Newsdesk Archive
Solar panel installations in the U.S. grew 76% in 2012 as the cost of panels and the surrounding equipment continued to fall, according to an annual report by a solar trade group.The U.S. installed panels capable of producing 3,313 megawatts of peak electricity, up from 1,887 megawatts in 2011, the report said. The panels installed last year will generate about the same amount of electricity over a year as a medium-sized coal plant, enough to power 400,000 U.S. homes.
Prisons in Sweden, Norway and Finland have a smaller average inmate population, bigger cells and broader access to social services than jails in English-speaking countries, a 10-year study has found.The authors of the study, who have published their findings in a book called Contrasts in Punishment: An explanation of Anglophone excess and Nordic exceptionalism, studied a vast amount of data on prisons in Sweden, Norway, Finland, New South Wales, New Zealand and England.
The evidence comes from fragments of an approximately 100,000-year-old human skull unearthed at a site called Xujiayao, located in the Nihewan Basin of northern China. The skull's owner appears to have had a now-rare congenital deformity that probably arose through inbreeding, researchers report in the journal PLOS ONE.
Ancient teeth of old-world monkeys, which are most closely related to humans, have now been unearthed, fossils 3 million years older than previous remains found to date, researchers say.The old-world monkeys are native to Africa and Asia today, and include many familiar primates, such as baboons and macaques. Unlike the new-world monkeys of the Americas, tails of old-world monkeys are never prehensile, or able to grasp things.
For ages, anthropologists have puzzled over Neanderthal and human brains, since they were the same size. If each species had comparable brainpower, why did humans dominate?A comparison of Neanderthal and human brains has revealed it was a matter of allocation: Neanderthal brains focused more on vision and movement, leaving less room for cognition related to social networking.
Astronomers are already getting set for the arrival of Comet ISON, which may become one of the brightest comets ever seen when it cruises through the inner solar system this fall.NASA has brought together a small team of experts to organize an observing campaign for Comet ISON, which could potentially shine as brightly as the moon when it makes its closest pass by the sun in late November if the most optimistic scenarios play out.
Last week, Dame Sally Davies, the chief medical officer of England, likened the problem of antibiotic resistance to the risks presented by international terrorism. While this might sound like an exaggeration the threat was actually, if anything, understated. Each year, the global number of deaths to which bacterial resistance contributes far outstrips those caused by terrorist attacks.
Biologists briefly brought the extinct Pyrenean ibex back to life in 2003 by creating a clone from a frozen tissue sample harvested before the goat's entire population vanished in 2000. The clone survived just seven minutes after birth, but it gave scientists hope that "de-extinction," once a pipedream, could become a reality.
Scientists have warned that a fishing rethink is needed after finding that catches of big fish trigger a rapid change in the gene pool of fish stocks.Researchers at Bangor University say they found that over-harvesting larger fish leads to a population of smaller fish that are less fertile.The research suggest that the change happens within a few generations.The scientists say the findings could have a massive impact for the future of global fishing policies.
Low levels of rainfall in Somalia in 2011 which resulted in tens of thousands of famine-related death may have been caused by climate change, according to a new study.British weather scientists say that close observation of weather patterns in Somalia and elsewhere in East Africa between 2010 and 2011 showed that short rains failed in late 2010 because of the natural effects of the weather pattern La Nina.
A defense contractor better known for building jet fighters and lethal missiles says it has found a way to slash the amount of energy needed to remove salt from seawater, potentially making it vastly cheaper to produce clean water at a time when scarcity has become a global security issue.
Ancient soil in Red Deer River valley sheds light on lingering mysteryThe dry, barren prairie around Alberta's Drumheller area was once a lush and subtropical forest on the shores of a large inland sea, with loads of wetlands inhabited by dinosaurs, turtles, crocodiles and small mammals.
While an Egyptian pharaoh built majestic temples filled with sparkling treasures, the lower classes performed backbreaking work on meager diets, new evidence suggests.An analysis of more than 150 skeletons from a 3,300-year-old cemetery at the ancient Egyptian city of Amarna reveals fractures, wear and tear from heavy lifting, and rampant malnutrition amongst the city's commoners.The discovery, detailed in the March issue of the journal Antiquity, could shed light on how the non-elites of ancient Egyptian society lived.
