Newsdesk Archive
The shark has been named in Latin as Diablodontus michaeledmundi - or "Devil Tooth". It represents a new extinct genus and species.Living about 260 million years ago, the shark survived the Permian-Triassic extinction event - a point in history 252 million years ago known as "The Great Dying," where 96 per cent of life was wiped out.
Waters off of France and the U.K. were once teeming with sharks, many of which would have looked like today's range of shark species.Samples of Late Cretaceous rock from the region turned up remains of 96 different types of prehistoric sharks, 18 of which represent new species, a paper in the Journal of Systematic Paleontology reports.
Two fossils have got palaeontologists scratching their heads about where to place an enigmatic group of animals in the mammalian family tree. A team analysing one fossil suggests that the group belongs in mammals, but researchers looking at the other propose that its evolutionary clan actually predates true mammals. The situation begs for more analysis, more fossils, or both, experts say.
Scientists at the University of East Anglia have shown that sequencing the DNA of crushed up creepy crawlies can accelerate the monitoring and cataloguing of biodiversity around the world.Research published today in the journal Ecology Letters shows that a process known as 'metabarcoding' is much faster than and just as reliable as standard biodiversity datasets assembled with traditional labour-intensive methods.
Investigators are on the verge of solving the last of the Boston Strangler killings of the 1960s, thanks to new DNA tests and a sample secretly collected from a relative of longtime suspect Albert DeSalvo.DNA taken from a water bottle thrown away by one of DeSalvo's nephews is a "familial match" with genetic material preserved in the January 1964 killing of 19-year-old Mary Sullivan, Suffolk County District Attorney Dan Conley said Thursday.
A mummified head said to be that of a South Sea island chief is to be sent back to New Zealand after more than 150 years in the UK.The Maori head, or toi moko, was brought to Britain in the 1840s and kept at Warrington Museum in Cheshire.The museum announced it was sending the head back to its motherland due to its "great cultural importance".
A mining company has been convicted of desecrating an Aboriginal site in Australia's Northern Territory.Mining firm OM Manganese was found guilty on Friday - the first time a company has been successfully prosecuted in Australia for desecration of a sacred site.The site is known as Two Women Sitting Down and is at Bootu Creek, north of Tennant Creek.
You've heard of Plymouth, England, but what about Harwich? The small town is looking to finally get some recognition as the actual launch site of the Mayflower.As the argument goes, Plymouth, which has long touted itself as the Pilgrim ship's final port of call before crossing the Atlantic Ocean, was actually an unplanned stop.
Over the weekend Jen-Luc Piquant found herself pondering the works of Herodotus, specifically the tale of the Lost Army of Cambyses. Sometime around 524 BC, priests at the oracle of the Temple of Amun decided they didn
Dinosaur eggs in Portugal were likely laid by a Torvosaurus, the largest predator of its day. The giant creatures lived during the Jurassic Era and were considered the equivalent of the T. rex in the Cretaceous.Ancient dino eggs are a rare and delicate find, but paleontologists have sill unearthed some of the most primitive Torovosaurus embryos ever discovered.The find was made by Vasco Ribeiro, a paleontologist with Portugal
Staff at a zoo in the Netherlands say they are baffled by their baboons, who have spent days sitting still, huddled together in fear and hardly eating.The behaviour started on Monday evening, and only now are the 112 baboons becoming their normal, active selves again, said a biologist at Emmen Zoo.The zoo still has no idea what spooked the hamadryas baboons, but it is a good sign that some are now eating apples, biologist Wijbren Landman said.
The mysterious deaths of three cows on a remote Missouri ranch has spawned a variety of weird theories, from Satanic activity to aliens.According to ABC
LOS ANGELES - A detective says a woman who said she had visions led them to a body in the search for a missing Southern California boy.Riverside County Sheriff's Detective John Powers tells KFI-AM radio Thursday that Pam Ragland found the body matching the description of 11-year-old Terry Smith. A 16-year-old family member was later arrested on suspicion of murder.
