Newsdesk Archive
Mexican archaeologists have found a dozen Mayan burial sites dating back more than 1,200 years at the Xtojil site, located some 20 kilometers (12 miles) from Chichen Itza in the Yucatan Peninsula, the National Anthropology and History Institute, or INAH, said.
In the summer of 2012 a burial of two high ranking individuals of the ancient Zapotec culture was discovered by archaeologists of the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) within the third chamber of a tomb in the Aztompa Archaeological Zone in Oaxaca, Mexico.Deep within the third chamber an anthropomorphic clay figurine, ornamented with painted face and headdress, emerged from the excavation under the careful scrutiny of archaeologist Eduardo GarcÃa. The piece belonged to the mortuary offerings of a male adult.
A diverse coalition of campaigners - the musicians Julian Cope and Mogwai's Stuart Braithwaite amongst them - are fighting to save the first astronomically aligned stone circle to be built in Britain in 3000 years.Sighthill Stone Circle, which sits in the heart of post-industrial Glasgow, has an obvious kinship with Britain's other megalithic sites like Stonehenge and Callanish.
Medicine that is more than 2,000 years old has been analysed by scientists.Six tablets were discovered in a tin box onboard an ancient Roman shipwreck, found off the coast of Italy.Samples of the fragile material revealed that the pharmaceuticals contained animal and plant fats, pine resin and zinc compounds.
Few people think of osmosis as a way to help feed the world's hunger for energy. But an experiment under way on a coastal inlet in Norway may help draw attention to the power packed in the salty seas.Tofte, an hour south of Oslo on the inlet known as Oslofjord, is home to a waterfront cellulose factory and not much else. But for more than three years, Norwegian energy company Statkraft has been rather quietly testing the technology in the world's first osmotic power plant, in a renovated wing of the town's factory.
PASADENA, Calif. - An area of the Amazon rainforest twice the size of California continues to suffer from the effects of a megadrought that began in 2005, finds a new NASA-led study. These results, together with observed recurrences of droughts every few years and associated damage to the forests in southern and western Amazonia in the past decade, suggest these rainforests may be showing the first signs of potential large-scale degradation due to climate change.
TYPICALLY, the taller the tree, the smaller its leaves. The mathematical explanation for this phenomenon, it turns out, also sets a limit on how tall trees can grow.Kaare Jensen of Harvard University and Maciej Zwieniecki of the University of California, Davis, compared 1925 tree species, with leaves ranging from a few millimetres to over 1 metre long, and found that leaf size varied most in relatively short trees.
NEW ORLEANS - The Audubon Nature Institute and San Diego Zoo Global were expected on Tuesday to announce the development of a breeding program for rare and endangered species on 1,000 acres south of this city, bringing herds of antelope, okapi and Masai giraffe to graze on the banks of the Mississippi River.The breeding site, which will be among the largest in the United States, represents the latest version of a wildlife conservation model based on the finding that certain species mate more successfully when allowed to roam in herds rather than when paired off in captivity, something to which many visitors to Bourbon Street could probably attest.
ANCHORAGE, Jan 17 (Reuters) - North America's largest living land mammals could roam the Alaska wilderness again by 2014, a century after they vanished in the state, under an agreement announced on Thursday to reintroduce wood bison to the lower Yukon River area.State and federal officials said the deal used provisions of the Endangered Species Act to classify the bison as a "nonessential experimental population" in Alaska - meaning that protecting them would not hinder development, including oil drilling or mining. The animal is classified as threatened.
For most, putting on deodorant is a necessary ritual on par with brushing teeth or washing hands. But for people who produce no armpit stench, it is totally unnecessary.Despite that, nearly three-quarters of those people still use deodorant daily, a new study finds.The findings, published Thursday in the Journal of Investigative Dermatology, show just how much a person's daily life is dictated by what's considered normal.
GenomeWeb caught what must be an interesting Q&A with George Church in Germany's Spiegel Online (I can't personally attest to the original story as it is behind a paywall). The Harvard Medical School geneticist is quoted as saying that eventually, an "adventurous female human" will be needed to be the surrogate mother for the first Neanderthal baby in some 30,000 years.This isn't the first time Church has talked publically about cloning a Neanderthal, or at least a near-Neanderthal.
More than a century after it went missing, the fossil of what has been regarded as India's first recorded dinosaur has been rediscovered in Kolkata, according to a top scientific journal.The recovery of Titanosaurus Indicus, or the Indian Tital reptile, was possible due to a collaborative programme between the Geological Survey of India (GSI) and the University of Michigan, according to the latest issue of Current Science (Vol. 104, No. 1, Jan. 10, 2013, Pg. No. 34), brought out by the Bangalore-based Indian Academy of Sciences.
