Newsdesk Archive

Microbes living in Antarctica's saltiest lake swap huge chunks of genetic material as a means of surviving their harsh environment, a new study finds.The single-celled organisms, called haloarchaea for their salt-loving ways, are biologically distinct from bacteria, algae and other tiny creatures that can thrive in extreme settings.

As they destroy bacteria very efficiently, plasmas constitute an alternative to chemical disinfectants and potentially to antibiotics, as well. How they achieve this effect has been investigated by biologists, plasma physicists and chemists at the Ruhr-Universität (RUB). Cold atmospheric-pressure plasmas attack the prokaryote's cell envelope, proteins and DNA.

Illegal drugs are now cheaper and purer globally than at any time over the last 20 years, a report has warned.The International Centre for Science in Drug Policy said its report suggested the war on drugs had failed.The report, published in the British Medical Journal Open, looked at data from seven international government-funded drug surveillance systems.

The Conservative government is launching a $1.3-billion free market in medical marijuana on Tuesday, eventually providing an expected 450,000 Canadians with quality weed.Health Canada is phasing out an older system on Monday that mostly relied on small-scale, homegrown medical marijuana of varying quality, often diverted illegally to the black market.

Farmers in California may finally begin growing industrial hemp under a new law signed Wednesday by Gov. Jerry Brown.Lawmakers have been discussing the proposal since 1999 to allow approved residents to grow hemp for industrial purposes by reclassifying the plant as a fiber or oilseed crop.

High clouds in the west, clear skies in the east: That's the weather report for Kepler-7b, a sizzling Jupiter-like world that's trillions of miles away.The scientific world's first map of the clouds on an extrasolar planet has been laid out in a paper accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. It's based on years' worth of readings from NASA's Kepler and Spitzer space telescopes.

It was hard to miss the disturbance in the force when scientists at Harvard and MIT declared they had turned light into molecules last week, prompting a collective air punch from the kind of folk who attend sci-fi conventions, for surely a working Jedi lightsaber was now close at hand.The story began with Mikhail Lukin, a Harvard professor, who through the medium of the double negative drew the first comparison to the Jedi's favoured weapon.

As women of a certain age can tell you, menopause comes with a variety of challenges. A new study from the Group Health Research Institute reveals that a 12-week yoga class and continuing to practice at home can help with some of those challenges, but not all.

A new understanding of the essential role of gut microbes in the immune system may hold the key to dealing with some of the more significant health problems facing people in the world today, Oregon State University researchers say in a new analysis.

Over the past four years, bee colonies have undergone a disturbing transformation. As helpless beekeepers looked on, the machinelike efficiency of these communal insects devolved into inexplicable disorganization. Worker bees would fly away, never to return; adolescent bees wandered aimlessly in the hive; and the daily jobs in the colony were left undone until honey production stopped and eggs died of neglect. Colony collapse disorder, as it is known, has claimed roughly 30 percent of bee colonies every winter since 2007.

Researchers in Sweden said Friday they had developed a new medicine to protect bees from diseases that kill entire populations of the insect in the US and Europe.A team of microbiologists at Lund University have patented the treatment, known as SymBeeotic -- made from lactic acid bacteria from the stomachs of healthy bees -- which they described as a major "boost" to bees' immune system and are hopeful that it could slow down the rate at which bees are dying.

Livestock manure represents a valuable resource in the agriculture sector. As fertilizer it is a source of nitrogen, phosphorous and organic matter, all crucial for the sustainability of European farming.But manure can also have negative impacts on the environment, depending on how it is used. Manure can contaminate surface and groundwater, for example, or cause air pollution in the form of malodorous emissions and greenhouse gases.

As China tries to take its seat at the top table of global academia, the criminal underworld has seized on a feature in its research system: the fact that research grants and promotions are awarded on the basis of the number of articles published, not on the quality of the original research. This has fostered an industry of plagiarism, invented research and fake journals that Wuhan University estimated in 2009 was worth $150m, a fivefold increase on just two years earlier.

Comments can be bad for science. That's why, here at PopularScience.com, we're shutting them off.In one study led by University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Dominique Brossard, 1,183 Americans read a fake blog post on nanotechnology and revealed in survey questions how they felt about the subject (are they wary of the benefits or supportive?). Then, through a randomly assigned condition, they read either epithet- and insult-laden comments ("If you don't see the benefits of using nanotechnology in these kinds of products, you're an idiot" ) or civil comments.

