Newsdesk Archive
The near-supersonic rail system known as hyperloop has passed another key milestone on its path to become reality, the US startup Hyperloop One said Wednesday.
Hyperloop One, which is developing a system theorized by entrepreneur Elon Musk, said that a test last week of a full hyperloop system at its private facility in the desert near Las Vegas was a success, hitting record speeds.
To do this, researchers have been feeding the computer pairs of photos and their corresponding recipes — about 800,000 of them. The AI network, called Recipe 1M, chews on all of that for a while, learning patterns and connections between the ingredients in the recipes and the photos of food.
What’s in your water? If it’s pollutant BPA, there might soon be a quick fix for that. Bisphenol A, or BPA, is found in everything from DVDs to credit card receipts to dental fillings, and has been linked to a range of health problems in humans, including cardiovascular disease and liver enzyme abnormalities. A new technique claims to be able to remove 99 per cent of the BPA from water in just 30 minutes.
Using a powerful gene-editing technique, scientists have rid human embryos of a mutation responsible for an inherited form of heart disease that’s often deadly to healthy young athletes and adults in their prime.
The experiment marks the first time that scientists have altered the human genome to erase a disease-causing mutation not only from the DNA of the primary subject but from the genes of his or her progeny as well.
An unspoken frustration for evolutionary biologists over the past 100 years, says Craig Albertson at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, is that genetics can only account for a small percentage of variation in the physical traits of organisms. Now he reports experimental results on how another factor, a "bizarre behavior" that is part of early cichlid fish larvae's developmental environment, influences later variation in their craniofacial bones.
An Australian trapdoor spider, which usually moves no further than a couple of metres from where it was hatched, must have travelled to Australia over the Indian Ocean from South Africa, University of Adelaide research has shown.
Caterpillars are being killed by a bug which turns them into "exploding zombies", a wildlife expert has said.
The baculovirus drives caterpillars on a "death march" to the top of plants, then when it dies the bug bursts out to seek other victims.
Starfish have a superpower, one that seem almost magical—they can regenerate entire limbs. If one of their five appendages becomes stricken with an incurable disease, they just drop it off and grow a new one. No problem.
That is, until it became a problem—a very big problem. In 2013 and 2014, scientists started noticing that west coast starfish weren't their usual regenerative selves. Instead, they were just turning to mush.
Eating jellyfish has been part of Asian cuisine for more than a millennium, but a new method that turns the creatures into crisps could help make it a popular habit elsewhere.
UNITED NATIONS — More than half of the world’s oceans belong to no one, which often makes their riches ripe for plunder.
Now, countries around the world have taken the first step to protect the precious resources of the high seas.
Scientists in Western Australia have observed large groups of dolphins engaging in what they described as 'homosexual behaviour' after the mating season finishes.
Humanity will have used up its allowance of planetary resources such as water, soil, and clean air for all of 2017 by Wednesday, a report said.
Earth Overshoot Day will arrive on August 2 this year, according to environmental groups WWF and Global Footprint Network. This is a day earlier than in 2016.
Forty-six sites containing artifacts, mainly stone tools, have been discovered beside the remains of ancient lakes in the western Nefud desert in Saudi Arabia.
Some of the tools, left by early humans, date to the Lower Paleolithic period, from 1.8 million to 250,000 years ago, the researchers said in a new study describing the findings.
A Norwegian jazz musician and citizen scientist, Jon Larsen has figured out how to do something the experts thought was impossible—find specks of cosmic dust, called micrometeorites, amid the detritus of human habitation. Scientists look for these particles, which rain down constantly on Earth, in Antarctica and other pristine locations, but Larsen thought there should be a way to collect them in more populated places.
Some of the brightest objects in the Universe — quasars — are vanishing rapidly. Astronomers now think that they understand this mysterious behaviour1, 2, and the answer could help them to explain how galaxies such as the Milky Way evolve.