PARIS: A weird marine creature that lived 500 million years ago at a time of explosive growth in Earth's biodiversity could be a forerunner of worms and molluscs, a study says.Palaeontologists in China and Europe have taken a second look at fossils of a species called Cotyledion tylodes - a small animal that, when it was identified in 1999, was at first thought to be a cnidarian, or part of a group of jellyfish-like species
New protocol advances solutions for more efficient teleportation - the transport of quantum information at the speed of light.For the last ten years, theoretical physicists have shown that the intense connections generated between particles as established in the quantum law of 'entanglement' may hold the key to eventual teleportation of information.Now, for the first time, researchers have worked out how entanglement could be 'recycled' to increase the efficiency of these connections. Published in the journal Physical Review Letters, the result could conceivably take us a step closer to sci-fi style teleportation in the future, although this research is purely theoretical in nature.
The first time anyone has achieved one-way laser communication at planetary distancesSince mid-2009, NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has been, as its name would suggest, circling the moon. As its name would also suggest, the little satellite -- skimming the lunar service at a distance of 31 miles -- is also doing some scouting on our behalf: In its two-and-a-half years of lunar orbit, the satellite has created valuable gravitational maps of the moon, documented the trash humans have left on the lunar surface, and otherwise increased our knowledge about our nearest planetary neighbor.
Titan's siblings must be jealous. While most of Saturn's moons display their ancient faces pockmarked by thousands of craters, Titan -- Saturn's largest moon -- may look much younger than it really is because its craters are getting erased. Dunes of exotic, hydrocarbon sand are slowly but steadily filling in its craters, according to new research using observations from NASA's Cassini spacecraft.
ESA's Mars Express imaged the striking upper part of the Reull Vallis region of Mars with its high-resolution stereo camera last year.Reull Vallis, the river-like structure in these images, is believed to have formed when running water flowed in the distant martian past, cutting a steep-sided channel through the Promethei Terra Highlands before running on towards the floor of the vast Hellas basin.
Humans produce trash just about everywhere they go, including space, which will pose a problem for astronauts on long voyages to other planets. But scientists have found a way to transform this space detritus into something useful: a radiation shield.Since flinging garbage out the door is not an option, engineers at NASA are testing how a novel on-board trash compactor could give new life to discarded water bottles, clothing scraps, duct tape and other waste on deep-space missions.
NASA is partnering with a commercial space company in a bid to replace the cumbersome "metal cans" that now serve as astronauts' homes in space with inflatable bounce-house-like habitats that can be deployed on the cheap.A $17.8 million test project will send to the International Space Station an inflatable room that can be compressed into a 7-foot tube for delivery, officials said Wednesday in a news conference at North Las Vegas-based Bigelow Aerospace.
A recently hatched robotic fish comes with an innovative pump that allows it to glide through rivers, lakes, and the seas until it runs out of room.When it needs an extra boost, the robot flaps its tail.The robot is a fish and glider combination, explained Xiaobo Tan, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Michigan State University.
A recent marine heatwave off Western Australia rapidly shrank the distribution range of an ecologically-important seaweed by about 5 per cent, researchers report.Scientists say the findings provide further evidence that extreme climate events can cause sudden "stepwise" changes to species distributions, on top of gradual changes brought by climate change.
Vietnam has abandoned plans to close a bear sanctuary at the heart of a land dispute in one of its national parks.Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung said the centre could stay to pursue plans to expand, and warned that any violations would be severely punished.The sanctuary was told last year to move for "national security reasons".
Video of an intriguing covered nest-like structure found abandoned in Arizona is being hailed as a possible home of the legendary Bigfoot.With a narrow entrance and hollowed inside, the lair is buried half under the ground in the wild woods of the Tonto National Forest on the Mogollon Rim.Discovered in June of 2010 and featuring on Animal Planet's current 'Finding Bigfoot' series, the footage of the large mysterious den unfortunately offers up little evidence that the fabled giant ape ever dwelt inside.
The as-yet-unexplained disappearance last Friday of the plane carrying six passengers and crew, including Italian fashion mogul Vittorio Missoni, has prompted some to blame the "Los Roques curse".The label has been attached to a series of mysterious plane crashes and "vanishings" over the past decade or so between the Caribbean archipelago of Los Roques and the Venezuelan capital Caracas, 140km to the south. Inevitably, comparisons have been made with the infamous Bermuda Triangle, the area between Miami, Bermuda and Puerto Rico that has long had a reputation for unexplained disappearances of ships and planes.
It's a wilderness out there in outer space. And as robotic surrogates set the stage for human footprints on Mars and other planetary bodies, just how much respect for other worlds should we have?One suggested response would establish planetary parks for the solar system, an answer that ties together space science and exploration, ethics, law, policy, diplomacy and communications.
