Newsdesk Archive
Right now, one half of all Americans are on a diet. The other half just gave up on their diets and are on a binge. Collectively, we are overweight, sick and struggling. Our modern choices about what and how much to eat have gone terribly wrong. The time has come to return to a more sensible way of eating and living, but which way? An entire class of self-help books recommends a return to the diets of our ancestors. Paleolithic diets, caveman diets, primal diets and the like, urge us to eat like the ancients. Taken too literally, such diets are ridiculous. After all, sometimes our ancestors starved to death and the starving to death diet, well, it ends badly. Yet, the idea that we might take our ancestral diet into consideration when evaluating the foods on which our organs, cells and existence thrive, makes sense. But what did our ancestors eat?
A race to unlock genetic clues behind living to 100 is set to begin next year, after a US team announced it will compete for the $10m Genomics X Prize.Genetic entrepreneur Dr Jonathan Rothberg is entering the challenge to identify genes linked to a long, healthy life.His team - and any other contenders - will be given 30 days to work out the full DNA code of 100 centenarians at a cost of no more than $1,000 per genome.
Earlier this month, anonymous associates of President Obama whispered to Marc Ambinder that "if the president wins a second term, he plans to tackle another American war that has so far been successful only in perpetuating more misery: the four decades of The Drug War." The news was greeted with skepticism due to the fact that Obama broke prior promises about federal targeting of medical marijuana facilities and has zealously prosecuted current drug policy.In a country where 50 percent of the population now favors legalizing marijuana, the Republican Party's candidate, Mitt Romney, is even less likely to take that course. Here he is angrily dismissing its importance.
Professor Lee Cronin is a likably impatient presence, a one-man catalyst. "I just want to get stuff done fast," he says. And: "I am a control freak in rehab." Cronin, 39, is the leader of a world-class team of 45 researchers at Glasgow University, primarily making complex molecules. But that is not the extent of his ambition. A couple of years ago, at a TED conference, he described one goal as the creation of "inorganic life", and went on to detail his efforts to generate "evolutionary algorithms" in inert matter. He still hopes to "create life" in the next year or two.
MYSORE: Isro chairman K Radhakrishnan on Saturday said the government's nod to the country's Mars mission is expected soon."India's much-awaited mission to Mars is in the final stage of approval," said Radhakrishnan. The mission will be launched from Sriharikota in Andhra either in November 2013, 2016 or 2018."Many studies have been done relating to this mission,'' said Radhakrishnan.
As we count down to the much-anticipated landing of NASA's six-wheeled Mars Science Lab (MSL) on Aug. 5/6th, it's noteworthy that 36 years ago today mankind made the first successful touchdown on the Red Planet.The nuclear-powered Viking 1 lander settled down in a burst of retrorocket fire on a smooth circular plain close to the great volcanic Tharsis Bulge on July 20, 1976. Four billion years ago this region may have been a water-filled bay on Mars.Viking's first black-and-white image (above) of a footpad resting on an alien planet transfixed the world.
Today it's a mirage-like expanse of monumental ruins. But under the Roman Empire, Palmyra was a trading metropolis, according to historical and archaeological evidence.Despite nearly a century of research, though, a key question remains unanswered: How did this city of 200,000 thrive in the middle of an infertile Syrian desert?Once a required stop on caravan routes that brought Asian goods west to eager Romans, Palmyra (map) has "always been conceived as an oasis in the middle of the desert, but it's never been quite clear what it was living from," said Michal Gawlikowski, the retired head of the University of Warsaw's Polish Mission at Palmyra.
What if taking an absolutely harmless substance could make you sick? What if a sugar pill caused you to feel nausea, or a fake dose of lactose triggered unwelcome stomach symptoms in patients who are lactose intolerant?The strange truth about medicine and the brain is that they often interact in completely unpredictable and counterintuitive ways. Nowhere is this more true than with the bewildering phenomenon known as the nocebo effect.Most of us already know about the placebo effect. As part of medical studies, a control group is typically given an inert substance (usually a sugar pill) that provides a baseline to which researchers can compare the effectiveness of the new medicine being tested.
A conservation charity is planning to plant a million trees over the next five years in a bid to regenerate an ancient Scottish forest.Trees for Life's new campaign, Million More Trees, is said to be a response to environmental problems including deforestation, climate change and biodiversity loss.The trees will be planted in the ancient Caledonian Forest, which once covered the Highlands but only 1% of it remains.
The thick, hazy atmosphere of Titan, Saturn's largest natural satellite, hides a complex moon with a perplexing geological past, a new study finds.Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge and the University of Tennessee at Knoxville studied images of Titan to investigate the erosion of its terrain, over millions of years, by rivers of liquid methane.The scientists found that in some regions, Titan's network of rivers caused surprisingly little erosion, which could indicate that erosion processes on Titan occur extremely slowly, or that a different, more recent phenomena is to blame for altering or eliminating ancient riverbeds and landforms, the researchers said.
Singaporeans who regularly eat burgers and fries and other US-style fast food are at a raised risk of diabetes and more likely than their peers to die of heart disease, according to an international study.But Asian fast foods, such as noodles or dumplings, did not bear the same risk, according to the study published in the journal Circulation.With globalisation, US-style fast food has become commonplace in East and Southeast Asia. The study looked at more than 60,000 Singaporeans of Chinese descent.
