Newsdesk Archive
The bizarre circular patches of bare land called "fairy circles" in the grasslands of Africa's Namib Desert have defied explanation, with hypotheses ranging from ants to termites to grass-killing gas that seeps out of the soil. But the patches may be the natural result of the subsurface competition for resources among plants, new research suggests.
Facing up to the slow collapse of our planet is hard, but thinking apocalyptically could help us prepare for the crises to comeThis weekend the Sustainability Centre in Hampshire will be home to Uncivilisation 2013, which describes itself as "a gathering of people searching for answers to questions about our collective future in a rapidly changing and depleting world". At Uncivilisation about 400 people are expected to attend sessions including a wild-food foraging workshop, a talk on moving beyond a monetary-based economy, and a ceremony of singers and storytellers leading the group in a "liturgy of loss".
The modern meltdown of the Antarctic Ice Sheet mirrors the frozen continent's big thaw after the last ice age ended 20,000 years ago, a new study finds.New ice core records from West Antarctica show the huge ice sheet started heating up about 20,000 to 22,000 years ago, 2,000 to 4,000 years earlier than previously thought. But in East Antarctica, which was higher in elevation, colder and drier than the West, the continent stayed in its deep-freeze cycle until 18,000 years ago. The results were published today (Aug. 14) in the journal Nature.
The oceans surrounding Antarctica may be littered with buried shipwrecks in pristine condition, new research suggests.Researchers came to that conclusion, detailed today (Aug. 13) in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, after burying wood and bone at the depths of the Antarctic oceans and analyzing the handiwork of worms and mollusks more than a year later.
A fluke rainstorm at an ancient rock shelter in western Pennsylvania has brought a renowned archaeologist back to the site of where a furious debate was launched in 1973 over when the first humans came to the Americas.As a young archaeologist, Jim Adovasio found radiocarbon evidence that humans had visited the Meadowcroft site 16,000 years ago. To archaeologists it was a stunning discovery that contradicted the so-called Clovis first theory, which dated the first settlement in the Americas to New Mexico about 13,000 years ago.
The threat of infants being killed by unrelated males is the key driver of monogamy in humans and other primates. The study, by academics from UCL, Oxford University, the University of Manchester and the University of Auckland, is the first to show that this evolutionary pathway explains the emergence of pair living.
Declassified spy photography has uncovered a lost Roman Eastern frontier, dating from the second century AD.Research by archaeologists at the Universities of Glasgow and Exeter has identified a long wall that ran 60 kilometers from the Danube to the Black Sea over what is modern Romania. It is considered the most easterly example of a man-made frontier barrier system in the Roman Empire.
A U.S biologist has found human behaviour could be driving the evolution of animals' brains by changing the habitats in which they live.The research suggests the brains of some animals have got bigger in tandem with the industrialisation of their habitat - making some city animals smarter than their rural peers.Evolutionary biologist Emilie Snell-Rood discovered white-footed mouse and meadow voles living in cities, had on average brains that were six per cent larger than the brains of animals collected from farms in the countryside.
Earlier this year, as astronauts busied themselves inside the International Space Station, engineers on the ground conducted their own experiment just outside the craft. Operating from a control room in Houston, they directed a nearly 60-foot-long, Canadian-built robotic arm to grab a smaller, two-armed robot called Dextre, before moving it into position in front of a washing machine-size module attached to the station.
A NASA spacecraft has hit the halfway mark of its five-year voyage to the solar system's largest planet: Jupiter.The odometer on NASA's Juno probe clicked over to 880 million miles (1.415 billion kilometers) on Monday (Aug. 12), space agency officials said. That means the spacecraft is halfway to Jupiter, at least in terms of distance traveled, they added.
The bizarre circular patches of bare land called "fairy circles" in the grasslands of Africa's Namib Desert have defied explanation, with hypotheses ranging from ants to termites to grass-killing gas that seeps out of the soil. But the patches may be the natural result of the subsurface competition for resources among plants, new research suggests.
A structure that is believed to have served as a possible early Christian religious place has been discovered in archaeological excavations in the ancient city of Derbe, in the Central Anatolian province of Karaman.Karaman Governor Murat Koca, who visited the Derbe tumulus close to Ekinozu village, said a team from Selcuk University was continuing excavations with support from the Culture and Tourism Ministry.
