Newsdesk Archive

Combining sensors and imaging of every plant with real-time data analytics improves farm outputs and reduces waste As the world’s population grows, farmers will need to produce more and more food. Yet arable acreage cannot keep pace, and the looming food security threat could easily devolve into regional or even global instability.

Racetrack Playa is a dried-up lake located in Death Valley, California, USA. This dry lake is notable for its sailing stones, which are known also as sliding stones, rolling stones, or moving rocks. The sailing stones are a geological phenomenon that has been observed since the early 1900s. Although they have been studied for a long time, no one has managed to provide an adequate explanation for this curious phenomenon. Recently, however, a team of scientists have succeeded in (partially) unravelling the mystery of the Racetrack Playa Sailing Stones.

Stories and tales about gigantic beings inhabiting the Earth occur in almost all ancient cultures and civilizations. From the Indo-Europeans, to the Greeks, to the Christian Bible, tales of giants have been passed down from generation to generation and these stories still exist in modern day. Related: Caught on Video: Mystery Creature Spotted Prowling Foothills in La Crescenta Area Related: Curious Ape Creature Caught on Camera in California Related: Huge Unidentified Cats Are Terrifying English Towns Related: Sweden’s Very Own Nessie: Storsjöodjuret Related: Proof of aliens or another hoax? Conspiracy theorists claim they have found a three-fingered 'mummified humanoid' with an elongated skull in a South American cave

"Fraidy cat" isn't the way most people think of mountain lions, but when it comes to encounters with humans, perhaps they should. New research into the behavior of these big cats indicates that they don't like encountering humans any more than we like bumping into them on hiking trails.

Alpha-Gal may sound empowering, but the nickname, short for galactose-alpha-1, 3-galactose, is a sugar molecule that might just cause you to become allergic to meat. The sugar molecule is spread from the Lone Star tick bite, named for the Texas-shaped marking on its back. Once bitten by a Lone Star tick, the body's immune system is rewired.

You’ve probably heard of the men who stared at goats in an attempt to get George Clooney or Ewan McGregor to play them in a movie – or was it to kill the goats by stopping their hearts? The movie was a bigger success than the experiment, but neither seem to be the inspiration for Martin Wikelski, the director of the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Radolfzell, Germany, who is staring at sheep and an occasional cow or chicken in an attempt to secure a patent on the practice as a means of predicting earthquakes.

Lunar luster triggers mating orgies, guides travelers and even can even provoke magical transformations One November night each year, beneath the full moon, more than 130 species of corals simultaneously spawn in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.

To understand human consciousness, we need to know why it exists in the first place. New experimental evidence suggests it may have evolved to help us learn and adapt to changing circumstances far more rapidly and effectively.

Some of the world's most renowned scientists are questioning whether the cosmos has an inner life similar to our own. For centuries, modern science has been shrinking the gap between humans and the rest of the universe, from Isaac Newton showing that one set of laws applies equally to falling apples and orbiting moons to Carl Sagan intoning that “we are made of star stuff” — that the atoms of our bodies were literally forged in the nuclear furnaces of other stars.

4.5 billion years ago in the violent, high-speed environment of the early solar system, a protoplanet roughly the size of Mars was involved in a series of fierce collisions with other large planetary bodies. A number of powerful impacts stripped the planet of its rocky mantle, leaving an exposed nickel-iron core. After further blows, break-away pieces of metal were flung into space—the final destination for some would be Earth

Since the mid-1990s, when the first planet around another sun-like star was discovered, astronomers have been amassing what is now a large collection of exoplanets—nearly 3,500 have been confirmed so far. In a new Caltech-led study, researchers have classified these planets in much the same way that biologists identify new animal species and have learned that the majority of exoplanets found to date fall into two distinct size groups: rocky Earth-like planets and larger mini-Neptunes.

Languages, like human bodies, come in a variety of shapes—but only to a point. Just as people don’t sprout multiple heads, languages tend to veer away from certain forms that might spring from an imaginative mind. For example, one core property of human languages is known as duality of patterning: meaningful linguistic units (such as words) break down into smaller meaningless units (sounds), so that the words sap, pass, and asp involve different combinations of the same sounds, even though their meanings are completely unrelated.