Manmade climate change is the main driver behind the unexpected emergence of a group of bacteria in northern Europe which can cause gastroenteritis, new research by a group of international experts shows.The paper, published in the journal Nature Climate Change on Sunday, provided some of the first firm evidence that the warming patterns of the Baltic Sea have coincided with the emergence of Vibrio infections in northern Europe.
Scientists aided by supercomputers are trying to unravel one of Mother Nature's biggest mysteries -- the vagaries of the summer monsoon rains that bring life, and sometimes death, to India every year.In a first-of-its-kind project, Indian scientists aim to build computer models that would allow them to make a quantum leap in predicting the erratic movements of the monsoon.
Imagine a creativity cap. A device that would free you, if only momentarily, from your mindsets, from your prejudices, from the mental blocks to creativity.These words are emblazoned on the website Creativitycap.com, and they represent the vision of neuroscientist Allan Snyder. Snyder believes we all possess untapped powers of cognition, normally seen only in rare individuals called savants, and accessing them might take just a few jolts of electricity to the brain.
It's a project 500 million years in the making. Only this time, instead of playing on a movie screen in Jurassic Park, it's happening in a lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology.Using a process called paleo-experimental evolution, Georgia Tech researchers have resurrected a 500-million-year-old gene from bacteria and inserted it into modern-day Escherichia coli(E. coli) bacteria. This bacterium has now been growing for more than 1,000 generations, giving the scientists a front row seat to observe evolution in action.
The oldest surviving human brain in Britain, dating back at least 2000 years to the Iron Age, has been unearthed during excavations on the site of the University of York's campus expansion at Heslington East.Archaeologists from York Archaeological Trust, commissioned by the University to carry out the exploratory dig, made the discovery in an area of extensive prehistoric farming landscape of fields, trackways and buildings dating back to at least 300 BC.
As the search for Amelia Earhart's plane probes the deep waters off Nikumaroro, a tiny desert island between Australia and Hawaii where the legendary aviator may have landed 75 years ago, new clues have surfaced in the artifacts unearthed on the coral atoll.A variety of fragmented objects collected by archaeologists at a site on the uninhabited island may have originally been American beauty and skin care products, all dating to the 1930s, says a new summary of research by the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (or TIGHAR), which will be published in October by the academic journal Pacific Studies.
THE ancient Iraqi city of Babylon is facing a very modern threat from the twin curses of oil and politics.Once the centre of the ancient world, it has been despoiled in modern times by Saddam Hussein's fantasies of grandeur, invading armies and village sprawl.Now come two more setbacks for the Iraqi city famous for its Hanging Gardens and Tower of Babel: Parts of its grounds have been torn up for an oil pipeline, and a diplomatic spat is hampering its bid for coveted UNESCO heritage status.The pipeline was laid in March by Iraq's Oil Ministry, overriding outraged Iraqi archaeologists and drawing a rebuke from UNESCO, the global guardian of cultural heritage.
Never mind the fact that the Google Lunar X Prize teams won't launch their crafts until 2015. Those teams are already meeting extremely high demand for their still-hypothetical moon missions as different organizations lobby for space onboard."Our first mission payload is oversubscribed and our second is fully subscribed," said Alan Stern, director of the Florida Space Institute and chief scientist for the Google Moon Express team. "There are a number of market segments for commercial lunar travel." .
Physicists have spotted something that looks like the Higgs boson, but what if it's actually a more exotic Higgs doppelganger?This possibility has been raised by Ian Low, of Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, and his team who posted an article to the arXiv preprint service on Monday.The Standard Model of physics predicts that the Universe needs a ubiquitous Higgs field that endows all subatomic particles with mass. The Higgs boson is the Higgs field's messenger that interacts with all particles and helps to explain why some particles are massive, while other particles are nearly mass-less.
A large (120kg) iron meteorite, 4.5bn years old, and found buried in Argentina, 12 feet below the earth in the Formosa province in the strewn field that is known as Campo del Cielo, or Field of the Sky. Although known to natives, the cratered field was first reported in 1576 and is the location of the heaviest natural objects ever found on earth. Looking like a lump of knobbly, dull bronze, it is made of 92% iron, 7% nickel and around 1% of other trace elements.In its untouched state it has a matt appearance with burnished edges where it has been stroked by human hand or by wind-blown sands. Such meteorites, nicknamed "campos", are popular with collectors and sell at high prices through dealers. Larger, high quality specimens like this might sell for $200 to $300 per kg.
When Complete Genomics was founded in 2005, scientists had only sequenced the DNA of a handful of people. But its founders, tech entrepreneur Clifford Reid and DNA-deciphering pioneer Rade Drmanac, had an out-of-the-box idea: a DNA factory that would be able to sequence the genomes of large numbers of people on the cheap.
Fashion experts have been surprised by the discovery of four bras around 600 years old in an Austrian castle.The underwear style was thought to be a little over 100 years old as women abandoned tight corsets, but the linen versions unearthed by archaeologists date back to the middle ages, the University of Innsbruck said on Wednesday.
Bonds between atoms are electrical in character: atoms share electrons or mutually ionize, creating an attractive force binding them together. However, researchers are now suggesting that it may be possible to generate magnetic bonds, resulting in stable molecules of different types than exist on Earth. While these molecules can't be produced with even our strongest laboratory magnets, they could form in the extreme magnetic fields near white dwarfs and neutron stars, and their unique spectral signatures may make them visible through observations.
