Newsdesk Archive
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Google has a plan. Eventually it wants to get into your brain. "When you think about something and don't really know much about it, you will automatically get information," Google CEO Larry Page said in an interview with Wired. "Eventually you'll have an implant, where if you think about a fact, it will just tell you the answer.".
Anna Begay lives on a remote plot of land in the Navajo reservation. To reach her home, you drive through twisting, unmarked trails of dust and mud along the edge of Coalmine Canyon, in northwest Arizona.A grandmother in her late 80s, Begay lives alone in a traditional, eight-sided house called a hogan. She raises sheep with the help of a nephew and a couple of fast sheepdogs. When the dogs bark, it
Over the last hundred years, the human population has exploded from about 1.5 billion to more than seven billion, driving an ever-increasing demand for resources. To satisfy civilization's appetite, communities have expanded recycling efforts while mine operators must explore forbidding frontiers to seek out new deposits, opening mines miles underground or even at the bottom of the ocean.
From across the vast expanse of our solar system, gas giants Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and Uranus appear serene.Their gaseous surfaces are unscarred by the meteor impacts that have gouged their rocky brethren in the inner solar system and the deep hues of browns, reds and blues misleadingly suggest a sense of calm.
New York City's East River isn't, technically, a river: It is a tidal strait that runs between Manhattan and Queens, connecting New York Harbor to Long Island Sound. But it sure can move like one: The current can reach a top speed of more than six feet per second, enough to turn swimming upstream into a serious challenge.
US-based entrepreneur Elon Musk has unveiled his proposed near-supersonic "Hyperloop" transport concept to link Los Angeles and San Francisco.The SpaceX, Tesla and PayPal founder envisions using magnets and fans to shoot capsules floating on a cushion of air through a long tube.If the Hyperloop is ever built, a trip on it between the two California cities would last about 30 minutes, he said.
After nine days of intensive discussions, nearly 700 particle physicists from about 100 universities and laboratories concluded nine months of work with a unified framework for unmasking the hidden secrets of matter, energy, space and time during the next two decades.
Practicing yoga may help people who have had cancer sleep better and reduce their use of sleep aids, according to a new study.Researchers found study participants, mostly women with a history of breast cancer, reported significant improvements in sleep quality and sleep duration when they attended yoga sessions twice per week.
A study published by the BMJ this week affirms one piece of conventional wisdom
In work published this week in Nature: Scientific Reports, a team of researchers from the University of Notre Dame's Eck Institute for Global Health, led by Associate Professor Giles Duffield and Assistant Professor Zain Syed of the Department of Biological Sciences, revealed that the major malaria vector in Africa, the Anopheles gambiae mosquito, is able to smell major human host odorants better at night.
As the password makes its slow fade towards extinction, many technologies are jockeying for position as the next method for securing online accounts. We
When did humans start talking? There are nearly as many answers to this perplexing question as there are researchers studying it. A new brain imaging study claims to support the hypothesis that language emerged long before Homo sapiens and coevolved with the invention of the first finely made stone tools nearly 2 million years ago. However, some experts think it
A new timeline for the origin of ancient Egypt has been established by scientists.A team from the UK found that the transformation from a land of disparate farmers into a state ruled by a king was more rapid than previously thought.Using radiocarbon dating and computer models, they believe the civilisation's first ruler - King Aha - came to power in about 3100BC.
Rising air pollution in the wake of the Industrial Revolution seems to be the explanation for a long-standing enigma in glaciology. The emission of soot from Europe
Google has a plan. Eventually it wants to get into your brain. "When you think about something and don't really know much about it, you will automatically get information," Google CEO Larry Page said in an interview with Wired. "Eventually you'll have an implant, where if you think about a fact, it will just tell you the answer.".
Anna Begay lives on a remote plot of land in the Navajo reservation. To reach her home, you drive through twisting, unmarked trails of dust and mud along the edge of Coalmine Canyon, in northwest Arizona.A grandmother in her late 80s, Begay lives alone in a traditional, eight-sided house called a hogan. She raises sheep with the help of a nephew and a couple of fast sheepdogs. When the dogs bark, it
Over the last hundred years, the human population has exploded from about 1.5 billion to more than seven billion, driving an ever-increasing demand for resources. To satisfy civilization's appetite, communities have expanded recycling efforts while mine operators must explore forbidding frontiers to seek out new deposits, opening mines miles underground or even at the bottom of the ocean.
From across the vast expanse of our solar system, gas giants Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and Uranus appear serene.Their gaseous surfaces are unscarred by the meteor impacts that have gouged their rocky brethren in the inner solar system and the deep hues of browns, reds and blues misleadingly suggest a sense of calm.
New York City's East River isn't, technically, a river: It is a tidal strait that runs between Manhattan and Queens, connecting New York Harbor to Long Island Sound. But it sure can move like one: The current can reach a top speed of more than six feet per second, enough to turn swimming upstream into a serious challenge.
US-based entrepreneur Elon Musk has unveiled his proposed near-supersonic "Hyperloop" transport concept to link Los Angeles and San Francisco.The SpaceX, Tesla and PayPal founder envisions using magnets and fans to shoot capsules floating on a cushion of air through a long tube.If the Hyperloop is ever built, a trip on it between the two California cities would last about 30 minutes, he said.
After nine days of intensive discussions, nearly 700 particle physicists from about 100 universities and laboratories concluded nine months of work with a unified framework for unmasking the hidden secrets of matter, energy, space and time during the next two decades.