Riding on the subway can get mighty boring. The New York City metro system, in particular, has no Internet connection on most routes. So, how are you supposed to pass the time? Sure, you could listen to music or space out for a bit, but here's an interesting concept that could make the ride more enjoyable.
When it comes to life across the cosmos, the universe might just be an "awful waste of space" after all.A new theory presented at a conference this week would confirm the worry of Ellie Arroway, Jodie Foster's character in the film "Contact," that life might not exist on other worlds.Some scientists think that just because exoplanets could have habitable environments, that does not mean that life evolved there.
On 29 December 2012, a fireball lit up the early evening skies over the Sri Lankan province of Polonnaruwa. Hot, sparkling fragments of the fireball rained down across the countryside and witnesses reported the strong odour of tar or asphalt.Over the next few days, the local police gathered numerous examples of these stones and sent them to the Sri Lankan Medical Research Institute of the Ministry of Health in Colombo. After noticing curious features inside these stones, officials forwarded the samples to a team of astrobiologists at Cardiff University in the UK for further analysis.
To all those who are interested in freedom of speech, a non-materialist approach to the mystery of consciousness, and the negative attitude of a powerful lobby of self-styled scientists towards visionary plants...Please study the documents below which concern the removal from wide circulation of two TEDx presentations, one by myself one by Rupert Sheldrake, and the subsequent framing of these presentations in a negative and defamatory light by senior TED staff on TED's own website.
Last month I posted videos of two recent thought-provoking TEDx talks by Graham Hancock and Rupert Sheldrake. However, if you visit either of those stories today, you'll find that the videos are no longer accessible. The reason? Complaints were made to the TED organisation - for example, by atheist blogger Jerry Coyne, and of course, P.Z. Myers - about the lectures being unscientific and full of 'woo'. Under pressure from these bloggers and their readers (and others), TED set up a conversation page to get input from TED viewers about these talks.
NASA officials announced March 12 that ancient Mars could have supported primitive life. But this begs the question: What exactly constitutes life?Merriam-Webster.com defines life as "an organismic state characterized by capacity for metabolism, growth, reaction to stimuli and reproduction." But there's no single satisfactory definition of life.
In the swirling canopy of Jupiter's atmosphere, cloudless patches are so exceptional that the big ones get the special name "hot spots." Exactly how these clearings form and why they're only found near the planet's equator have long been mysteries. Now, using images from NASA's Cassini spacecraft, scientists have found new evidence that hot spots in Jupiter's atmosphere are created by a Rossby wave, a pattern also seen in Earth's atmosphere and oceans. The team found the wave responsible for the hot spots glides up and down through layers of the atmosphere like a carousel horse on a merry-go-round.
With the planet heating up, many scientists seem fairly certain some weather elements like hurricanes and droughts will worsen. But tornadoes have them stumped.These unpredictable, sometimes deadly storms plague the United States more than any other country. Here in tornado alley, Oklahoma City has been hit with at least 147 tornadoes since 1890.
Large British wind farms will actually release as much carbon dioxide as fossil-fuel power plants, according to a study conducted by researchers from Aberdeen University and published in the journal Nature.The source of the emissions is not the windmills themselves, but the land on which they are being constructed."Much of the cheap land being targeted by developers desperate to cash in on wind farm subsidies is peat land in remote wild land areas of the UK," said Helen McDade of the John Muir Trust.
Tokyo Electric Power Co. said Friday it detected a record 740,000 becquerels per kilogram of radioactive cesium in a fish caught in waters near the crippled Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, equivalent to 7,400 times the state-set limit deemed safe for human consumption.
Get a whiff of this: Milky rinse water flowing from Wisconsin cheese factories will soon be used to generate enough electricity for 3,000 homes, thanks to an innovative solution to a growing wastewater problem.For years, the milky rinse water was spread on farmland as a low-grade fertilizer, but the practice was curtailed in the face of more stringent environmental regulations to limit runoff pollution, especially in the winter months when spraying on frozen ground was outlawed.
Bedbugs are a growing public health issue in the United States and around the world, but their resurgence in recent years may have been aided by humans who unwittingly helped the pests evolve numerous ways of thwarting a common insecticide, scientists say.In a new study published online today in Scientific Reports, researchers examined the genes of bedbugs from different U.S. cities and found that several of the populations had multiple means of resisting a class of insecticides called pyrethroids.