Earlier this year, theoretical physicists Frank Wilczek, of MIT put forth an idea that intrigued the research community. He suggested that it should be possible to construct a so called space-time crystal by adding a fourth dimension, movement in time, to the structure of a crystal, causing it to become an infinitely running clock of sorts. At the time, Wilczek acknowledged that his ideas on how to do so were inelegant, to say the least. Now another international team led by Tongcang Li has proposed a way to achieve what Wilczek proposed using a far more elegant process. They have posted a paper on the preprint server arXiv describing what they believe is a real-world process for creating an actual space-time crystal that could conceivably be carried out in just the next few years.
Astronomers have spotted the earliest known spiral galaxy, dating to just three billion years after the Big Bang.Theories of galaxy formation held that the Universe was still too chaotic a place to allow such a perfectly formed or "grand-design" spiral to form.It should take far longer for gravity to bring matter into thin, neat discs.But a team reporting in Nature says the galaxy BX442 got the gravitational "kick" it needed to form a spiral from a smaller "dwarf galaxy" orbiting it.
(SPACE.com) A NASA spacecraft orbiting Saturn has captured an amazing view of lightning in broad daylight on the ringed planet.The Cassini orbiter captured the daytime lightning on Saturn as bright blue spots inside a giant storm that raged on the planet last year. NASA unveiled the new Saturn lightning photos Wednesday (July 18), adding that the images came as a big surprise."We didn't think we'd see lighting on Saturn's day side --only its night side," said Ulyana Dyudina, a Cassini imaging team associate at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, in a statement. "The fact that Cassini was able to detect the lightning means that it was very intense.".
Already a curiosity for its sheer size, the 8.6-magnitude earthquake that shook the seafloor west of the Indonesian island of Sumatra on April 11 appears to have been even weirder than scientists thought.A new study reveals the quake zigzagged along four faults, three of which are set perpendicular to each other. From above, the layout looks like a city street grid. "We call it an earthquake in a maze," said Lingsen Meng, lead author of the study and a graduate student in seismology at Caltech.
The next time you savor the sweet flavor of vanilla ice cream or the fresh orange scent of a hand soap, you may have bacteria to thank. Fragrance companies are now looking to lab-engineered bacteria and yeast to produce fragrances normally derived from plants, reports Chemical & Engineering News. The story is an interesting look at how the somewhat secretive fragrance industry is evolving.For centuries, humans have worked to harness good smells. Bottling a scent required painstakingly extracting plant oils from crops often grown in far-flung countries. The commercial fragrance market, which is responsible for the scents in everything from food and drinks to cleaning products and perfume, relies on a steady supply of these oils. But a natural disaster or corrupt government practice can easily dry up a source.
The most expansive drought in more than a half century intensified this week and stretched further into major farm areas of the western Midwest where crops had largely been shielded from the harsh conditions that decimated yields further east.The moderate drought in parts of eastern Nebraska, northern Illinois and much of the top corn and soybean state Iowa was downgraded to a severe drought in the past week, climate experts said Thursday, and forecasts showed little relief in sight.
The population recorded during the last winter by the RSPB's annual Big Garden Birdwatch show the population has fallen by almost a third in the last ten years and 80 per cent since 1979.Famous for its spectacular aerial displays and chirpy, chattering song, the starling is one of our most popular and recognisable birds.But 40 million have vanished from the European Union since 1980 - at a rate of 150 a hour - with the crash triggering concern about its future as a widespread and familiar bird.
Beginning in the 13th century, the Mongol Empire spread across Asia and into the Middle East like wildfire, growing into the largest contiguous land empire the world has ever seen.Historians have long speculated that periods of drought pushed the Mongol hordes to conquer their neighbors, but preliminary new findings suggest that theory may be exactly backward. Instead, consistent rain and warm temperatures may have given the Mongols the energy source they needed to conquer Eurasia: grass for their horses.
The 2010 BP oil spill contributed to an unusually high death rate for dolphins in the Gulf of Mexico, a new study suggests.Between January and April 2011, 186 dead bottlenose dolphins washed ashore between Louisiana and western Florida. Most alarmingly, nearly half of these casualties were calves, which is more than double the usual proportion of young to old dolphins found dead. Scientists now blame both natural factors and human catastrophe for the unusual die-off.
A gigantic sunspot unleashed an intense solar flare early Thursday, though the solar storm shouldn't pose any serious problems to us here on Earth, scientists say.The flare erupted from a sunspot known as AR 1520 at 1:13 a.m. ET Thursday and peaked about 45 minutes later. The outburst qualifies as an M7.7-class solar flare, meaning it's a bit weaker than the sun's most powerful blast, X-class flares.
A version of the Tube map has been produced to show how life expectancy varies from station to station.The contrast it depicts between Tube stops is stark, with the variation in life expectancies of children born near stations only minutes apart being years different.For example, it shows there is a 20-year difference in life expectancy between those born near Oxford Circus and others born close to some stations on the Docklands Light Railway (DLR).
(SPACE.com) The discovery of another moon around Pluto is exciting news for planetary science, but it's also likely causing some anxiety for the team in charge of New Horizons, a spacecraft set to be the first probe ever to visit the dwarf planet.On Wednesday (July 11), researchers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope announced the detection of P5, a tiny moon measuring just 6 to 15 miles (10 to 24 kilometers) across. P5 brings Pluto's known satellite tally to five, and it comes just a year after Hubble spotted moon number four, the similarly diminutive P4.
