Newsdesk Archive
Reports that surfaced last week about the remains of a "gay caveman" found in the Czech Republic have prompted scientists to take on an unlikely foe -- an overhyped news media that may be overblowing the archaeological find.
This is not a trick. There are no invisible strings, no post production video fixes. What we have here is a graceful, flapping, unfeathery machine that looks and flies like a seagull. It was built by a team of engineers at a company called Festo in Germany, which specializes in factory automation, and for years now they've been doing what Leonardo dreamed of when he sat on those hills near Florence sketching birds: they copy from nature's designs.
When black holes slam into each other, the surrounding space and time surge and undulate like a heaving sea during a storm. This warping of space and time is so complicated that physicists haven't been able to understand the details of what goes on -- until now."We've found ways to visualize warped space-time like never before," says Kip Thorne, Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics, Emeritus, at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
A space mission will soon visit an unusual asteroid called Vesta that may turn out to not be an asteroid at all, but a minor planet.You've heard of Pluto, once a full-scale planet that astronomers now classify as a dwarf planet. Now meet 4 Vesta -- or Vesta for short -- an asteroid that may not be a real asteroid.The 330-mile diameter object sits in the asteroid belt, a collection of large and small pieces of rubble that circles the sun between the orbits of the planets Mars and Jupiter. But Vesta, numbered 4 because it was the fourth member of the asteroid belt to be discovered, is larger than most of its asteroid companions and also differs from them geologically.
Researchers have achieved a breakthrough in quantum communications and computing using a teleporter and a paradoxical cat.The breakthrough is the first-ever transfer, or teleportation, of a particular complex set of quantum information from one point to another, opening the way for high-speed, high-fidelity transmission of large volumes of information, such as quantum encryption keys, via quantum communications networks.
While it seemed the rest of London was out soaking up the springtime sun this past Saturday, roughly 100 people opted instead to pass their time in a basement lecture theatre at Birkbeck College - discussing the possibilities of human immortality, and alternatively, of total human extinction.Odd topics for a sunny April Saturday, you might think. The discussion was spawned by the recent release of Transcendent Man, a biopic-cum-documentary movie about inventor and immortality advocate Ray Kurzweil. Organised and staged by Humanity+ UK, a British transhumanist organisation, the genial mixture of brief presentations and informal discussion was intended to examine Kurzweil's life and vision on the heels of the film's debut.
Planets and maybe even advanced life could theoretically exist inside a black hole, according to a new theory.The idea by physicist Professor Vyacheslav Dokuchaev from the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow appears to go against the common belief that black holes are giant gravity wells gobbling up anything that gets too close.In a paper written for the journal Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics and appearing on the pre-press website arXiv.org, Dokuchaev follows on from previous theories that subatomic particles such as photons can have stable orbits inside the internal structure of some black holes.
A new "evil spirit" buck-toothed dinosaur recently unearthed in New Mexico represents an evolutionary link between the world's oldest known carnivorous dinosaurs and later meat-loving dino species from the Jurassic, according to new research.The dinosaur, named Daemonosaurus chauliodus (evil spirit buck-toothed reptile), is described in the latest issue of the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
Archaeologists have made the first three-dimensional topographical map of ancient monumental buildings long buried under centuries of jungle at the Maya site "Head of Stone" in Guatemala.The map puts into 3-D perspective the location and size of Head of Stone's many buildings and architectural patterns, which are typical of Maya sites: 70-foot-tall "triadic pyramid," an astronomical observatory, a ritual ball court, numerous plazas and also residential mounds that would have been the homes of elites and commoners, according to archaeologist Brigitte Kovacevich, Southern Methodist University, Dallas.
About 6,000 languages are spoken today worldwide. How this wealth of expression developed, however, largely remains a mystery. A group of researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, has now found that word-orders in languages from different language families evolve differently.The finding contradicts the common understanding that word-order develops in accordance with a set of universal rules, applicable to all languages. Researchers have concluded that languages do not primarily follow innate rules of language processing in the brain. Rather, sentence structure is determined by the historical context in which a language develops.
Documents revealing new UFO sightings have been made public on the FBI's official database.The previously classified records, which contain information of extraterrestrial encounters dating back 60 years, show eye-witness accounts of flying saucers and aliens.Nick Pope used to be a government UFO investigator. He tells BBC Radio 5 live's Tony Livesey about lights in the sky and conspiracy theories.
Beginning in late 2004, a flurry of massive, tsunami-spawning earthquakes have rocked the world, first slamming Indonesia, then Chile and most recently Japan. Temblors that size are rare indeed: only 7 quakes as large or larger than 8.8 -- the magnitude of last February's Chilean event -- have occurred since 1900.
Artifacts from Seattle's early history have been unearthed by Sound Transit contractors building the University Link light rail expansion."It's a neat feeling; as we're building something for the 21st, 22nd century, to run across this material from the late 1800's," said Sound Transit Spokesman Bruce Gray. "We are unearthing parts of our very first infrastructure as we build out the latest thing.