The Sydney Morning HeraldAustralian travellers to Indonesia beware: smuggling drugs will still earn you jail time but, if an official draft of the country's new criminal code becomes law, witches and people practising "black magic", even adulterers and those living together outside wedlock, may also be locked away.The new draft law is meant to modernise Indonesia's 1918 Criminal Code, which was last updated in 1958, but some of its proposals constitute a big step back to the Middle Ages.
A Roman sculpture of a Cotswold god has been found in a castle cupboard after being missing for over 100 years.The artefact, dated 150-350AD, was first found during an archaeological dig on the estate of Sudeley Castle in 1875.But when historians found records of the discovery in the 1960s, there was no trace of the sculpture.
Stone Age man's gradual improvement in tool development, particularly in crafting stone handaxes, is providing insight into the likely mental advances these early humans made a million years ago. Better tools make for better hunting, and better tools come from more sophisticated thought processes. Close analysis of bits of chipped and flaked stone from across Ethiopia is helping scientists crack the code of how these early humans thought over time.
Researchers in northeastern Spain say they've uncovered hundreds of dinosaur egg fossils, including four kinds that had never been found before in the region. The eggs likely were left behind by sauropods millions of years ago.Eggs, eggshell fragments and dozens of clutches were nestled in the stratigraphic layers of the Tremp geological formation at the site of Coll de Nargó in the Spanish province of Lleida, which was a marshy region during the Late Cretaceous Period, the researchers said.
Publishing houses are Germany's intellectual backbone. For many years, they created a culture of literary abundance and generated healthy profits. But in the age of Amazon, e-books and self-publishing, they could be facing demise.
The clock is ticking on the next big earthquake in the Pacific Northwest, and experts fear it will be a monster.Following the deadly magnitude-9.0 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan in March 2011, Oregon legislators commissioned a study of the impact a similar quake could have on the state, according to the Associated Press.The report, "Oregon Resilience Plan: Reducing Risk and Improving Recovery for the Next Cascadia Earthquake and Tsunami," was presented to legislators yesterday (March 14).
Graham Hancock will be talking live on the internet on the Progressive Radio Network tonight 9pm - 10pm EDT (which is 6pm to 7pm Pacific Time and 1am to 2am GMT).The show is The Lifeboat Hour with Mike Ruppert -- see here: http://prn.fm/shows/political-shows/lifeboat-hour/#axzz2Np66cnlpThe subject of the show will be the recent controversial censorship by TED of Graham's popular Youtube presentation "The War on Consciousness". For background on this controversy, see here: http://www.grahamhancock.com/forum/HancockG5-TED.php.
Biologists briefly brought the extinct Pyrenean ibex back to life in 2003 by creating a clone from a frozen tissue sample harvested before the goat's entire population vanished in 2000. The clone survived just seven minutes after birth, but it gave scientists hope that "de-extinction," once a pipedream, could become a reality.
In what may be considered an early Easter miracle, an extinct species of native frog has begun its rise from the dead.Australian scientists have grown embryos containing the revived DNA of the extinct gastric-brooding frog, the crucial first step in their attempt to bring a species back to life.
A new genus and species of extinct saber-toothed cat has been found in Polk County, Fla., scientists say.The fossil, which is 5 million years old, is related to the well-known carnivorous predator Smilodon fatalis from the La Brea Tar Pits of Los Angeles. The group of saber-toothed cats called Smilodontini was thought to have originated in the Old World and later migrated to North America, but the new species' age suggests the group evolved in North America, researchers reported March 13 in the journal PLOS ONE.
BRUSSELS (Reuters) - EU governments failed to agree a ban on three widely used pesticides linked to the decline of honeybees on Friday, but the European Commission could force one through by the summer unless member states agree a compromise.A sharp fall in bee populations around the world, partly due to a phenomenon known as colony collapse disorder, has fuelled concerns over the impact of widespread use of pesticides, notably the neonicotinoids class.
Polar bears and brown bears diverged much longer ago than previously thought, new research suggests.Past estimates for this divergence came from brown bears living on the Admiralty, Baranof and Chichagof (ABC) Islands in Alaska.
A 22-year-old man in Madrid apparently predicted who would be the next pope last month -- just a few hours before the pope emeritus announced his resignation.Alejandro Rodriguez de Cabo's girlfriend, Yolanda De Mena, sent out a tweet on Feb. 11 claiming that earlier that morning her boyfriend had awoken with a strange premonition."My boyfriend woke up last night at 4 a.m. saying he had dreamed of a new pope called "Francis I" and Benedict resigned today," the message read.