The continent of Antarctica is at risk from human activities and other forces, and environmental management is needed to protect the planet's last great wilderness area, says an international team of researchers, including a Texas A&M University oceanographer, in a paper published in the current issue of Science magazine.Mahlon "Chuck" Kennicutt II, professor of oceanography who has conducted research in the area for more than 25 years, says Antarctica faces growing threats from global warming, loss of sea ice and landed ice, increased tourism, over-fishing in the region, pollution and invasive species creeping into the area. One of the longer-term concerns that may present the greatest threat overall is the potential for oil, gas and mineral exploitation on the continent and in the surrounding ocean, the authors note.
A large iceberg has broken off a glacier in northern Greenland. Where will it go - and how do you track an iceberg?At twice the size of Manhattan, the iceberg that has just calved from the Petermann Glacier, is not hard to miss.It can easily be seen on satellite images and is nestled within the glacial fjord.But once it gets out to open sea, it will drift and start to break up into smaller pieces, in a way that is virtually impossible to predict, says Trudy Wohlleben, senior ice forecaster with the Canadian Ice Service.
Sperm, decoded: a technological achievement parses the genomes of individual sperm cells, showing new way to study reproductive medicine and hereditary cancer.Less than a decade after the first full human genome was mapped, technology has arrived to decode the full genome of a single sex cell. The ability promises to offer new insight into the causes of infertility, the development of mutations and the diversity of the human genome.
A city-block size asteroid will fly by Earth this weekend well beyond the orbit of the moon, and you can watch it zip safely by live in an online webcast.The asteroid 2002 AM31 will make its closest approach to Earth on Sunday (July 22), when it will pass by at a range of about 3.2 million miles (5.2 million kilometers). That's about 13.7 times the distance between the Earth and the moon.On Sunday, the Slooh Space Camera sky watching website will host two live webcasts to offer Internet denizens views of the space rock from telescopes at the Prescott Observatory in Arizona and the Canary Islands, off the west coast of Africa.
Scientists from RAL Space at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory have solved a lunar mystery and their results might lead the way to determining if the same mechanism could be artificially manipulated to create safe havens for future space explorers. Their work focussed on the origin of the enigmatic "lunar swirls" - swirling patches of relatively pale lunar soil, some measuring several tens of km across, which have been an unresolved mystery - until now.In the Apollo era it was realised that lunar swirls were associated with localized magnetic fields in the lunar crust (so-called lunar 'magnetic anomalies').
The NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope reveals astronomers a new alien planet possibly covered with molten lava.Scientists have discovered what appears to be an alien planet just two-thirds the size of Earth, a heat-blasted world perhaps covered in molten lava, a new study reports.Astronomers discovered the newfound alien planet, known as UCF-1.01, using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. The diminutive world is just 33 light-years away, making it a near neighbor of Earth in the cosmic scheme of things.
Using a powerful scanning electron microscope at the Idaho State University Center for Archaeology, Materials, and Applied Spectroscopy (CAMAS), ISU anthropologist and research scientist David Peterson is helping shed light on the making of gold by nomadic horsemen nearly 4,000 years ago on the Eurasian steppe grasslands of present-day Russia.
The unusually powerful right arms of Neanderthals may not be due to a spear-hunting life as once suggested, but rather one often spent scraping animal skins for clothes and shelters, researchers say.The Neanderthals are our closest known extinct relatives, who were probably less brutish and more like modern humans than commonly portrayed. Their brains were at least as large as ours. They controlled fire, expertly made stone tools, were proficient hunters, lived in complex social groups, buried their dead, and perhaps artfully wore feathers. Genetic research even suggests they interbred with modern humans.
Fertilising the oceans with iron to combat climate change can lock carbon away for centuries, research suggests.Tiny marine plants induced to grow by the iron sink to the ocean floor taking carbon with them, a German-led team reports in Nature journal.Iron fertilisation is one of the oldest ideas for a climate "technical fix".But much more research is needed before the approach could be put to use, the scientists say, and cutting emissions should be the priority.
Scientists have outfitted two snow leopards in a wild corner of Afghanistan with satellite-tracking collars, a first for the country and a boon for researchers trying to better understand the habits and favored habitats of the endangered cats.The snow leopards, both male, were captured in Afghanistan's northeastern Wakhan Corridor, a narrow strip of desolate, windswept mountains sandwiched between Pakistan and Tajikistan, and a spot where camera traps first snapped the elusive cats in 2011.The first snow leopard was captured and released on May 27, the second on June 8.
Every Friday evening they gather before Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda's residence.The first rally in March was modest: a few hundred citizens joined against nuclear power, marking the anniversary of the earthquake- and tsunami-triggered Fukushima Daiichi disaster a year earlier. But in recent weeks, since Noda decided to restart two of Japan's 54 idled nuclear reactors, the protest has swelled into a mass demonstration blocking the streets of Japan's political center.Building on their Friday night momentum, protestors on Monday staged their largest rally yet, with tens of thousands of people congregating at Yoyogi Park, and then marching in three groups through the capital.