When it comes to comets making direct hits on our home planet, no news is good news. Today isn’t one of those days. A new NASA study of the Oort cloud where most of our solar system’s comets are born found that these frozen space rocks are much bigger than expected and up to seven times more likely to hit Earth than previously thought. Is it time to tell Elon Musk to hurry up with that Mars ship?
New research concludes Earth’s climate is unusual in its ability to produce liquid water, a key ingredient for life.
The global meat industry, already implicated in driving global warming and deforestation, has now been blamed for fueling what is expected to be the worst “dead zone” on record in the Gulf of Mexico.
Toddlers who are severely punished are more likely to be aggressive at 10 to 11 years old, a study found.
Such children are also less likely to show positive behaviors, such as helping others, the research adds.
Related: Exposure to violence and obesity linked in teens
Related: High-fat diet in pregnancy can cause mental health problems in offspring
Related: Programs that teach emotional intelligence in schools have lasting impact
The study, published in the journal Psychopharmacology on Monday, found that regular marijuana users were significantly better at keeping their cool under stressful situations compared to those who did not use marijuana.
Related: Legalise cannabis as treatment of last resort for MS, says charity
Related: Scientists Still Seek A Reliable DUI Test For Marijuana
The key to recalling memories from the void of Alzheimer's disease may be to use lasers to activate certain neurons in the brain. If this research undertaken on mice could be applied to humans, it could help the millions suffering from the disease.
Related: ‘Rust’ could be the real Alzheimer’s trigger
Analysis of chimp brains reveals protein plaques and tangles that signal brain disease in humans, but whether the animals can develop dementia is unclear.
Honey bees that consistently fail to respond to obvious social cues share something fundamental with autistic humans, researchers report in a new study. Genes most closely associated with autism spectrum disorders in humans are regulated differently in unresponsive honey bees than in their more responsive nest mates, the study found.
Dietary restriction -- the reduction of a specific nutrient or total dietary intake without triggering malnutrition -- increases longevity and improves learning, but are these processes regulated separately? A new study indicates that the answer is 'yes.'
The camouflage and concealment strategies of various animal species have been widely studied, but scientists from Exeter and Cambridge universities have discovered that individual wild birds adjust their choices of where to nest based on their specific patterns and colours.
Related: Wild Rabbits Ride Sheep to Escape Floods
After fears the Loch Ness Monster had "disappeared" last winter, a new sighting in May 2017 was celebrated by its enthusiasts. The search for monsters and mythical creatures (or "cryptids") such as Nessie, the Yeti or Bigfoot is known as "cryptozoology".
On the face of it, cryptozoology has little in common with mainstream conservation.
Related: “This Thing Was Definitely Not Human”
Every so often, given the proper conditions, a small and roughly spherical piece of the atmosphere around us will briefly catch fire. As they are best viewed late into the night and have no obvious natural explanation, it’s perhaps no wonder they’ve inspired a rich mythology.
Related: Orbs Over English Park Stir Talk of Tree Spirits
Related: Multiple sightings of bizarre 'UFO' are captured on video in Cornwall
Related: Mystery surrounds series of loud bangs heard in Birmingham city centre
The sun's core rotates nearly four times faster than the sun's surface, according to new findings by an international team of astronomers. Scientists had assumed the core was rotating like a merry-go-round at about the same speed as the surfa
During the total solar eclipse on Aug. 21, skywatchers will direct most of their attention to the sun, but don't forget about the moon: Its slow progress away from Earth means these celestial events won't keep happening forever.
Venus may have been all wet early on.
New simulations suggest that if the now-hellish planet had just the right amount of cloud cover, carbon dioxide and water to start with, Venus could have formed an ocean.
For a few months in the fall of 1957, citizens of Earth could look up and see the first artificial star. It shone as bright as Spica, but moved across the sky at a much faster clip. Lots of people thought they were seeing Sputnik—Russia’s antennaed, spherical satellite, and the first thing humans had flung into orbit. But it wasn’t: It was the body of the rocket that bore Sputnik to space—and Earth’s first piece of space junk.