In one of the fastest-growing areas in psychology, researchers are gaining insight into the mental processes of subjects that are barely able to communicate: babies. In recent years, innovative and playful experimental setups have suggested that infants as young as six months old have a sense of morality and fairness, and that 18-month-olds are capable of altruistically helping others.
Stone tools unearthed at a Brazilian rock-shelter may date to as early as 22,000 years ago. Their discovery has rekindled debate about whether ancient people reached the Americas long before the famed Clovis hunters spread through parts of North America around 13,000 years ago.
LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - Emperor Yongle of China who reigned from 1403-1425 during the Ming Dynasty is listed on the coin. Scientists say the coin is made of copper and silver and has a square hole in the center so it could be worn on a belt.The island of Manda, off the northern coast of Kenya was home to an advanced civilization from about 200 A.D. to 1430 A.D., when it was abandoned and never inhabited again. Trade was an important part of everyday life on Manda and this coin may show trade's importance on the island dates far earlier than was previously believed.
Christopher Columbus has long been the poster boy Renaissance explorer who found fame and fortune by sailing from the Old World to the New.Crossing the great unknown waters between Spain and the Caribbean in 1492, he became one of the most renowned -- and pivotal -- Europeans to set foot in America.
Diverse underground ecosystems buried deep beneath the Earth's crust may offer clues to the origins of life on Earth, several recent studies have revealed.Whether it is tiny worms found wriggling in the depths of a South African mine or micro-organisms discovered six kilometers (3.7 miles) under the surface in China, subterranean life forms are found everywhere.
This exoplanet, named HR 8799c, orbits a star known as HR 8799.According to the study published online in Science Express, HR 8799c has water and carbon monoxide in its atmosphere, but not methane. The team suggests that a particular planet-forming mechanism, known as core accretion, brought the exoplanet, into existence.
The discovery that ancient Mars could have supported microbes raises the tantalizing possibility that life may have evolved on the Red Planet before it took root on Earth.New observations by NASA's Curiosity rover suggest that microbial life could have survived on Mars in the distant past, when the Red Planet was a warmer and wetter place, scientists announced Tuesday.It's unclear exactly how long ago Mars' habitability window opened up, researchers said. But the timing may be comparable to that of Earth, where life first appeared around 3.8 billion years ago.
An ancient Egyptian pigment -- apparently humanity's first artificial pigment -- could soon find new life-enabling modern high-tech applications such as telecommunications networks and state-of-the-art biomedical imaging, according to researchers.Known as Egyptian blue, the pigment first appeared roughly 5,000 years ago in a tomb painting dated to the reign of Ka-sen, the last king of Egypt's First Dynasty."Egyptian blue was the first synthetic pigment produced by people, so it represents a major milestone for both human civilization and the development of chemistry,"...
Cells taken from adult human gums can be combined with cells from the molars of fetal mice to form teeth with viable roots, according to research published this week in the Journal of Dental Research. The method remains a long way from clinical use, but the findings represent a step toward the goal of growing bioengineered replacements for lost teeth.
From the moment they are born, sea turtles fight to survive. Buried alive, they dig themselves out and evade hungry crabs and birds as they crawl to the ocean, where they begin a long and treacherous migration. One out of 1,000 will survive into adulthood. And those that do will bear a toxic burden.Scientists are discovering that sea turtles, long ignored by toxicologists who study wildlife, are highly contaminated with industrial chemicals and pesticides.
Sickness being attributed to wind turbines is more likely to have been caused by people getting alarmed at the health warnings circulated by activists, an Australian study has found.Complaints of illness were far more prevalent in communities targeted by anti-windfarm groups, said the report's author, Simon Chapman, professor of public health at Sydney University. His report concludes that illnesses being blamed on windfarms are more than likely caused by the psychological effect of suggestions that the turbines make people ill, rather than by the turbines themselves.
For the first time in more than two decades, the United States can put a "Made in the USA" stamp on non-weapons grade plutonium, Discovery News reports.Plutonium-238 is an important fuel source for the radioisotope power systems that are used in spacecraft like the Mars Curiosity Rover and the New Horizon spacecraft that's on its way to Pluto. As plutonium-238 decays, it gives off enough heat to generate electricity and keep all the expensive parts of a spacecraft warm in the cold, dark nether regions of deep space.