Practicing yoga may help people who have had cancer sleep better and reduce their use of sleep aids, according to a new study.Researchers found study participants, mostly women with a history of breast cancer, reported significant improvements in sleep quality and sleep duration when they attended yoga sessions twice per week.
A study published by the BMJ this week affirms one piece of conventional wisdom
In work published this week in Nature: Scientific Reports, a team of researchers from the University of Notre Dame's Eck Institute for Global Health, led by Associate Professor Giles Duffield and Assistant Professor Zain Syed of the Department of Biological Sciences, revealed that the major malaria vector in Africa, the Anopheles gambiae mosquito, is able to smell major human host odorants better at night.
As the password makes its slow fade towards extinction, many technologies are jockeying for position as the next method for securing online accounts. We
When did humans start talking? There are nearly as many answers to this perplexing question as there are researchers studying it. A new brain imaging study claims to support the hypothesis that language emerged long before Homo sapiens and coevolved with the invention of the first finely made stone tools nearly 2 million years ago. However, some experts think it
A new timeline for the origin of ancient Egypt has been established by scientists.A team from the UK found that the transformation from a land of disparate farmers into a state ruled by a king was more rapid than previously thought.Using radiocarbon dating and computer models, they believe the civilisation's first ruler - King Aha - came to power in about 3100BC.
Rising air pollution in the wake of the Industrial Revolution seems to be the explanation for a long-standing enigma in glaciology. The emission of soot from Europe
Google has a plan. Eventually it wants to get into your brain. "When you think about something and don't really know much about it, you will automatically get information," Google CEO Larry Page said in an interview with Wired. "Eventually you'll have an implant, where if you think about a fact, it will just tell you the answer.".
Anna Begay lives on a remote plot of land in the Navajo reservation. To reach her home, you drive through twisting, unmarked trails of dust and mud along the edge of Coalmine Canyon, in northwest Arizona.A grandmother in her late 80s, Begay lives alone in a traditional, eight-sided house called a hogan. She raises sheep with the help of a nephew and a couple of fast sheepdogs. When the dogs bark, it
Over the last hundred years, the human population has exploded from about 1.5 billion to more than seven billion, driving an ever-increasing demand for resources. To satisfy civilization's appetite, communities have expanded recycling efforts while mine operators must explore forbidding frontiers to seek out new deposits, opening mines miles underground or even at the bottom of the ocean.
From across the vast expanse of our solar system, gas giants Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and Uranus appear serene.Their gaseous surfaces are unscarred by the meteor impacts that have gouged their rocky brethren in the inner solar system and the deep hues of browns, reds and blues misleadingly suggest a sense of calm.
New York City's East River isn't, technically, a river: It is a tidal strait that runs between Manhattan and Queens, connecting New York Harbor to Long Island Sound. But it sure can move like one: The current can reach a top speed of more than six feet per second, enough to turn swimming upstream into a serious challenge.
US-based entrepreneur Elon Musk has unveiled his proposed near-supersonic "Hyperloop" transport concept to link Los Angeles and San Francisco.The SpaceX, Tesla and PayPal founder envisions using magnets and fans to shoot capsules floating on a cushion of air through a long tube.If the Hyperloop is ever built, a trip on it between the two California cities would last about 30 minutes, he said.
After nine days of intensive discussions, nearly 700 particle physicists from about 100 universities and laboratories concluded nine months of work with a unified framework for unmasking the hidden secrets of matter, energy, space and time during the next two decades.
Practicing yoga may help people who have had cancer sleep better and reduce their use of sleep aids, according to a new study.Researchers found study participants, mostly women with a history of breast cancer, reported significant improvements in sleep quality and sleep duration when they attended yoga sessions twice per week.
A study published by the BMJ this week affirms one piece of conventional wisdom
In work published this week in Nature: Scientific Reports, a team of researchers from the University of Notre Dame's Eck Institute for Global Health, led by Associate Professor Giles Duffield and Assistant Professor Zain Syed of the Department of Biological Sciences, revealed that the major malaria vector in Africa, the Anopheles gambiae mosquito, is able to smell major human host odorants better at night.
As the password makes its slow fade towards extinction, many technologies are jockeying for position as the next method for securing online accounts. We
When did humans start talking? There are nearly as many answers to this perplexing question as there are researchers studying it. A new brain imaging study claims to support the hypothesis that language emerged long before Homo sapiens and coevolved with the invention of the first finely made stone tools nearly 2 million years ago. However, some experts think it
A new timeline for the origin of ancient Egypt has been established by scientists.A team from the UK found that the transformation from a land of disparate farmers into a state ruled by a king was more rapid than previously thought.Using radiocarbon dating and computer models, they believe the civilisation's first ruler - King Aha - came to power in about 3100BC.
Rising air pollution in the wake of the Industrial Revolution seems to be the explanation for a long-standing enigma in glaciology. The emission of soot from Europe
Google has a plan. Eventually it wants to get into your brain. "When you think about something and don't really know much about it, you will automatically get information," Google CEO Larry Page said in an interview with Wired. "Eventually you'll have an implant, where if you think about a fact, it will just tell you the answer.".
Over the last hundred years, the human population has exploded from about 1.5 billion to more than seven billion, driving an ever-increasing demand for resources. To satisfy civilization's appetite, communities have expanded recycling efforts while mine operators must explore forbidding frontiers to seek out new deposits, opening mines miles underground or even at the bottom of the ocean.
From across the vast expanse of our solar system, gas giants Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and Uranus appear serene.Their gaseous surfaces are unscarred by the meteor impacts that have gouged their rocky brethren in the inner solar system and the deep hues of browns, reds and blues misleadingly suggest a sense of calm.