Artificial skin with post-human sensing capabilities, and a better understanding of skin tissue, could pave the way for robots that can feel, smart-transplants and even cyborgs.
In the EU, residents waste an estimated 88 million tonnes of food every year, according to the latest estimates. That is roughly 170 kilogrammes per person. But what if scientists could turn some of that waste into useful products?
Related: Fig Leaves Are Out. What to Wear to Be Kind to the Planet?
The Colorado city will rely on solar energy, a king-sized lithium-ion battery, and energy efficiency schemes
The city, called Peña Station Next, is located at the last stop of Denver's newly completed rail line to its airport.
Arctic sea ice is not merely a passive responder to the climate changes occurring around the world, according to new research. Scientists say the ongoing Arctic ice loss can play an active role in altering one of the planet's largest water circulation systems: the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC).
There is only a 5% chance that the Earth will avoid warming by at least 2C come the end of the century, according to new research that paints a sobering picture of the international effort to stem dangerous climate change.
The Department of Homeland Security said on Tuesday that it would use its authority to exempt the agency from having to comply with environmental and other laws in its efforts to build border walls and access roads in the San Diego area.
All living flowers ultimately derive from a single ancestor that lived about 140 million years ago, a study suggests.
Scientists combined models of flower evolution with the largest data set of features from living flowers ever assembled.
A fort that is more than 1,000 years old, dating back to the time of Alfred the Great, has been unearthed in Scotland, more than 200 years after it was thought to have been completely destroyed.
King Tutankhamun, the pharaoh who ruled Egypt more than 3,300 years ago, slept on the forerunner of our modern camping bed, according to a study presented at the latest international conference on the boy king in Cairo.
A quarter of a century ago, researchers Robert Schoch and Robert Bauval were at the centre of two controversial debates in Egyptology: Schoch, with his geological redating of the Great Sphinx to a period earlier than its supposed builder, the Pharaoh Khafre; and Bauval, with his 'Orion Correlation Theory' that suggested the three famous pyramids of Giza were laid out to mimic the stars in the 'belt' of the constellation Orion.
An elaborately carved globe made from joining the lower halves of two ostrich eggs is the oldest known depiction of the New World. The 16th century globe had become lost to the pages of history but resurfaced a few years ago at a London map fair, when it was spotted by an anonymous map collector.
Archaeologists have unearthed a large, centuries-old statue that is believed to have once stood guard over an ancient hospital at Cambodia’s famed Angkor temple complex.
Alt: The six foot tall guardian of Angkor Wat: Archaeologists unearth a giant buried statue at the site of an ancient hospital at the temple complex
Imagine you're at work and suddenly, a cheetah pokes its head through your window.
That's about what Richard McCourt, PhD, and his colleagues dealt with when they came across Lychnothamnus barbatus, a large green alga that was thought to have died in the Western Hemisphere long before the cheetahs here died out.
100,000 years ago, giant sloths, wombats and cave hyenas roamed the world. What drove them all extinct?
Turn the clock back 1.8 million years, and the world was full of fantastic beasts: In North America, lions, dire wolves and giant sloths prowled the land
Evolution doesn’t have to take millions of years. New research shows that a type of lizard living on man-made islands in Brazil has developed a larger head than its mainland cousins in a period of only 15 years.
Genetic analyses of tardigrades has revealed some of the secrets of their incredible survival abilities.
These tiny creatures, sometimes called water bears, can survive radiation, freezing, extreme dehydration and even the vacuum of space.
A study by a researcher in the Syracuse University College of Arts and Sciences offers new clues to what may have triggered the world's most catastrophic extinction, nearly 252 million years ago.
The biophysicist Jeremy England made waves in 2013 with a new theory that cast the origin of life as an inevitable outcome of thermodynamics. His equations suggested that under certain conditions, groups of atoms will naturally restructure themselves so as to burn more and more energy, facilitating the incessant dispersal of energy and the rise of “entropy” or disorder in the universe.