Dark matter, the mysterious substance that may account for nearly 25 percent of the universe, has so far evaded direct observation. But researchers from UCLA, Columbia University and other institutions participating in the international XENON collaboration say they are now closer than ever before.Their new results, announced April 14 at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy, where the XENON experiment is housed deep beneath a mountain 70 miles west of Rome, represent the highest-sensitivity search for dark matter yet, with background noise 100 times lower than competing efforts.
A Roman pendant of unmistakable shape was the subject of a Treasure Trove inquest in Norfolk, England. Made of gold and fashioned into the distinctive shape of a phallus, the pendant was found by metal detectorist Kevin Hillier earlier this year and reported through the Portable Antiquities Scheme who confirmed it as a treasure find.
A flurry of recent papers could lay to rest once and for all a longstanding mystery in astrophysics: the so-called "Pioneer anomaly," an as-yet-unexplained deceleration of NASA's Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 spacecraft in their wanderings beyond our solar system.NASA launched Pioneer 10 in 1972 and Pioneer 11 the following year, part of a mission to explore the asteroid belt, Jupiter, Saturn, and their respective moons.Those "flyby" missions were completed within a few years, but the plucky little Pioneers kept going, eventually traveling beyond our solar system, carrying messages for any aliens they might happen to encounter along the way. And all along scientists at the Jet Propulsion Lab have been tracking their progress through Doppler radio transmissions.
Beneath Yellowstone National Park lurks a partially molten plume rising from the Earth's mantle, fueling the park's famous geysers and hot springs, and causing the crust above to bulge and recede in response to its forces.Now researchers report that the source beneath the surface may be even more massive than previously thought. Using a new technique, they have created an image of the plume beneath Yellowstone showing the cyclone shape stretching at a 40-degree angle to the west at a depth of 200 miles for 400 miles east to west, as far as the new technique can reach.
Five thousand years of fascinating history lie beneath the sands of the Gaza Strip, from blinded biblical hero Samson to British general Allenby.The flat, sandy lands on the Mediterranean's southeastern shore have been ruled by Ancient Egyptians, Philistines, Romans, Byzantines and Crusaders.Alexander the Great besieged the city. Emperor Hadrian visited. Mongols raided Gaza, and 1,400 years ago Islamic armies invaded. Gaza has been part of the Ottoman Empire, a camp for Napoleon and a First World War battleground.But archaeology here does not flourish.
MANILA - A BLOOD-CURDLING scream echoes through the Roman Catholic chapel in Manila as Father Jose Francisco Syquia says a prayer of exorcism over a Satanic cult member believed to be possessed by the devil.'It's very painful,' the woman cries in an unearthly voice, her body contorting in an attempt to break free from the tight grasp of Father Syquia's assistants. After a few minutes she falls silent, her limp body exhausted.
The Catholic Church's exorcism ministry has throughout history tended to operate under a cloud of controversy and secrecy.But Pope Benedict XVI had recently issued fresh guidelines encouraging more exorcisms and for the church to be more open about the issue, he said.
While police continue their search for a serial killer stalking Long Island, a psychic is claiming to have accurately predicted where the body of one of the first victims would be found.From New York Post titled, "Psychic Nailed It:"A psychic eerily predicted where the victim of a suspected serial killer could be found -- nine months before cops dug up the corpse and that of three other young women on a Long Island beach, police sources said. In April, the clairvoyant, hired by the desperate family of Melissa Barthelemy, 24, of Buffalo, chillingly saw "her body buried in a shallow grave overlooking a body of water," the police source said. The psychic also said "there was a 'G' in a sign nearby." Last month, cops unearthed the skeletons of the victims, missing call girls, each wrapped in burlap bags on Long Island's Gilgo Beach.
Two Roman nails dating back 2,000 years, found in the burial cave of the Jewish high priest who handed Jesus over to the Romans, may be linked to the crucifixion, an Israeli filmmaker has claimed.The gnarled bits of iron, which measure around three inches (eight centimeters) each, were shown to reporters in Jerusalem on Tuesday at the premier of a television documentary series examining the question of whether they could have been the nails used to crucify Jesus.The series is to air from Wednesday in the United States, Canada and South America, and in Israel from May 15.
Using eyes made of a calcium carbonate crystal, a simple mollusk may have evolved enough vision to spot potential predators, scientists say.Daniel Speiser, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Ecology Evolution and Marine Biology at UC Santa Barbara, studied mollusks that he collected in the Florida Keys. His research of their vision, performed during his graduate studies at Duke University, resulted in a study published today by Current Biology.
Using human kidney cells and brain tissue from adult mice, Johns Hopkins scientists have uncovered the sequence of steps that makes normally stable DNA undergo the crucial chemical changes implicated in cancers, psychiatric disorders and neurodegenerative diseases. The process may also be involved in learning and memory, the researchers say.
Humpback whales have their own version of the hit single, according to a study reported online on April 14th in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication. At any given time within a population, male humpbacks all sing the same mating tune. But the pattern of the song changes over time, with the new and apparently catchy versions of the song spreading repeatedly across the ocean, almost always traveling from west to east.
An expensive wine may well have a full body, a delicate nose and good legs, but the odds are your brain will never know.A survey of hundreds of drinkers found that on average people could tell good wine from plonk no more often than if they had simply guessed.In the blind taste test, 578 people commented on a variety of red and white wines ranging from a £3.49 bottle of Claret to a £29.99 bottle of champagne. The researchers categorised inexpensive wines as costing £5 and less, while expensive bottles were £10 and more.