It is a much debated question: why did Central African forests become partially fragmented between 2,500 and 2,000 years ago, leaving room for more open forest landscapes and savannah?Recently, a publication attempted to explain that it was the farming Bantu peoples who were responsible for this, through the large-scale clearing that they undertook. But IRD (Institut de recherche pour le développement) experts and their partners (1) have contested this argument in a recent article in the journal Science.
HOW much is nature worth, in measurable financial value? Most economists - and politicians - would answer in terms of the price of timber, pasture for grazing or tourism in national parks. But nature delivers far, far more than that. In What has Nature ever Done for Us?, Tony Juniper aims to bring that knowledge to a broader public.One of the UK's leading environmentalists, Juniper lays out the many ways that natural ecosystems pay dividends to human societies. Some are obvious: soils support crop growth; photosynthetic plants are the ultimate source of all the food that nourishes us; and thanks to biodiversity, we have access to a wealth of genes to breed better crop varieties and develop new antibiotics and other drugs.
Soot is bad stuff all around, whether you're breathing it into your lungs or it's heating the atmosphere by absorbing more of the sun's energy. But a new 4-year, 232-page assessment of soot's role in climate finds that the combustion product could be warming the world twice as much as previously thought. The study points policymakers toward the best targets for reducing climate-warming soot emissions while at the same time improving the health of billions of people.
2012 was among the 10 warmest years on record, new figures show. This animation displays a progression of changing global surface temperatures anomalies from 1880 to 2012. Higher than normal temperatures are shown in red and lower than normal temperatures are shown in blue. Global surface temperature in 2012 was +0.55°C (1F) warmer than the 1951-1980 base period average, despite much of the year being affected by a strong La Niña.
The Colombian government may double the size of an enormous, diverse reserve, according to news reports. The new park would incorporate the lands of two tribes that have little or no contact with the outside world.The Chiribiquete National Park is home to a dazzling array of plant and animal life, including 300 bird species, seven monkey species and 300 butterfly species, according to mongabay.com, an environmental news website.
One of the most beautiful and revered cathedrals in Christendom, York Minster in northern England has survived war, looting, fire, pillaging and other threats over the centuries. But the Gothic masterpiece is crumbling due to a relatively recent enemy: acid rain. Preservationists, however, may have found a way to protect it using a common kitchen item.The limestone rock used to build the church is vulnerable to acids, and has been under attack since the Industrial Revolution began filling the skies of England with acidic pollution, according to Gizmag.com. The result is acid rain that can wreak havoc on earthly structures.
Even small changes in solar activity can impact Earth's climate in significant and surprisingly complex ways, researchers say.The sun is a constant star when compared with many others in the galaxy. Some stars pulsate dramatically, varying wildly in size and brightness and even exploding. In comparison, the sun varies in the amount of light it emits by only 0.1 percent over the course of a relatively stable 11-year-long pattern known as the solar cycle.
Eating fast food three times a week may lead to asthma and eczema in children, say researchers who have looked at global disease and dietary patterns.Data from more than 500,000 children in more than 50 countries suggests poor diet may be to blame for rising levels of these allergy-related conditions.Those who ate fast food, such as take-away burgers, risked severe asthma, eczema and itchy, watery eyes.
When nobody's looking, lazy dog owners have been known to leave their dog's poop on the sidewalk, in a park or on a neighbor's lawn. But one Florida condominium association has a new weapon in the war on dog droppings: DNA analysis.The Vue, a luxury high-rise condo in Orlando, has a rooftop area for pets that's covered in artificial turf. But at least one dog owner was skirting the rules by not cleaning up after their dog, according to ClickOrlando.com. The condo association tried installing security cameras and adding more cleanup crews, but complaints kept piling up.
The discovery was made during a collaborative research project between Royal Holloway, the British Library and Reading University, in which a team of academics are cataloguing and investigating the works of the Italian Academies, dating from 1525 to 1700. The project provides information about the academies, their members, publications, activities and emblems.
A gene has been uncovered that may help to create born leaders.The leadership gene, known as rs4950, is an inherited DNA sequence associated with people taking charge.Scientists accept that leadership skills are also learned. But the gene may provide the vital push needed to make someone into a manager rather than a minion.
To spread and regenerate, an important marine plant depends on animals to eat its seeds and poop them out around the ocean, according to recent research.Seeds from eelgrass, a type of marine grass found around the world, can survive and germinate after being eaten by three types of fish, one turtle and one type of bird, said Sarah Sumoski, a researcher at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science and co-author of a study published recently in the journal Marine Ecology Progress Series.
For the Pacific bluefin tuna, sitting at the popular kids' table sure isn't paying off. The stock of the fish is at historically low levels and is being dangerously overfished, a new report shows.Fisheries scientists from the International Scientific Committee to Study the Tuna and Tuna-Like Species of the North Pacific Ocean estimate that the Pacific bluefin population has declined from its unfished level by more than 96 percent. The report warns that stock levels likely won't improve by extending the current fishing levels. All the world's scrombrids -- a family that includes tunas and mackerels -- are on the endangered list.
