Newsdesk Archive
Archaeologists in England have unearthed a massive 4,000-year-old henge monument near a farm in Newbold-on-Stour, in Warwickshire County. The Neolithic site was discovered when construction crews began breaking ground on a new residential project.
Alt: Prehistoric henge discovered in Newbold-on-Stour
In human history, the transition from hunting and gathering to farming is a significant one. As such, hunter-gatherers and farmers are usually thought about as two entirely different sets of people. But researchers reporting new ancient DNA evidence in Current Biology on May 25 show that in the area we now recognize as Romania, at least, hunter-gatherers and farmers were living side by side, intermixing with each other, and having children.
Alt: Hunter gatherers and early farmers DID live together and even had children: Rival societies co-operated 8,000 years ago, DNA reveals
Around 10,000 years ago, as the Pleistocene gave way to our current geological epoch, a group of hunter-gathers near China’s Yangtze River began changing their way of life. They started to grow rice.
It’s a fat-burning secret anyone interested in bone health should know. For the first time, UNC School of Medicine researchers show that exercising burns the fat found within bone marrow and offers evidence that this process improves bone quality and the amount of bone in a matter of weeks.
Neuroplasticity is the idea that we can shape our brains mentally and physically through controlling our stimulus. Meditation and physical exercise have been shown as two of the most effective ways of doing this.
Scientists involved more than 100 individuals in a bouldering (rock climbing) intervention in Germany, where some hospitals have begun to use climbing as a therapeutic treatment. The team found the social, mental and physical endurance of bouldering could be successful psychotherapy for treating depression in adults.
No one would blame you for not wanting your body to be infested with creatures from your garden. But maybe you should rethink your position.
Your garden has its own microbiome, and research suggests it’s good for you. Our health depends on the flourishing microbiome in our guts—and on how much of the natural world’s microbiome we let infiltrate.
The hearts of people who live in polluted areas are weaker than those who regularly breathe cleaner air, according to a new study which adds to the growing volume of evidence that fossil fuels are killing us.
The air pollution around you could affect how well you sleep, a new study finds.
Researchers found that people in the study who lived in areas with high levels of air pollution were 60 percent more likely to sleep poorly
America's beekeepers watched as a third of the country's honeybee colonies were lost over the last year, part of a decade-long die-off experts said may threaten our food supply.
Physical similarities aside, we share a lot in common with our primate relatives. For example, as Jane Goodall famously documented, chimpanzees form lifelong bonds and show affection in much the same way as humans. Chimps can also solve novel problems, use objects as tools, and may possess “theory of mind”—an understanding that others may have different perspectives than oneself. They can even outperform humans in certain types of cognitive tasks.
How do baboons succeed in coordinating the movements of their group? Biologists have studied these organisms in the wild to find out which behavioral rules baboons use when interacting with others.
If you open Google and start typing "Chinese cave gecko", the text will auto-populate to "Chinese cave gecko for sale" – just US$150, with delivery. This extremely rare species is just one of an increasingly large number of animals being pushed to extinction in the wild by animal trafficking.
Microsoft executives have announced plans to have an operational DNA data storage system available in 10 years.
DNA data storage could be our most viable solution to the ever increasing demand from a population that is growing both in size and in technological engagement.
Enjoy beating robots while you still can. There is a 50 per cent chance that machines will outperform humans in all tasks within 45 years, according to a survey of more than 350 artificial intelligence researchers.
Most plans for universal basic income start by suggesting a tax robots. The goal here is to replace revenue lost from the mass numbers of unemployed and keep it coming in from the bots. Plus, this is still a net gain for businesses — they get money flowing into pockets so people can keep spending, and even conservative estimates suggest that robots will be able to pay for themselves dozens of times over.
The Google-owned computer algorithm AlphaGo is retiring from playing humans in the ancient Chinese game of Go after roundly defeating the world's top player this week, its developer said Saturday.
While you might have heard about robots taking on law enforcement roles before it’s unlikely you’ve seen anything like this.
Dubai Police have unveiled its very first robot officer, and it’s already being sent out on patrol.
It is unclear whether the system will ever be put into use, though the patent may provide new insight into Amazon’s Prime Air drone delivery project. The system calls for a packaging label that would be integrated with a folded parachute and a network of cords.
A business school in Paris will soon begin using artificial intelligence and facial analysis to determine whether students are paying attention in class. The software, called Nestor, will be used two online classes at the ESG business school beginning in September.
Researchers have successfully given AI a curiosity implant, which motivated it to explore a virtual environment. This could be the bridge between AI and real world application
Researchers have created a 'Bot Dylan' computer that is capable of writing its own folk music.
The system uses artificial intelligence to compose new tunes after it was trained using 23,000 pieces of Irish folk music.
When a ballerina pirouettes, twirling a full revolution, she looks just as she did when she started. But for electrons and other subatomic particles, which follow the rules of quantum theory, that's not necessarily so. When an electron moves around a closed path, ending up where it began, its physical state may or may not be the same as when it left.
Scientists studying FRBs – energy explosions from distant parts of the universe – are on to something vitally important. But what causes them?