Conspiracy theorists, start your engines: On the wind-blown steppes of central Asia, in an isolated corner of Kazakhstan, there's a large pentagram etched into the Earth's surface. And now an archaeologist has revealed the source of the mysterious structure.The five-pointed star surrounded by a circle, located on the southern shore of the Upper Tobol Reservoir, shows up vividly on Google Maps. There are almost no other signs of human habitation in the area; the closest settlement is the city of Lisakovsk, about 12 miles (20 kilometers) to the east.
A clear connection between spiritual beliefs in a society and the music it creates has been claimed by researcher Jon Skarpeid at the University of Stavanger, based in part on his studies of Hinduism.Religious narratives are concerned with origins and destinations, observes Skarpeid, who works in the department of cultural studies and languages at the University of Stavanger (UiS).
The vast wilderness in the photo above may seem to evoke some ancient time before man
In the early 1990s, Eshel Ben-Jacob, a biological physicist at Tel Aviv University, and his colleagues discovered two new species of bacteria
A team of researchers says it has solved the longstanding puzzle of why a key protein linked to learning is also needed to become addicted to cocaine. Results of the study, published in the Aug. 1 issue of the journal Cell, describe how the learning-related protein works with other proteins to forge new pathways in the brain in response to a drug-induced rush of the "pleasure" molecule dopamine. By adding important detail to the process of addiction, the researchers, led by a group at Johns Hopkins, say the work may point the way to new treatments.
For years, anti-drug and anti-smoking ads have relied on scaring people about the potential health risks of substance abuse. These are smoker's lungs! This is your brain on drugs!Unfortunately, scaring kids into sobriety with information about how terrible drugs and alcohol are for your health doesn't seem to be an effective tactic, according to a study released this month by the International Journal of Public Health. In fact, drug users probably know more about the risks of drugs than people who decide not to use them.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling information from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans.Related: Domestic Law Enforcement Is Using NSA Intercepts To Prosecute Drug Offenders
Security researchers tonight are poring over a piece of malicious software that takes advantage of a Firefox security vulnerability to identify some users of the privacy-protecting Tor anonymity network.The malware showed up Sunday morning on multiple websites hosted by the anonymous hosting company Freedom Hosting. That would normally be considered a blatantly criminal
The U.S. government is quietly pressuring telecommunications providers to install eavesdropping technology deep inside companies' internal networks to facilitate surveillance efforts.FBI officials have been sparring with carriers, a process that has on occasion included threats of contempt of court, in a bid to deploy government-provided software capable of intercepting and analyzing entire communications streams.
In comic books, it's not enough that there are suits that give mere mortals super-human strength. No, these super suits have to be so lightweight that they fit into a suitcase
The first lab-grown burger has now been cooked in a frying pan and tasted by two food writers. But did it live up to all its hype?The event certainly did. It had the surreal vibe of a live TV food show rather than a science press conference, with presenter Nina Hossain fielding questions.Chef Richard McGeown was tasked with frying the patty.
Lying in bed, unable to move a muscle, so-called locked-in patients have few ways to communicate with the outside world. But researchers have now found a way to use the widening and narrowing of the pupils to send a message, potentially helping these patients break the silence.
The whole of the sun's magnetic field is about to "flip", according to NASA - with warning signs being spotted by observatories around the world this year.This "flip" happens every 11 years, and coincides with the greatest solar activity in the "cycles" of the sun, known as "solar maximum" - with sunspots and "coronal mass ejections" on the surface of the sun.
Over the weekend Jen-Luc Piquant found herself pondering the works of Herodotus, specifically the tale of the Lost Army of Cambyses. Sometime around 524 BC, priests at the oracle of the Temple of Amun decided they didn
Dinosaur eggs in Portugal were likely laid by a Torvosaurus, the largest predator of its day. The giant creatures lived during the Jurassic Era and were considered the equivalent of the T. rex in the Cretaceous.Ancient dino eggs are a rare and delicate find, but paleontologists have sill unearthed some of the most primitive Torovosaurus embryos ever discovered.The find was made by Vasco Ribeiro, a paleontologist with Portugal
Staff at a zoo in the Netherlands say they are baffled by their baboons, who have spent days sitting still, huddled together in fear and hardly eating.The behaviour started on Monday evening, and only now are the 112 baboons becoming their normal, active selves again, said a biologist at Emmen Zoo.The zoo still has no idea what spooked the hamadryas baboons, but it is a good sign that some are now eating apples, biologist Wijbren Landman said.