A tiny chip used in smart phones to adjust the orientation of the screen could serve to create a real-time urban seismic network, easily increasing the amount of strong motion data collected during a large earthquake, according to a new study published in the October issue of the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America (BSSA).

HISTORIANS have given their theories of how a young African woman came to be found in a Fairford river, 1,000 years after her death.Fairford schoolboys Christian Thompson and Robbie Cribley made the discovery in June as they stumbled across a human skull while paddling their dinghy down the River Coln.

Human memory constantly adapts and moulds itself to fit the world. Now an art project hopes to highlight just how fallible our recollections are.All of us generate false memories and artist Alasdair Hopwood has been "collecting" them.For the past year he has asked the public to submit anecdotes of fake recollections which he turns into artistic representations.

Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden's leaks of surveillance secrets have already prompted concerted efforts to reform spy laws in the US. But now a burgeoning international attempt to rein in the mass surveillance is taking shape.Led by the German government, a loose coalition of privacy chiefs from countries across the world is pushing to update an influential international human rights treaty that enshrines the right to privacy.

Augmented reality glasses that can translate a menu in real time were unveiled at a Japanese gadget fair Monday, with promises they could be ready for visitors to the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.NTT Docomo was showing off its latest development where cameras, computers and know-how combine to give the wearer a whole different view of what they are looking at.

Nasa is preparing to launch a 3D printer into space next year, a toaster-sized game changer that greatly reduces the need for astronauts to load up with every tool, spare part or supply they might ever need.The printers would serve as a flying factory of infinite designs, creating objects by extruding layer upon layer of plastic from long strands coiled around large spools. Doctors use them to make replacement joints and artists use them to build exquisite jewellery.

In October 2018, a 1,600ft-wide asteroid named Bennu will pass Earth, close enough for Nasa to land a spacecraft on it. Five years later, the craft will return to Earth carrying rock samples that could tell us exactly how planets are formed. But the mission, dubbed OSIRIS-REx, has another purpose: to lay the groundwork for the development of an asteroid-mining industry.

SYDNEY (Reuters) - An international team of scientists in China has discovered what may be the earliest known creature with a distinct face, a 419 million-year-old fish that could be a missing link in the development of vertebrates.The fossil find in China's Xiaoxiang Reservoir, reported by the journal "Nature" on Thursday, is the most primitive vertebrate discovered with a modern jaw, including a dentary bone found in humans.

Although long thought to be devoid of life, the bottom of the deep ocean is now known to harbor entire ecosystems teeming with microbes. Scientists have recently documented that oxygen is disappearing from seawater circulating through deep oceanic crust, a significant first step in understanding the way life in the "deep biosphere" beneath the sea floor is able to survive and thrive. The new research findings were published in the journal Nature Communications on September 27, 2013, and are helping to redefine our concepts of the limits of life on our planet.

Fourteen-year-long archaeological excavations in the Parc National des Écrins in the southern Alps have provided evidence of human activity from the Mesolithic to the Post-Medieval period.Dr Kevin Walsh from the University of York with colleagues unearthed a series of stone animal enclosures and human dwellings considered some of most complex high altitude Bronze Age structures found anywhere in the Alps.

It has been estimated that the first people arrived in Australia possibly around 45,000 years ago and from that time, until the settlement of Europeans on the eastern coast, the Australian Aborigines had been turning space into place for much of that time.At first the Indigenous people showed trust towards the Europeans for they believed them to be their ancestors, returned from the dead.

Of course England's most controversial king couldn't be reburied without a fight.The rediscovered bones of Richard III are set to be reinterred at Leicester Cathedral in England next year. But, displeased with the church's newly unveiled tomb design, some members of the Richard III Society are reportedly pulling their funds from the medieval king's reburial.

What did our ancient ancestors sound like?Between approximately 4,500 and 2,500 B.C, the ancestors of much of Europe and Asia once spoke the same mother tongue, a language referred to as Proto-Indo-European, or PIE. Although there is no written record of such a language, linguist Dr. Andrew Byrd recently attempted to reconstruct his own recordings of PIE language for Archaeology magazine, building off three centuries' worth of scholarly work on the topic.

Combining traditional forms of Chinese and Western medicine could offer new hope for developing new treatments for liver, lung, colorectal cancers and osteosarcoma of the bones.Experts from Cardiff University's School of Medicine have joined forces with Peking University in China to test the health benefits of a traditional Chinese medicine.