One of the mysteries of Giza is the missing pyramidion or capstone of the Great Pyramid of Khufu. Since modern recorded history, the Great Pyramid has been topless, with several meters of its apex missing. Egyptologists have assumed that the pyramid was originally capped by a small pyramid called a pyramidion. If that is true, then what happened to it, and what could it have looked like?It is possible, indeed highly probable, that the great Egyptian architect and royal vizier, Imhotep, was still alive when Khufu planned his pyramid.
Dying stars that are among the most beautiful objects in the universe tend to line up across the night sky, and astronomers aren't sure why.These "cosmic butterflies"
Sometime in the next two or three months, something special will happen: the magnetic field that emanates from the Sun and extends throughout the entire solar system will reverse in polarity.
On 6 September, NASA plans to send a vacuum cleaner to the Moon. Called the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE), the orbiter will collect dust and gas molecules to figure out what floats above the Moon and how it got there. "These mysteries have not really been addressed since the Apollo missions," says Rick Elphic, LADEE project scientist at the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California.
More than 40 years after the last Apollo astronauts left the moon, NASA is preparing to launch a small robotic spacecraft to investigate one of their most bizarre discoveries.Crews reported seeing an odd glow on the lunar horizon just before sunrise. The phenomenon, which prompted a notebook sketch by Apollo 17 Commander Eugene Cernan, was unexpected because the airless moon lacked atmosphere for reflecting sunlight.
There may be a new market for video games: octogenarians.Brain scientists have discovered that swerving around cars while simultaneously picking out road signs in a video game can improve the short-term memory and long-term focus of older adults. Some people as old as 80, the researchers say, begin to show neurological patterns of people in their 20s.
People who exercise vigorously as young adults may reduce their risk of developing epilepsy later in life, a new study from Sweden suggests.The researchers looked at 1.17 million Swedish men born between 1950 and 1987 who had completed cardiovascular fitness tests when they enlisted for military service at the age of 18. The participants were followed for up to 40 years, during which 6,796 men were diagnosed with epilepsy.
canadians 5 aquasox 1: Weird blue thing appears in sky and C's bust out for four runsVancouver Canadians' opponents like to claim that strange things tend to happen at Nat Bailey Stadium, but parts of Tuesday would have fit in fine with David Duchovny and The X-Files.In the sixth inning of the Game 1 of the best-of-three North Division final between the C's and the Everett AquaSox, a shiny blue something or other appeared levitating just beyond the right field fence.More here.
Dan Brown has written a massive world-wide bestseller by creating a fictional mystery around Dante. The real-life mystery is much more intriguing.We are privileged to host this original article by Jonathan which looks at the strange parallels surrounding the fictional character Robert Langdon in Dan Brown's new novel Inferno, and the real-life mysteries surrounding Dante Alighieri, the great Italian poet of the Middle Ages. Is there a hidden layer of meaning in Dan Brown's novel that the critics have missed?
The "TED talks" organization, once founded on the idea of spreading good ideas, has become the new priesthood of status quo dogma. The TED organization doesn't want you to hear the really important, breakthrough advancements in scientific thinking, and to enforce that intellectual ignorance, it has resorted to censoring and suppressing two of the most important scientists our world has ever produced.
Bees have been in steep decline in Britain in recent decades due in part to the varroa mite, which is widely blamed for the mysterious
India is considering a ban on the use of all animals used in circuses after activists said Wednesday they discovered elephants and horses shackled for long periods, dogs housed in tiny cages and drunk trainers.The Animal Welfare Board of India (AWBI), a statutory advisory body, said it has recommended the ban after a nine-month investigation by animal rights activists into conditions at 16 of the nation
Bats and dolphins may live in radically different worlds, but the fact they both evolved a type of sonar means they resemble each other genetically, researchers now find.When different species live similar lives, they can evolve similar traits, a phenomenon known as convergent evolution. For instance, dolphins, sharks and the extinct marine giants known as ichthyosaurs all differ from each other greatly in origin
Under the rich Venezuelan soil, paleontologists have found treasures rivaling the bountiful oil: a giant armadillo the size of a Volkswagen, a crocodile bigger than a bus and a saber-toothed tiger.Oil companies' surveys of the soil have uncovered a trove of fossils dating from 14,000 to 370 million years ago.
In the northern hemisphere, ice sheets ebb and flow in 100,000-year cycles, driven by varying amounts of sunlight falling on Earth's surface as its orbit and orientation toward the sun changes. But astronomical variations alone cannot explain why ice ages develop gradually but end quickly, in a few thousand years.