Embryos (and algae) on boardSpotted salamander embryos may rank as the first known vertebrates with full-fledged algal partners living inside their cells. Biologists had known that the embryos link up in some mutually beneficial way with an Oophilia algal species. Embryos develop more quickly and the algae grow better when the species entangle. Now, imaging and genetic analysis have detected algae hitchhiking in salamander egg capsules and actually living inside animal cells when the embryo starts developing, an international research team reports online April 4 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Africa the Birthplace of Human Language, Study SaysHuman language originated in Africa, according to a newly completed University of Auckland study. The study results parallel and complement recent genetic and phenotype studies that support an African origin for Homo sapiens, or modern humans, strengthening the notion that the development of language was a key innovation that enabled modern humans to spread across the globe. (Popular Archaeology.
A recent and ongoing excavation at the remains of an expansive Middle Bronze Age Canaanite palace in the western Galilee region of present-day Israel is opening a new window on the possible presence of ancient Minoans at an ancient Canaanite palace, revealing what may be the earliest known Western art found in the eastern Mediterranean.
It's just like a wimp to be a no-show when summoned for interrogation. That seems to be the result of an experiment to detect the Weakly Interacting Massive Particles, or WIMPs, thought to make up elusive dark matter.After 100 days of monitoring, a tub of cryogenically-chilled liquid xenon, buried deep in an Italian mountain, has shown no trace of the particles it is designed to catch. The result doesn't rule out the existence of WIMPs, but it does seem these particles are slipperier than previously hoped.
Anyone who remembers high-school physics knows that a fluctuating magnetic field can induce an electrical current. That's the principle behind transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), where an electromagnet is held over the head and pulsed rapidly. Depending on the frequency of the pulses, this can either enhance or suppress activity in neurons a few centimetres under the skull.
"Advanced civilizations may live safely inside the supermassive black holes in the galactic nuclei without being visible from the outside."Vyacheslav Dokuchaev at the Institute for Nuclear Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow.We love Russian astrophysicists at The Daily Galaxy: The discovery of stable orbits inside certain kinds of black hole implies that planets and perhaps even life could survive inside these weird objects, says Vyacheslav Dokuchaev at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow.
He stood 5-foot-8 and weighed 145 pounds. His face was gaunt and sunburned. Ticks, fleas and lice covered his body.Before battle, his lips would quiver and his body went numb. When the shooting started, some of his comrades burst into maniacal laughter. Others bit the throat and ears of their enemy. And some were shattered by shells so powerful that tufts of their hair stuck to rocks and trees.
BOSTON: A Silicon Valley start-up, founded by an Indian-American entrepreneur, plans to mine the moon and is in the process of building robotic rovers that will search the lunar surface for precious metals and rare metallic elements.Moon Express Inc or MoonEx, co-founded by Naveen Jain, is building the robotic rovers alongside scientists at Nasa's Ames Research Centre near San Jose, a report in the 'Los Angeles Times' said. While there is no guarantee that the moon is "flush" with these materials, MoonEx thinks it "may be a gold mine of so-called rare earth elements.
Do we live in a "galactic ecosystem"? Once we evolve into a true space-faring, interstellar race, will we bump into other alien species competing for the bounty of our galaxy's resources?Could such a competition define mankind as a Milky Way heavyweight? Or due to our willingness to "reach out" to extraterrestrials, might we get exterminated/assimilated/eaten faster than we can say "You were right, Stephen Hawking!"?Should we just stay quiet, in case our ET neighbors don't like us?.
Despite shifting into higher gear within the consumer's green conscience, hybrid vehicles are still tethered to the gas pump via a fuel-thirsty 100-year-old invention: the internal combustion engine.However, researchers at Michigan State University have built a prototype gasoline engine that requires no transmission, crankshaft, pistons, valves, fuel compression, cooling systems or fluids. Their so-called Wave Disk Generator could greatly improve the efficiency of gas-electric hybrid automobiles and potentially decrease auto emissions up to 90 percent when compared with conventional combustion engines.
John Glenn's biography reads like that of a superhero: first American to orbit Earth, then a United States senator and eventually the oldest person to go into space. So when PM ran into him at a recent gathering at Ohio State University (home of the John Glenn School of Public Affairs), we couldn't help but ask him his thoughts on the current space program and America's world standing.
New scheme would use only sunlight, air and water to supply energy for cars, laptops, GPS systems."At the California Institute of Technology, they're developing a way to turn sunlight and water into fuel for our cars."--President Barack Obama, Jan. 25, 2011The Sun is Earth's primary energy source and harnessing its abundant light is the Holy Grail of renewable energy.
Scientists at Harvard University have harnessed the prowess of fast-replicating bacterial viruses, also known as phages, to accelerate the evolution of biomolecules in the laboratory. The work, reported this week in the journal Nature, could ultimately allow the tailoring of custom pharmaceuticals and research tools from lab-grown proteins, nucleic acids, and other such compounds.
Battery technology hasn't kept pace with advancements in portable electronics, but the race is on to fix this. One revolutionary concept being pursued by a team of researchers in New Zealand involves creating "wearable energy harvesters" capable of converting movement from humans or found in nature into battery power.