A deletion in a growth hormone receptor gene is tied to an average of 10 extra years of life among men, but not women, according to a study.

Though flying via airplane is fast and fun, it’s one of the least environmentally-friendly methods of travel. That may soon change, however, as Eviation Aircraft (a member of NASA’s on-demand mobility program) recently unveiled the first prototype of an all-electric aircraft with a range of up to 600 miles (965 km).

Children are at risk of dangerous levels of air pollution in cars because exposure to toxic air is often far higher inside than outside vehicles, a former government chief scientific adviser has warned.

Water temperature doesn’t make any difference when it comes to removing harmful bacteria from your hands, a new study suggests. “People need to feel comfortable when they are washing their hands but as far as effectiveness, this study shows us that the temperature of the water used didn’t matter,” Related: Common household chemicals lead to birth defects in mice, research finds

How did music begin? Did our early ancestors first start by beating things together to create rhythm, or use their voices to sing? What types of instruments did they use? Has music always been important in human society, and if so, why?

Helping homeless people in Montreal reintegrate into society by teaching them to care for bees may seem like an unusual approach, but organizers of the Accueil Bonneau honey program say it's been a real success story. Related: Finland’s Universal Basic Income Program Is Already Reducing Stress for Recipients

Could it be that sex actually does not sell? An analysis of nearly 80 advertising studies published over more than three decades suggests that’s the case.

Farm soil harbors abundant genes related to antibiotic resistance in microbes, including some that have never been identified in human pathogens, according to a study published Friday

New research from Dartmouth College raises questions over how scientists should interpret observed groupings of bacteria. The study advises caution with the assumption that bacterial clusters are always a result of ecological and genetic forces.

Flowering crops such as beans and cotton offer their sweetest nectar to recruit colonising ants in a strategy that balances their need for defence and to reproduce, research suggests. So-called ant-plants carefully manage the amount and sweetness of nectar produced on their flowers and leaves, a study shows.

Sometimes you run across a grimy, tattered dollar bill that seems like it’s been around since the beginning of time. Assuredly it hasn’t, but the history of human beings using cash currency does go back a long time – 40,000 years.

In 2012 ancient remains were discovered in a bog in Denmark – not an uncommon occurrence. However, after examining the bones, archaeologists were startled by what appeared to be a brutal desecration of the skeletal remains. The macabre discovery tested what we thought we knew about the rituals and beliefs of Iron Age man. Archaeologists are now trying to piece together what happened to dozens of dead warriors found at Alken Enge.

Archaeologists have discovered a "billboard" of hieroglyphs carved into the rocks near the Egyptian village of El-Khawy. The symbols, which show a message related to the cosmos, are the earliest monumental (large) hieroglyphs known, dating back around 5,200 years.

Historical accounts of bright nights go back centuries. Pliny the Elder described bright nights, saying, "The phenomenon commonly called 'nocturnal sun', i.e. a light emanating from the sky during the night, has been seen during the consulate of C. Caecilius and Cn. Papirius (~ 113 BCE), and many other times, giving an appearance of day during the night." European newspapers and the scientific literature also carried observations of these events in 1783, 1908 and 1916. Alt: Mystery of unexplained 'bright nights' solved

Prof Stephen Hawking has called for leading nations to send astronauts to the Moon by 2020. They should also aim to build a lunar base in 30 years' time and send people to Mars by 2025.

Astronomers have identified another rare example of an extreme helium star. The star, designated GALEX J184559.8?413827 (or J1845?4138 for short), was initially classified as a faint helium-rich "hot subdwarf," but new spectroscopic observations reveal that this star is more hydrogen-deficient than previously thought.

With the discovery of thousands of planets beyond the solar system, scientists are eager to learn if rocky "super-Earths," up to 10 times more massive than Earth, might also be able to harbor life.