In what looks set to be one of the most one-sided struggles in the history of Amazon forest conservation, an indigenous community of about 400 villagers is preparing to resist the Ecuadorean army and one of the biggest oil companies in South America.The Kichwa tribe on Sani Isla, who were using blowpipes two generations ago, said they are ready to fight to the death to protect their territory, which covers 70,000 hectares of pristine rainforest.
When you can't feel individual keys on a touchscreen device it can be hard to type at speed.That is why Tactus, a company based in California, has developed technology which can turn a typical flat tablet screen into a real keyboard with bumpy buttons.
Researchers have proposed a method for cooling trapped antihydrogen which they believe could provide 'a major experimental advantage' and help to map the mysterious properties of antimatter that have to date remained elusive.The new method, developed by a group of researchers from the USA and Canada, could potentially cool trapped antihydrogen atoms to temperatures 25 times colder than already achieved, making them much more stable and a lot easier to experiment on.
Chunks of hydrocarbon ice may float atop the lakes and seas of Saturn's huge moon Titan, a new study reveals.The presence of such ice floes in the ethane and methane seas on Titan would make the moon an even more exciting target for astrobiologists, researchers said."One of the most intriguing questions about these lakes and seas is whether they might host an exotic form of life," study co-author Jonathan Lunine of Cornell University said in a statement. "And the formation of floating hydrocarbon ice will provide an opportunity for interesting chemistry along the boundary between liquid and solid, a boundary that may have been important in the origin of terrestrial life." .
Nearly 700 feet (more than 200 meters) under the Svartisen glacier in northern Norway, researchers are huddled together underground. In the world's only lab located inside one of these giant hunks of ice, they are carrying out some of the best experiments on the movement and composition of glaciers ever done.The lab, operated by the Norwegian Water Resources and Energy Directorate, is located above the Arctic Circle. It started out as a tunnel for hydropower, but then researchers persuaded the hydropower company to dig out one small extra tunnel just for them and created a valuable in-site lab.
Why do you want to drill through 3 kilometres of ice to tap Lake Ellsworth, which has been undisturbed for half a million years?We are trying to test two hypotheses: that life exists in ancient deepwater subglacial lakes, and that sediments on these lake floors contain important climate records, potentially revealing the history of the West Antarctic ice sheet.
Researchers with Russia's Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute have announced that they have successfully retrieved a clean ice core sample from Lake Vostok in Antarctica. The sample, taken from a bore hole drilled over two miles through the ice to the lake underneath, is the result of years of effort. Researchers hope to find evidence in the ice of life on Earth as it existed as far back as 20 million years ago.
Archaeologists working at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama have discovered a cluster of 12 unusual stones in the back of a small, prehistoric rock-shelter near the town of Boquete. The cache represents the earliest material evidence of shamanistic practice in lower Central America.Ruth Dickau, Leverhulme Post-doctoral Fellow at the University of Exeter in England, unearthed the cache of stones in the Casita de Piedra rock-shelter in 2007. A piece of charcoal found directly underneath the cache was radiocarbon dated to 4,800 years ago. A second fragment of charcoal in a level above the cache was dated to 4,000 years ago.
Some aboriginal Australians can trace as much as 11% of their genomes to migrants who reached the island around 4,000 years ago from India, a study suggests. Along with their genes, the migrants brought different tool-making techniques and the ancestors of the dingo, researchers say.This scenario is the result of a large genetic analysis outlined today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1. It contradicts a commonly held view that Australia had no contact with the rest of the world between the arrival of the first humans around 45,000 years ago and the coming of Europeans in the eighteenth century.
A University of Alberta researcher's examination of fossilized dinosaur tail bones has led to a breakthrough finding: some feathered dinosaurs used tail plumage to attract mates, much like modern-day peacocks and turkeys.U of A Paleontology researcher Scott Persons followed a chain of fossil evidence that started with a peculiar fusing together of vertebrae at the tip of the tail of four different species of dinosaurs, some separated in time and evolution by 45 million years.
The hottest field in science this past decade has been neuroscience. That explosion in research, and our understanding of the human brain, was largely fueled by a new technology called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) that became widely available in the 1990s. Well look out! Another technology-based neuroscience revolution is in the making, this one perhaps even bigger. The term to watch for in 2013 is "optogenetics." It's not a sexy term, but it is a very sexy technology.
Does objective reality exist? Is there an underlying truth that doesn't depend on the observer?According to quantum physics, there may be no consistent reality. Not only do we change the outcome of experiments by what we choose to measure, but we can alter those results after they've already happened.