Shimmering auroras in the night sky are amazing to behold, but nothing prepared one NASA astronaut for seeing the celestial lights dance over Earth from above.A new photo of the southern lights by astronaut Joe Acaba convey only a portion of the amazing view from his window on the International Space Station during a weekend photo session to catch the auroras over Earth. Acaba watched the auroras on Saturday and Sunday (July 14 and 15) from the station's observation deck, a seven-window cupola that offers astronauts a 360-degree of space and the Earth below.
Deep-sea explorers have pulled up 48 tons of silver treasure from three miles below the surface of the North Atlantic in what may be the deepest, largest precious metal recovery in history.The haul was retrieved from the S.S. Gairsoppa, a 412-foot steel-hulled British cargo ship that sank in February 1941.The expedition, by Odyssey Marine Exploration, a company specializing in shipwreck exploration, recovered 1,203 bars of silver, totaling 1.4 million ounces. Viewers will have the chance to follow the pursuit of the lost treasure on an upcoming Discovery Channel special produced by JWM Productions.
Researchers have found evidence of the earliest known instance of domesticated caprines (sheep and goats) in southern Africa, dated to the end of the first millennium BC, providing new data to the ongoing debate about the origins of domestication and herding practices in this region.The full results are published July 11 in the open access journal PLoS ONE.
One month ago, Giza's antiquities inspectorate installed a new system to pump subterranean water out from under Egypt's historical Sphinx monument and the underlying bedrock.Subterranean water levels at the Giza Plateau, especially the area under the valley temples and Sphinx, have recently increased due to a new drainage system installed in the neighbouring village of Nazlet Al-Seman and the irrigation techniques used to cultivate the nearby residential area of Hadaeq Al-Ahram.The system involves 18 state-of-the-art water pumps capable of pumping 26,000 cubic metres of water daily.
A giant space probe is set to plunge into the atmosphere of Mars at a speed of more than 13,000mph in a few weeks' time. For the following seven minutes, its onboard computer will issue electronic instructions to direct the craft through manoeuvres of unprecedented complexity to guide it to the ground. Atmospheric friction and later a giant parachute will cut its speed to a few hundred miles per hour. Then rocket engines will fire and the probe will slow down until it hovers about 20 metres above the surface of the Red Planet.
In the 1920s archaeologists discovered more than 1,000 cattle skulls buried at an early Iron Age stock enclosure at Harrow Hill in Sussex, while a huge Iron Age midden (rubbish heap) covering at least 2.5 hectares has been found at East Chisenbury in Wiltshire. Each is thought to represent the remains of vast annual feasts on grasslands shared between local communities, perhaps during the annual round-ups of their collective herds.These meetings were much more than the chance for a good meal. Feasts reinforced links and relationships within and between communities: such occasions provided at very least a context for resolving disputes about livestock and grazing, at times when animals were taken to the pastures in the spring or rounded up in the autumn and disagreements were most likely to occur.
On July 1st, 2001, Portugal decriminalized every imaginable drug, from marijuana, to cocaine, to heroin. Some thought Lisbon would become a drug tourist haven, others predicted usage rates among youths to surge.Eleven years later, it turns out they were both wrong.Over a decade has passed since Portugal changed its philosophy from labeling drug users as criminals to labeling them as people affected by a disease. This time lapse has allowed statistics to develop and in time, has made Portugal an example to follow.
Nasa might not be able to follow the progress of its big Mars rover all the way to the surface when it attempts to land on the planet on 6 August (GMT).The Curiosity vehicle is aiming for a deep depression known as Gale Crater.The US space agency will be tracking the descent with satellites, but its prime craft for the task may not now be in the correct place in the sky.Engineers have been tackling a fault on the Odyssey satellite and it is no longer in the best observational orbit.
A type of UFO never filmed before was caught by a passenger videotaping the scene out the window of a jet flying at high altitude. The unidentified flying object is nearly transparent with several concentric rings. What is it?The video, only 15 seconds in length, catches the action but does nothing to identify the videographer or the location. It's obviously taken inside a passenger jet cabin and the area below looks to be very mountainous.
Billionaire-backed Planetary Resources, the company that in April announced ambitious plans to mine space rocks for minerals, will hitch a ride with space tourism company Virgin Galactic.The new union is a sign that the nascent commercial space-flight industry could soon become self-sustaining. It was prompted by LauncherOne, a low-cost satellite-launching rocket that Virgin founder Richard Branson revealed on 11 July at the Farnborough International Airshow, UK.
For four months out of every year in the ancient Mayan city of Tikal, the skies dried up and no rain fell. Nevertheless, this metropolis in what is now Guatemala became a bustling hub of as many as 80,000 residents by A.D. 700. Now, researchers have found that the residents of Tikal hung on to their civilization for more than 1,000 years thanks to a surprisingly sustainable system of water delivery.The water needs of Tikal were met by a series of paved reservoirs that held rainwater during the 8-month-long wet season for use during dry periods, archeologists report Monday (July 16) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. This early plumbing system was surprisingly resilient, seeing the city through times of both plenty and drought.
The GHMB Community Interview with Tim Freke, co-author with Peter Gandy of The Jesus Mysteries, is now finished and the questions have been answered.Please see the community interview page for past and upcoming interviews.If you would like to add your voice and suggest someone as a future community interviewee, please do so on the messageboards in the community interview suggestions thread.
While interstellar journeys have been explored by researchers, one type of mission has not received much attention, namely the interstellar rendezvous and return mission that could be accomplished on timescales comparable with a working scientist's career.Such a mission would involve an initial boost phase followed by a coasting phase to the target star system. Next would be the deceleration and rendezvous phase, which would be followed by a period of scientific data gathering.