The "quake island" that rose from the sea off Pakistan this week is pictured clearly in a new satellite image.It was acquired by the French Pleiades high-resolution Earth-observing system, and has enabled scientists to map the muddy mound's precise dimensions.It is almost circular - 175.7m on the long axis and 160.0m on the short axis, giving a total area of 22,726 sq m.See here for more.

The creation of new islands could make up for the loss of land in the Maldives due to sea level rise, a study published in the journal Geology suggests.Regional island building consists of lagoons filling with sand taken from the surrounding coral reefs. As this happens, plant and animal life take root.

Putting mirrors in space and salting clouds are two of the more outlandish ideas noted by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as a way to help counteract the consequences of increasing greenhouse gas emissions.Its report also examines carbon dioxide removal, with ideas such as sowing the seabed with iron to stimulate the growth of plankton that would then absorb carbon, as well as capturing carbon dioxide from the air and storing it in either land or sea.

In 1987, the government of Thailand launched a huge, unplanned experiment. They built a dam across the Khlong Saeng river, creating a 60-square-mile reservoir. As the Chiew Larn reservoir rose, it drowned the river valley, transforming 150 forested hilltops into islands, each with its own isolated menagerie of wildlife.

Tetsuro Matsuzawa begins his working day, conventionally enough, in front of a computer. He taps in a few commands, takes a seat and waits. Within minutes, the calm of his basement laboratory is pierced by the sound of excitable primates.On cue, two chimpanzees appear through an opening in the ceiling, flash a look of recognition at Matsuzawa, and then aim an inquisitive stare at his unfamiliar companion from the Observer.

One of England's most senior police officers has called for class-A drugs to be decriminalised and for the policy of outright prohibition to be radically revised.In a dramatic move that will reignite the debate over the so-called war on drugs, Mike Barton, Durham's chief constable, has suggested that the NHS could supply drugs to addicts, breaking the monopoly and income stream of criminal gangs.Read the letter here

A European study analyzes the relationship between fruit and vegetable consumption and the risk of mortality. As previous research has already suggested, this study concludes that fruit and vegetable consumption reduces all-cause mortality, and especially cardiovascular disease mortality.The benefits of fruit and vegetable consumption are not a new discovery. However, new research confirms their role in reducing mortality. This reduction is more significant in the case of deaths from cardiovascular disease.

Most animals have a circadian clock that helps them distinguish night and day, but now researchers have found coastal animals seem to be equipped with a separate clock to track time via the tides.The evidence comes from the discovery of internal clock genes that help some marine animals track the ebb and flow of the tides, according to two studies detailed today (Sept. 26) in the journals Current Biology and Cell Reports.

A recent newspaper article called "Elephant tears: Newborn weeps after being parted from mother who tried to kill him" reports about a newborn male elephant who "cried for five hours without stopping after he was rejected by his mother."This story immediately made me think of the book When Elephants Weep (Delta, 1996), which helped to open the door to people taking the emotional lives of animals more seriously than they previously had.

Nearly two-thirds of Americans mistakenly believe that humans use only 10 percent of their brains, according to a new poll on brain health.The poll, which surveyed more than 2,000 Americans, found that 65 percent of respondents agreed with the statement "People only use 10 percent of their brains on a daily basis.".

A common drug that dermatologists turn to treat nail fungus appears to come with a not-so-tiny side effect: eradicating HIV.In a study performed at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, not only does the drug Ciclopirox completely eradicate infectious HIV from cell cultures, but unlike today's most cutting-edge antiviral treatments, the virus doesn't bounce back when the drug is withheld. This means it may not require a lifetime of use to keep HIV at bay.

Martin Seligman, the father of positive psychology, theorizes that while 60 percent of happiness is determined by our genetics and environment, the remaining 40 percent is up to us.In his 2004 Ted Talk, Seligman describes three different kinds of happy lives: The pleasant life, in which you fill your life with as many pleasures as you can, the life of engagement, where you find a life in your work, parenting, love and leisure and the meaningful life, which "consists of knowing what your highest strengths are, and using them to belong to and in the service of something larger than you are."