Playing with the filters on a telescope can show us amazing things. In a recent case, Japanese astronomers looked at the star Gilese 1214 in blue light and watched its
Geophysicists have discovered what they say is the largest single volcano on Earth, a 650-kilometre-wide beast the size of the British Isles lurking beneath the waters of the northwest Pacific Ocean.The megavolcano has been inactive for some 140 million years. But its very existence will help geophysicists to set limits on how much magma can be stored in Earth's crust and pour out onto the surface.
A structure that is believed to have served as a possible early Christian religious place has been discovered in archaeological excavations in the ancient city of Derbe, in the Central Anatolian province of Karaman.Karaman Governor Murat Koca, who visited the Derbe tumulus close to Ekinozu village, said a team from Selcuk University was continuing excavations with support from the Culture and Tourism Ministry.
One of the mysteries of Giza is the missing pyramidion or capstone of the Great Pyramid of Khufu. Since modern recorded history, the Great Pyramid has been topless, with several meters of its apex missing. Egyptologists have assumed that the pyramid was originally capped by a small pyramid called a pyramidion. If that is true, then what happened to it, and what could it have looked like?It is possible, indeed highly probable, that the great Egyptian architect and royal vizier, Imhotep, was still alive when Khufu planned his pyramid.
Dying stars that are among the most beautiful objects in the universe tend to line up across the night sky, and astronomers aren't sure why.These "cosmic butterflies"
Sometime in the next two or three months, something special will happen: the magnetic field that emanates from the Sun and extends throughout the entire solar system will reverse in polarity.
On 6 September, NASA plans to send a vacuum cleaner to the Moon. Called the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE), the orbiter will collect dust and gas molecules to figure out what floats above the Moon and how it got there. "These mysteries have not really been addressed since the Apollo missions," says Rick Elphic, LADEE project scientist at the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California.
More than 40 years after the last Apollo astronauts left the moon, NASA is preparing to launch a small robotic spacecraft to investigate one of their most bizarre discoveries.Crews reported seeing an odd glow on the lunar horizon just before sunrise. The phenomenon, which prompted a notebook sketch by Apollo 17 Commander Eugene Cernan, was unexpected because the airless moon lacked atmosphere for reflecting sunlight.
There may be a new market for video games: octogenarians.Brain scientists have discovered that swerving around cars while simultaneously picking out road signs in a video game can improve the short-term memory and long-term focus of older adults. Some people as old as 80, the researchers say, begin to show neurological patterns of people in their 20s.
People who exercise vigorously as young adults may reduce their risk of developing epilepsy later in life, a new study from Sweden suggests.The researchers looked at 1.17 million Swedish men born between 1950 and 1987 who had completed cardiovascular fitness tests when they enlisted for military service at the age of 18. The participants were followed for up to 40 years, during which 6,796 men were diagnosed with epilepsy.
canadians 5 aquasox 1: Weird blue thing appears in sky and C's bust out for four runsVancouver Canadians' opponents like to claim that strange things tend to happen at Nat Bailey Stadium, but parts of Tuesday would have fit in fine with David Duchovny and The X-Files.In the sixth inning of the Game 1 of the best-of-three North Division final between the C's and the Everett AquaSox, a shiny blue something or other appeared levitating just beyond the right field fence.More here.
Dan Brown has written a massive world-wide bestseller by creating a fictional mystery around Dante. The real-life mystery is much more intriguing.We are privileged to host this original article by Jonathan which looks at the strange parallels surrounding the fictional character Robert Langdon in Dan Brown's new novel Inferno, and the real-life mysteries surrounding Dante Alighieri, the great Italian poet of the Middle Ages. Is there a hidden layer of meaning in Dan Brown's novel that the critics have missed?
The "TED talks" organization, once founded on the idea of spreading good ideas, has become the new priesthood of status quo dogma. The TED organization doesn't want you to hear the really important, breakthrough advancements in scientific thinking, and to enforce that intellectual ignorance, it has resorted to censoring and suppressing two of the most important scientists our world has ever produced.