Dolphins may use complex nonlinear mathematics when hunting, according to a new study that suggests these brainy marine mammals could be far more skilled at math than was ever thought possible before.Inspiration for the new study, published in the latest Proceedings of the Royal Society A, came after lead author Tim Leighton watched an episode of the Discovery Channel's "Blue Planet" series and saw dolphins blowing multiple tiny bubbles around prey as they hunted.
A new study shows gold nanoparticles, in combination with a compound found in tea, may treat prostate cancer better than chemotherapy.Chemotherapy can treat different kinds of cancer, but typically carries toxic side effects. While it has been known to shrink tumors, chemo also destroys healthy areas as it passes through the body. But, University of Missouri researchers discovered that when small gold particles and a compound found in tea leaves were combined, they targeted prostate cancer tumors more directly.
Charles Dudley Warner, a friend of Mark Twain, wrote, "Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it." He'd have thought differently if he had laser beams.A review in the Institute of Physics' Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics, says that it might be possible to use high-powered laser beams to make it rain. This might be an alternative to seeding clouds, either with dry ice or silver iodide particles. While such seeding is common, it isn't always clear how effective it is and the results can vary a lot. It's also unclear what the consequences are to the atmosphere in those areas where seeding is done.
The solution to a long-standing puzzle, why magnetic north sits off the coast of Canada, rather than at the North Pole, may have been found in the strange, lopsided nature of Earth's inner core.The inner core is a ball of solid iron about 760 miles (1,220 kilometers) wide. It is surrounded by a liquid outer core (mostly iron and nickel), a rocky, viscous mantle layer and a thin, solid crust.
"Why are all the good UFOs invisible?" one Gather.com user asked in response to the latest "invisible UFO" report posted to the site.You might have thought a defining characteristic of a UFO would be visibility. But thanks to zealous alien hunters doggedly scanning the sky with night-vision cameras, a new class of flying objects that only emit infrared light has emerged from the darkness. Are they spies from the great beyond?.
Scientists loaded their ship to the max this month off the coast of Hawaii, but their bounty wasn't fish or coral or any other scientific specimen. It was garbage.The crew of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) ship Oscar Elton Sette pulled 50 metric tons of marine debris out of the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument off the northwestern Hawaiian Islands last month, part of an ongoing mission since 1996 to clean up the shallow coral reef environment.
Despite NASA's tough budget situation, the 1-ton rover streaking toward an Aug. 5 landing on Mars is unlikely to be the space agency's last big, ambitious Red Planet mission.Funding cuts have forced NASA to shelve plans for future multibillion-dollar "flagship" planetary missions beyond the $2.5 billion Curiosity rover, which will investigate Mars' potential to host past or present microbial life after it touches down three weeks from now. For the time being, the space agency is looking for ways to explore the Red Planet on the cheap.
With the announcement last week that astronomers have found a fifth moon orbiting around Pluto, the dwarf planet's system got a little more crowded. Of course, Pluto hasn't gained a new moon; we're just getting better at finding the satellites already out there.Finding moons of a planet that far away isn't easy. It's taken astronomers a long time to find Pluto's moons, and there's likely more to find.
High-tech technology, traditionally usually used to design racing cars and aeroplanes, has helped researchers to understand how plant-eating dinosaurs fed 150 million years ago.A team of international researchers, led by the University of Bristol and the Natural History Museum, used CT scans and biomechanical modelling to show that Diplodocus -- one of the largest dinosaurs ever discovered -- had a skull adapted to strip leaves from tree branches.
Lots of time spent in front of a TV early in life may have lasting consequences, indicates a study that connected the viewing habits of Canadian toddlers with waist circumference and muscular fitness later in childhood.Using data collected periodically for 1,314 kids participating in the Québec Longitudinal Study of Child Development, researchers found increases in TV viewing starting when kids were 29 months old were linked to reduced jumping ability in second grade and bigger waist circumferences in fourth grade.
Surfer Ben Linden this weekend became Western Australia's fifth shark attack fatality in just 10 months, with experts now wondering if shark behavior is changing, such that the often-enormous predators are more likely to go after humans.Twenty-four-year-old Linden of Osborne Park near Perth was surfing near Wedge Island. Jet skier Matt Holmes watched as the shark bit into Linden "like it was eating a seal," Surf on Grind TV reported. "It just threw its body out of the water for this guy. I turned and looked back at my mate, and I just thought, 'Is this real?'"
New discoveries made in Inverness have fuelled speculation among experts that it was an important area of prehistoric iron production.Rare finds of well-preserved metalworking hearths, or furnaces, have been uncovered at Beechwood during work by Edinburgh-based AOC Archaeology.Archaeologists believe the discoveries date to the Iron Age.Highlands and Islands Enterprise (HIE) is spending £25m on preparing the land for the new Inverness Campus.
A new poll suggests there's a growing disconnect between Canadians and their government over marijuana.The Ipsos Reid poll released Monday indicated about two-thirds of those surveyed support decriminalizing possession of small amounts of pot.The poll, conducted last month, showed 32 per cent of respondents strongly supported and 34 per cent somewhat supported the idea of eliminating fines or other penalties for having a little cannabis.