Reports of drug-induced flashbacks have existed since the 1950s. Though the term "flashback" wasn't used specifically until 1969, as early as 1954 scientists noticed LSD users complaining of a reoccurrence of an LSD-like state long after the drug's effects should have worn off.The risk of a flashback has become a standard line in anti-drug messaging. Months or years after taking LSD, suddenly, the trip could come back without warning, and suddenly you would be floridly hallucinating again. An urban legend holds that molecules of LSD stay in the body, hiding in fat or in the spine, and can later be re-released.

Here's one more sign of a thaw in U.S.-Iranian relations: A 2,700-year-old silver drinking cup, looted from a cave in Iran and seized by U.S. Customs officials a decade ago, was returned to Iran this week. Its value is estimated at a million dollars or more.The ceremonial drinking vessel from the 7th century B.C., cast in the shape of a winged griffin, has been sitting in a warehouse in New York for years. And for years, U.S. officials have been saying they couldn't return it to Iran until relations between Washington and Tehran were normalized.

Playing an instrument could sharpen the mind, according to a new study.Researchers at the University of St Andrews said their findings showed musicians were quicker to pick up mistakes and correct them.The study adds to previous studies linking musical skills with mental and physical well-being.

Some of Europe's key animals have made a comeback over the past 50 years, a report suggests.Conservationists say species such as bears, wolves, lynx, eagles and vultures have increased in numbers.They believe that protection, curbs on hunting and people moving away from rural areas and into cities have helped Europe's wildlife to recover.The analysis was carried out by the Zoological Society of London, Birdlife and the European Bird Census Council.

As one species of European songbird island-hopped to colonize mid-Atlantic archipelagoes over the course of a half million years, their songs lost their sense of syntax.Chaffinches (Fringilla coelebs) on the furthest island of their dispersal, Gran Canaria in the Canary Islands, still sing the same notes, but with a much less structured pattern from one bird to the next, sort of like an island of Charlie Parkers.

Deep in the cloud forests of Central America, two species of singing mice put on a high-pitched opera to mark their territory and stave off clashes, researchers discovered.Alston's singing mouse (Scotinomys teguina) and the Chiriqui singing mouse (S. xerampelinus) have overlapping lifestyles in the cloud forests of Costa Rica and Panama. But the tawny cousins seem to establish geographic boundaries so they can avoid competing with each other.

For the entomophiles who keep insects as pets, this question will seem a little silly. Some bugs appear aggressive, and others, shy; some venture into the open, others hide by the wall. But beyond casual observation, researchers are still learning the dimensions of an insect's personality and how individuals of the same species might differ in temperament.

A robot that feels, sees and, in particular, thinks and learns like us. It still seems like science fiction, but if it's up to University of Twente (UT) researcher Frank van der Velde, it won't be. In his work he wants to implement the cognitive process of the human brain in robots. The research should lead to the arrival of the latest version of the iCub robot in Twente. This human robot (humanoid) blurs the boundaries between robot and human.

A team of specialists has designed a bionic prosthetic leg that can reproduce a full range of ambulatory movements by communicating with the brain of the person wearing it.The act of walking may not seem like a feat of agility, balance, strength and brainpower. But lose a leg, as Zac Vawter did after a motorcycle accident in 2009, and you will appreciate the myriad calculations that go into putting one foot in front of the other.

Anybody wondering what Earth was like 4 billion years ago should cast an eye toward Jupiter's hypervolcanic moon Io, a new study suggests.Io is the most volcanically active object in the solar system, dissipating its massive stores of internal heat via intense eruptions that cover the entire moon with about 0.4 inches (1 centimeter) of lava every year. Earth probably went through a similar phase in its youth, back before the planet cooled enough for plate tectonics to start up, researchers report today (Sept. 25) in the journal Nature.

Over a billion kilometers from Earth, dark forces are at work.They reach out from deep inside a planet, plunging into and manipulating the heart of another nearby world. Gently, perhaps, on a cosmic scale, but vast and inexorable by that of humans, these forces alternately squeeze and stretch the inky depths. Implacable, they have wrought their damage for eons, until the very body of the world itself could take no more. The stress finally took its toll, and the small world weepingly burst forth with frigid tears.And the Cassini spacecraft has a front row seat.

Recent discoveries by NASA's Curiosity rover show Mars to be more complex than had been known, with water-embedded dust covering its surface and a mature, almost Earthlike, geology.A series of discoveries from NASA's Curiosity rover are giving scientists a picture of Mars that looks increasingly complex, with small bits of water spread around the surface and an interior that could have been more geologically mature than experts had previously thought.