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Europe and Russia signed a deal on Thursday for a joint Mars mission to bring back samples of dirt they hope will answer the mystery of whether there is life beyond Earth.Europe had hoped to work with NASA on the two-spacecraft mission but turned to the Russians after the U.S. agency pulled out due to budget shortfalls and a change in direction.
The great Tohoku earthquake in Japan two years ago was so big its effects were even felt at the edge of space.Scientists say the Magnitude 9.0 tremor on 11 March 2011 sent a ripple of sound through the atmosphere that was picked up by the Goce satellite.
The Earth's oceanic crust covers an enormous expanse, and is mostly buried beneath a thick layer of mud that cuts it off from the surface world. Scientists now document life deep within the oceanic crust that appears to be sustained by energy released from chemical reactions of rocks with water.
A mysterious burst of charged particles from space hit Earth at some point from 774 to 775 C.E. Scientists know this thanks to a spike in radioactive carbon found in ancient tree rings. What they didn't know was the source of the burst.Now, a team of physicists argues that our own sun was the culprit. The sun normally emits bursts of charged particles called coronal mass ejections (lower left of image), but they either never strike the Earth or are too weak to do much damage.
Happy Pi Day! Pi, as we're sure you all know, is the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, which is 3.14 in decimal form. It's actually more like 3.1415926, and can be calculated to many, many more digits because it's an irrational number. But we'll stick with 3.14 because it corresponds with March 14, which brings us back to Pi Day. Sure, you could celebrate today with a compass and calculator in hand, but we'd rather do so with a spatula and apron. Today, we're making pies for Pi day.
Japanese people often fail to understand why neighbouring countries harbour a grudge over events that happened in the 1930s and 40s. The reason, in many cases, is that they barely learned any 20th Century history. I myself only got a full picture when I left Japan and went to school in Australia.From Homo erectus to the present day - 300,000 years of history in just one year of lessons. That is how, at the age of 14, I first learned of Japan's relations with the outside world.
Roughly 150 million years ago, birds began to evolve. The winged creatures we see in the skies today descended from a group of dinosaurs called theropods, which included tyrannosaurs, during a 54-million-year chunk of time known as the Jurassic period. Why the ability to fly evolved in some species is a difficult question to answer, but scientists agree that wings came to be because they must have been useful: they might have helped land-based animals leap into the air, or helped gliding creatures who flapped their arms produce thrust.
Polly may want a cracker, but when a parrot wants a better deal, it will trade a so-so nut for an even better snack, a new study has found.The discovery, published in the journal Biology Letters, demonstrates that birds can do business in their own way, wheeling and dealing with nuts. It also shows that they can exhibit remarkable self restraint, even performing better than some children.
An entire ecosystem living without light or oxygen flourishes beneath the ocean floor, a new study confirms.Scientists call it the dark biosphere, and it's potentially one of the biggest ecosystems on the planet. Buried oceanic crust covers 60 percent of Earth's surface. For the first time, researchers have pulled up pieces of the crust and examined the life within. In its rocks, microbial communities thrive, eating altered minerals for food, the study found.
Scientists have tentatively identified several particles lurking deep inside the Earth's mantle that could reveal how much heat the planet produces and confirm that the Earth formed from materials from the sun.The wacky particles are called geoneutrinos, or the antimatter partners of neutrinos (exotic fundamental particles that can pass right through Earth), that form deep within the Earth's mantle. Every matter particle has an antimatter partner particle that has an opposite charge, and when the two meet they annihilate each other. The findings were detailed described March 11 in the preprint journal arXiv.org.
The water that may once have flowed freely on the surface of Mars is likely to have been pure enough for humans to drink, Nasa scientists have revealed.Samples of rocks heated to nearly 1100C revealed clay minerals which indicate that water once flowed freely in the ancient stream bed from which they were taken.
The discovery that ancient Mars could have supported microbes raises the tantalizing possibility that life may have evolved on the Red Planet before it took root on Earth.New observations by NASA's Curiosity rover suggest that microbial life could have survived on Mars in the distant past, when the Red Planet was a warmer and wetter place, scientists announced Tuesday (March 12).
In a controversial paper published in the March issue of the Journal of Cosmology, scientists from Cardiff University with colleagues from Sri Lanka and the United States are claiming that they have found algae microfossils in samples of a meteorite that landed in the Sri Lankan province of Polonnaruwa in December, 2012.
