Newsdesk Archive
Coloring, doodling and drawing all showed significant bloodflow in the section of the brain related to feeling rewarded, a new study by an art therapist found.
A growing number of diarists are using expressive writing or ‘bullet journalling’ to improve their health and productivity. But does keeping a daily log actually work?
If you have a name that matches your face, you are more likely to win votes if you are a politician, and gain approval in general
Alt: Does your name match your face?
With algorithms in hand, scientists are looking to make elections in the United States more representative.
Related: Paramilitary security tracked and targeted Dakota pipeline opponents as ‘jihadists,’ docs show
Self-proclaimed 'space nation' Asgardia will launch a satellite later this year to test the concept of long-term data storage in orbit around the Earth. This potentially opens the door to off-planet data and tax havens, according to filings obtained by Motherboard, and represents an important step towards the group's proclaimed goal of starting a private nation in space.
People who live close to an airport and are constantly barraged by the sound of planes taking off are at increased risk of heart disease, research suggests.
A study found that people who were exposed to the highest noise levels, particularly at night, were at greater risk of developing high blood pressure and heart flutter.
A loud "booming" noise has been heard above Nottingham and people are desperate to find out what it was.
The unexplained noise has been described as a "roaring" and "rumbling" noise, which has happened every few minutes over night.
Related: Did you hear mysterious noise in Chellaston last night?
When you call yourself ‘The UFO Capital of Australia’ because of the hundreds of sightings there since World War II but you’ve had none in the past year, you tend to get worried.
Related: UFOs in Videos from Bermuda Triangle May Be Organisms
Related: UFO BOMBSHELL: Could this memo solve Roswell 'flying saucer' crash mystery?
Related: Shimmering lights spotted near 'Britain's UFO capital' spark rumours of another extra-terrestrial sighting
Related: Red Sprites Create Psychedelic Light Show in English Channel
Carl DeVito, an emeritus faculty in the mathematics department at the University of Arizona in Tucson, has proposed a language based on plausibly universal scientific concepts.
An astronomer thinks he's pinpointed the source of a mysterious radio signal from space: a passing comet that nobody knew about. But his colleagues said they're still skeptical of the explanation, noting that comets don't emit radio waves in the right way.
Alt: Astronomer Who Discovered The “Wow!” Signal Says We Still Don’t Understand Its Origin
The origin of the xenon in Earth’s atmosphere has been a mystery for decades. Now, using data from the Rosetta spacecraft’s tight orbits around a comet, researchers have determined that 22 per cent came from comets. This strengthens suspected connections between these celestial bodies and Earth’s evolution.
Aside from all the neato deep space exploration NASA conducts, one of the space agency’s responsibilities includes keeping track of all the potentially dangerous objects hurtling around our own neck of the space woods. NASA tracks over 15,000 so-called near-Earth objects (NEOs), many of which have been passing uncomfortably close to Earth lately.
Bacteria riding on an incoming meteorite may be able to survive the violent shockwave created when it crash-lands on a planet. Their cell walls have been seen to rapidly harden and relax after a sudden shock compression, enabling them to bounce back even after an extreme collision.
New research shows that astronauts traveling beyond the Earth's geomagnetic sphere are at a risk for cancer that's twice as high as previously thought. The study's team points out that this research must inform all protective measures in space.
This 70 km-wide crater and its surrounds offer a window into the watery past of the Red Planet.
The scene, captured by ESA's Mars Express, is a composite of two images taken in March 2007 and February 2017.
Whenever we talk about the expanding universe, everyone wants to know how this is going to end. Sure, they say, the fact that most of the galaxies we can see are speeding away from us in all directions is really interesting. Sure, they say, the Big Bang makes sense, in that everything was closer together billions of years ago.
According to Einstein's theory of relativity, the curvature of spacetime was infinite at the big bang. In fact, at this point all mathematical tools fail, and the theory breaks down. However, there remained the notion that perhaps the beginning of the universe could be treated in a simpler manner, and that the infinities of the big bang might be avoided.