The mysterious deaths of three cows on a remote Missouri ranch has spawned a variety of weird theories, from Satanic activity to aliens.According to ABC
LOS ANGELES - A detective says a woman who said she had visions led them to a body in the search for a missing Southern California boy.Riverside County Sheriff's Detective John Powers tells KFI-AM radio Thursday that Pam Ragland found the body matching the description of 11-year-old Terry Smith. A 16-year-old family member was later arrested on suspicion of murder.
Conspiracy theorists, start your engines: On the wind-blown steppes of central Asia, in an isolated corner of Kazakhstan, there's a large pentagram etched into the Earth's surface. And now an archaeologist has revealed the source of the mysterious structure.The five-pointed star surrounded by a circle, located on the southern shore of the Upper Tobol Reservoir, shows up vividly on Google Maps. There are almost no other signs of human habitation in the area; the closest settlement is the city of Lisakovsk, about 12 miles (20 kilometers) to the east.
A clear connection between spiritual beliefs in a society and the music it creates has been claimed by researcher Jon Skarpeid at the University of Stavanger, based in part on his studies of Hinduism.Religious narratives are concerned with origins and destinations, observes Skarpeid, who works in the department of cultural studies and languages at the University of Stavanger (UiS).
The vast wilderness in the photo above may seem to evoke some ancient time before man
In the early 1990s, Eshel Ben-Jacob, a biological physicist at Tel Aviv University, and his colleagues discovered two new species of bacteria
A team of researchers says it has solved the longstanding puzzle of why a key protein linked to learning is also needed to become addicted to cocaine. Results of the study, published in the Aug. 1 issue of the journal Cell, describe how the learning-related protein works with other proteins to forge new pathways in the brain in response to a drug-induced rush of the "pleasure" molecule dopamine. By adding important detail to the process of addiction, the researchers, led by a group at Johns Hopkins, say the work may point the way to new treatments.
For years, anti-drug and anti-smoking ads have relied on scaring people about the potential health risks of substance abuse. These are smoker's lungs! This is your brain on drugs!Unfortunately, scaring kids into sobriety with information about how terrible drugs and alcohol are for your health doesn't seem to be an effective tactic, according to a study released this month by the International Journal of Public Health. In fact, drug users probably know more about the risks of drugs than people who decide not to use them.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling information from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans.Related: Domestic Law Enforcement Is Using NSA Intercepts To Prosecute Drug Offenders
Security researchers tonight are poring over a piece of malicious software that takes advantage of a Firefox security vulnerability to identify some users of the privacy-protecting Tor anonymity network.The malware showed up Sunday morning on multiple websites hosted by the anonymous hosting company Freedom Hosting. That would normally be considered a blatantly criminal
The U.S. government is quietly pressuring telecommunications providers to install eavesdropping technology deep inside companies' internal networks to facilitate surveillance efforts.FBI officials have been sparring with carriers, a process that has on occasion included threats of contempt of court, in a bid to deploy government-provided software capable of intercepting and analyzing entire communications streams.
In comic books, it's not enough that there are suits that give mere mortals super-human strength. No, these super suits have to be so lightweight that they fit into a suitcase
The first lab-grown burger has now been cooked in a frying pan and tasted by two food writers. But did it live up to all its hype?The event certainly did. It had the surreal vibe of a live TV food show rather than a science press conference, with presenter Nina Hossain fielding questions.Chef Richard McGeown was tasked with frying the patty.
Lying in bed, unable to move a muscle, so-called locked-in patients have few ways to communicate with the outside world. But researchers have now found a way to use the widening and narrowing of the pupils to send a message, potentially helping these patients break the silence.