CaliforniaPlanets orbiting other stars are running out of ways to hide. For the first time, astronomers have used reflected starlight to tease out the possible presence of 60 large, roasted worlds.

Astronomers using the National Science Foundation's Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) have found new evidence suggesting that a jet of fast-moving material ejected from one young star may have triggered the formation of another, younger protostar.

The European Space Agency (ESA) has formally embarked on a mission to search for gravitational waves from space. The Lisa (laser interferometer space antenna mission) will use three spacecraft to detect these minute ripples in the fabric of spacetime. The spacecraft will be stationed millions of kilometres apart in space, and linked via laser beams.

In 2015, a team of Scottish scientists announced they had found a way to slow the speed of light. By sending photons through a special mask, the researchers altered their shape. In this malformed state, these infinitesimal particles of light traveled slower than normal photons. But why would anybody want to slow down the speed of light? After all, it's already slow enough!

Adding artificial intelligence to the machines we send out to explore space makes a lot of sense, as it means they can make decisions without waiting for instructions from Earth, and now NASA scientists are trying to figure out how it could be done.

If we’re lucky, robots might steal our chores before they steal our jobs. Next on the list could be ironing, now that a humanoid robot has mastered the art of getting rid of creases.

Researchers have built the first robot made of soft, deployable materials that is capable of moving itself without the use of motors or any additional mechanical components. The robot "walks" when an electric current is applied to shape-memory alloy wires embedded in its frame: the current heats the wires, causing the robot's flexible segments to contract and bend. Sequentially controlling the current to various segments in different ways results in different walking gaits.

Proponents of the technological singularity theory insist that it's only a matter of time before mankind finally merges with machines, creating a new order of being on planet Earth. While much of this discussion focuses on artificial intelligence, our cyborg future will surely include a physical component as well.

But the biggest impediment to figuring out diseases such as Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s is the astounding complexity of the brain itself. As James Watson put it, “The brain is the last and grandest biological frontier, the most complex thing we have yet discovered in our universe. It contains hundreds of billions of cells interlinked through trillions of connections. The brain boggles the mind.”

Your next doctor could very well be a bot. And bots, or automated programs, are likely to play a key role in finding cures for some of the most difficult-to-treat diseases and conditions.

Forecasters often overestimate how good they are at predicting geopolitical events—everything from who will become the next pope to who will win the next national election in Taiwan.

Human cloning may endure as one of the go-to science fiction tropes, but in reality we may be much closer to achieving it than our fictional heroes might imply. At least in terms of the science required.

The mystery of why birds’ eggs come in so many shapes has long been up in the air. Now new research suggests adaptations for flight may have helped shape the orbs. Alt: Bird eggs may be shaped by the way their mother flies

When army ants move out, a new study found that, instead of chasing each other away, birds work together to follow the column and hunt the insects that marching ants scare out of hiding.

Long typecast as the strong silent type, bones are speaking up. In addition to providing structural support, the skeleton is a versatile conversationalist. Bones make hormones that chat with other organs and tissues, including the brain, kidneys and pancreas, experiments in mice have shown.

Through the application of the hormone via a nasal spray, the blood-brain barrier is bypassed and the insulin reaches the brain directly. In the study, 25 lean, ten overweight and 12 obese participants "sniffed" insulin or the placebo

Doctors frequently tell us to eat our greens, but soon they could be prescribing broccoli. A powder that contains concentrated extract from the vegetable could prove indispensable to people with type 2 diabetes. The extract reduced blood sugar levels by up to 10 per cent in people with the disease.

Therapies to change the bacteria in the gut, through diet, pro-and prebiotic supplements, fecal matter transplants or antibiotics, could treat autism. A review of six decades of research linking the gut to brain development could pave the way for cheap and effective treatment.

The Mediterranean diet, rich in plant-based foods, is associated with a variety of health benefits, including a lower incidence of dementia. Now, researchers at the Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University (LKSOM) have identified a specific ingredient that protects against cognitive decline: extra-virgin olive oil

The purpose of memory might not be to record everything Most of us think “perfect” memory means never forgetting, but maybe forgetting actually helps us navigate a world that is random and ever-changing.