New analysis of images taken by ESA's Venus Express orbiter has revealed surprising details about the remarkable, shape-shifting collar of clouds that swirls around the planet's South Pole (left). This fast-moving feature is all the more surprising since its centre of rotation is typically offset from the geographical pole.Several planets in the Solar System, including Earth, have been found to possess hurricane-like polar vortices, where clouds and winds rotate rapidly around the poles. Some of these take on strange shapes, such as the hexagonal structure on Saturn.
A new index has been developed to help conservationists better understand how close species are to extinction. The index, developed by a team of Australian researchers from the University of Adelaide and James Cook University, is called SAFE (Species Ability to Forestall Extinction).The SAFE index builds on previous studies into the minimum population sizes needed by species to survive in the wild. It measures how close species are to their minimum viable population size.
It's easy to imagine that black holes gobble up everything they encounter, consigning this stuff to eternal oblivion. Right?Well, not quite. Today, Vyacheslav Dokuchaev at the Institute for Nuclear Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow points out that certain black holes can have a complex internal structure. And that this structure ought to allow photons, particles and perhaps even planets to orbit the central singularity without ever getting sucked all the way in.
The previously classified records, which contain information of extraterrestrial encounters dating back 60 years, show eye-witness accounts of flying saucers and alien life forms.In one document, a special agent in charge of the FBI's Washington Field Office sent a letter to the FBI's director on 22 March 1950, claiming that an Air Force investigator recovered a spacecraft in a field near to Roswell, New Mexico.It reads: "Three so-called flying saucers had been recovered in New Mexico. They were described as being circular in shape with raised centers, approximately 50 feet in diameter.
A mysterious flashing light was captured on video over Japan as yet another earthquake hit the beleaguered country on Thursday, but what was it?The footage (video to the right) clearly shows a ball of light pulsing for around eight seconds on the horizon in Tokyo during the aftershock.It registered 7.1 on the Richter scale and struck 40 miles east of Sendai along the same fault line as last month's quake.We take a look at several theories as to what could have caused the bizarre phenomenon, from the plausible to the wacky, and get some insight from an expert seismologist.
Bolivia is set to pass the world's first laws granting all nature equal rights to humans. The Law of Mother Earth, now agreed by politicians and grassroots social groups, redefines the country's rich mineral deposits as "blessings" and is expected to lead to radical new conservation and social measures to reduce pollution and control industry.The country, which has been pilloried by the US and Britain in the UN climate talks for demanding steep carbon emission cuts, will establish 11 new rights for nature. They include: the right to life and to exist; the right to continue vital cycles and processes free from human alteration; the right to pure water and clean air; the right to balance; the right not to be polluted; and the right to not have cellular structure modified or genetically altered.
Many scientists are concerned that plant and animal species may face extinction due to global warming, but biologists at Washington University in St. Louis are trying to predict exactly what will happen to them. Which species will migrate? Which evolve? Which change their behavior? Which become extinct?
Galaxies often occur in groups. Our own Milky Way galaxy, for example, and its local neighborhood with about fifty galaxies are at the edge of the Virgo Cluster, a collection of somewhere between 1200 and 2000 galaxies. Galaxy clusters are the most massive objects in the universe, and their formation is thought to have begun from small spatial variations in the density of matter in the early universe. Clusters are therefore powerful probes of the growth of structure in the early universe, and their numbers and masses help astronomers test cosmological models including galaxy formation.
Yale University in the United States, and the Universidad Nacional de San Antonio Abad del Cusco (UNSAAC) in Peru, recently signed an agreement establishing the UNSAAC-Yale International Center for the Study of Machu Picchu and Inca Culture in Cusco.The Center will display, conserve and study the Machu Picchu archaeological collections curated by Yale at the Peabody Museum since their excavation by Hiram Bingham in 1912. Its establishment is central to the agreement reached last November between the Government of Peru and Yale to return the collections to Peru and house the material definitively in Cusco.
When it comes to picking a face out of a police lineup, would you guess that you would use some of the same processes a pigeon might use?If you said "yes," then you're right.A study published by two University of Iowa researchers in the March 31 issue of the Journal of Vision found that pigeons recognize a human face's identity and emotional expression in much the same way as people do.
People in different cultures make different assumptions about the people around them, according to an upcoming study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The researchers studied the brain waves of people with Caucasian and Asian backgrounds and found that cultural differences in how we think about other people are embedded deep in our minds. Cultural differences are evident very deep in the brain, challenging a commonsense notion that culture is skin deep.
Sometimes there are so many stories about endangered species that not all of them can be covered in depth by this blog. Here are some quick updates on stories previously covered in Extinction Countdown.Wolves still being targetedEven though conservation groups had proposed a compromise to keep gray wolves (Canis lupus) protected under the Endangered Species Act (ESA), lawmakers have continued to press ahead to lift those protections. The latest federal budget agreement may have avoided a government shutdown, but it added riders to remove wolves in the Northern Rockies from the ESA, circumventing the act and the science on which it is based.