Our corner of the galaxy teems with alien worlds. In the 25 years since the discovery of the first planets beyond our solar system, astronomers have found more than 3,600 worlds orbiting other stars. A select few have become tantalizing targets in the search for life despite orbiting stars that are much smaller, cooler — and in many ways harsher — than the sun.
Two teams of researchers report today that they have detected a prebiotic molecule—a potential building block of life—around newly formed sunlike stars. The molecule, methyl isocyanate, has a structure that is chemically similar to a peptide bond, which is what holds amino acids together in proteins. The finding suggests that quite complex organic molecules may be created very early in the evolution of star systems.
Alt: Vast "Ocean" of Water Detected at Nearby Galaxy's Core --"30 Trillion Times Earth's Oceans, With a Diameter 15 Million Times Distance of Earth to the Sun"
Since the 1980s, astronomers have been searching for the Sun's "evil" twin, dubbed Nemesis due to its habit of slinging deadly asteroids our way every 26 million years or so. Lately, the Nemesis hypothesis has fallen out of favor after decades of sky surveys have turned up no trace of the star, but a new mathematical model from UC Berkeley suggests that almost every star is born with a buddy – including our Sun.
Alt: Astronomers Discover That Our Sun Likely Had an “Evil” Twin That Killed the Dinosaurs
Alt: Our sun likely had a twin called ‘Nemesis’
Related: Lost Star of Myth and Time by Walter Cruttenden
A method that gives mice a tan without using ultraviolet radiation now works in human skin samples. It’s an early step in developing a lotion or cream that might provide fair-skinned folk with protection against skin cancer.
Could sitting in the dentist's chair really be as enjoyable as a walk on the beach?
UK scientists found that putting patients in a virtual reality (VR) environment while being treated can reduce anxiety levels.
The scientific team planning to carry out the world’s first human head transplant have announced the successful repair of severed spinal cords in rats, confirming their proof-of-principle study and helping show their technique “works across the board.”
A four-armed, marimba-playing robot can now write and play its own compositions with aid from artificial intelligence and deep learning.
Researchers fed the robot nearly 5,000 complete songs—from Beethoven to the Beatles to Lady Gaga to Miles Davis—and more than 2 million motifs, riffs, and licks of music.
Imagine wearing a device that continuously analyzes your sweat or blood for different types of biomarkers, such as proteins that show you may have breast cancer or lung cancer.
The best medicine for a person going into sudden cardiac arrest is an electric shock. That jolt temporarily stops the heart, along with its rapid or erratic beat. When the heart starts itself up again, it can revert to its normal rhythm and resume pumping blood to the brain and the rest of the body.
A mosquito-killing fungus genetically engineered to produce spider and scorpion toxins could serve as a highly effective biological control mechanism to fight malaria-carrying mosquitoes, scientists report. The fungus is specific to mosquitoes and does not pose a risk to humans. Further, the study results suggest that the fungus is also safe for honey bees and other insects.
When a soil dries out, this has a negative impact on the activity of soil bacteria. Using an innovative combination of state-of-the-art analysis and imaging techniques, researchers at UFZ have now discovered that fungi increase the activity of bacteria in dry and nutrient-poor habitats by supplying them with water and nutrients. The ability of fungi to regulate drought stress in soil and thus sustain ecosystem functions is an important insight in the context of climate change.
With a classic shape, gills and a sturdy stalk, it wouldn’t look out of place in a stir-fry – but in fact it’s the fossilised remains of a mushroom thought to have sprouted about 115m years ago. It is the world’s oldest known fossil mushroom, and it is remarkable that it was preserved at all.
Alt: Scientists find world's oldest fossil mushroom
The remains of a baby bird from the time of the dinosaurs have been discovered in a specimen of 99-million-year-old amber, according to scientists writing in the journal Gondwana Research.
The hatchling belonged to a major group of birds known as enantiornithes, which went extinct along with dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous period, about 65 million years ago.
It has been described as a "giant flying turkey" the size of a grey kangaroo by Australian scientists.
It is actually an extinct species of megapode bird - an ancient cousin of the modern Malleefowl, which famously builds mounds of earth and leaf litter in which to lay and incubate its eggs.