People at risk for Alzheimer's disease who do more moderate-intensity physical activity, but not light-intensity physical activity, are more likely to have healthy patterns of glucose metabolism in their brain, according to a new study.

Researchers have built a new type of "neuron transistor"—a transistor that behaves like a neuron in a living brain. These devices could form the building blocks of neuromorphic hardware that may offer unprecedented computational capabilities, such as learning and adaptation.

Traditional cameras -- even those on the thinnest of cell phones -- cannot be truly flat due to their optics: lenses that require a certain shape and size in order to function. At Caltech, engineers have developed a new camera design that replaces the lenses with an ultra-thin optical phased array (OPA). The OPA does computationally what lenses do using large pieces of glass: it manipulates incoming light to capture an image.

Screens on even the newest phones and tablets can be hard to read outside in bright sunlight. Inspired by the nanostructures found on moth eyes, researchers have developed a new antireflection film that could keep people from having to run to the shade to look at their mobile devices.

Battery flat on your radio? Don’t sweat it. Or maybe that’s exactly what you should do. Sweat alone has been used to power a radio for two days, demonstrating the capability of a new skin patch.

Your cognitive capacity is significantly reduced when your smartphone is within reach -- even if it's off. McCombs Assistant Professor Adrian Ward and co-authors conducted experiments with nearly 800 smartphone users in an attempt to measure, for the first time, how well people can complete tasks when they have their smartphones nearby even when they're not using them.

Children of Nso farmers in Cameroon know how to master the marshmallow test, which has tempted away the self-control of Western kids for decades. In a direct comparison on this delayed gratification task, Cameroonian youngsters leave middle-class German children in the dust when challenged to resist a reachable treat while waiting for another goodie, a new study finds.

The saying goes that 'power corrupts', and a new study suggests there may be some truth behind this - especially when it comes to brain function. Researchers have found that CEOs and other leaders may suffer damage to their brain as a result of their rise to power.

Research has shown that how trusting a person is may depend, at least in part, on his or her genes. However, distrust does not appear to be inherited in the same way, according to a new study led by the University of Arizona.

Male chimpanzees in Uganda’s notorious Ngogo clan are now known to patrol the borders of their territory, actively seeking out members of rival groups to fight and even kill.

Chimpanzees in Uganda may have changed their hunting strategy in response to being watched by scientists. "Sonso" chimps hunt in small groups for colobus monkeys, while those from the "Waibira" troop hunt solo and catch "whatever they can get their hands on"

Whales were shrinking in size ahead of a global population collapse last century, new research has revealed, with scientists saying the finding may help them set up an early warning system for other species. Alt: Measuring the body size of whales could help scientists detect when they're in trouble: The marine mammals shrink when they are being hunted

A widely used method to find oil and gas for offshore drilling can kill tiny sea creatures that are key for feeding many marine animals like shellfish, fish, and even whales. And the impacts on these tiny, drifting creatures — called zooplankton — are seen in an area much larger than previously thought.

The towering 234-year-old 'Napoleon' oak on the campus of the University of Lausanne in Switzerland has weathered storms both meteorological and political. The tree was young when Napoleon’s troops passed through town in 1800, and has grown into a majestic city landmark. But through it all, its genome has remained largely — and surprisingly — unchanged.

Plants adopt different strategies to survive the changing temperatures of their natural environments. This is most evident in temperate regions where forest trees shed their leaves to conserve energy during the cold season. In a new study, a team of plant biologists from the National University of Singapore (NUS) found that some plants may selectively kill part of their roots to survive under cold weather conditions.

Scientists believe they have discovered the reason behind mysterious changes to the climate that saw temperatures fluctuate by up to 15°C within just a few decades during the ice age periods. In a new study published today, the researchers show that rising levels of CO2 could have reached a tipping point during these glacial periods, triggering a series of chain events that caused temperatures to rise abruptly.