Bees have been in steep decline in Britain in recent decades due in part to the varroa mite, which is widely blamed for the mysterious
India is considering a ban on the use of all animals used in circuses after activists said Wednesday they discovered elephants and horses shackled for long periods, dogs housed in tiny cages and drunk trainers.The Animal Welfare Board of India (AWBI), a statutory advisory body, said it has recommended the ban after a nine-month investigation by animal rights activists into conditions at 16 of the nation
Bats and dolphins may live in radically different worlds, but the fact they both evolved a type of sonar means they resemble each other genetically, researchers now find.When different species live similar lives, they can evolve similar traits, a phenomenon known as convergent evolution. For instance, dolphins, sharks and the extinct marine giants known as ichthyosaurs all differ from each other greatly in origin
Under the rich Venezuelan soil, paleontologists have found treasures rivaling the bountiful oil: a giant armadillo the size of a Volkswagen, a crocodile bigger than a bus and a saber-toothed tiger.Oil companies' surveys of the soil have uncovered a trove of fossils dating from 14,000 to 370 million years ago.
In the northern hemisphere, ice sheets ebb and flow in 100,000-year cycles, driven by varying amounts of sunlight falling on Earth's surface as its orbit and orientation toward the sun changes. But astronomical variations alone cannot explain why ice ages develop gradually but end quickly, in a few thousand years.
Playing with the filters on a telescope can show us amazing things. In a recent case, Japanese astronomers looked at the star Gilese 1214 in blue light and watched its
Geophysicists have discovered what they say is the largest single volcano on Earth, a 650-kilometre-wide beast the size of the British Isles lurking beneath the waters of the northwest Pacific Ocean.The megavolcano has been inactive for some 140 million years. But its very existence will help geophysicists to set limits on how much magma can be stored in Earth's crust and pour out onto the surface.
A structure that is believed to have served as a possible early Christian religious place has been discovered in archaeological excavations in the ancient city of Derbe, in the Central Anatolian province of Karaman.Karaman Governor Murat Koca, who visited the Derbe tumulus close to Ekinozu village, said a team from Selcuk University was continuing excavations with support from the Culture and Tourism Ministry.
One of the mysteries of Giza is the missing pyramidion or capstone of the Great Pyramid of Khufu. Since modern recorded history, the Great Pyramid has been topless, with several meters of its apex missing. Egyptologists have assumed that the pyramid was originally capped by a small pyramid called a pyramidion. If that is true, then what happened to it, and what could it have looked like?It is possible, indeed highly probable, that the great Egyptian architect and royal vizier, Imhotep, was still alive when Khufu planned his pyramid.
Dying stars that are among the most beautiful objects in the universe tend to line up across the night sky, and astronomers aren't sure why.These "cosmic butterflies"
Sometime in the next two or three months, something special will happen: the magnetic field that emanates from the Sun and extends throughout the entire solar system will reverse in polarity.
On 6 September, NASA plans to send a vacuum cleaner to the Moon. Called the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE), the orbiter will collect dust and gas molecules to figure out what floats above the Moon and how it got there. "These mysteries have not really been addressed since the Apollo missions," says Rick Elphic, LADEE project scientist at the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California.
More than 40 years after the last Apollo astronauts left the moon, NASA is preparing to launch a small robotic spacecraft to investigate one of their most bizarre discoveries.Crews reported seeing an odd glow on the lunar horizon just before sunrise. The phenomenon, which prompted a notebook sketch by Apollo 17 Commander Eugene Cernan, was unexpected because the airless moon lacked atmosphere for reflecting sunlight.
There may be a new market for video games: octogenarians.Brain scientists have discovered that swerving around cars while simultaneously picking out road signs in a video game can improve the short-term memory and long-term focus of older adults. Some people as old as 80, the researchers say, begin to show neurological patterns of people in their 20s.
People who exercise vigorously as young adults may reduce their risk of developing epilepsy later in life, a new study from Sweden suggests.The researchers looked at 1.17 million Swedish men born between 1950 and 1987 who had completed cardiovascular fitness tests when they enlisted for military service at the age of 18. The participants were followed for up to 40 years, during which 6,796 men were diagnosed with epilepsy.
canadians 5 aquasox 1: Weird blue thing appears in sky and C's bust out for four runsVancouver Canadians' opponents like to claim that strange things tend to happen at Nat Bailey Stadium, but parts of Tuesday would have fit in fine with David Duchovny and The X-Files.In the sixth inning of the Game 1 of the best-of-three North Division final between the C's and the Everett AquaSox, a shiny blue something or other appeared levitating just beyond the right field fence.More here.