The government is to unveil controversial plans to make publicly funded scientific research immediately available for anyone to read for free by 2014, in the most radical shakeup of academic publishing since the invention of the internet.Under the scheme, research papers that describe work paid for by the British taxpayer will be free online for universities, companies and individuals to use for any purpose, wherever they are in the world.In an interview with the Guardian before Monday's announcement David Willetts, the universities and science minister, said he expected a full transformation to the open approach over the next two years.
Sea levels may rise much higher than previously thought, according to scientists from The Australian National University, who have used fossil corals to understand how warmer temperatures in the past promoted dramatic melting of polar ice sheets.Dr Andrea Dutton, formerly of the Research School of Earth Sciences (RSES) in the ANU College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, teamed up with Professor Kurt Lambeck of the RSES to analyse fossil corals around the world from the last interglacial period, 125,000 years ago.
Madang Police Commander Anthony Wagambie confirmed a report in The National newspaper that said the cult members allegedly ate their victims' brains raw and made soup from their penises."They don't think they've done anything wrong; they admit what they've done openly," Wagambie told The Associated Press by telephone.He said the killers believed that their victims practised "sanguma," or sorcery, and that they had been extorting money as well as demanding sex from poor villagers for their supernatural services.
More than 500 dead penguins have been washed up on beaches in southern Brazil over the past week.Marine biologists and veterinarians reported yesterday that the birds had no visible injuries or oil stains and appeared to be well fed.The Centre of Coastal and Marine Studies said it expected to receive the results of autopsies on some of the birds within the next month.
The tale is bizarre, but true. During World War II, an orphaned brown bear went from being a cuddly pet to an officially enlisted soldier in the Polish army, and reportedly saw fierce combat in Italy. Decades after the war and his death, "Wojtek" continues to be honored.Archibald Brown had already seen a lot during the war -- but nothing like this. It was mid-February 1944, and the courier for British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery was in the port of Naples to help process a unit of Polish soldiers that had just arrived by ship from Alexandria, Egypt, to advance with British soldiers against German and Italian forces.
A wildlife expert says Britain should bring back the beaver to stop the growing menace of flooded homes and businesses.Ecologist Derek Gow says the water-loving creatures would gnaw through trees and build dams, holding back the floods when rivers get swollen by heavy rain.Britain is lagging behind other European countries who have already re-introduced the beaver and studies in places like Belgium and Germany have proved they can help alleviate flooding, he says.
Unlike animals, plants do not have a circulating blood system containing cell capable of fighting off bacterial invasion. Instead, they have to rely on various other techniques, which I covered in detail way back on my old Field of Science blog. One method they use is to kill off cells that are close to a bacterial or fungi infection in order to starve the oncoming infection and prevent it spreading
A resin in the most commonly used white composite dental fillings may be linked to subtle neuropsychological deficits in children.The association appears in reanalyzed data collected from 434 children as part of a trial begun roughly a decade ago. The original study was designed to probe for IQ or other neurobehavioral impacts of the mercury that can be released by metal-amalgam dental fillings. Half of the kids received amalgam fillings for cavities in back teeth, the rest got composite back fillings.
A record-setting drought grips more than half of the contiguous United States. For farmers the drought is ruining harvests, but driving up the price of crops that do survive. Higher wholesale prices will soon translate into rising costs at the supermarket.The United States Department of Agriculture recently lowered the expected yield of 2012's corn harvest by a further 1.8 billion bushels, meaning the projected corn crop has now dropped by 46.2 million tons. The ailing corn crop won't be helped by the Nebraska Department of Natural Resources' order that 1,106 farmers stop irrigating farmland on Friday of last week due to the drought affecting the entire state, reported the DesMoines Register.
The planetary warm spell continued through June; last month ranked as the fourth warmest June since record keeping began in 1880, according to the U.S. National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration.Much of the world saw higher-than-average temperatures for June, particularly the lower 48 states, where last month brought the warmest 12-month period since the late 19th century. In addition to most of North America, Eurasia and northern Africa also saw much higher-than-average monthly temperatures, according to NOAA.
SACRAMENTO BEEBREMERTON, Wash. -- Beth Arcos picked her way through muck and pickleweed just west of the Bremerton waterfront, on the trail of an ancient earthquake and tsunami."Here's the first evidence," the former University of Washington doctoral student said, kneeling to pluck clam shells from what used to be a tidal mud flat - but now sits well above the waterline. More than 1,000 years ago, Arcos explained, the Seattle fault let loose, lifting the ground here nearly 10 feet.
The deposits at Etricourt Manancourt in the Picardie region of France documents the history of early European settlements, revealing at least five prehistoric levels, ranging between 300,000 and 80,000 years old.This discovery resulted from the archaeological work carried out prior to construction of a large canal. Archaeologists from Inrap looked at 17 hectares in 2010, which revealed a Palaeolithic level and more evidence was found in 2012, when 3,200 square metres were excavated over 4 month period.
Australian archaeologists are embarking on a study of one of the earliest ever records of a key transformation in human history, the end of the nomadic lifestyle.The team, headed by Dr Andrew Fairbairn from the University of Queensland, will join with a British team next week to continue work on the excavation of a 10,000-year-old early village site in central Turkey.
Ten years ago, an international group of anthropologists made a bold claim: They had unearthed the earliest hominid ever found, in the Sahel region of Chad. They named their discovery Sahelanthropus tchadensis. Today, many anthropologists agree that the seven-million-year-old Sahelanthropus was an early hominid while others suggest it was nothing more than an ancient ape.