TOKYO, April 12 (Reuters) - Japan raised the severity of its nuclear crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant to a level 7 from 5, putting it on par with the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986.The rating reflects the initial severity of the crisis not the current situation which has seen radiation levels drop dramatically."This is a preliminary assessment, and is subject to finalisation by the International Atomic Energy Agency," said an official at the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA), the government's nuclear watchdog, which made the announcement with the Nuclear Safety Commission.
April 12 (Reuters) - The operator of Japan's crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant said on Tuesday that they are concerned that the radiation leakage could eventually exceed that of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster."The radiation leak has not stopped completely and our concern is that it could eventually exceed Chernobyl," an official from operator Tokyo Electric and Power told reporters on Tuesday.Japan on Tuesday raised the severity of its nuclear crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant to a level 7 from 5, putting it on par with the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986.
A cursor on a computer screen can be controlled using thoughts about a range of vowel sounds, research has found.Brain signals have been translated into motion or even pictures before, but the current research showcases a nascent technique called electrocorticography.The approach uses sensors placed directly on the surface of the brain.The authors of the Journal of Neural Engineering paper say the technique will lead to better "brain-computer interfaces" for the disabled.
Studies have shown that neutron stars often exist as pairs on the fringes of galaxies, and that they collide frequently, sometimes involving a black hole, also a stellar remnant but one that is much more dense. Neutron stars are often as small as the island of Manhattan with a teaspoon of its material weighing several tons.A German supercomputer cluster at the Albert Einstein Institute in Germany models events that unfold in just 35 milliseconds -- three times faster than the blink of an eye, has finally solved the Gamma-ray burst mystery by showing that colliding neutron stars can produce magnetic structures which are responsible for the cosmic event, says a NASA study.
Marking a milestone for the Navy, the Office of Naval Research and its industry partner on April 6 successfully tested a solid-state, high-energy laser (HEL) from a surface ship, which disabled a small target vessel.The Navy and Northrop Grumman completed at-sea testing of the Maritime Laser Demonstrator (MLD), which validated the potential to provide advanced self-defense for surface ships and personnel by keeping small boat threats at a safe distance.
TURNING a vacuum into a superconductor could be as simple as zapping it with a super-powerful magnet.That's according to Maxim Chernodub of the University of Tours in France, who believes powerful magnetic fields could pluck charged particles out of the vacuum of space and set them flowing as a current that never encounters any resistance.This seemingly bizarre proposal is a consequence of the uncertainty principle of quantum theory, which says we can never be sure that a vacuum is truly empty. Instead, space is fizzing with "virtual" particles, which tend to disappear almost as soon as they form. In principle, however, they could stick around long enough to become real, if they could avoid adding energy to the universe's current tally - in accordance with the law of conservation of energy.
A SOFTWARE upgrade to existing radar systems will allow aircraft to map landscapes and buildings in 3D, and make it easier to spot part-hidden objects on the ground.The software augments synthetic aperture radar (SAR), a technique that has been around since the 1950s. Airborne SAR works by sending radar signals towards each spot on the ground from several different points along a plane's flight path. Signals bouncing back from a particular object on the ground are combined to create a 2D image as if it had been taken from a single viewpoint - and in more detail than would be possible from a single source.
LONDON: The Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) has published in its website a bizarre memo that proves aliens did land in New Mexico in 1947. The memo titled "Flying Saucers", written by FBI agent Guy Hottel, is published in the agency's new online resource 'The Vault'.Hottel, who was in charge of the Washington field office in 1950, reveals that a US air force investigator had stated that "three so-called flying saucers had been recovered in New Mexico".
Move over, newts and salamanders. The mouse may join you as the only animal that can re-grow their own severed limbs. Researchers are reporting that a simple chemical cocktail can coax mouse muscle fibers to become the kinds of cells found in the first stages of a regenerating limb.Their study, the first demonstration that mammal muscle can be turned into the biological raw material for a new limb, appears in the journal ACS Chemical Biology.
The mantle of Mars is possibly cooling by 30-40°C every billion years. Based on satellite observations of the composition of the planet's volcanic rocks, researchers from CNRS and the Université Paul Sabatier in Toulouse reached this conclusion after reconstructing for the first time the thermal evolution of the planet over the past 4 billion years. These values indicate that cooling is slower than on Earth (70-100°C per billion years) and highlight the specific nature of our planet, where thermal evolution is affected by plate tectonics. These findings were recently published in the journal Nature.
LAS CRUCES SUN NEWSNo, they did not find a Tyrannosaurus Rex tooth. But, the ongoing dig off of Highway 180 has revealed another find for the archaeology team from the Museum of New Mexico.Contrary to the ever-present rumor mill in Deming, the team did not find part of the "tyrant lizard," which was one of the largest carnivores to walk the Earth. The team has uncovered a number of tools and a structure believed to have been used by an ancient nomadic hunter/gatherer society.
A large gap in pre-history could signal that Britain underwent an economic downturn over 2,500 years ago.In history lessons, the three ages of pre-history - Stone Age, Bronze Age and Iron Age - seem to flow together without a gap.But there is a 300-year period in British history between around 800 BC and 500 BC where experts still struggle to explain what happened, where bronze is in decline and iron was not widely used."By 1000 BC the bronze axe had become almost a proto-currency," says historian and presenter Neil Oliver.