Schoolchildren in Siberia were in for a surprise when they dug up the remains of a mysterious ancient 'smelly beast.' The creature, which is thought to be around 25,000 years ago, was buried in permafrost in the Yakutia region.

Archaeologists have uncovered a prehistoric ritual landscape that possibly includes a cairn cemetery around a 5,000-year-old burial mound aligned with the summer solstice sun on Anglesey.

A traditional Polynesian voyaging canoe has returned to Honolulu in Hawaii, completing the first-ever round-the-world trip by such a vessel. Its crew navigated without modern instruments, using only the stars, wind and ocean swells as guides.

For centuries, ancient Taxila in Punjab, modern Pakistan, was revered as a center of learning and a holy city in the Buddhist and Hindu traditions. It hosted one of the earliest institutions which could be called a university, though there are disagreements over whether it counted as a true university.

It is likely to be one of the oldest prosthetic devices in human history: Together with other experts, Egyptologists have reexamined an artificial wooden big toe. The find is almost 3000 years old and was discovered in a female burial from the necropolis of Sheikh ´Abd el-Qurna close to Luxor. This area is currently being studied using state-of-the-art methods.

Aging should be based on the number of years people are likely to live in a given country in the 21st century, say researchers. By that logic, 70 may be the new 60. The new study also predicts an end to population aging in the United States and other countries before the end of the century.

Older adults who lead an active sex life are more likely to have increased cognitive function, according to a new Oxford University research collaboration. Related: Adults 'having less sex than 20 years ago'

One of the well-known challenges of marriage is keeping the passion alive after years of partnership, as passions tend to cool even in very happy relationships. Psychological scientists have now developed an unconventional intervention for helping a marriage maintain its spark: pictures of puppies and bunnies.

When an empathetic partner holds a lover's hand, their heart rates and breathing rates sync and her pain subsides, new research shows. Authors say such 'interpersonal synchronization' could play a role in the analgesic impacts of touch.

The megalithic Fertility Temple also known as “Chucuito” on the edge of Lake Titicaca in Peru is special and at the same time controversial basically for a single reason: its “sexuality”. Whether the upright stones are supposed to be phallic or represent magic mushrooms has caused much debate between historians for many years now.

From far away, El Volcán in the Nepeña Valley of coastal Peru might look like a natural feature in the landscape. But this volcano is artificial, a mound or pyramid built by human hands with a crater dug out of the top. And some archaeologists are trying to figure out what it was used for.

Huge pulses of volcanic activity are likely to have played a key role in triggering the end-Triassic mass extinction, which set the scene for the rise and age of the dinosaurs, new Oxford University research has found.

There are some ideas that just won’t die. Like the villain in a movie, even when they’ve been shot with the bullets of refutation, scalded by heated discourse, and pushed off into the pool of disproven theories, these ideas still claw their way back, bedraggled and screaming, to attack us one more time.

For decades scientists have grappled with one of our planet's greatest biogeographical mysteries: how the geologic history of the Amazon River basin has shaped its magnificent ecosystem. Now new research describes sedimentary evidence from eastern Colombia and northwestern Brazil that suggests the enormous basin was covered by ocean water at least twice in the past.

T he oxygen-poor “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico may be the biggest on record this year, nearly doubling in size to cover an area of ocean as large as Vermont, scientists at Louisiana State University estimate.

According to researchers at Aalto University, by using suitable systems, more than 80 percent of heating energy for Finnish households could be produced using solar energy. As the price of heating energy obtained from solar heating systems needed to be competitive with the currently used heating alternatives, calculations made by researchers showed that renewable energy could be used to cover 53 to 81 percent of annual domestic heating energy consumption depending on the technical implementation method.

Around the world, countries are claiming obscure and difficult-to-reach tracts of the deep-sea floor, far from the surface and further still from land. Why? There is a long history of claiming newly discovered territories, of planting the flag at far outposts of the known world.

Corn is grown not only for food, it is also an important renewable energy source. Renewable biofuels can come with hidden economic and environmental issues, and the question of whether corn is better utilized as food or as a biofuel has persisted since ethanol came into use. For the first time, researchers at the University of Illinois have quantified and compared these issues in terms of economics of the entire production system to determine if the benefits of biofuel corn outweigh the costs.