The least harmful new "legal highs" should be made readily available for sale under strictly regulated conditions rather than being immediately banned as happens now, according to a cross-party group of peers.Senior police officers told the inquiry into the new psychoactive synthetic drugs, which are appearing in Britain at the rate of more than one a week, that the existing criminal sanctions for drug users is doing nothing to reduce their use.
On a Spanish island, an ancient whistling language that once seemed to be dying out is now undergoing a revival.The night has not yet fallen in La Gomera, one of the smallest Canary Islands.From the top of the hill I can see, scattered in the distance, a few old houses. To my right, a row of black trees is a stark reminder of the fires that struck this Spanish island off the coast of Morocco last summer.
Exactly 200 years ago, the Grimm brothers published the first edition of their fairy tales. Many of the originals were brutal and there was no lack of blood, gore and carnality. But thanks to a bit of clean-up work, they have gone on to enrapture people around the world. What is the secret to their success?Once upon a time, two centuries ago, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm set out to gather folk stories for posterity. Little did they know that the collection of tales they published would become one of the most widely read works in history, capturing the popular imagination around the world for generations.
Fifty miles north of Mazatlan in Sinaloa State, north west Mexico, there is a beach known as Las Labradas where the rocks are covered in over 600 petroglyphs. Now Mexican investigators have uncovered archaeological sites in the vicinity dating to the Archaic period (2500-1000 BCE) along with another later site that may provide clues to the creators of the Las Labradas petroglyphs.V filed teeth and cranial deformationTo date there are 22 locations around the rocky outcrop with evidence of human activity, of which, between 2010 and 2012, four were studied: The Flower of the Ocean, The Sprig, Lomas del Mar and Arroyo La Lomita.
San Francisco - Research by US scientists into the composition of dried human faeces from archeological sites shows that the increasingly urban and cosmopolitan way of modern life has led to dramatic changes in the make-up of human intestinal flora.Raul Tito and his colleagues from the University of Oklahoma analysed the microbial composition of coprolite samples (faeces retrieved from archaeological contexts) from three locations in the Americas.The sites were chosen because they provided a broad range of environmental conditions.
EGYPTOLOGY - 2,200 years ago in the ancient Egyptian city Tebtunis, Egyptians voluntarily entered into slave contracts with the local temple for all eternity. And they even paid a monthly fee for the 'privilege'. Egyptologist Kim Ryholt from the University of Copenhagen is the first researcher who has studied this puzzling phenomenon."I am your servant from this day onwards, and I shall pay 2½ copper-pieces every month as my slave-fee before Soknebtunis, the great god.".
Medieval Afghanistan, Iran and the one-time Soviet Central Asian states were frontiers in flux as the Islamic Caliphate spread beyond the Arabian Peninsula in the seventh through 10th centuries.As such, different groups, such as the new Arab ruling class, the native landed gentry and local farmers, jockeyed for power, position and economic advantage over an approximately 300-year period as the Sasanian Empire collapsed and the Caliphate took its place.
One of the most anticipated articles in religion circles will be absent from the pages of the January edition of the Harvard Theological Review. Harvard Divinity School professor Karen King's final article on the "Jesus wife" fragment did not make the scholarly journal because further testing on the Coptic papyrus fragment has not been finished.
From high above Earth, Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield is broadcasting a message of peace for the people of Earth, with a little help from 200,000 Twitter fans.The three-time spaceflyer, a flight engineer and prolific Twitter user on the International Space Station, spoke solemnly Thursday (Jan. 10) about a picture he recently took of war-torn Syria.The picture had special poignancy given that the Earth appears as "one place" from orbit, Hadfield told reporters in a press conference at the Canadian Space Agency's headquarters near Montreal, Quebec.
Yesterday, NASA announced the latest orbital data on the asteroid Apophis, which indicated that there is less than a one-in-a-million chance of it hitting Earth in 2036. As far as the space agency is concerned, that's enough to declare our planet safe from a punishing impact.
Space-time is smooth rather than foamy, a new study suggests, scoring a possible victory for Einstein over some quantum theorists who came after him.In his general theory of relativity, Einstein described space-time as fundamentally smooth, warping only under the strain of energy and matter. Some quantum-theory interpretations disagree, however, viewing space-time as being composed of a froth of minute particles that constantly pop into and out of existence.
The surface of the sun erupted in a solar flare early today (Jan. 11), unleashing a blast of super-heated plasma into space.A huge sunspot known as AR1654 produced the M1-class flare at 4:11 a.m. EST (0911 GMT), officials with NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory said in a description of the event. The SDO spacecraft is one of several sun-watching space telescopes keeping tabs on solar flares and other sun weather events.