Astronomers have detected water vapour and carbon monoxide in the atmosphere of a planet 130 light years away from Earth. However, the planet, known only as HR8799c, is devoid of methane, a gas that can indicate life, the researchers said.Their analysis was performed using the most precise atmospheric measurements ever made of a planet outside our solar system. The levels of gases shed light on how the planet formed, from a cluster of ice crystals tens of millions of years ago.
Russia is considering proposals to establish nuclear explosives in space to combat meteorites. Scientists are assessing the possibility of such a preventative measure, after hundreds were injured in the Chelyabinsk region during a meteor shower last month. Oleg Shubin, director of the state nuclear agency Rosatom, claims such an undertaking could take about a year to implement.
The apparent destruction of a tiny Russian satellite by a piece of Chinese space junk probably won't result in legal action against China, experts say.The satellite and space junk crash involved Russia's Ball Lens In The Space nanosatellite, or BLITS, which likely collided on Jan. 22 with a piece of orbital debris spawned by a 2007 Chinese anti-satellite (ASAT) test that destroyed a defunct weather satellite known as FY-1C.
The Russian scientist who is leading an effort to analyse samples from a lake buried under almost 4 kilometres of Antarctic ice has hit back against criticism that an unknown species of bacterium discovered by the team was in fact contamination.At an international scientific meeting in Moscow on 6 March, Sergey Bulat of the Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute in Gatchina said that water from Lake Vostok contained a bacterium whose DNA was less than 86% similar to DNA from known bacterial species. But other researchers argue that announcement was premature because the bacterium might just have been a contaminant from the drilling fluid.
Researchers at The University of Western Australia in collaboration with the University of Queensland and the Australian Museum are trying to understand how fish see at depths.In the deep sea, and particularly between 200m and 1km, eyes need to adapt to see in dark conditions and to see bioluminescence, a type of light emitted by the creatures themselves. One of the most common adaptations to increase sight at those depths is enlarged eyes.
A study of Neanderthal skulls suggests that they became extinct because they had larger eyes than our species.As a result, more of their brains were devoted to seeing in the long, dark nights in Europe, at the expense of high-level processing.By contrast, the larger frontal brain regions of Homo sapiens led to the fashioning of warmer clothes and the development of larger social networks.The study is published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
Drugs that could combat ageing and help people to live to 150-years-old may be available within five years, following landmark research.The new drugs are synthetic versions of resveratrol which is found in red wine and is believed to have an anti-ageing effect as it boosts activity of a protein called SIRT1.Pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline has been testing the medications on patients suffering with medical conditions including cancer, diabetes and heart disease.
Research found those who had regularly exercised from age of 11 scored higher in brain function tests than those who had notLifelong exercise can lead to improved brain function in later life, a study has shown. People perform better in mental tests at the age of 50 if they have engaged in regular intense activity, such as playing sport, running, swimming or working out in the gym, since childhood.
With data from 73 ice and sediment core monitoring sites around the world, scientists at Oregon State University and Harvard University have reconstructed Earth's temperature history back to the end of the last Ice Age. Their analysis reveals that the planet today is warmer than it's been during 70 to 80 percent of the last 11,300 years. According to the lead paper author, Shaun Marcott of OSU, previous research on past global temperature change has largely focused on the last 2,000 years. Extending the reconstruction of global temperatures back to the end of the last Ice Age puts today's climate into a larger context.
At a time when Brazil is expected to bump up its sugar cane output, researchers find that converting lands from tropical savannas to sugar cane plantations could alter the local climate.Temperatures could fall about 1 degree Celsius during the peak of the growing season and rise an equivalent amount after harvest, said researchers from Arizona State University and the Carnegie Institution for Science's Department of Global Ecology. While the results suggest that more fields of sugar cane won't drastically alter the landscape, they could affect local seasonal temperatures.
Creating microscopic black holes using particle accelerators requires less energy than previously thought, researchers say.If physicists do succeed in creating black holes with such energies on Earth, the achievement could prove the existence of extra dimensions in the universe, physicists noted.Any such black holes would pose no risk to Earth, however, scientists added.