“We were well into carrying out our reassessment of the survey when a student came into my office one day with a data plot of a signal,” Lorimer said. “It had been recorded in 2001 and it was incredibly bright and energetic but it was also incredibly distant. It was unlike anything we had ever seen before.”
Astronomers working at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in New Mexico have discovered a mysterious object in the Cygnus A galaxy. Cygnus A is about 800 million light-years from Earth and is one of the strongest sources of radio waves in the known universe.
Related: Methanol detected for first time around young star
Saturn's icy, ocean-bearing moon Enceladus may have tipped over in the distant past, according to recent research from NASA's Cassini mission. Researchers with the mission found evidence that the moon's spin axis—the line through the north and south poles—has reoriented, possibly due to a collision with a smaller body, such as an asteroid.
Monstrous cyclones are churning over Jupiter's poles, until now a largely unexplored region that is more turbulent than scientists expected.
NASA's Juno spacecraft spotted the chaotic weather at the top and bottom of Jupiter once it began skimming the cloud tops last year, surprising researchers who assumed the giant gas planet would be relatively boring and uniform down low.
NASA has a whole bunch of fancy hardware checking out several of the planets in our solar system, including Jupiter, Mars, and Saturn, but astronomers do most of their observations of our sun from here on Earth, or at least nearby. A new mission is going to change that in a big way, and NASA is set to reveal details regarding its immediate plans to fly a spacecraft directly into the star’s atmosphere shortly.
Alt: NASA to reveal new details on groundbreaking mission to 'touch the Sun'
A new study sheds light on how damaging black holes can be to the habitability of planets throughout the Milky Way and the universe
Related: Astronomers discover 'super-Earth' planet orbiting nearby star
Forty-five years have passed since humans last set foot on an extraterrestrial body. Now, the moon is back at the center of efforts not only to explore space, but to create a permanent, independent space-faring society.
Lighter-toned bedrock that surrounds fractures and comprises high concentrations of silica—called "halos"—has been found in Gale crater on Mars, indicating that the planet had liquid water much longer than previously believed.
Alt: Bizarre 'halos' on Mars suggest life may have existed on the red planet more recently than thought
It may not be aliens after all. A fresh model that might explain the so-called “alien megastructure” star evokes only natural phenomena, such as a ringed planet that puts Saturn to shame and clouds of comets that contain more mass than Jupiter.
An international research team led by a University of Washington astronomer has worked out the intricate dance of seven planets circling an ultracool dwarf star known as TRAPPIST-1, nailing down the coordinates of the outermost world in the process.
NASA has officially fast tracked its mission to Psyche, an asteroid so rich in resources that if it were ever towed back to Earth it could collapse the world economy.
Originally scheduled for a 2023 launch NASA has brought it forward by an entire year to 2022.
Construction began in Chile on Friday on the European Extremely Large Telescope, which when completed will be the world's largest optical telescope, some five times larger than the top observing instruments in use today.
Observing Earth from 400 kilometres (250 miles) away has made astronaut Thomas Pesquet aware of the planet's fragility as never before, he told AFP from the International Space Station days before heading home.
Online volunteers, including a woman from Belgium and a Scottish man, have helped astronomers at The Australian National University (ANU) find a star that exploded 970 million years ago, predating the dinosaurs' time on Earth.
A postgraduate research student has produced a study that examines the effects of reading and watching television on social behavior – concluding that literature lovers have the edge over their remote control-loving counterparts when it comes to being nicer people.
People who frequently check Facebook on their smartphone tend to have less gray matter in a reward-related area of the brain, according to new research.
“Smartphones, Facebook – in short the digital world – is a major part of our lives,” the study’s corresponding author, Christian Montag of Ulm University, told PsyPost.
The system involves an underwater computer touchscreen through which dolphins are able to interact and make choices. The system, the first of its kind, will be used to investigate dolphin intelligence and communication by providing them choice and control over a number of activities.
Related: Killer Whales Attacked a Blue Whale—Here's the Surprising Reason Why
Long-tailed macaques living near an Indonesian temple have figured out how to run a ransom racket on visiting tourists.
The monkeys grab valuables, such as glasses, hats, cameras or, in one case, a wad of cash from the ticket booth, then wait for temple staff to offer them food before dropping their ill-gotten gains and dashing off with the tasty prize
A new species of flying squirrel has been found in the Pacific Northwest. The discovery means that three—not two—species of the furred gliders live in North America, and it changes our understanding of how these squirrels evolved and spread across the continent
Related: New species of frog from the Neotropics carries its heart on its skin
Canadian researchers have discovered a new species of meat-eating sponge in the North Atlantic Ocean. Don’t worry, though, it doesn’t eat human meat — it feeds on zooplankton, tiny animals that drift in sea water. (With those fish bone-looking spikes, though, it sure looks like a creature from hell.)
Global food consumption and production is seriously unbalanced. In the UK alone we threw away 4.4 million tonnes of "avoidable" food waste in 2015 – that is food that was edible before it was discarded – which equates to £13 billion worth of food wasted, or £470 per household. Meanwhile, nearly 800 million people globally are chronically undernourished.