AS OUR ancestors moved north out of Africa and onto the doorstep to the rest of the world, they came across their long-lost cousins: the Neanderthals. As the popular story goes, the brutish hominins were simply no match for cultured, intelligent Homo sapiens and quickly went extinct.Maybe, but it's also possible that Neanderthals were simply unlucky and disappeared by chance, mathematicians propose.
The sand along the south-western coastal rim of Norway has drifted for more than 9000 years, triggered by sea-level changes and human activity, new research has found.Researchers in countries such as Denmark, the Netherlands and Poland study sand drift, but most of them focus on dunes along the coastline, not on the plains further inland.
Tennessee's Republican-dominated House of Representatives has overwhelmingly passed a bill that would protect teachers who want to challenge the theory of human evolution.Thursday's 70-28 passage of HB 368 was hailed by sponsor Rep. Bill Dunn, R-Knoxville, who said the proposal was designed to promote "critical thinking" in science classes.That's one way of seeing it. However, the Tennessee Science Teachers Association is on record describing the bill as "unnecessary, anti-scientific, and very likely unconstitutional." Although the document is worded so as not to promote any particular doctrine, the thrust of the proposed law would elevate creationist theories about human evolution to the same status accorded by most educators to Darwin's research.
There have been several messages broadcast into space or placed on board deep space probes intended for any attentive aliens out there. But we shouldn't be narcissistic when it comes to crafting interstellar greetings, says a group of researchers in a recent science paper. They argue that if we are, E.T. simply won't understand what we're trying to tell them.Take the aluminum postcard plaque aboard the star-bound Pioneer 10 and 11 probes (pictured above). The most dominant graphic is an engraving of man and woman, his hand upraised in a greeting gesture. This is hardly a universal gesture especially if the aliens who find it have no limbs. Or it could be taken as downright obscene in some corners of the Galaxy.
A galaxy's core is a busy place, crowded with stars swarming around an enormous black hole. When galaxies collide, it gets even messier as the two black holes spiral toward each other, merging to make an even bigger gravitational monster.Once it is created, the monster goes on a rampage. The merger kicks the black hole into surrounding stars. There it finds a hearty meal, shredding and swallowing stars at a rapid clip. According to new research by Nick Stone and Avi Loeb (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics), upcoming sky surveys might offer astronomers a way to catch a gorging black hole "in the act."
The giant tsunami that assaulted northern Japan's coast surprised just about everyone. But Masanobu Shishikura was expecting it. The thought that came to mind, he says, was "yappari," a Japanese word meaning roughly, "Sure enough, it happened.""It was the phenomenon just as I had envisioned it," says the 41-year-old geologist, who has now become the Japanese Cassandra.Dr. Shishikura's studies of ancient earth layers persuaded him that every 450 to 800 years, colliding plates in the Pacific triggered waves that devastated areas around the modern city of Sendai, in Miyagi Prefecture, as well as in Fukushima Prefecture.
The evolution and diversification of the more than 300,000 living species of flowering plants may have been "jump started" much earlier than previously calculated, a new study indicates. According to Claude dePamphilis, a professor of biology at Penn State University and the lead author of the study, which includes scientists at six universities, two major upheavals in the plant genome occurred hundreds of millions of years ago -- nearly 200 million years earlier than the events that other research groups had described. The research also indicates that these upheavals produced thousands of new genes that may have helped drive the evolutionary explosion that led to the rich diversity of present-day flowering plants.
One of the last things Yuri Gagarin did before making his pioneering voyage into space 50 years ago was make sure he had enough sausage to last him on the trip back home to Moscow.This tidbit was among more than 700 pages of once-secret material linked to the life and times of the world's first spaceman that were released by Russia ahead of the April 12 anniversary.
It is hoped a 1,700-year-old African skeleton unearthed in Warwickshire could provide data about the DNA history of later populations and the ethnic origin of modern Britons.The male skeleton, thought to be of a Roman soldier, was found earlier this year in a Roman cemetery in Stratford.Discovered by Archaeology Warwickshire, the skeleton is thought to belong to the county's earliest known African.Further tests aim to determine the man's place of birth.
Sewer construction workers made an unusual discovery on Des Moines' southeast side in January: remains of a human body archeologists believe could be as old as 7,000 years.The remains are thought to be from the Middle Archaic period and were found near a site where scientists believe early Iowans harvested, cooked and consumed clams thousands of years ago.Ancient ash and charcoal remains, apparent signs of a Stone Age clambake, also were uncovered.
Archaeologists surveying the ground at Liverpool Street station in preparation for Crossrail tunnelling have unearthed hundreds of skeletons on the site of a historic mental health hospital.Opened in 1247, St Bethlehem hospital was the first institution dedicated to mental health patients and is believed to have led to the coining of the word "bedlam".The site now lies beneath what will be Liverpool Street's new Crossrail ticket hall.
The remarkable website 360 Cities brings you the world through the largest and fastest-growing collection of immersive, panoramic images on the web.Below are some of the ancient sites and monuments that are captured in this stunning format. You can use Shift and Ctrl to zoom in and out and the mouse to move around. View thousands more here at 360 Cities.