Just days after Russian scientists announced that they had found a previously unidentified species of bacteria in Antarctica's subglacial Lake Vostok, the discovery has been called into question.On 7 March, the St. Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute's Sergei Bulat, who led the Russian team that drilled through 4 kilometers of ice to the surface of the lake last year, told Russian news agency RIA Novosti that they had found a previously unidentified species of bacteria in lake samples collected during an expedition in January.
A slew of press reports have trumpeted the finding of a new strain of bacteria recovered from Lake Vostok. Vostok is located in Antarctica, where the liquid water is buried under several kilometers of ice that have kept it isolated from the outside environment for millions of years. After several years of efforts and a pause to work out decontamination procedures, a Russian team drilled down to the lake water for the first time last year.
The beginning of papal conclave to elect a new head of the Catholic Church has some people worrying the end is nigh.These believers interpret two medieval-era prophecies to mean that the next pope elected will be the last before doomsday. One prophecy allegedly comes from a 12th-century archbishop, the other from no less famed a name than Nostradamus himself. Both could be charitably described as "open to interpretation.".
A team of Canadian researchers has found that anthropogenic noise (noise created by people that impacts other species) in urban areas leads to less songbird diversity. In their paper published in the journal Global Change Biology, the researchers describe how in studying songbird diversity in and around the city of Edmonton, they noted that songbirds that sang in low frequencies tended to have difficulty in communicating when having to compete with urban noise, leading to less mating and offspring production.
THEY have a reputation as the most dangerous bird in the world. If the cassowary - a large flightless bird that lives in Australia and New Guinea - feels cornered it will charge, slashing out with blade-like claws. Just Google "cassowary attacks" and you'll see what I mean.Photographer Christian Ziegler, of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Balboa, Panama, has had a few close calls, including being charged by a male. "That was quite scary, I have to admit, probably the closest one can feel to being charged by a dinosaur," he says. "However, each time it was my fault for accidently getting too close to one of the chicks."
Mats of algae and seaweed have shrouded the once thick coral in shallow reefs off Jamaica's north coast. Warm ocean waters have bleached out the coral, and in a cascade of ecological decline, the sea urchins and plant-eating reef fish have mostly vanished, replaced by snails and worms that bore through coral skeletons.
Recent archaeological discoveries on the Arabian Peninsula have uncovered evidence of a previously unknown civilisation based in the now arid areas in the middle of the desert.The artefacts unearthed are providing proof of a civilisation that flourished thousands of years ago and have renewed scientific interest in man and the evolution of his relationship with animals.The 300-odd stone objects so far found in the remote Al Magar area of Saudi Arabia include traces of stone tools, arrow heads, small scrapers and various animal statues including sheep, goats and ostriches.
Our cyborg future may not be far off.An ultra-stretchy battery could one day be used to power bionic eyeballs, brain-wave monitoring devices and robotic skins, new research suggests.The new device, which embeds tiny lithium-based batteries in a silicone sheet, can stretch up to three times its initial length and could be recharged wirelessly, Yonggang Huang, study co-author and a mechanical engineer at Northwestern University, wrote to LiveScience in an email.
It looks like a Stormtrooper's snapshot of the Death Star's superlaser in action, but this is actually a photo of a new laser that's just completed testing at the Very Large Telescope in Chile.The laser shoots 90 kilometres into the atmosphere, where it interacts with the 10-kilometre-thick layer of sodium atoms left around our planet by meteoroid impacts. The laser makes the sodium fluoresce, producing a bright point of light that acts as an artificial star.
THERE'S no need to cry over spilt chemicals. Thanks to an accident inside one of its instruments, NASA's Curiosity rover has detected the presence of a substance called perchlorate in Martian soilNot exactly earth-shattering, you might think. But it adds a new twist to the most controversial chapter in Martian history: did the Viking landers detect life?
Meteorite hunters at the bottom of the world bagged a rare find this southern summer: a 40-pound (18 kilogram) chunk of extraterrestrial rock.A team from Belgium and Japan discovered the hefty meteorite as the members drove across the East Antarctic plateau on snowmobiles. Initial tests show it is an ordinary chondrite, the most common type of meteorite found on Earth, Vinciane Debaille, a geologist from Université Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium, said in a statement.
Japan says it has successfully extracted natural gas from frozen methane hydrate off its central coast, in a world first.Methane hydrates, or clathrates, are a type of frozen "cage" of molecules of methane and water.The gas field is about 50km away from Japan's main island, in the Nankai Trough.