Dan Brown has written a massive world-wide bestseller by creating a fictional mystery around Dante. The real-life mystery is much more intriguing.We are privileged to host this original article by Jonathan which looks at the strange parallels surrounding the fictional character Robert Langdon in Dan Brown's new novel Inferno, and the real-life mysteries surrounding Dante Alighieri, the great Italian poet of the Middle Ages. Is there a hidden layer of meaning in Dan Brown's novel that the critics have missed?
The "TED talks" organization, once founded on the idea of spreading good ideas, has become the new priesthood of status quo dogma. The TED organization doesn't want you to hear the really important, breakthrough advancements in scientific thinking, and to enforce that intellectual ignorance, it has resorted to censoring and suppressing two of the most important scientists our world has ever produced.
Bees have been in steep decline in Britain in recent decades due in part to the varroa mite, which is widely blamed for the mysterious
India is considering a ban on the use of all animals used in circuses after activists said Wednesday they discovered elephants and horses shackled for long periods, dogs housed in tiny cages and drunk trainers.The Animal Welfare Board of India (AWBI), a statutory advisory body, said it has recommended the ban after a nine-month investigation by animal rights activists into conditions at 16 of the nation
Bats and dolphins may live in radically different worlds, but the fact they both evolved a type of sonar means they resemble each other genetically, researchers now find.When different species live similar lives, they can evolve similar traits, a phenomenon known as convergent evolution. For instance, dolphins, sharks and the extinct marine giants known as ichthyosaurs all differ from each other greatly in origin
Under the rich Venezuelan soil, paleontologists have found treasures rivaling the bountiful oil: a giant armadillo the size of a Volkswagen, a crocodile bigger than a bus and a saber-toothed tiger.Oil companies' surveys of the soil have uncovered a trove of fossils dating from 14,000 to 370 million years ago.
In the northern hemisphere, ice sheets ebb and flow in 100,000-year cycles, driven by varying amounts of sunlight falling on Earth's surface as its orbit and orientation toward the sun changes. But astronomical variations alone cannot explain why ice ages develop gradually but end quickly, in a few thousand years.
Playing with the filters on a telescope can show us amazing things. In a recent case, Japanese astronomers looked at the star Gilese 1214 in blue light and watched its
Geophysicists have discovered what they say is the largest single volcano on Earth, a 650-kilometre-wide beast the size of the British Isles lurking beneath the waters of the northwest Pacific Ocean.The megavolcano has been inactive for some 140 million years. But its very existence will help geophysicists to set limits on how much magma can be stored in Earth's crust and pour out onto the surface.
A structure that is believed to have served as a possible early Christian religious place has been discovered in archaeological excavations in the ancient city of Derbe, in the Central Anatolian province of Karaman.Karaman Governor Murat Koca, who visited the Derbe tumulus close to Ekinozu village, said a team from Selcuk University was continuing excavations with support from the Culture and Tourism Ministry.
One of the mysteries of Giza is the missing pyramidion or capstone of the Great Pyramid of Khufu. Since modern recorded history, the Great Pyramid has been topless, with several meters of its apex missing. Egyptologists have assumed that the pyramid was originally capped by a small pyramid called a pyramidion. If that is true, then what happened to it, and what could it have looked like?It is possible, indeed highly probable, that the great Egyptian architect and royal vizier, Imhotep, was still alive when Khufu planned his pyramid.
On 6 September, NASA plans to send a vacuum cleaner to the Moon. Called the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE), the orbiter will collect dust and gas molecules to figure out what floats above the Moon and how it got there. "These mysteries have not really been addressed since the Apollo missions," says Rick Elphic, LADEE project scientist at the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California.
More than 40 years after the last Apollo astronauts left the moon, NASA is preparing to launch a small robotic spacecraft to investigate one of their most bizarre discoveries.Crews reported seeing an odd glow on the lunar horizon just before sunrise. The phenomenon, which prompted a notebook sketch by Apollo 17 Commander Eugene Cernan, was unexpected because the airless moon lacked atmosphere for reflecting sunlight.
There may be a new market for video games: octogenarians.Brain scientists have discovered that swerving around cars while simultaneously picking out road signs in a video game can improve the short-term memory and long-term focus of older adults. Some people as old as 80, the researchers say, begin to show neurological patterns of people in their 20s.