Former Japanese prime minister Naoto Kan, who was in office during the Fukushima nuclear meltdowns, has told the ABC he believes the plant's operator has been hiding key evidence.For months TEPCO has resisted pressure to release critical recordings, arguing they are in-house material and to release them would compromise the privacy of those on the tapes.
Space weather experts are keeping close watch for a solar storm expected to reach Earth Saturday, the fallout from a powerful solar flare earlier this week.The solar storm originated from a massive solar flare on Thursday that included a powerful eruption on the sun, known as a coronal mass ejection. The eruption sent a wave of charged solar plasma toward Earth, which was expected to arrive sometime today, according to forecasts by NASA and the NOAA-run Space Weather Prediction Center in Colorado. The CME could amplify Earth's northern lights displays, some space weather officials have said.
We're less than a month away from one of the most highly anticipated Martian landings of all time.On Aug. 5 (Pacific Time, Aug. 6 Eastern), NASA's Mars Science Laboratory rover Curiosity will land in Gale Crater. The incredibly sophisticated rover is a mobile laboratory designed to run tests on soil to determine whether or not the Martian environment ever had the conditions to support life.But in the 1960s, the future of Mars exploration looked very different. In many instances, there were men aboard the spacecraft that were designed to fly by the red planet rather than land on it.
The world's most sensitive dark matter detector settled into a new home Friday in an old U.S. gold mine.And when it starts collecting data later this year, scientists say it could lead to another breakthrough in studies of the universe, on the scale of the recent celebration over the so-called "God particle.""Dark matter presents a much bigger problem to detect," said Tom Shutt, a physics professor with Case Western Reserve University who's working on the Large Underground Xenon detector, known as LUX."If we find it, it's going to be a much bigger shift in our understanding of physics.
When antique dealer Subhash Chandra Kapoor, 61, arrested in Germany and extradited to India for his alleged role in spiriting away 18 temple idols from Tamil Nadu, was produced before the Ariyalur court on Saturday, it marked the second most sensational development of its kind in the country. It also pointed once again to the inscrutable ways of the idol-smugglers and their ruthlessly creative potential.
The cause of rapid sea level rise in the past has been found by scientists at the University of Bristol using climate and ice sheet models.The process, named 'saddle-collapse', was found to be the cause of two rapid sea level rise events: the Meltwater pulse 1a (MWP1a) around 14,600 years ago and the '8,200 year' event. The research is published today in Nature.
South African scientists said Thursday they had uncovered the most complete skeleton yet of an ancient relative of man, hidden in a rock excavated from an archaeological site three years ago.The remains of a juvenile hominid skeleton, of the Australopithecus (southern ape) sediba species, constitute the "most complete early human ancestor skeleton ever discovered," according to University of Witwatersrand palaeontologist Lee Berger.
Research by academics at two universities have concluded that the common belief of lying eyes is a myth.Many psychologists think when a person looks up to their right they are likely to be telling a lie and glancing up to the left is said to indicate honesty.However, the experts from Edinburgh University and Hertfordshire University carried out tests and found the theory to be wrong.
Orangutans are being taught to communicate with zoo keepers at a Miami Zoo using iPads.Linda Jacobs, who is a keeper at Jungle Island Zoo, wants the apes to use apps to tell keepers what they want to eat.Jacobs said: "They have all the intelligence they need to communicate with us."But what they don't have is developed vocal chords and voiceboxes. This gives them a voice."
Wild chimpanzees communicate using similar gestures to humans, according to a Stirling researcher.Dr Anna Roberts said she had identified about 20 to 30 manual gestures used by chimps, up to a third of which were similar to those used by humans.The chimps' gestures included beckoning to make someone approach or flailing their arms to make someone leave.
A new article feature article is now up. Full title: Azerbaijan: Land of Fire and Flood Ancient Mariners and a Deluged Landscape. Opening paragraph:Azerbaijan has long been known as the Land of Fire, but few realize that it has actually been subjected to massive floods in the past so creating a geography that was very different from what we see today. With the Caspian Sea level at 28m below average sea level, (b.s.l.) it is almost impossible to imagine an upper elevation of around 225m above sea level (a.s.l.) and a massive inland sea. And yet this is what strandline evidence reveals. This great flood most likely happened some 18ka to 16ka BP at the end of the Ice Age during deglaciation and cannot be explained by glacial melt water alone.
The next time you browse cute little ivory objects in a jewelry shop, remember that they could be made from the tusks of elephants illegally killed by poachers and smuggled into the United States. Their death could have far-reaching consequences, perhaps even affecting the climate.At a July 12 press conference in New York City, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance announced the seizure of more than $2 million worth of illicit ivory items, one of the largest such seizures in state history. The ivory was mostly used to make small jewelry, animal statues and carved tusks, which were being sold at two shops in Manhattan.
There is a growing amount of plastic floating around in the world's oceans, posing threats to animal life, human health and environmental balance.But how much plastic is out there? It's a hard question to answer because there is no one standardized way to document all the bits of floss, fishing line and food containers drifting in the waves.Looking into the bellies of birds might be one solution to quantifying the problem, suggests a new study in the Pacific Northwest. In the waters there, plastic pollution is becoming as common as in the highly polluted North Sea.