Jinha Lee, an MIT graduate student, this week showed his SpaceTop, a desktop environment where you can "reach inside" a computer screen and manipulate objects as if they were real. Lee, who initially worked on the concept as an intern with Microsoft Applied Science, presented the SpaceTop at the TED conference. The project earlier on had been tagged at Microsoft as the 3-D See-Through Desktop.
PASADENA, Calif. -- An analysis of a rock sample collected by NASA's Curiosity rover shows ancient Mars could have supported living microbes.Scientists identified sulfur, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and carbon -- some of the key chemical ingredients for life -- in the powder Curiosity drilled out of a sedimentary rock near an ancient stream bed in Gale Crater on the Red Planet last month.
The US space agency (Nasa) has reported that its Curiosity rover has made another significant discovery on Mars.The robot has drilled into a rock that contains clay minerals - an indication of formation in, or substantial alteration by, neutral water.Scientists say the find is one more step towards showing conditions on the Red Planet in the distant past could have supported life.
The most insistent political question of the past four years has been: How can more Americans get access to medical care?The federal response was the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Better known as "Obamacare," it is a complex mix of insurance changes and tax credits. When the act takes effect on January 1, 2014, it will provide access to insurance to about 30 million people who currently don't have it.
The danger posed by growing resistance to antibiotics should be ranked along with terrorism on a list of threats to the nation, the government's chief medical officer for England has said.Professor Dame Sally Davies described it as a "ticking time bomb".She warned that routine operations could become deadly in just 20 years if we lose the ability to fight infection.Dame Sally urged the government to raise the issue during next month's G8 Summit in London.
Viruses can acquire fully functional immune systems, according to new research that bolsters the controversial theory that viruses are living creatures.Until now, scientists thought that viruses existed only as primitive particles of DNA or RNA, and therefore lacked the sophistication of an immune system.
The DEA and NIDA act as a "tag team" to censor science on pot.In the face of obstacles to marijuana research from both the Drug Enforcement Administration and the National Institute on Drug Abuse, a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology and one-time MacArthur Fellow is calling out the federal government on its obstruction of science.
Rabbits are small, fast, and devilishly hard to catch. And that could have had dire consequences for Neanderthals.A new study suggests that an inability to shift from hunting large mammals to wild rabbits and other small game may have contributed to the downfall of European Neanderthals during the Middle Paleolithic period, about 30,000 years ago.
Two years after a deadly tsunami swept ashore in Japan, killing more than 15,000 people, solemn reminders of the disaster are still washing ashore in Hawaii and along the Pacific coast of North America.The tsunami debris, sometimes identifiable by serial numbers, includes boats, docks, appliance parts and fishing buoys. Though harder to trace back to a particular source, an uptick in Styrofoam and housing materials may also originate from the March 2011 wave.
Hundreds of survivors of the Fukushima nuclear crisis in Japan filed a class action lawsuit Monday seeking restitution of the region that was contaminated by radioactive fallout.Some 800 plaintiffs filed the case with the Fukushima District Court, demanding 50,000-yen ($520) a month from the government and Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) until the area is restored, their lawyers said in a statement.
Models predict that forests such as the Amazon will keep carbon locked up until 2100.Tropical forests are unlikely to die off as a result of the predicted rise in atmospheric greenhouse gases this century, a new study finds. The analysis refutes previous work that predicted the catastrophic loss of the Amazon rainforest as one of the more startling potential outcomes of climate change.
As the planet warms, the Arctic is feeling the heat. Trees and shrubs are taking hold on what was once tundra, like this young pine and surrounding shrubs in Norway's Arctic Finnmark.A new international study of the satellite record of greening landscape shows that the places which were firmly Arctic in climate during the mid-20th century are now transforming into evergreen forest lands. If the trend continues, by the end of this century northern Sweden could get the temperatures more common to southern France and northernmost Canada could be more like Montana.
Researchers in the Evolutionary Bioinformatics Laboratory at the University of Illinois in collaboration with German scientists have been using bioinformatics techniques to probe the world of proteins for answers to questions about the origins of life.
Echoing with joyful song and with a congregation bent on leading better lives, this London church is like any other -- except there's no mention of God.Britain's atheist church is barely three months old but it already has more "worshippers" than can fit into its services, while more than 200 non-believers worldwide have contacted organisers to ask how they can set up their own branch.