People who exercise vigorously as young adults may reduce their risk of developing epilepsy later in life, a new study from Sweden suggests.The researchers looked at 1.17 million Swedish men born between 1950 and 1987 who had completed cardiovascular fitness tests when they enlisted for military service at the age of 18. The participants were followed for up to 40 years, during which 6,796 men were diagnosed with epilepsy.
canadians 5 aquasox 1: Weird blue thing appears in sky and C's bust out for four runsVancouver Canadians' opponents like to claim that strange things tend to happen at Nat Bailey Stadium, but parts of Tuesday would have fit in fine with David Duchovny and The X-Files.In the sixth inning of the Game 1 of the best-of-three North Division final between the C's and the Everett AquaSox, a shiny blue something or other appeared levitating just beyond the right field fence.More here.
Dan Brown has written a massive world-wide bestseller by creating a fictional mystery around Dante. The real-life mystery is much more intriguing.We are privileged to host this original article by Jonathan which looks at the strange parallels surrounding the fictional character Robert Langdon in Dan Brown's new novel Inferno, and the real-life mysteries surrounding Dante Alighieri, the great Italian poet of the Middle Ages. Is there a hidden layer of meaning in Dan Brown's novel that the critics have missed?
The "TED talks" organization, once founded on the idea of spreading good ideas, has become the new priesthood of status quo dogma. The TED organization doesn't want you to hear the really important, breakthrough advancements in scientific thinking, and to enforce that intellectual ignorance, it has resorted to censoring and suppressing two of the most important scientists our world has ever produced.
Under the rich Venezuelan soil, paleontologists have found treasures rivaling the bountiful oil: a giant armadillo the size of a Volkswagen, a crocodile bigger than a bus and a saber-toothed tiger.Oil companies' surveys of the soil have uncovered a trove of fossils dating from 14,000 to 370 million years ago.
In the northern hemisphere, ice sheets ebb and flow in 100,000-year cycles, driven by varying amounts of sunlight falling on Earth's surface as its orbit and orientation toward the sun changes. But astronomical variations alone cannot explain why ice ages develop gradually but end quickly, in a few thousand years.
Geophysicists have discovered what they say is the largest single volcano on Earth, a 650-kilometre-wide beast the size of the British Isles lurking beneath the waters of the northwest Pacific Ocean.The megavolcano has been inactive for some 140 million years. But its very existence will help geophysicists to set limits on how much magma can be stored in Earth's crust and pour out onto the surface.
The heart of the Atacama desert is the driest place on Earth. But that didn't prevent the first settlers of South America from setting up home there more than 12,000 years ago.Aside from Antarctica, South America was the last continent that modern humans colonised, says Claudio Latorre of the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile in Santiago. The first settlers arrived from North America at least 14,000 years ago, but their route south is a mystery.
URUMQI - Archaeologists have excavated a set of stone shields in Northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region which they believe were used in sacrifices by nomads nearly 3,000 years ago.
Humans originated in Africa. But what route did they take as they began to disperse around the world 60,000 years ago? A new professor at the University of Huddersfield has played a key role in finding the answer to one of the most fundamental questions in the history of mankind.
An information technology academic's love of ancient languages and cultures has resulted in the preservation of a 4000 year-old artefact.Dr Larry Stillman, from the Caulfield School of Information Technology at Monash University, usually spends his time researching the social effects of IT in community organisations.
Sometime in the 4th millennium BC, the pastoralists that had canvased the Sahara desert, packing up and moving in search of new hunting game, began to cluster around the Nile River Valley. There, the people rigged up villages and put down cereals plots. Life achieved a new, more regular, rhythm.And in that same millennium, King Aha, the first of the eight dynastic rulers, ascended to power and pulled together those villages into a state: Egypt.
Pilgrims came from hundreds of miles away to sacrifice animals at an ancient temple in Jerusalem, new research suggests.An analysis of bones found in an ancient dump in the city dating back 2,000 years revealed that animals sacrificed at the temple came from far and wide.
We do a lot of serious business at The HSUS, taking all kinds of cruelty head-on. But we also celebrate animals, taking stock of the diversity of life and the incredible attributes of the other creatures on the planet.HSUS supporters may have received an e-mail from me a few weeks ago announcing an art contest
Human infants' responses to the vocalizations of non-human primates shed light on the developmental origin of a crucial link between human language and core cognitive capacities, a new study reports.Previous studies have shown that even in infants too young to speak, listening to human speech supports core cognitive processes, including the formation of object categories.