Whales rely on a keen sense of hearing for their underwater existence. But whales show surprisingly vast differences in hearing ability. Baleen whales tune into infrasonic sounds—at frequencies too low for humans to hear—to communicate over long distances. Toothed whales do just the opposite, relying on ultrasonic frequencies too high for humans to hear.
If scientists could resurrect extinct animals — such as the dodo, Columbian mammoth or Tasmanian tiger — should these animals have different names that distinguish them from the original species?
Related: Forget Mammoths, We Could Bring Dinosaurs and Neanderthals Back to Life
Around 250 million years ago, a huge mass extinction known as the 'Great Dying' killed 96 per cent of life on Earth.
Scientists still aren't sure what caused the event, although one leading theory is that Earth was hit by a massive asteroid.
Archaeologists at The Australian National University (ANU) and the University of Sydney have provided a window into one of the most exciting periods in human history - the transition between Neanderthals and modern humans.
Remains from Morocco dated to 315,000 years ago push back our species' origins by 100,000 years — and suggest we didn't evolve only in East Africa.
Alt: Oldest Homo sapiens bones ever found shake foundations of the human story
Alt: 'First of our kind' found in Morocco
Alt: These Early Humans Lived 300,000 Years Ago—But Had Modern Faces
The Neanderthals, conducted much of their activities in the open landscape according to a study by an international team lead by Israeli researchers.
Neanderthals in the Levant constituted a resilient population that survived successfully in caves and open landscapes 60,000 years ago, when dispersing modern humans reached the region.
Shifts in the diets of Europeans after the introduction of farming 10,000 years ago led to genetic adaptations that favored the dietary trends of the time, new research indicates. The study has implications for the growing field of nutritional genomics, called nutrigenomics. Based on one's ancestry, clinicians may one day tailor each person's diet to her or his genome to improve health and prevent disease.
A low-carb diet might do more than affect your health – it could make you a more tolerant person. People who ate fewer carbohydrates for breakfast made more forgiving decisions in a money-sharing game they played a few hours later.
Eating late at night could be worse for your health than you might think.
Compared to eating earlier in the day, prolonged delayed eating can increase weight, insulin, and cholesterol levels, and negatively affect fat metabolism, and hormonal markers implicated in heart disease, diabetes, and other health problems, according to new research.
Globally, more than 2 billion children and adults suffer from health problems related to being overweight or obese, and an increasing percentage of people die from these health conditions, according to a new study.
Related: Prebiotics reduce body fat in overweight children
Related: Diabetes drug may work by changing gut bacteria makeup
Related: The Biggest Reason You Gain Weight as You Age Has Nothing to Do With Your Metabolism
Eating in front of a mirror makes meals taste better, a new study suggests.
Previous studies have found that people rate food as more flavoursome and, eat bigger portions, when they dine with company, a phenomenon known as ‘the social facilitation of eating.’
Related: Decadent-sounding descriptions could lead to higher consumption of vegetables
Dieters who go vegetarian not only lose weight more effectively than those on conventional low-calorie diets but also improve their metabolism by reducing muscle fat, a new study has found.
Researchers at Leicester University have shown that it might be possible to develop an alternative to antibiotics for treating diseases in pigs.
They have identified a range of viruses, called bacteriophages, that can be used to kill common pig infections.
Eighteen months ago, a gene that confers resistance to colistin — known as an ‘antibiotic of last resort’ — emerged in bacteria from pigs in China. Since then, the resistance gene, called mcr-1, has been found around the world at an alarming rate, according to several presentations at the American Society for Microbiology (ASM) meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana, last week.
A new concept proposes to provide food, energy and water resources for the world's growing population by combining systems that simultaneously use different parts of sunlight's spectrum to produce crops, generate electricity, collect heat and purify water.
The Amazon basin could suffer significant and irreversible damage if an extensive dam building programme goes ahead, scientists say.
Currently, 428 hydroelectric dams are planned, with 140 already built or under construction.
Smithsonian astrophysicist Martin Elvis would like to see astronomers take on a crucial role for future asteroid mining: as astronomical prospectors scoping out the next big catch.