In the search for an Earth-like alien world, astronomers have had their eyes set on planets beyond our solar system, but some moons orbiting some of these exoplanets may be just as likely to support life, scientists say.Astronomers have discovered more than 800 exoplanets, with many more candidate worlds awaiting confirmation by follow-up observations. Most of them, however, are gas giants, similar to Jupiter, and only a handful have a solid surface and orbit their host stars in the habitable zone, the range where liquid water, and perhaps life as we know it, can exist.
As 2012 ended and 2013 began, numerous UFOs were reported around the country -- nothing earthshattering there -- but what about alleged unidentified objects seen in space near the International Space Station (or ISS), a couple of hundred miles above Earth?Videos have cropped up on YouTube showing images taken by NASA cameras of objects of different shapes, some moving very slowly, others rapidly hurtling through space.What, exactly, are we looking at here?
Russian researchers say they have brought up fresh samples of clear ice from Antarctica's Lake Vostok, a huge reservoir of freshwater more than 2 miles (3.2 kilometers) beneath the surface.Lake Vostok could contain water and perhaps living organisms that have been sitting undisturbed in the deep dark for up to 20 million years. The drilling operation also could set a precedent for far more ambitious efforts to find life beneath the ice of the Jovian moon Europa or the Saturnian moon Enceladus.
When the Deepwater Horizon oil rig blew in 2010, it spewed some 200 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. In order to break up the slick, another 1.84 million gallons of dispersant was added to the mix. This one-two punch of toxic chemicals devastated coastal ecosystems [pdf], but how would such a chemical bombardment affect underwater ecosystems like coral reefs? According to a new study, the picture is no prettier.
Glaciologists fear they may have seriously underestimated the potential for melting ice sheets to contribute to catastrophic sea-level rises in coming decades which could see increases of a metre or more by 2100.The ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica contain about 99.5 per cent of the Earth's glacier ice and could raise sea levels by 65 metres if they melted completely - although experts think this is highly unlikely in the foreseeable future.
Continuing Australia's trend of being majorly unpleasant this week, it got so hot in the Outback town of Oodnadatta a few days ago that you couldn't even pump gas.On Monday, temperatures in the town reached 48.2 degrees Celsius (118.76 degrees Fahrenheit), and drivers who stopped for gas were stymied when unleaded fuel became unavailable because it was vaporizing in the heat.
Kentucky was America's leading hemp producer in the early 19th century. Now, two hundreds year later, after a historic election for drug policy has led to a shift for marijuana policy reform in America, Kentucky lawmakers are taking steps to revive the crop. While advocates for hemp legalization say the plant could bring a wealth of green jobs to Kentucky, deep-rooted drug stigma and conflict with federal law have made the legislation's passing unlikely. Nonetheless, two state bills are in the works, while a federal proposal aims to clear the way for state legalization. Lawmakers suggest the bills could at least open up the conversation about hemp, and clear misconceptions about its use.
EVERY sport has its idols and superstars. Now video gaming is getting them too. Professional gaming, or e-sports, exploded in popularity in the US and Europe last year.The scene has been big in Asia - particularly South Korea - for about a decade, with top players such as Lim Yo-Hwan earning six-figure salaries and competing for rock-star glory in Starcraft tournaments that attract audiences in the hundreds of thousands.
Frank Weaver is a documentary filmmaker and native Paraguayan (now working from Florida) who has lived among and documented the culture of Paraguay's Panambi'y Indians for several years now, logging the traditions and lore of a very old culture threatened by encroaching progress, particularly deforestation and slash-and-burn farming. But when it came time to record and preserve the centuries-old traditions of the local Pai Tavytera Indians of the Amambay hills, Weaver turned to a decidedly modern tool: the much-hacked Microsoft Kinect.
For years, researchers have puzzled over why Viking descendents abandoned Greenland in the late 15th century. But archaeologists now believe that economic and identity issues, rather than starvation and disease, drove them back to their ancestral homes.On Sept. 14, 1408, Thorstein Olafsson and Sigrid Bjornsdottir were married. The ceremony took place in a church on Hvalsey Fjord in Greenland that was only five meters (about 16 feet) tall.
Brown-eyed people may have more trustworthy faces than blue-eyed people, suggests a new study that comes with caveats but also raises fascinating questions about recent human evolution.It wasn't eye color itself that proved more or less trustworthy in the study. Rather, it was particular facial features, such as chin shape and mouth position, that happened to cluster with eye color.
Throughout our history environmental problems have contributed to collapses of civilizations. A new paper published yesterday in Proceedings of the Royal Society B addresses the likelihood that we are facing a global collapse now. The paper concludes that global society can avoid this and recommends that social and natural scientists collaborate on research to develop ways to stimulate a significant increase in popular support for decisive and immediate action on our predicament.