Like naked mole-rats (Heterocephalus gaber), blind mole-rats (of the genus Spalax) live underground in low-oxygen environments, are long-lived and resistant to cancer. A new study demonstrates just how cancer-resistant Spalax are, and suggests that the adaptations that help these rodents survive in low-oxygen environments also play a role in their longevity and cancer resistance.The findings are reported in the journal Biomed Central: Biology.
The familiar teardrop eggplant, with its deep purple luster, is but one member of a large and diverse botanical family. Some eggplants are long, lean and pendulous, like smooth-skinned cucumbers. From a distance, ripening kumba eggplants are indistinguishable from miniature pumpkins. And oblong white cultivars that look like they were plucked from beneath chickens and ostriches explain the etymology of
A bizarre-looking web structure has been found in the Peruvian Amazon, and apparently nobody knows what it is, not even scientists.The strange formation resembles a tiny spire surrounded by a webby picket fence and is about 2 centimeters (0.8 inches) wide. Georgia Tech graduate student Troy Alexander first spotted one of these on the underside of a tarp near the Tambopata Research Center in the Peruvian Amazon. At first he thought it might have been an aborted moth cocoon, he wrote on Reddit. But then he found several more, all of which looked quite similar.
The stability of the Amazon rainforest, and the ecosystem's resilience to widespread deforestation, may be much lower than previously thought. The replacement of stands of trees with grassland changes evapotranspiration rates and atmospheric moisture convergence, which in turn reduce regional rainfall, a feedback effect that could drive further deforestation.
In the rich world, each of us consumes or uses 30 or more animals a year (the bulk
The results of research conducted by professors at UC Santa Barbara and colleagues mark the beginning of a new paradigm for our understanding of the history of Earth's great global ice sheets. The research shows that, contrary to the popularly held scientific view, an ice sheet on West Antarctica existed 20 million years earlier than previously thought.
Physicist Frank Wilczek has had to defend his ideas more than once during his long and celebrated career. His Nobel-prizewinning work on quarks, the smallest building blocks of matter, was originally considered a bit out there, he says.Even so, Wilczek, who is at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, was caught off guard by the severity of an attack on his latest proposal, a type of device in never-ending motion called a time crystal.
A system that allows electronic messages to be sent with complete secrecy could be on the verge of expanding beyond niche applications.The system is based on a communication system, where information is carried by individual photons - single particles of light.
No one knows for sure, but it is not at all unlikely that the universe is constructed in a very different way than the theories and models of today predict. The most widely used model today cannot explain everything in the universe, and therefore there is a need to explore the parts of nature which the model cannot explain. This research field is called "New Physics," and it turns our understanding of the universe upside down.
A fierce predator with a huge stinger and long pincers is the oldest land-animal fossil ever found on the former Gondwana supercontinent, a new study reports.The 360-million-year-old scorpion was discovered in a spectacular fossil deposit in South Africa at Waterloo Farm, near Grahamstown. Until now, the only evidence of ancient creepy crawlies on land came from Laurasia, the giant land mass north of Gondwana.
The heart of the Atacama desert is the driest place on Earth. But that didn't prevent the first settlers of South America from setting up home there more than 12,000 years ago.Aside from Antarctica, South America was the last continent that modern humans colonised, says Claudio Latorre of the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile in Santiago. The first settlers arrived from North America at least 14,000 years ago, but their route south is a mystery.
URUMQI - Archaeologists have excavated a set of stone shields in Northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region which they believe were used in sacrifices by nomads nearly 3,000 years ago.
Humans originated in Africa. But what route did they take as they began to disperse around the world 60,000 years ago? A new professor at the University of Huddersfield has played a key role in finding the answer to one of the most fundamental questions in the history of mankind.
An information technology academic's love of ancient languages and cultures has resulted in the preservation of a 4000 year-old artefact.Dr Larry Stillman, from the Caulfield School of Information Technology at Monash University, usually spends his time researching the social effects of IT in community organisations.
Sometime in the 4th millennium BC, the pastoralists that had canvased the Sahara desert, packing up and moving in search of new hunting game, began to cluster around the Nile River Valley. There, the people rigged up villages and put down cereals plots. Life achieved a new, more regular, rhythm.And in that same millennium, King Aha, the first of the eight dynastic rulers, ascended to power and pulled together those villages into a state: Egypt.