Most cars and trucks in the United States run on a blend of 90 percent gasoline and 10 percent ethanol, a renewable fuel made primarily from fermented corn. But to produce the 14 billion gallons of ethanol consumed annually by American drivers requires millions of acres of farmland.

Fusion power has the potential to provide clean and safe energy that is free from carbon dioxide emissions. However, imitating the solar energy process is a difficult task to achieve. Alt: Fusion Breakthrough Puts Us One Step Closer to Limitless Clean Energy

A new design concept that aims to combine the luxury of a hotel room with a high-speed rail system could make traveling between U.S. cities faster and far more comfortable.

France's national railway operator has announced plans to have driverless trains ready for use by 2023. As autonomous vehicles promise a safer, more efficient method of transportation, companies across the globe are pursuing the technology.

Researchers at UC Santa Barbara professor Yasamin Mostofi's lab have given the first demonstration of three-dimensional imaging of objects through walls using ordinary wireless signal. The technique, which involves two drones working in tandem, could have a variety of applications, such as emergency search-and-rescue, archaeological discovery and structural monitoring.

An elegantly simple experiment with floating particles self-assembling in response to sound waves has provided a new framework for studying how seemingly lifelike behaviors emerge in response to external forces.

For several centuries now, scientists have known that light behaves like a wave, expanding out from its source until absorbed or reflected by objects, which are in turn illuminated. In recent years, however, research has indicated that light can also behave like a liquid — flowing around objects and reconstituting on the other side.

Identity theft is often a multi-layered process. Once a thief gets one bit of your information, they try to use it to get more. The hackers behind the 2015 data breach of the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS), for example, used personal information they’d previously stolen from thousands of Americans to answer security questions on the IRS website, and in turn get access to their tax returns.

Different types of memories stored in the same neuron of the marine snail Aplysia can be selectively erased, according to a new study by researchers at Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) and McGill University and published today in Current Biology. Alt: New Discovery Could Allow Us to Edit Memories to Make Them Less Traumatic

In a hidden room in a house near Argentina's capital, police believe they have found the biggest collection of Nazi artifacts in the country's history, including a bust relief of Adolf Hitler, magnifying glasses inside elegant boxes with swastikas and what authorities say is a medical device used to measure head size.

In what may be the best chance yet to learn the famous aviator's fate, forensic dogs are headed to a Pacific island to search for her bones.

The domestic cat is descended from wild cats that were tamed twice - in the Near East and then Egypt, according to the largest study of its kind. Farmers in the Near East were probably the first people to successfully tame wild cats about 9,000 years ago. Alt: Cats Domesticated Themselves, Ancient DNA Shows

Researchers have used an artificial atom to show it's possible to keep Schrödinger's cat alive indefinitely, but also accelerate its demise, all without needing to look inside its box.

Chinese physicists managed to demonstrate long-distance quantum entanglement in space, breaking previous records. This development, made possible by a novel method, could lead to improved information storage and transfer in the future.

Regular readers may have the same expectations of this column as they would a safari: something huge has to show up. Greedy black holes. Giant lava lakes. Stars too big to exist. Even the comparatively small stuff in outer space, like asteroids or geologic features on a world’s surface, would effortlessly dwarf you if stood in front of them in a space suit.

Astronomers have recently identified a peculiar bubble-like structure associated with an energetic pulsar known as PSR J1015?5719. The newly found feature, designated G283.1?0.59, is most likely a polar wind nebula. The findings were presented June 9 in a paper published on the arXiv pre-print server.

An unknown Mars-to-Earth-mass planet may lurk in the outer reaches of the Solar System, according to new research on the orbits of minor planets to be published in the Astronomical Journal. This planet would be different from — and much closer than — the hypothetical Planet Nine. Alt: Unseen 'planetary mass object' signalled by warped Kuiper Belt Alt: Planet 10? Another Earth-Size World May Lurk in the Outer Solar System