Kamila Remisova Vesinova and her team of researchers from the Czech Archeological Society believe they have unearthed the remains of an early homosexual man. The remains date from around 2900-2500 B.C., on the outskirts of Prague.That claim stems from the fact the 5,000-year old skeleton was buried in a manner reserved for women in the Corded Ware culture: its head was pointed east rather than west, and its remains were surrounded by domestic jugs rather than by hammers, flint knives and weapons that typically accompany male remains.
The people of the Indus valley seem to have exported many more goods than they seem to have imported. Moreover, imported items like silver (found mainly in Harappa and Mohenjodaro) did not seem to have been distributed beyond the main cities suggesting that there was little demand for the goods in the smaller centres. Does this suggest that, if, as has been suggested, the Indus people took the initiative for the trade, this was a centralised effort that profited only the cities?.
By studying fossilized mollusks from some 3.5 million years ago, UCLA geoscientists and colleagues have been able to construct an ancient climate record that holds clues about the long-term effects of Earth's current levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, a key contributor to global climate change.Two novel geochemical techniques used to determine the temperature at which the mollusk shells were formed suggest that summertime Arctic temperatures during the early Pliocene epoch (3.5 million to 4 million years ago) may have been a staggering 18 to 28 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than today. And these ancient fossils, harvested from deep within the Arctic Circle, may have once lived in an environment in which the polar ice cap melted completely during the summer months.
The long-held theory that early human ancestors in East Asia crafted their tools from bamboo and wood is much more complicated than originally conceived, according to a new study. Research until now has failed to address a fundamental question: Is it even possible to make complex bamboo tools with simple stone tools?Now an experimental archaeological study -- in which a modern-day flint knapper replicated the crafting of bamboo knives -- confirms that it is possible to make a variety of bamboo tools with the simplest stone tools.
An excavation site in Canterbury, south England, has yielded an amazing amount of material, ranging from a 400,000 year old elephant tusk, to items from the more recent past.The site lies within an important suburb of the Roman, Anglo-Saxon and medieval city and has been intensively used for the past 2000 years.
Contagious yawning is not just a marker of sleepiness or boredom. For chimpanzees, it may actually be a sign of a social connection between individuals.New research at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, Emory University, may help scientists understand empathy, the mechanism thought to underlie contagious yawning, in both chimpanzees and humans. The research also may help show how social biases strengthen or weaken empathy.
Five years into Mexico's U.S.-backed war on drug trafficking, the sale of narcotics continues to be a one of Mexico's most profitable industries -- earning violent cartels an estimated $30 billion each year, or roughly three to four percent of Mexico's GDP. The country is awash in bloodshed. Since Mexican President Felipe Calderón deployed his military to take on drug cartels in 2006, some 35,000 Mexicans have lost their lives. And now relations between the U.S. and Mexico are showing strain. The U.S. Ambassador to Mexico resigned earlier this month after leaked confidential cables revealed him questioning the competency of the Mexican effortMaking pot legal, Castañeda says, would kneecap the cartels, which make their profit from the very illegality of the drug they are selling. Drug users are willing to pay a premium for what they can't easily get; Making pot legal would drop prices and put traffickers out of business. Not only that, says Castañeda, but an above-board marijuana trade would employ thousands of workers, and allow the Mexican government to collect much-needed tax revenues.
Protests in more than 20 Mexican cities against drug-related violence have been interrupted by news of the discovery of 59 bodies.The bodies were found in Tamaulipas state by police investigating the abduction of bus passengers.The area is a hotspot in the violence related to drug trafficking that is ravaging parts of Mexico.The violence was condemned by protesters in the main square in Mexico City, who chanted: "No more blood!"Some called for President Felipe Calderon to resign, saying his strategy had exacerbated the bloodshed.About 35,000 Mexicans have died in drug-related violence since the president began deploying the army to fight the cartels in December 2006.
Astronomers are tracking unusual, extremely bright blasts of radiation coming from the center of a galaxy 3.8 billion light-years from Earth.Typically, a burst as powerful as the one seen in the Draco constellation marks the death throes of a massive star, but that's usually a one-time event. So far, the source has brightened four times since Tuesday.The first sign of the event was on March 28 when the Swift gamma-ray detector picked up a burst. Automated messages went out to astronomers' cell phones and they quickly mobilized to get a better fix on the blast's location.
The woman believed to have inspired Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa may be exhumed in a bid to recreate her face, Italian researchers announced this week.Most scholars believe that the Mona Lisa, known as La Gioconda in Italian or La Joconde in French, is the portrait of Lisa Gherardini, a member of a minor noble family of rural origins who married the wealthy merchant Francesco del Giocondo."Her life is no longer a mystery," said Giuseppe Pallanti, who carried out extensive research on the Renaissance woman.
Halfway up Salt Mountain in Utah, petroglyphs on a limestone rock bear witness to an obscure twist of history: a Hawaiian Mormon settlement that flourished briefly more than a century ago.A research team from New York has made the first effort to try to tease out possible meanings from this rock art, looking for themes from both Hawaiian petroglyphs and the traditions of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.Some of the images, including lizards and turtles, could have evoked the sense that ancestors were still watching over these transplanted Hawaiians, according to Benjamin Pykles, an anthropology professor at the State University of New York at Potsdam.