Scientists have long debated the possibility of that the microbial seeds of life did not originate on Earth, but were perhaps delivered here from an alien source, encased in comets or meteorites from Mars.But to get here, simple life forms would have had to endure a litany of harsh cosmic conditions, including ejection into space, freezing temperatures, fiery re-entry and impact.

Within its first three months on Mars, NASA's Curiosity Rover saw a surprising diversity of soils and sediments along a half-kilometer route that tell a complex story about the gradual desiccation of the Red Planet.Perhaps most notable among findings from the ChemCam team is that all of the dust and fine soil contains small amounts of water.

The black hole at the centre of the Milky Way is relatively quite, but astronomers have found traces of a major feeding event two million years ago.The research reported in the Astrophysical Journal, provides the best estimate for the long suspected event.The smoking gun was found in a lacy filament of gas called the Magellanic stream, according to the study's lead author Professor Joss Bland-Hawthorn of the University of Sydney and the Australian Astronomical Observatory.

Improved age data for the Moon suggests that it is much younger than previously believed according to scientists presenting at a Royal Society discussion meeting entitled Origins of the Moon this week (23 September). Professor Richard Carlson of the Carnegie Institution of Washington will say that Earth's Moon is more likely between 4.4 and 4.45 billion years old rather than 4.56 billion years old, as previously thought.

The origin of life on Earth is still a hotly-debated topic. There are many different theories on how life was kick-started, as well as various experiments underway attempting to understand the processes involved. For example, a reverse engineering approach can be used by stripping away cells until the simplest possible system is left. However, evolution has ultimately hampered our understanding of life's origins as it has washed away the traces of the first forms of life, making it impossible to retrace life's early steps. This means that even the simple systems left after the reverse engineering approach are still too complicated to bear a resemblance to the first forms of life.

Future Mars explorers may be able to get all the water they need out of the red dirt beneath their boots, a new study suggests.NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has found that surface soil on the Red Planet contains about 2 percent water by weight. That means astronaut pioneers could extract roughly 2 pints (1 liter) of water out of every cubic foot (0.03 cubic meters) of Martian dirt they dig up, said study lead author Laurie Leshin, of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y.

The night was clear, a perfect backdrop for the strange, floating object that lit up the sky.Two witnesses, jailers at the Johnson County Correctional Facility in Cleburne, described it as triangular in shape with a dark surface and a series of circular lights. They said it hovered above them as they talked in the parking lot.

A two-month rain storm in southern India may be the most compelling evidence yet that extraterrestrial lifeforms have visited Earth.Between July 25 and Sept. 23, 2001, the Indian state of Kerala was drenched by bizarre red-colored rain unlike any seen previously, according to the latest episode of "The Unexplained Files," airing Sept. 25 on the Science Channel.

In a flurry of often uncritical reporting, the University of Sheffield has announced it has found evidence of life beyond Earth, publishing its findings in the online Journal of Cosmology. Particles of material, recovered by a balloon from the stratosphere at an altitude of 27km, included a diatom fragment, a frustule, or "shell" if you like, of this most ubiquitous group of ocean and freshwater-dwelling micro-organisms.

A research team of Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST), South Korea, developed a "wormlike" hematite photoanode that can convert sunlight and water to clean hydrogen energy with a record-breaking high efficiency of 5.3%.This research was published in Scientific Reports, a science journal published by the Nature Publishing Group.

Coal-powered synthetic natural gas plants being planned in China would produce seven times more greenhouse gas emissions than conventional natural gas plants, and use up to 100 times the water as shale gas production, according to a new study by Duke University researchers.These environmental costs have been largely neglected in the drive to meet the nation's growing energy needs, the researchers say, and might lock China on an irreversible and unsustainable path for decades to come.

Around 30 large dolphins beached themselves in northeastern Brazil over the weekend, and news reports said Monday that at least seven of them had died.The dolphins, known as false killer whales, ran aground early Sunday on the shallow sands of Upanema beach in Areia Branca, roughly halfway between the cities of Fortaleza and Natal.

The discovery of what may be the earliest known creature with a face has provided scientists with the missing link needed to solve an age-old mystery as to when vertebrates developed jaws.Discovered in China, the fossilised fish preserved in three-dimensions is the most primitive vertebrate found with a modern type of jaw, including a dentary bone found in humans.