The whole of the sun's magnetic field is about to "flip", according to NASA - with warning signs being spotted by observatories around the world this year.This "flip" happens every 11 years, and coincides with the greatest solar activity in the "cycles" of the sun, known as "solar maximum" - with sunspots and "coronal mass ejections" on the surface of the sun.
Over the weekend Jen-Luc Piquant found herself pondering the works of Herodotus, specifically the tale of the Lost Army of Cambyses. Sometime around 524 BC, priests at the oracle of the Temple of Amun decided they didn
Dinosaur eggs in Portugal were likely laid by a Torvosaurus, the largest predator of its day. The giant creatures lived during the Jurassic Era and were considered the equivalent of the T. rex in the Cretaceous.Ancient dino eggs are a rare and delicate find, but paleontologists have sill unearthed some of the most primitive Torovosaurus embryos ever discovered.The find was made by Vasco Ribeiro, a paleontologist with Portugal
Staff at a zoo in the Netherlands say they are baffled by their baboons, who have spent days sitting still, huddled together in fear and hardly eating.The behaviour started on Monday evening, and only now are the 112 baboons becoming their normal, active selves again, said a biologist at Emmen Zoo.The zoo still has no idea what spooked the hamadryas baboons, but it is a good sign that some are now eating apples, biologist Wijbren Landman said.
The mysterious deaths of three cows on a remote Missouri ranch has spawned a variety of weird theories, from Satanic activity to aliens.According to ABC
LOS ANGELES - A detective says a woman who said she had visions led them to a body in the search for a missing Southern California boy.Riverside County Sheriff's Detective John Powers tells KFI-AM radio Thursday that Pam Ragland found the body matching the description of 11-year-old Terry Smith. A 16-year-old family member was later arrested on suspicion of murder.
Conspiracy theorists, start your engines: On the wind-blown steppes of central Asia, in an isolated corner of Kazakhstan, there's a large pentagram etched into the Earth's surface. And now an archaeologist has revealed the source of the mysterious structure.The five-pointed star surrounded by a circle, located on the southern shore of the Upper Tobol Reservoir, shows up vividly on Google Maps. There are almost no other signs of human habitation in the area; the closest settlement is the city of Lisakovsk, about 12 miles (20 kilometers) to the east.
A clear connection between spiritual beliefs in a society and the music it creates has been claimed by researcher Jon Skarpeid at the University of Stavanger, based in part on his studies of Hinduism.Religious narratives are concerned with origins and destinations, observes Skarpeid, who works in the department of cultural studies and languages at the University of Stavanger (UiS).
The vast wilderness in the photo above may seem to evoke some ancient time before man
In the early 1990s, Eshel Ben-Jacob, a biological physicist at Tel Aviv University, and his colleagues discovered two new species of bacteria
A team of researchers says it has solved the longstanding puzzle of why a key protein linked to learning is also needed to become addicted to cocaine. Results of the study, published in the Aug. 1 issue of the journal Cell, describe how the learning-related protein works with other proteins to forge new pathways in the brain in response to a drug-induced rush of the "pleasure" molecule dopamine. By adding important detail to the process of addiction, the researchers, led by a group at Johns Hopkins, say the work may point the way to new treatments.
For years, anti-drug and anti-smoking ads have relied on scaring people about the potential health risks of substance abuse. These are smoker's lungs! This is your brain on drugs!Unfortunately, scaring kids into sobriety with information about how terrible drugs and alcohol are for your health doesn't seem to be an effective tactic, according to a study released this month by the International Journal of Public Health. In fact, drug users probably know more about the risks of drugs than people who decide not to use them.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling information from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans.Related: Domestic Law Enforcement Is Using NSA Intercepts To Prosecute Drug Offenders
Security researchers tonight are poring over a piece of malicious software that takes advantage of a Firefox security vulnerability to identify some users of the privacy-protecting Tor anonymity network.The malware showed up Sunday morning on multiple websites hosted by the anonymous hosting company Freedom Hosting. That would normally be considered a blatantly criminal
The U.S. government is quietly pressuring telecommunications providers to install eavesdropping technology deep inside companies' internal networks to facilitate surveillance efforts.FBI officials have been sparring with carriers, a process that has on occasion included threats of contempt of court, in a bid to deploy government-provided software capable of intercepting and analyzing entire communications streams.