As NASA works toward sending people into deep space, the agency is looking for new types of space habitats that astronauts can live in far from Earth. One company, Nanoracks, has a design idea in mind — but rather than build something completely new, the company has a bold plan to recycle space hardware to create living quarters. Their plan: turn used rocket tanks into suitable places for deep-space explorers to live.
Jupiter may have been a very early bloomer, gaining significant mass within the first million years of the solar system’s birth, according to a new analysis of meteorite fragments.
The risk is growing that Earth will be hit by an asteroid from a meteor stream known as the Taurids, Czech astronomers said on Tuesday.
The astronomers, from the Czech Academy of Sciences, drew their conclusion after analysing 144 bolides—large meteors that explode in the atmosphere—from the Taurids and detecting a new branch with at least two asteroids measuring 200-300 metres (220-330 yards) in diameter.
Enceladus, an icy moon of Saturn that could host life, may have tipped over long ago.
NASA's Cassini orbiter, which has been studying Saturn and its many moons up close since the probe arrived in 2004, has found evidence that Enceladus' axis of rotation has rotated by 55 degrees. That would mean the moon moved more than halfway onto its side.
When Karin Andreassen set out for the Barents Sea, she knew she would find a lot of methane. The cold, shallow body of water just north of where Norway meets Russia is home to oil and gas fields, and methane—the main component of natural gas—naturally seeps out of the seafloor here. Andreassen, a marine geologist at UiT The Arctic University of Norway, also knew from surveys in the 90s that she’d find some underwater craters.
It’s rare to hear good news about Australia’s ailing Great Barrier Reef, but some of its larger animals are surviving against the odds.
Populations of dugongs—a relative of the manatee—have surged throughout the southern region of the coral reef, according to newly released aerial surveys, taken in November.
Cuttlefish have been caught on film walking like crabs by moving their tentacles in novel ways.
Kohei Okamoto at the University of the Ryukyus in Okinawa, Japan, and his team first spotted pharaoh cuttlefish (Sepia pharaonis) displaying the unusual behaviour while feeding them in the lab.
Conservationists believe they can bring back a species of giant tortoise unique to Floreana Island in the Galapagos and considered extinct since the mid-19th century.
No experience with human speech is necessary for budgerigars to perceive the difference between "d" and "t,".
The debate over speech perception is unresolved, with some evidence supporting a speech-specific mechanism and other evidence supporting a general auditory mechanism.
Many of us have seen those classic wildlife documentaries of wolves or lions working in packs to chase down their prey.
But snakes?
A new study has revealed that Cuban boas coordinate bat hunts in the sinkhole caves of Cuba's Desembarco del Granma National Park.
Water really does has its own taste and should be considered an independent flavour, scientists claim.
Researchers say the 'sixth taste' should join the current recognised flavours of salty, sweet, sour, bitter and umani.
Related: Water forms 'spine of hydration' around DNA, group finds
Never mind the Leaning Tower of Pisa – this is the leaning tower of pines.
Cook pines are towering trees that were once restricted to their native home of New Caledonia, an archipelago in the Pacific Ocean. Through cultivation, they have taken root across tropical, subtropical and temperate regions around the world.
Tumbleweeds may be iconic symbols of the American West, but regions around the world have their own versions of the wind-blown plants — even Antarctica.
Antarctica's "tumbleweeds" look more like snowballs, but like their western namesake, they are created by the wind.
There’s a whiff of magic about the site of Tell el-Amarna that makes the hair on the back of my neck stand on end. It’s partly down to the effort of imagination needed to conjure a great capital of ancient Egypt from the sea of low humps stretching between the cultivation and the desert cliffs, and partly the long shadows cast by its founders – the ‘heretic’ pharaoh Akhenaten and his queen Nefertiti.
One of the many tragedies that have unfolded in the wake of the Islamic State (IS) is their smashing of statues and the destruction of ancient archaeological sites. Indeed, the rapid and terrifying advance of the IS has proved fatal for much invaluable heritage.
More than 1,500 Buddhist tablets and stone sculptures have been recovered in the centre of one of the largest cities in western China following the rediscovery a lost temple, a mainland newspaper reports.
Archaeological digs in the Middle East have revealed the remains of ancient harvests that record how some of the world's earliest cities grew and developed.