A major international row with wide-ranging implications for global drugs policy has erupted over the right of Bolivia's indigenous Indian tribes to chew coca leaves, the principal ingredient in cocaine.On Friday, Bolivia obtained a special exemption from the 1961 single convention on narcotic drugs, the framework that governs international drugs policy, allowing its indigenous people to chew the leaves.
Few writers can match Graham Hancock's influence as the author of several breakthrough books of alternative history, including Fingerprints of the Gods, Underworld, and Supernatural. His work has been instrumental in challenging institutional thinking about humanity's lost past, while bringing the indigenous shamanic perspective to a broader audience. He's certainly someone to talk with about the significance of our present moment, as the Mayan calendar cycle comes to an end, and we look beyond.
New fossils discovered on an Indonesian island further point to the existence of a separate species of "Hobbit humans," Discovery reported on Thursday."The tiny people from Flores were not simply diseased modern humans," said the lead author on the findings, Caley Orr. "The new species of human stood approximately 3' 6" tall, giving it its nickname 'The Hobbit.'".
The residents of the ancient city of Pompeii weren't limited to street-level plumbing, a new study finds. In fact, many in the city may have headed upstairs when nature called.Most second floors in the Roman city are gone, claimed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius that destroyed Pompeii in A.D. 79. But vertical pipes leading to lost second stories strongly suggest that there were once toilets up there, according to a new analysis by A. Kate Trusler, a doctoral candidate in anthropology at the University of Missouri.
A 1,500-year drought in Australia may have led to the demise of an ancient aboriginal culture, a new study suggests.The results, published Nov. 28 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, show that geological traces of a mega-drought in the northwest Kimberley region of Western Australia coincide with a gap and transition in the region's rock art style. The finding suggests that the people who lived prior to the drought, called the Gwion, either left the region or dramatically altered their culture as a result of the drought, and a new culture called the Wanjinda eventually took its place.
Italian archaeologists have unearthed tombs in the southern Egyptian city of Luxor that are more than 3,000 years old.Egypt's antiquities ministry says the tombs were found under the mortuary temple of the Pharoah Amenhotep II, who reigned from 1427 BC to 1401 BC.The temple is located on the western bank of the River Nile.
Can the world's population keep on growing without any threat to the future of the planet?Of course not. If the world's population kept on growing at its current rate, there would be 10 people per square yard of land in 774 years, and a mass of people equal to the Earth's mass in less than 2,000 years. Long before that, we would have problems less serious than 10 people per square yard, but serious enough to worry about; we already have serious problems now.
This evocative melody is literally the sound of Nature as a group of Russian percussionists make music on the frozen waters of breathtaking Lake Baikal.In minus 20C, they found by pure chance that the one metre thick ice has a distinctive and haunting rhythm all of its own, the coolest music on earth. We all know New Wave music, but this is Frozen Wave, with the tune made from tapping the ice-bound water of the 25 million year old lake, the oldest and deepest on the planet.
Four months ago, the parents of a teenage South Korean girl were at their wits' end over her addiction to surfing the Internet for pornography.But now, thanks to a horse riding therapy programme, their daughter appears to be back in control of her life.
The evolution of speech is a complex story, but one key feature is we humans' ability to form intricate sounds using vowels and consonants. Animals have simpler anatomy, so they can't produce as many distinguishable sounds, instead combining their basic noises into more complicated patterns that become things like birdsong.But it turns out even the monosyllabic noises work like a sort of Morse code, with specific structures that contain different information.
Songbirds possess a musical instrument more complex than anything found in an orchestra, a study has confirmed.Known as the syrinx, it is the bird's version of the voice box or larynx in humans.Scientists used 3D imaging to examine the structure, located where the windpipe forks into the lungs, in unparalleled detail.
It may not quite be Romeo and Juliet. They're not even technically lovebirds. But Bangladeshi macaws Prince and Princess certainly have that animal magnetism.Princess has not eaten for over a week after being separated from her partner Prince when he was sent back to his owner from a private zoo in Dhaka, Bangladesh, where the two birds had met and fallen in love (as it were).
Are crows mind readers? Recent studies have suggested that the birds hide food because they think others will steal it - a complex intuition that has been seen in only a select few creatures. Some critics have suggested that the birds might simply be stressed out, but new research reveals that crows may be gifted after all.
Who needs the freaky precogs of Minority Report to predict if someone's likely to commit murder when you have an algorithm that can do it for you?New crime-prediction software used in Maryland and Pennsylvania, and soon to be rolled out in the nation's capital too, promises to reduce the homicide rate by predicting which prison parolees are likely to commit murder and therefore receive more stringent supervision.
Christchurch's crime busters may be in need of some ghostbusters.Officers at the Hornby station say there have been paranormal occurrences in the building for many years, but there are no clues on who the phantom may be.Senior Sergeant Pete Laloli, who has run the Hornby station for 20 years, said the night-time spooks had been present as long as he could remember. "If you're in the station by yourself, strange things happen." .