NASA and co-researchers from the United States, South Korea and Japan have found a new mineral named "Wassonite" in one of the most historically significant meteorites recovered in Antarctica in December 1969.NASA and co-researchers from the United States, South Korea and Japan have found a new mineral named "Wassonite" in one of the most historically significant meteorites recovered in Antarctica in December 1969.
Meditation produces powerful pain-relieving effects in the brain, according to new research published in the April 6 edition of the Journal of Neuroscience."This is the first study to show that only a little over an hour of meditation training can dramatically reduce both the experience of pain and pain-related brain activation," said Fadel Zeidan, Ph.D., lead author of the study and post-doctoral research fellow at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center.
Scientists from the Morgridge Institute for Research, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the University of California and the WiCell Research Institute moved gene therapy one step closer to clinical reality by determining that the process of correcting a genetic defect does not substantially increase the number of potentially cancer-causing mutations in induced pluripotent stem cells.
California-based SpaceX has announced plans for a new rocket that it says will be the most powerful in the world.Headed by PayPal co-founder Elon Musk, SpaceX has already successfully flown two other rockets, the Falcon 1 and Falcon 9. It has a NASA contract to deliver cargo to the International Space Station using the Falcon 9 and Dragon space capsule.Today Musk announced plans for a much more powerful rocket called the Falcon
Heavy in a press briefing in Washington DC.
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Virgin Group founder Richard Branson, known for such exploits as trying to balloon around the world, said on Tuesday he planned to explore the deepest parts of the world's oceans with a jet-like submarine.The 18-foot vessel is capable of descents more than 36,000 feet below the surface, said Branson at a news conference in Newport Beach, California.His project, called Virgin Oceanic, will undertake five dives over two years. The first is set for later this year, when the team plans to explore the Pacific Ocean's Mariana Trench at a depth of 36,000 feet.
Murdoch University researchers have used new DNA sequencing techniques to help give them a better understanding of how cockatoo species have evolved and how they fit together in a family tree.Nicole White, who carried out the research, said some of the findings were surprising. For example, some species of cockatoo which look quite different were actually closely related.
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Materials scientists at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and SiEnergy Systems LLC have demonstrated the first macro-scale thin-film solid-oxide fuel cell (SOFC).While SOFCs have previously worked at the micro-scale, this is the first time any research group has overcome the structural challenges of scaling the technology up to a practical size with a proportionally higher power output.
That familiar odor wafting from San Francisco street corners, storefronts, and the neighborhood growhouse? It's the smell of legality. Medical cannabis is the law of the land in California, 14 other states, and the District of Columbia. Yet, as many marijuana users will tell you, protection under state law hasn't guaranteed protection under federal law at all.It was more obvious under the George W. Bush administration, which pledged to "ignore" state medical marijuana laws and go after marijuana users. For eight years, the federal government "subverted" the will of the states, according to the ACLU, and in the process ignored the Constitution's guarantees of state sovereignty, as many a pot user has tried to argue in court.So when Barack Obama's new administration delivered a message on medical marijuana in February 2009, it was heard loud and clear: The federal government was getting out of the business of busting pot in California and other states where voters had approved medicinal application of the plant. Obama the candidate promised as much during the campaign, and now the new attorney general, Eric Holder, had made it so by issuing guidelines protecting those following state law. Federal policy on medical marijuana had changed.
A 6.5 magnitude earthquake was felt across Mexico this morning. It happened a little more than hour before the 7.1 earthquake hit Japan. Luckily, the Mexican earthquake happened very deep underground, so no damage has been reported.
A 7.1 magnitude earthquake has stuck off the north-eastern coast of Japan, triggering a tsunami alert which was later cancelled.The warning covered the same area where thousands of lives were lost last month after a magnitude 9.0 quake and tsunami which damaged reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.Officials say Thursday's quake, which happened late at night local time, hit 25 miles under water off the coast of Miyagi prefecture.The strongest aftershock since the day of the 9.0 magnitude megaquake was a fresh blow to victims of that 11 March quake and subsequent tsunami that killed some 25,000 people, tore apart hundreds of thousands of homes.
A pill to enhance moral behaviour, a treatment for racist thoughts, a therapy to increase your empathy for people in other countries - these may sound like the stuff of science fiction but with medicine getting closer to altering our moral state, society should be preparing for the consequences, according to a book that reviews scientific developments in the field.
Biologists recently fished out two new species of freshwater stingray from a river in the Amazon rainforest near Iquitos, Peru. The animals have been put into a new genus - the first time this has been done for stingrays since 1987. At first glance the creatures look like nothing so much as freckled pancakes with feeble tails. But X-rays revealed an elaborate skeleton in which hundreds of slivers of cartilage fan out radially to support the fish's floppy disc-shaped body.
The chemical which summons stem cells from bone marrow to the site of a wound has been discovered by scientists in the UK and Japan.The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, identified the distress signal - HMGB1.The authors believe it can be used to put "a megaphone in the system" to improve the treatment of injuries such as burns and leg ulcers.Another UK expert said the research had potential.Bone marrow was thought to play a role in repairing damaged skin, but the exact process was unknown.
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