In comic books, it's not enough that there are suits that give mere mortals super-human strength. No, these super suits have to be so lightweight that they fit into a suitcase
The first lab-grown burger has now been cooked in a frying pan and tasted by two food writers. But did it live up to all its hype?The event certainly did. It had the surreal vibe of a live TV food show rather than a science press conference, with presenter Nina Hossain fielding questions.Chef Richard McGeown was tasked with frying the patty.
Lying in bed, unable to move a muscle, so-called locked-in patients have few ways to communicate with the outside world. But researchers have now found a way to use the widening and narrowing of the pupils to send a message, potentially helping these patients break the silence.
The whole of the sun's magnetic field is about to "flip", according to NASA - with warning signs being spotted by observatories around the world this year.This "flip" happens every 11 years, and coincides with the greatest solar activity in the "cycles" of the sun, known as "solar maximum" - with sunspots and "coronal mass ejections" on the surface of the sun.
Staff at a zoo in the Netherlands say they are baffled by their baboons, who have spent days sitting still, huddled together in fear and hardly eating.The behaviour started on Monday evening, and only now are the 112 baboons becoming their normal, active selves again, said a biologist at Emmen Zoo.The zoo still has no idea what spooked the hamadryas baboons, but it is a good sign that some are now eating apples, biologist Wijbren Landman said.
LOS ANGELES - A detective says a woman who said she had visions led them to a body in the search for a missing Southern California boy.Riverside County Sheriff's Detective John Powers tells KFI-AM radio Thursday that Pam Ragland found the body matching the description of 11-year-old Terry Smith. A 16-year-old family member was later arrested on suspicion of murder.
Conspiracy theorists, start your engines: On the wind-blown steppes of central Asia, in an isolated corner of Kazakhstan, there's a large pentagram etched into the Earth's surface. And now an archaeologist has revealed the source of the mysterious structure.The five-pointed star surrounded by a circle, located on the southern shore of the Upper Tobol Reservoir, shows up vividly on Google Maps. There are almost no other signs of human habitation in the area; the closest settlement is the city of Lisakovsk, about 12 miles (20 kilometers) to the east.
A clear connection between spiritual beliefs in a society and the music it creates has been claimed by researcher Jon Skarpeid at the University of Stavanger, based in part on his studies of Hinduism.Religious narratives are concerned with origins and destinations, observes Skarpeid, who works in the department of cultural studies and languages at the University of Stavanger (UiS).
A team of researchers says it has solved the longstanding puzzle of why a key protein linked to learning is also needed to become addicted to cocaine. Results of the study, published in the Aug. 1 issue of the journal Cell, describe how the learning-related protein works with other proteins to forge new pathways in the brain in response to a drug-induced rush of the "pleasure" molecule dopamine. By adding important detail to the process of addiction, the researchers, led by a group at Johns Hopkins, say the work may point the way to new treatments.
For years, anti-drug and anti-smoking ads have relied on scaring people about the potential health risks of substance abuse. These are smoker's lungs! This is your brain on drugs!Unfortunately, scaring kids into sobriety with information about how terrible drugs and alcohol are for your health doesn't seem to be an effective tactic, according to a study released this month by the International Journal of Public Health. In fact, drug users probably know more about the risks of drugs than people who decide not to use them.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling information from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans.Related: Domestic Law Enforcement Is Using NSA Intercepts To Prosecute Drug Offenders
The U.S. government is quietly pressuring telecommunications providers to install eavesdropping technology deep inside companies' internal networks to facilitate surveillance efforts.FBI officials have been sparring with carriers, a process that has on occasion included threats of contempt of court, in a bid to deploy government-provided software capable of intercepting and analyzing entire communications streams.