The White House says building a Death Star would be an out-of-this-galaxy waste of money - not only because it's against government policy to blow up planets, but also because the United States already has access to a space station as well as a laser-wielding space robot.Today's official statement on the Death Star issue, titled "This Isn't the Petition Response You're Looking For," was written by Paul Shawcross, chief of the science and space branch at the White House Office of Management and Budget. It comes in response to a "We the People" petition that called on the federal government to start building a "Star Wars"-style Death Star battle station by 2016.
What could be the largest structure yet seen in the observable universe has emerged from data taken during a 12-year survey of the night sky.The discovery is an apparent cluster of quasars some 4 billion light-years across. If it holds up to further scrutiny, it could challenge a long-held assumption that at the cosmos's largest scales, the physical processes at work and the distribution of matter and energy are the same, regardless of an observer's location.That's the view of the team formally reporting the results Friday in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
What is the simplest, most fundamental clock? Physicist Holger Müller and his UC Berkeley colleagues have shown that a single atom is sufficient to measure time using its high-frequency matter wave. Conversely, the frequency of matter can be used to define its mass. The feat is a fundamental demonstration of wave-particle duality central to quantum mechanics.Ever since he was a kid growing up in Germany, Holger Müller has been asking himself a fundamental question: What is time? That question has now led Müller, today an associate professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, to a fundamentally new way of measuring time.
The ichthyosaur, called Thalattoarchon saurophagis (means lizard-eating sovereign of the sea), was found in what is today Favret Canyon in Augusta Mountains, Nevada. Most of the creature was preserved, including the skull, parts of the fins, and the complete vertebral column up to the tip of the tail.Thalattoarchon is an early representative of the ichthyosaurs, a group of marine reptiles that lived at the same time as dinosaurs and roamed the oceans for 160 million years. It was about 28 feet (8.6 m) in length, had a massive skull and jaws armed with large teeth with cutting edges used to seize and slice through other marine reptiles in the Triassic seas.
In 2012, robotic technology made some huge leaps forward. We put the world's most sophisticated planetary rover on Mars using a daring--and precise--robotic delivery system. We launched marine robots capable of taking on hurricanes and rebuilding damaged coral reefs. We saw four-legged robots set new land speed records, and winged, autonomous robots strut their potentially lethal stuff on the deck of an aircraft carrier.We see this kind of improvement in robotic capabilities each year--indicative of just how much momentum the robotics revolution has gained in the opening stretch of the 21st century.
While film buffs have been arguing over the need to make The Hobbit into three different films, anthropologists have been busy debating the origins of real hobbits, whose remains were discovered in Indonesia only a decade ago.In 2003, researchers uncovered 18,000-year-old bones of a woman with a skull a third of the size of a human's on the island of Flores, Indonesia. They subsequently found more remains belonging to up to nine similarly pint-sized prehistoric creatures. Nicknamed after the the J.R.R. Tolkien characters, they stood some 3 and a half feet tall.The origin of these hobbits has been controversial...
BEIJING, Jan. 2 (UPI) -- Chinese scientists say evidence based on data gleaned from eclipses and Earth tides support the hypothesis that gravity travels at the speed of light.Researchers at the Institute of Geology and Geophysics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences said six observations of total and annular solar eclipses, as well as records of Earth tides, showed gravitational force released from the sun and gravitational force recorded at ground stations on Earth did not travel at the same speed.
Scientists were plenty busy this year, with landing the 1-ton rover Curiosity on Mars, announcing the discovery of what is likely the Higgs boson and even revealing a little-dirty secret in research.For the second year, the editors of the scientific journal Nature have announced their "Nature's 10," the top 10 scientists who mattered in 2012, with profiles that dig deeper into the personal stories behind the achievements. Here's a look at their picks.
The history of encryption is a tale of broken secrets. But some mysteries remain unraveled. Among the thousands of broken codes and ciphers solved by cryptologists from the NSA and the KGB to amateurs at home, there are the few elusive codes that no one has ever managed to crack.
The global climate may already be changing faster than humans are prepared to adapt to, heralding a shift in the climate change debate from who to blame to how to cope, according to a new report from the World Economic Forum.In turn, runaway climate change could spur an island nation doomed to drown under rising seas or a wealthy entrepreneur with do-good intentions to deliberately inject sunlight-reflecting particles high into the stratosphere in a bid to cool the planet.
As much as half of the world's food, amounting to two billion tonnes worth, is wasted, a UK-based report has claimed.The Institution of Mechanical Engineers said the waste was being caused by poor storage, strict sell-by dates, bulk offers and consumer fussiness.The study also found that up to 30% of vegetables in the UK were not harvested because of their physical appearance.