A team of excavators in Bulgaria has resumed a search for fossils of an ape-like creature which may be the oldest-known direct ancestor of man and whose discovery has challenged the central hypothesis that humankind originated in Africa.
Alt: Archaeologists resume search for controversial 7.2 million-year-old fossils that could rewrite human history
The face of a 10,000 year old African caveman has been revealed for the first time, reigniting the debate over whether the first ancient people to set foot on American soil were African or Asian.
Digital imaging by Brazilian graphic designer, Cicero Moraes - who is not of African decent himself - shows the features of a 40 to 50-year-old prehistoric African man whose face resembles Australian Aborigines.
Despite its ancestors having feathers, Tyrannosaurus rex most likely had scaly skin, according to fossil evidence.
Researchers say the huge predator had scales much like modern reptiles rather than feathers or fluff.
Most of the methods used to look at fossilized shit, more commonly called coprolites, are fairly outdated. Scientists mainly use two-dimensional imaging techniques that require cutting literal slices of the sample to look at them up close. Three-dimensional imaging methods in the lab might miss the smallest features like hairs or insect legs. But a team of Swedish scientists have a better way to reveal the poo’s secrets: particle accelerators.
Scientists have found a hellish world where the "surface" of the planet is over 4,000C - almost as hot as our Sun.
In part, that’s because KELT-9b’s host star is itself very hot, but also because this alien world resides so close to the furnace.
A new citizen-science tool released earlier this year to help astronomers pinpoint new worlds lurking in the outer reaches of our solar system has already led to a discovery: a brown dwarf a little more than 100 light years away from the Sun. Just six days after the launch of the Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 website in February, four different users alerted the science team to the curious object, whose presence has since been confirmed via an infrared telescope.
Cosmologically speaking, the Milky Way and its immediate neighborhood are in the boondocks.
In a 2013 observational study, University of Wisconsin-Madison astronomer Amy Barger and her then-student Ryan Keenan showed that our galaxy, in the context of the large-scale structure of the universe, resides in an enormous void—a region of space containing far fewer galaxies, stars and planets than expected.
A new study may help reveal the nature of dark energy, the mysterious substance that is pushing the universe to expand outward. Dark energy may emerge from fluctuations in the nothingness of empty space, a new hypothesis suggests.
In 1977, an astronomer looking for alien life in the nigh sky above Ohio spotted a powerful radio signal so strong that he excitedly wrote 'Wow!' next to his data.
The 72-second blast, spotted by Dr Jerry Ehman through a radio telescope, came from Sagittarius but matched no known celestial object.
Scientists on the lookout for subtle disturbances in the fabric of space-time have detected the signal from a cataclysmic collision between two black holes that lie some 3 billion light-years away, much farther two previous discoveries.
Scientists have discovered black holes may be doing more damage to their surroundings than originally thought. A study published this month shows quasars may be responsible for disappearing atmospheres in our galaxy along with the rest of the universe.
Of all the mysteries in the universe, black holes surely top the list. They have such strong gravitational fields that once an object falls in, it will never be able to escape.
What then happens to that object is a total mystery that current physics cannot answer.
The world’s most powerful X-ray laser beam has been used to create a tiny microscopic “black hole."
The machine uses extremely bright, fast flashes of light to take atomic-level snapshots of some of nature’s fastest processes.
Alt: X-ray laser turns molecule into tiny ‘black hole’
A 3D printer that could re-create itself from lunar material is in development at a university in Canada.
The technology could one day enable humans to 3D-print lunar bases, as well as conduct in-space manufacturing of satellites and solar shields on the moon that could help fight global warming
A single treatment giving life-long protection from severe allergies such as asthma could be made possible by immunology research at The University of Queensland.
Older people who received transfusions of young blood plasma have shown improvements in biomarkers related to cancer, Alzheimer’s disease and heart disease
Virtual reality systems can create out-of-body experiences — and these experiences may be able to reduce the fear of death, according to a recently published study.
“My lab has been working for many years on the influence of changing someone’s body in virtual reality on their attitudes
Different cultures around the world define death in different ways. In modern medicine, the concept of “brain death” or death by neurological criteria, known as DNC, was introduced 40 years ago, but doctors have different ideas of what this means.