The charred remains of 2,500-year-old honeycombs, as well as other beekeeping artifacts, have been discovered in an Etruscan workshop in northern Italy.
The findings included the remains of a unique grapevine honey produced by traveling beekeepers along rivers, according to a new study.
The Eternal City’s water utility, Acea, had proposed cutting off water to 1.5 million residents for eight hours a day starting on Monday. The city avoided that fate on Friday when the central government allowed the city to keep drawing from a drought-ravaged lake.
The remains of a 1.5-year-old boy with a pronounced elongation of the skull have been found by archaeologists at a 2,000-year-old burial site in Crimea. Russian archaeologists say that the skull deformation indicates that this boy was marked out to be a warrior.
Beginning runners worry about having the perfect stride, but a new study suggests that sticking with the way you naturally run — even if you’re inexperienced — is the most efficient option.
Related: We Evolved to Run—But We're Doing It All Wrong - "Thinking about running as a slow, meditative practice provides more benefits than viewing it as a sport, author says."
News last week that sperm counts in western men have halved confirmed what experts already knew. The real problem is that no one knows why
Facial recognition technology could mean that queuing to buy a train ticket and waiting to go through the barriers may be a thing of the past.
The cameras use high speed infrared lights to capture the shape and texture of the face in detail never seen before - even spotting small blemishes and wrinkles.
New York City is in the middle of a transportation nervous breakdown. Never before have city dwellers had so many options for getting around — subway, bus, bike, ferry, taxi, and every sharing app under the sun — and never have commutes been so hellacious
Desktop Metal – remember the name. This Massachussetts company is preparing to turn manufacturing on its head, with a 3D metal printing system that's so much faster, safer and cheaper than existing systems that it's going to compete with traditional mass manufacturing processes.
Erik Gatenholm first saw a 3D bioprinter in early 2015. His father, Paul, a professor in chemistry and biopolymer technology at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, had bought one for his department. It cost somewhere in the region of $200,000. “My father was like, ‘This thing can print human organs,’” Gatenholm recalls, still awestruck. “I said, ‘Bullshit!’ Then it printed a little piece of cartilage.
An artificial intelligence system being developed at Facebook has created its own language. It developed a system of code words to make communication more efficient. Researchers shut the system down when they realized the AI was no longer using English.
Alt: Stopping a Skynet scenario before it begins: Facebook kills AI that invented its own language because English was slow
There’s no doubt we love our digital devices at all hours, including after the sun goes down. Who hasn’t snuggled up with a smart phone, tablet or watched their flat screen TV from the comfort of bed? A new study by researchers at the University of Houston College of Optometry, published in Ophthalmic & Physiological Optics, found that blue light emitted from those devices could contribute to the high prevalence of reported sleep dysfunction.
The thought of a cupcake, skillfully frosted with fluffy vanilla icing, may put a smile on your face, but research suggests that, in the long term, a sweet tooth may turn that smile into a frown – but not for the reasons you think.
A number of so-called scientific journals have accepted a Star Wars-themed spoof paper. The manuscript is an absurd mess of factual errors, plagiarism and movie quotes. I know because I wrote it.
"It’s just a reminder that at some “peer reviewed” journals, there really is no meaningful peer review at all."
Alt: A Neuroscientist Just Tricked 4 Dodgy Journals Into Accepting a Fake Paper on 'Midi-Chlorians'
For a select few who have stood on the brink of clinical death, the process of dying is often accompanied by feelings of peace, bright lights, and a sense of disconnection with the body.
A new study links abnormalities in the inner ear to a predisposition for such sensations.
Out-of-body experience can vary person to person, but they often involve the sense of floating above one’s actual body and looking down.
Talking to yourself in the third person can help you keep your emotions in check, based on new research that aims to find simple and effective ways to reduce the impact of stress and other negative feelings.
New research has revealed a group of neurons that are active in anxious brains of monkeys when they are anticipating possible negative outcomes. This work opens up possibilities for studying the roots of anxiety and could someday lead to new treatments.