About 513 million years ago, a creature curled up like a pill bug to protect itself from predators, a recently-discovered fossil suggests.The new discovery is the oldest evidence that trilobites rolled up in self-defense so early in their evolutionary history."Until now, it was thought that this group was incapable of enrolling, as they lack various of the complex adaptations observed in younger trilobites," study co-author Javier Ortega-Hernández, a paleobiologist at the University of Cambridge in England, wrote in an email.

The inhabitants of Easter Island consumed a diet that was lacking in seafood and was, literally, quite ratty.The island, also called Rapa Nui, first settled around A.D. 1200, is famous for its more than 1,000 "walking" Moai statues, most of which originally faced inland. Located in the South Pacific, Rapa Nui is the most isolated inhabited landmass on Earth; the closest inhabitants are located on the Pitcairn Islands about 1,200 miles (1,900 kilometers) to the west.

Policymakers need to rethink the idea of promoting biofuels to protect the climate because the methods used to justify such policies are inherently flawed, according to a University of Michigan energy researcher.

Global warming is irreversible without massive geoengineering of the atmosphere's chemistry. This stark warning comes from the draft summary of the latest climate assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.Delegates from national governments are discussing the draft this week, prior to its release on Friday morning.

New research advocates use of pastures with shrubs and trees as it is more sustainable, improving animal welfare and increasing biodiversity.Consumers are increasingly demanding higher standards for how their meat is sourced, with animal welfare and the impact on the environment factoring in many purchases.

For years, scientists have thought that a continental ice sheet formed during the Late Cretaceous Period more than 90 million years ago when the climate was much warmer than it is today. Now, a University of Missouri researcher has found evidence suggesting that no ice sheet formed at this time. This finding could help environmentalists and scientists predict what the earth's climate will be as carbon dioxide levels continue to rise.

Researchers may have just scratched the surface of a major new dinosaur site nearly inside the Arctic Circle. This past summer, they discovered thousands of fossilized dinosaur footprints, large and small, along the rocky banks of Alaska's Yukon River.In July, the scientists from the University of Alaska Museum of the North embarked on a 500-mile (800 kilometers) journey down the Tanana and Yukon rivers; they brought back 2,000 pounds (900 kilograms) of dinosaur footprint fossils.

Scientists don't have any footage to shed light on the sex lives of ancient bears, but fossil penis bones can tell all.Researchers recently studied a collection of penis bones from an extinct species of bear in Spain. Compared with today's bears, this ancient creature, named Indarctos arctoides, had a surprisingly large penis bone that suggests it had infrequent but long-lasting sex sessions, the study found. And the females may have used penis size to assess their mates.

This vial of blood may be the key to bringing woolly mammoths back to life after scientists discovered 'the world's best preserved trunk' buried in the Siberian permafrost.The find has sparked a wave of excitement from research teams seeking to recreate the DNA of the extinct beasts with a view to bringing the species back to life.The trunk was frozen for around 10,000 years on an Arctic island off diamond-rich Sakha Republic, the largest region in Russia, said Semyon Grigoriev, head of the Mammoth Museum in Yakutsk, leader of the expedition.

A previously unknown genus of electric fish has been identified in a remote region of South America by team of international researchers including University of Toronto Scarborough professor Nathan Lovejoy.The Akawaio penak, a thin, eel-like electric fish, was discovered in the shallow, murky waters of the upper Mazaruni River is northern Guyana.

The loss of small Australian mammals that dig up soil could be contributing to ecosystem decline, say researchers.Wildlife biologist Associate Professor Trish Fleming, of Murdoch University, and colleagues, report their findings in a recent issue of Mammal Review.

Audio CDs, all the rage in the '90s, seem increasingly obsolete in a world of MP3 files and iPods, leaving many music lovers with the question of what to do with their extensive compact disk collections. While you could turn your old disks into a work of avant-garde art, researchers in Taiwan have come up with a more practical application: breaking down sewage. The team will present its new wastewater treatment device at the Optical Society's (OSA) Annual Meeting, Frontiers in Optics (FiO) 2013, being held Oct. 6-10 in Orlando, Fla.

Just a whiff of a woman close to ovulation is enough to stimulate another woman's testosterone levels, along with her desire to compete.Competition among women may be, in large part, nose-driven, as a new study finds that the scent of a woman close to ovulation triggers a testosterone boost in the smelling female.Testosterone, in turn, can affect behavior.