The first lab-grown burger has now been cooked in a frying pan and tasted by two food writers. But did it live up to all its hype?The event certainly did. It had the surreal vibe of a live TV food show rather than a science press conference, with presenter Nina Hossain fielding questions.Chef Richard McGeown was tasked with frying the patty.
Lying in bed, unable to move a muscle, so-called locked-in patients have few ways to communicate with the outside world. But researchers have now found a way to use the widening and narrowing of the pupils to send a message, potentially helping these patients break the silence.
The whole of the sun's magnetic field is about to "flip", according to NASA - with warning signs being spotted by observatories around the world this year.This "flip" happens every 11 years, and coincides with the greatest solar activity in the "cycles" of the sun, known as "solar maximum" - with sunspots and "coronal mass ejections" on the surface of the sun.
Perhaps Eve wasn't an older woman after all. Genetically speaking, at least.Two new studies have found that the oldest paternal ancestor of all human males lived somewhere between 120,000 and 200,000 years ago, at roughly the same time as humanity's most recent ancestor on the female side.
It's well known that the dinosaurs were wiped out 66 million years ago when a meteor hit what is now southern Mexico but evidence is accumulating that the biggest extinction of all, 252.3m years ago, at the end of the Permian period, was also triggered by an impact that changed the climate.While the idea that an impact caused the Permian extinction has been around for a while, what's been missing is a suitable crater to confirm it.
We are in the small town of Clarkia, Idaho. It's an ordinary middle-class town by anyone's standards. I say a 'town'... just 97 people live here, so as you can imagine the nightlife is usually a little wanting, but other than that it's pretty normal. Kids go to school; people go to work, mostly civil service jobs, just another place in the Northwest. To most of the people here it's a pretty unexceptional place to live, but to a certain group of fossil hunters, it is among the most important sites in the world...
Researchers from the Gene and Stem Cell Therapy Program at Sydney's Centenary Institute have confirmed that, far from being "junk", the 97 per cent of human DNA that does not encode instructions for making proteins can play a significant role in controlling cell development.
Eighty years ago, Winston Churchill looked forward to the day when "we shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium". Churchill thought this would take only 50 years. We are still not there, but today we will reach a milestone on the road to the future that Churchill envisaged: the first public tasting of in vitro meat.
Italian paleontologists have reported the discovery of enigmatic fossils in Pleistocene shallow-marine clay deposits in central Italy.Dr Paola Sassi from the University of Perugia
Oceans cover 71 percent of the Earth's surface, yet our knowledge of the impact of climate change on marine habitats is a mere drop in the proverbial ocean compared to terrestrial systems. An international team of scientists set out to change that by conducting a global meta-analysis of climate change impacts on marine systems.
HERE come the girls. Fewer boys than girls were born in the months after the huge earthquake struck Japan in March 2011.Ralph Catalano of the University of California in Berkeley and colleagues examined hospital records of births in Japan between 2006 and the end of 2011. After the quake, births in areas closest to the epicentre were more likely to be girls, but provinces farther out showed no gender bias. About 2.2 per cent fewer boys were born in the most damaged areas than expected.
Radioactive groundwater at the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant has risen to levels above a barrier being built to contain it, highlighting the risk of an increasing amount of contaminated water reaching the sea, Japanese media reported on Saturday.
Two and a half years after the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl, the operator of Japan's wrecked Fukushima plant faces a daunting array of unknowns.Why the plant intermittently emits steam; how groundwater seeps into its basement; whether fixes to the cooling system will hold; how nearby groundwater is contaminated by radioactive matter; how toxic water ends up in the sea and how to contain water that could overwhelm the facility's storage tanks.What is clear, say critics, is that Tokyo Electric Power Co is keeping a nervous Japanese public in the dark about what it does know.
The conservation group WWF is calling on a UK-based company to abandon its plans to explore for oil in Africa's oldest national park.The charity says Soco International's proposals could put the Virunga National Park in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo at risk.The park is home to more than 3,000 different kinds of animals, including endangered mountain gorillas.