Does wearing makeup affect academic performance? The new study investigates the "Lipstick Effect" among college students.
Female students wearing makeup get higher grades than those not wearing makeup, a new study has found.
Consuming alcohol three or four days a week was associated with a reduced risk of developing diabetes – a 27% reduction in men and a 32% reduction in women – compared with abstaining, scientists found.
Government study says £80m worth is discarded every year – sometimes simply because of a minor bruise or black mark
Industrial fishing fleets dump nearly 10 million tonnes of good fish back into the ocean every year, according to new research.
Are you good with faces? So is the Japanese rice fish – at least, it is if the faces are the right way up. Just like humans, the tiny fish has no problem recognising faces orientated the usual way, but, again like us, it struggles when they are inverted. The finding indicates that the fish may have developed a unique brain pathway for face recognition, just as humans have.
In Death Valley, one of the world's most inhospitable landscapes, researchers have discovered jellyfish fossils from the oldest known mass animal stranding.
The findings suggest that jellyfish behaved in a similar way then compared to now, but that the environmental conditions at the time were very different.
Using new methods to analyze stone projectile points crafted by North America's earliest human inhabitants, Smithsonian scientists have found that these tools show evidence of a shift toward more experimentation in their production beginning about 12,500 years ago, following hundreds of years of consistent stone-tool production created using uniform techniques.
The oral traditions of Native Americans are historical content that most academics refuse to reference, even in the face of startlingly accurate perceptions of early earth conditions and human occupation. This is most apparent from an anthropological perspective when we seek to understand the great antiquity of the Maya, one of the most misunderstood and thought-provoking cultures from Central America.
Scientists are attempting to unlock the secrets of the "lost continent" of Zealandia, setting sail Friday to investigate the huge underwater landmass east of Australia that has never been properly studied.
Zealandia, which is mostly submerged beneath the South Pacific, was once part of the Gondwana super-continent but broke away some 75 million years ago.
Separate archaeological teams working at the vast ancient site of Shiloh city on the West Bank are confident they have made finds consistent with the area being the location of an ancient tabernacle described in the Bible as being a long-term holding place for the Ark of the Covenant.
The ancient Canaanites were not wiped out, as the Bible suggests, but went on to become modern-day Lebanese, a study has found.
Living between 3,000 and 4,000 years ago, the holy text suggests things did not end well for the people living in the Middle East.
Alt: Ancient DNA offers clues to the Canaanites’ fate
Devon farmers who made their home in the same remote location for 1,200 years had a taste for exotic imported food and drink, archaeologists have found.
There was a thriving settlement in Ipplepen, South Devon, for hundreds of years longer than previously thought, excavations have shown.
In the year A.D. 9, a combined force of deeply independent Germanic tribes led by the Roman-trained chieftain Arminius ambushed and destroyed three legions of elite Roman soldiers over the course of three days.
You could call it reading behind the lines. When medieval scribes sat down to preserve the literature and records of their day, they often wrote on parchment – a paper-like material made from animal skins. What they didn’t know was that the parchment holds DNA that can provide information about medieval life – and might even hold clues on how to preserve the ancient documents more effectively.
Telling patients to stop taking antibiotics when they feel better may be preferable to instructing them to finish the course, according to a group of experts who argue that the rule long embedded in the minds of doctors and the public is wrong and should be overturned.
I can identify the exact moment when my relationship with birthday cake changed forever, and it was last week, when I read a study titled “Bacterial Transfer Associated with Blowing Out Candles on a Birthday Cake.”
Related: Why you should always buy a present for yourself when choosing gifts for others
Archaeological records suggest we’ve been close with our pets for some time: About 10,000 years ago we started to co-habitate with cats drawn to the well-fed rodents scurrying around our farms. In ancient Egypt millions of pet dogs were buried in elaborate tombs adorned with expensive gifts and inscriptions.
Using the flatworm's ability to survive and even regrow its head after decapitation, researchers have shown the animal will shy away from a light source even when it no longer has eyes.