Dying patients could someday receive a 3D-printed organ made from their own cells rather than wait on long lists for the short supply of organ transplants. Such a futuristic dream remains far from reality, but university labs and private companies have already taken the first careful steps by using 3D-printing technology to build tiny chunks of organs.

An apparently man-made pyramid oriented to the cardinal directions has been identified by sonar at a depth of approximately 40 metres (130 feet) under water off the Azores islands. See here for a video (Portuguese commentary) of the discovery: http://videos.sapo.pt/9j3fd6z5h8cVMiBr5sUa. The location is between Sao Miguel and Terceira (the biggest Azorean Islands) and it also lies close to this underwater volcano: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dom_Jo%C3%A3o_de_Castro_Bank.Many thanks to Pedro Branco, Eduardo Costa, Viviana Lopes, Daniel Mendes, Jo Anne Taisbin and others who have messaged me to tell me about this. The name of the discoverer, featured in the video, is Diocleciano Silva. According to the video the discovery was made five months ago but there has been minimal international coverage up to now. Eduardo Costa and Daniel Mendes both sent me a link to this short article on the subject in English: http://gregdougall.wordpress.com/2013/09/21/an-undersea-pyramid-has-just-been-discovered-in-the-azores/. Pedro Branco has just sent me two further links: http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=c16_1380022655&comments=1 and: http://beforeitsnews.com/beyond-science/2013/09/giant-underwater-pyramid-found-near-azores-island-associated-with-atlantis-portuguese-navy-investigating-2443658.html. The latter story states that the Portuguese navy is investigating. And Mario Belo Pedro sent this story from the Portuguese-American Journal: http://portuguese-american-journal.com/terceira-subaquatic-pyramidal-shaped-structure-found-azores/Looks like I might need to get my wetsuit on again! I wasn't planning any further diving research for the sequel to Fingerprints of the Gods but if this checks out I'm there! In general what we know about rising sea levels at the end of the last Ice Age (see my book Underworld for detail) tells us that lands now under 40 metres/130 feet of water were submerged more than 12,500 years ago.Click images for larger view

Many ancient crustaceans went extinct following a massive collapse of reefs across the planet, and new University of Florida research suggests modern species living in rapidly declining reef habitats may now be at risk.Available online and scheduled to appear in the November issue of Geology, the study shows a direct correlation between the amount of prehistoric reefs and the number of decapod crustaceans, a group that includes shrimp, crab and lobster.

LONDON - Water scarcity is a fact of life in many parts of the world, particularly in the countries of sub-Saharan Africa. A new study says the situation could get a lot worse, with climate change resulting in less rain and more evaporation in many areas.The study, led by researchers at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact and Research and appearing in the journal Environmental Research Letters, looks at present commitments by countries to reduce greenhouse gases (GHGs).

Since 2011, a team of achaeologists have been uncovering some tantalizing new finds at the remains of a fourteenth century B.C. Egyptian fortress gate complex at the coastal city of Jaffa in Israel. It is today the only Egyptian gate ever excavated in Israel, and excavation co-directors Aaron A. Burke of the University of California, Los Angeles and Martin Peilstöcker of the Israel Antiquities Authority are convinced that the site may tell an important story about how an Egyptian enclave survived and persisted within Canaanite territory well over 3,000 years ago.

Archaeologists have unearthed a 5,000-year-old leopard trap in the Negev Desert in Israel.The trap, which was found along with a 1,600-year-old trap, was originally thought to be just a few hundred years old, and is nearly identical to traps that have been used by desert-dwelling Bedouins in the area in the last century.

After some initial digs, a Dutch filmmaker believes he may have found the site of buried Nazi treasure long rumored to exist. He was led to the Bavarian town of Mittenwald after cracking a code believed to be hidden in a music score.Three attempts have been made in recent weeks to find buried Nazi treasure in the Bavarian town of Mittenwald, close to the Austrian border. Even though the holes in the ground have since been filled, the traces left by drills and blue markings are still visible below a thin layer of autumn leaves.

We live in a lopsided universe: That has been a lesson that cosmologists have learned from examining the detailed structure of the radiation left over from the Big Bang. Now, two cosmologists show that the data are consistent with a Universe that is curved slightly, similarly to a saddle. If their model is correct, it would overturn the long-held belief that the cosmos is flat.