Bioquark is about to begin a trial that will attempt to bring brain-dead patients back to life using stem cells. However, the trial is raising numerous scientific and ethical questions for other experts in the field.
Alt: Could we soon reverse death? US company to start trials 'reawakening the dead' in Latin America 'in a few months' - and this is how they'll do it
Currently, most parts of a smart phone are made of silicon and other compounds, which are expensive and break easily, but with almost 1.5 billion smart phones purchased worldwide last year, manufacturers are on the lookout for something more durable and less costly.
A team lead by the University of Utah has discovered a new group of materials called organic-inorganic hybrid perovskites that could bring spintronics from a largely conceptual concept into reality. Spintronics aims to use the magnetic properties of electrons rather then their ability to conduct electricity to store and transmit information.
The medical machines of the future will be able to predict when you will die by analysing images of your organs, according to a new study.
Researchers have developed an artificial intelligence system that can tell which patients will die almost as accurately as trained specialists.
Confidence in your abilities is usually a good thing – as long as you can recognise when it’s time to ask for help. As we build ever smarter software, we may want to apply the same thinking to machines. An experiment that explores a robot’s sense of its own usefulness could help guide how future artificial intelligences are built.
Machine translation systems that convert sign language into text and back again are helping people who are deaf or have difficulty hearing to communicate with those who cannot sign.
Famous physicist Albert Einstein, assassinated Japanese prime-minister Hisashi Hamaguchi, and English engineer Charles Babbage all have at least one thing in common; pickled brains – all cut out of their skulls and preserved after their deaths so researchers could study their genius.
Since the publication of my William the Conqueror in the Yale University Press English Monarchs series in October 2016, I have often been asked how long it took me to write the book. In response, I usually say that it has taken 50 years and three years.
High in a remote area of the Oetztaler Alps in northern Italy, 5,300 years ago, Oetzi the Iceman was shot in the back with an arrow.
It hit a main artery and he probably bled to death within minutes.
Archaeologists have discovered an ancient city, roughly 4,000 years old, on the banks of the Great Zab River in the Kurdistan Region.
The region had been off-limits to archaeologists for many years, first because of political instability in the area and later due to the presence of the Islamic State (IS).
In November of 1632, the townspeople of Lützen, Germany, were stuck with a grim task: They had to bury some 9,000 soldiers who were left dead on a battlefield after a bloody fight during the Thirty Years' War.
Archaeologists recently undid some of that work.
One of Australia’s most treasured second world war warships has been illegally salvaged for metal, devastating the war grave of more than 300 sailors, maritime archaeologists say.
An ancient, rectangular copper mask recently found in the southern Andes in Argentina is about 3,000 years old — one of the oldest human-made metal object from South America — and its discovery challenges the accepted idea that South American metalworking originated in Peru, according to archaeologists.
The Great Pyramids in Egypt, Stonehenge in England, and the Maya city of Teotihuacan were all built thousands of years ago. Add to that list of extraordinary achievements the earthen mounds—some rising to heights of 70 or 100 feet, some more than 5,000 years old—that dot the landscape of North America.
Related: Ancient Native American Site Found on California Island
In a study published in the international journal Antiquity, Professor David Pearce, Director of the Rock Art Research Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, Adelphine Bonneau of Laval University, and colleagues at the University of Oxford showed that paintings in south-eastern Botswana are at least 5,500 years old, whilst paintings in Lesotho and the Eastern Cape Drakensberg, South Africa, date as far back as 3,000 years. These dates open the floodgates for researchers to ask and answer questions about the rock art that have baffled them for decades.
A new Tel Aviv University study has uncovered the earliest known geological indications of manmade impact on geological processes, in particular erosion of the surface, from 11,500 years ago. Within a core sample retrieved from the Dead Sea, researchers discovered basin-wide erosion rates dramatically incompatible with known tectonic and climatic regimes of the period recorded.
A new study combining European ice core data and historical records of the infamous Black Death pandemic of 1349-1353 shows metal mining and smelting have polluted the environment for thousands of years, challenging the widespread belief that environmental pollution began with the Industrial Revolution in the 1700s and 1800s.