you have to do is follow the cold sores. Or, to be more precise, follow the mutation patterns encoded in the genome of the virus that causes those cold sores.That's what researchers at the University of Wisconsin at Madison did: In the journal PLOS ONE, they describe how they sequenced the genomes of 31 samples of herpes simplex virus type-1 to reconstruct how it hitchhiked on humans as they dispersed around the world.
Colony collapse disorder has been decimating bees for several years, but explanations have been hard to come by. After some spurious claims about cell phones causing the problem, researchers began identifying factors that did create problems for the health of bees, including infections, insecticides, and agricultural practices. The problem is that all of these seemed connected to colony collapse, which suggested the cause was likely to be complex.
Once a rare delicacy served to honored guests, shark fin soup had become so popular among China's fast-growing elite in recent years that it was pushing some shark species close to extinction.Now, there is fresh hope for sharks around the world. The demand for shark fins has plunged, providing a rare victory for conservationists that could have wider implications for other endangered wildlife.
Concerns are mounting that the venomous lionfish, an invading fish in the Atlantic Ocean, is enjoying a population explosion in its conquered waters, despite vast efforts to fish out the destructive species, CNN reported.The news comes just three months after a team of researchers from a number of US universities reported that the lionfish population was booming in the deep waters off the Florida coast, as the Christian Science Monitor reported in July.
A rare oarfish has washed up on the California coast for the second time in less than a week, authorities said, leaving experts stumped.The 14-foot (4.3-meter) fish, which has a pug-like face and a skeleton of bone, was found five days after a marine instructor snorkeling off Santa Catalina Island, about 50 miles to the west, spotted a dead 18-foot (5.5-meter) oarfish in shallow water.
Ukrainian astronomers have discovered a large asteroid heading for Earth which could strike our planet on 26 August 2032, impacting with a force 50 times greater than the biggest ever nuclear bomb.Its existence has been verified by teams around the world, in at least 27 distinct observations over the course of the past week, and Nasa has been forced to issue an earth impact risk summary as part of its Near Earth Object Program.
Exactly 10 years before, when Newcastle yachtsman Ivan Macfadyen had sailed exactly the same course from Melbourne to Osaka, all he'd had to do to catch a fish from the ocean between Brisbane and Japan was throw out a baited line."There was not one of the 28 days on that portion of the trip when we didn't catch a good-sized fish to cook up and eat with some rice," Macfadyen recalled.But this time, on that whole long leg of sea journey, the total catch was two. No fish. No birds. Hardly a sign of life at all..
Members of the Cantabria community found a giant squid washed up on La Arena beach Tuesday. The squid is 30 feet long, weights 400 pounds and belongs to the Architeuthis dux species, the largest invertebrates on Earth.An underwater photographer named Enrique Talledo was on the beach at the time it washed ashore.
The controversial badger cull taking place in Gloucestershire should be stopped immediately, says the lead scientist on the board of Natural England, the organisation charged with making the decision.NE, the nation's official protector of nature, will rule Monday on whether the night-time badger shoots can be significantly extended, following the revelation that marksmen fell far short of their initial legal targets.
When it comes to learning from mistakes, humans and rats think alike, research suggests.In a study that tracked how humans and their rodent cousins adapted to errors during a time estimation task, the two species showed similar brain activity in the medial frontal cortex (MFC), which sends signals that synchronize neurons in the part of the brain that controls movement.
Japan's under-40s appear to be losing interest in conventional relationships. Millions aren't even dating, and increasing numbers can't be bothered with sex. For their government, "celibacy syndrome" is part of a looming national catastrophe. Japan already has one of the world's lowest birth rates. Its population of 126 million, which has been shrinking for the past decade, is projected to plunge a further one-third by 2060.
Herod the Great, the king of Judea who ruled not long before the time of Jesus, seems to have eluded historians once again.In 2007 archaeologists announced they had found the great king's tomb, a surprisingly modest mausoleum that was part of the Herodium, a massive complex built by Herod on a cone-shaped hill in the desert outside Jerusalem.
To an outsider, the Wind River Range of Wyoming does not seem a hospitable place. Glaciers dot the peaks, and snow can fall even in August. But in the thin air above 10,000 feet, archaeologists have discovered a host of sky-high prehistoric villages, including one that may be the oldest mountain settlement in North America.
The age-old secret of why Stonehenge was built where it was can now be revealed, according to historians.The reason for the stone monument's location has remained one of the great unsolved mysteries of British prehistory, with no one theory accepted as correct.
Marmoset monkeys take it in turns to "talk" in a pattern very similar to human conversation, according to scientists.Researchers recorded the sounds of the marmosets as they called to one another from behind a curtain.Each animal would call, then wait for the other to respond before calling again.
More than 80 percent of the world's sharp-snouted day frogs died off in the decade leading up to 2004. In 2002, the International Union for Conservation of Nature placed the little frog species with a wedge-shaped snout on its Red List of critically endangered species. Its hopping grounds were at the fringes of the rainforest and in the uplands of Australia.
The great flowering of human evolution over the past 2 million years may have been driven not by the African savannahs, but by the lakes of that continent's Great Rift Valley. This novel idea, published this week, may explain why every major advance in the evolution of early humans, from speciation to the vast increase in brain size, appears to have taken place in eastern Africa.
Researchers have discovered a subtle twist in the primeval light that formed shortly after the universe came into being. They hope it can reveal new secrets about the moments after the Big Bang.This afterglow, called Cosmic Microwave Background, or CMB, was created out of hot ionized plasma some 13.7 billion years ago, when the universe was just 380,000 years old. A small fraction of this light is polarized (meaning the light waves vibrate in one plane).