Sometimes just holding a cute newborn will make a person say, "I want to eat you up!" New research shows that for women, there might be a biological mechanism behind that expression.The smell of a newborn triggers a surge of dopamine for new moms similar to the reward response that comes with satisfying a craving for food, the study researchers found.

It can take only an instant for fear to take hold in the brain: a fear of snakes after being bitten by one, or anxiety around bodies of water after witnessing a drowning.Overcoming that fear can take a long time, but now researchers are saying it can be done in your sleep. Scientists at Northwestern University say they have lowered levels of fear in people by using certain odors to trigger and rechannel frightening memories into harmless ones during a deep slumber.

The topical anti-fungal drug Ciclopirox causes HIV-infected cells to commit suicide by jamming up the cells' powerhouse, the mitochondria -- according to a study by researchers at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School. And unlike current anti-HIV drugs, Ciclopirox completely eradicates infectious HIV from cell cultures, with no rebound of virus when the drug is stopped. The study has been published in the journal PLOS ONE.

More than 83,000 volunteer citizen scientists. Over 16 million galaxy classifications. Information on more than 300,000 galaxies. This is what you get when you ask the public for help in learning more about our universe.The project, named Galaxy Zoo 2, is the second phase of a crowdsourcing effort to categorize galaxies in our universe. Researchers say computers are good at automatically measuring properties such as size and color of galaxies, but more challenging characteristics, such as shape and structure, can currently only be determined by the human eye.

The moon just got younger - by a few hundred million years.Scientists now claim that the moon is around 4.4 and 4.45 billion years old, rather than the 4.56 billion years previously thought.Despite being the nearest body to the Earth, astronomers are still not sure precisely how or when it formed.

A UK team is developing its idea for a Mars "hopper" - a robot that can bound across the surface of the Red Planet.At the moment, landing missions use wheels to move around, but their progress can be stymied by sand-traps, steep slopes and boulder fields.A hopper would simply leap across these obstacles to the next safest, flat surface.The research group is led from Leicester University and the Astrium space company.

The paleo-tectonic maps of retired geologist Ronald Blakey are mesmerizing and impossible to forget once you've seen them. Catalogued on his website Colorado Plateau Geosystems, these maps show the world adrift, its landscapes breaking apart and reconnecting again in entirely new forms, where continents are as temporary as the island chains that regularly smash together to create them, on a timescale where even oceans that exist for tens of millions of years can disappear leaving only the subtlest of geological traces.

Google announced Wednesday it was launching a new company focused on health and well-being, and hinted at cooperation with longtime rival Apple in the venture. A Google statement said the company, Calico, would put a particular focus on "the challenge of aging and associated diseases." Arthur Levinson, chairman and former chief executive of the biotech firm Genentech and chairman of Apple, will be Calico's chief executive and a founding investor.

Steam condensation is key to the worldwide production of electricity and clean water: It is part of the power cycle that drives 85 percent of all electricity-generating plants and about half of all desalination plants globally, according to the United Nations and International Energy Agency. So anything that improves the efficiency of this process could have enormous impact on global energy use.

A common songbird may have acquired genes from fellow migrating birds in order to travel greater distances, according to a University of British Columbia study published this week in the journal Evolution.

Shoppers spend over $10 billion on bananas annually and now this demand is being linked to the contamination of Central America's crocodilians. New research, published in Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry, analyses blood samples from spectacled caiman in Costa Rica and finds that intensive pesticide use in plantations leads to contaminated species in protected conservation areas.

Underwater mountains in the ocean passage between South America and Antarctica mix midlevel seawater dramatically, new research suggests.This churning of waters in the Southern Ocean plays a huge role in ocean circulation and, in turn, climate."Our study indicates that virtually all the mixing in the Southern Ocean occurs in Drake Passage and at a few other undersea mountain locations".

Climate change is a big factor for lobsters and other marine species moving north in large numbers, according to new research published in the journal Science, co-authored by a Halifax university professor.The study, co-authored by Dalhousie University marine biology professor Dr. Boris Worm, compiled 40 years worth of data to explain several significant marine species shifts seen in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

It's confirmed: The largest deep earthquake ever recorded happened in May off the coast of Russia. But this massive temblor is still a mystery to scientists.The magnitude-8.3 earthquake occurred on May 24, 2013, in the Sea of Okhotsk, deep within the Earth's mantle. The earthquake, described today (Sept. 19) in the journal Science, is perplexing because seismologists don't understand how massive earthquakes can happen at such depths.