An important molecule that can produce life and organic material has been found elsewhere in our solar system.
Scientists have been shocked to find that the Cassini spacecraft spotted the chemicals, central to prebiotic chemistry, on Saturn's moon Titan.
It’s a moonshot. A signal has been spotted that might be the first moon detected outside our solar system, and researchers are gearing up to use the Hubble Space Telescope to confirm it.
In a first-of-its-kind analysis, Northwestern University astrophysicists have discovered that, contrary to previously standard lore, up to half of the matter in our Milky Way galaxy may come from distant galaxies. As a result, each one of us may be made in part from extragalactic matter.
One of the brightest gamma-ray bursts ever observed briefly released as much energy as the sun will emit over its lifetime, directing a narrow beam of gamma rays toward Earth by chance.
Half of the atoms making up everything around you are intergalactic interlopers. Large galaxies like our Milky Way amassed half their matter from neighbouring star clusters up to a million light years away, according to a new simulation.
“We did not realise how much of the mass in today’s Milky Way-like galaxies was actually ‘stolen’ from the winds of other galaxies,” says corresponding author Claude-André Faucher-Giguère at Northwestern University in Illinois
Dark matter is the aptly named unseen material that makes up the bulk of matter in our universe. But what dark matter is made of is a matter of debate.
Scientists have never directly detected dark matter. But over decades, they have proposed a variety of theories about what type of material—from new particles to primordial black holes—could comprise dark matter and explain its many effects on normal matter.
Breakthrough Starshot has taken the first step towards their grand plans to one day send spacecraft to Alpha Centauri. On June 23, the $100 million initiative to send light-propelled spacecraft to our nearest star sent the tiniest-ever satellites into orbit.
An Indian rocket carried six of these miniature satellites, called Sprites, into space.
Forty-eight years ago today, Neil Armstrong made history as the first human to step foot on the moon, followed minutes later by pilot ‘Buzz’ Aldrin.
As space agencies and private companies around the world once again turn their sights to the moon, experts warn that the precious artifacts they bring back must be protected, or risk setting a ‘dangerous precedent for potential moon scavengers.’
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich Egyptologist Julia Budka is studying the impact of intercultural contacts in Ancient Egypt. Her excavations in Sudan have uncovered a tomb dating to around 1450 BC on the island of Sai in the Nile.
A Bronze Age wooden container found in an ice patch at 2,650m in the Swiss Alps could help archaeologists shed new light on the spread and exploitation of cereal grains following a chance discovery.
The existence of a prehistoric New Zealand swan has long been contentious. Legends from the Moriori people tell of the Po?wa – a large swan-like creature. But some palaeontologists have suggested this may refer to the Australian black swan (Cygnus atratus), which occasionally flies across the Tasman Sea.
He's Australian, around half a centimeter long, fairly nondescript, 300 million years old -- and he's currently causing astonishment among both entomologists and palaeontologists. The discovery of a beetle from the late Permian period is throwing a completely new light on the earliest developments in this group of insects.
The most catastrophic mass extinction on Earth took place about 252 million years ago – at the boundary between the Permian and Triassic geological periods. Up to 90 percent of the marine species of that time were annihilated.
It’s shaking so much, it could be renamed Jellystone. Since 12 June, about 1400 quakes – most of them tiny – have been recorded in Yellowstone National Park in the western US.
The earthquake “swarm” is occurring in the Hebgen Lake area. In 1959, a major quake in this region killed 28 people. But geologists monitoring the activity don’t think another big one is on the cards.
Land plants are absorbing 17% more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere now than 30 years ago, our research published today shows. Equally extraordinarily, our study also shows that the vegetation is hardly using any extra water to do it, suggesting that global change is causing the world’s plants to grow in a more water-efficient way.
New diesel and petrol cars and vans will be banned in the UK from 2040 in a bid to tackle air pollution, the government is set to announce.
Ministers will also unveil a £255m fund to help councils tackle emissions from diesel vehicles, as part of a £3bn package of spending on air quality.