Instead of wearing mountains down, evidence from Europe's high Alps shows that glaciers shield summits from erosion, acting as a protective lid.French scientists studied erosion on Mont Blanc, western Europe's highest peak, below and around its glaciers.Ice at the highest points froze to the mountain rock and played little part in erosion, the team said.
Enceladus, the icy moon that circles Saturn and shoots out jets of water, emits a much larger amount of water at the farthest point in its orbit, according to a new study published in the journal Nature. The discovery backs up a years-old theory and provides the researchers with fresh insight into this geophysically intriguing body.
Jupiter's moon Europa is a icy shell with an underground ocean. The new movie 'Europa Report' is based on real science, and NASA ideas about how to explore Jupiter's fourth largest moon.Jupiter's icy moon Europa is shrouded in mystery.Scientists have long been intrigued by Jupiter's fourth largest moon with its underground ocean and icy shell. Researchers have said that Europa's saltwater ocean could harbor life, and some have theorized that it is the most likely place to find life in the solar system.
In a warming world, what could cause temperatures to suddenly plummet across the Northern Hemisphere? Scientists have tried to answer this question for decades, ever since they discovered geological and biological evidence for the "Big Freeze."Now, a new study points to an armada of icebergs or meltwater from Greenland as a possible cause for the sudden climate change called the Younger Dryas, or the Big Freeze. The findings were published online July 10 in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters.
New data from Greenland ice cores suggest North America may have suffered a large cosmic impact about 12,900 years ago.A layer of platinum is seen in ice of the same age as a known abrupt climate transition, US scientists report.The climate flip has previously been linked to the demise of the North American "Clovis" people.
NASA this week entreated amateur astronomers the world over in helping to identify the smaller asteroids lurking about space that could wipe out a city or worse upon impact with Earth.The U.S. space agency has reportedly coined the initiative,
THE dazzling success of NASA's rover Curiosity has paved the way for a human conquest of Mars, scientists say, almost one year after the groundbreaking probe touched down on the red planet.Since it alighted on the Martian surface on August 6 last year, Curiosity has gathered and beamed back to Earth a treasure trove of information expected to be vital when a manned mission to Mars eventually takes place.
Bad news, "Star Trek" fans: Even if you found a way to teleport a human being, sending the required data would take longer than the age of the universe. At least that's what fourth-year physics students from the University of Leicester concluded in the latest of a series of studies on way-out topics.Teleportation transmission rates get the technical treatment in the Journal of Physics Special Topics, an online publication created by the British university to answer burning questions on the fringes of science, such as: Could Batman really use a cape to fly? What would Han Solo see when he made the jump to hyperspace?.
Perhaps Eve wasn't an older woman after all. Genetically speaking, at least.Two new studies have found that the oldest paternal ancestor of all human males lived somewhere between 120,000 and 200,000 years ago, at roughly the same time as humanity's most recent ancestor on the female side.
It's well known that the dinosaurs were wiped out 66 million years ago when a meteor hit what is now southern Mexico but evidence is accumulating that the biggest extinction of all, 252.3m years ago, at the end of the Permian period, was also triggered by an impact that changed the climate.While the idea that an impact caused the Permian extinction has been around for a while, what's been missing is a suitable crater to confirm it.
We are in the small town of Clarkia, Idaho. It's an ordinary middle-class town by anyone's standards. I say a 'town'... just 97 people live here, so as you can imagine the nightlife is usually a little wanting, but other than that it's pretty normal. Kids go to school; people go to work, mostly civil service jobs, just another place in the Northwest. To most of the people here it's a pretty unexceptional place to live, but to a certain group of fossil hunters, it is among the most important sites in the world...
Researchers from the Gene and Stem Cell Therapy Program at Sydney's Centenary Institute have confirmed that, far from being "junk", the 97 per cent of human DNA that does not encode instructions for making proteins can play a significant role in controlling cell development.
Eighty years ago, Winston Churchill looked forward to the day when "we shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium". Churchill thought this would take only 50 years. We are still not there, but today we will reach a milestone on the road to the future that Churchill envisaged: the first public tasting of in vitro meat.