It was once a stretch of coastline where beach-goers were more likely to drown in a sea of garbage than the ocean.
But now the formerly litter-stacked Versova beach in Mumbai, India, is unrecognisable from its former self thanks to a mammoth 85-week clean-up effort.
The Amazon forest stores about half of the global tropical forest carbon and accounts for about a quarter of carbon absorption from the atmosphere by global forests each year. As a result, large losses of Amazonian forest cover could make global climate change worse.
The European Union asked Poland on Thursday to stop massive logging in one of Europe’s last primeval forests, warning it might take the country to the European Court of Justice if it doesn’t reverse course.
Penn State researchers have created a new hybrid technology that produces unprecedented amounts of electrical power where seawater and freshwater combine at the coast.
That difference in salt concentration has the potential to generate enough energy to meet up to 40 percent of global electricity demands. Though methods currently exist to capture this energy, the two most successful methods, pressure retarded osmosis (PRO) and reverse electrodialysis (RED), have thus far fallen short.
The world's first wind farm powered by giant kites will power more than 5,000 British homes by 2020.
Twenty of the enormous kites, which will work in pairs, will fly in 100mph (160km/h) circles at heights reaching more than 300 metres (1,000 ft) - around the same height as the Shard.
Startup NET Power wants to revolutionize carbon capture and storage systems to get fossil fuel plants to produce zero carbon emissions. Instead of attaching such systems into existing power plants, they built one from scratch.
The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission relied on faulty analysis to justify its refusal to adopt a critical measure for protecting Americans from nuclear-waste fires at dozens of reactor sites around the country, according to a recent article. Radioactivity from such a fire could force approximately 8 million people to relocate and result in $2 trillion in damages.
Earlier this year, the bankruptcy of Westinghouse, builder of the AP1000 reactor—the model scheduled for use at plants in South Carolina and Georgia as well as Turkey Point—rattled the industry.
Both projects are now years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget.
Related: Why 3,000 Scientists Think Nuclear Arsenals Make Us Less Safe
If we can make a fusion reactor where the temperatures and pressures are high enough for atoms of hydrogen to merge into helium, we can harness those sweet sweet photons of gamma radiation.
The main technology developed to do this is called a tokamak reactor; it’s a based on a Russian acronym for: “toroidal chamber with magnetic coils”, and the first prototypes were created in the 1960s. There are many different reactors in development, but the method is essentially the same.
A small team of researchers with the Directorate for Sustainable Resources in Italy and Ghent University in Belgium has found evidence that shows some parts of the planet are becoming cooler and others warmer due to an increase in localized greening.
The Antarctic Peninsula's largest ice shelf has a 70-mile-long crack in it; scientists are watching closely.
This picturesque region has warmed at least twice as fast as Earth’s overall average. That’s led to the collapse of ice shelves. Larsen A, at the peninsula’s northern tip, crumbled in 1995. By 2002, its neighbor Larsen B collapsed. Both ice shelves were thousands of years old.
NASA has revealed a never before seen phenomenon that caused a 'giant wave' on a melting glacier.
Alt: NASA Watched a Wave of Ice Bend The Earth's Crust
Ice Age Europeans trekked thousands of miles from their birthplace to become immigrants in faraway empires, new research has revealed.
Researchers studying the DNA of men and women from the Ice Age found that more than half were buried hundreds of miles away from their place of birth.
A Newcastle University expert is leading a new study which aims to resolve a longstanding debate about how and when people first came to the Americas.
Archaeologists excavating in Yassitepe, Turkey for the past seven years have unearthed an ancient Greek settlement consisting of luxurious houses. So far, the findings suggest that luxury life began in Asia Minor almost 5,000 years ago.
Polished greenstone objects made of jade and serpentine were discovered in Ceibal, Guatemala, dating from about 1000 to 450 BCE. The artefacts are elongated objects called celts, thought to have been used in public ceremonies.
You can tell a lot from a basket. Especially if it comes from the ruins of an ancient civilization inhabited by humans nearly 15,000 years ago during the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene ages.
An archeologist from Florida Atlantic University's Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute is among a team of scientists who made a groundbreaking discovery in Huaca Prieta in coastal Peru - home to one of the earliest and largest pyramids in South America
Wichita Indian urban center dubbed Etzanoa by Spanish, home to some 20,000
Another of the “lost cities” of North America may have been found, according to Dr. Donald Blakeslee, an archaeologist at Wichita State University.
The ancient Greek myth of Cadmus battling a snake could be an allegory for the discovery of the Amazon River, said Dr. Enrico Mattievich, a retired professor of physics from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) in Brazil. Mattievich wrote a book titled “Journey to the Mythological Inferno” in 2011, exploring connections between Greek myths and South American geographical and historical sites.
Related: Similar Petroglyphs in Israel, America Reveal Ancient Global Language?
New genomic tools are enabling researchers to overturn long-held beliefs about the origins of populations, a researcher will tell the annual conference of the European Society of Human Genetics today (Monday). Dr Eran Elhaik, Assistant Professor of Animal and Plant Sciences at the University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK, will say that new technologies are enabling scientists to track the origins and migrations of populations with increasing accuracy.
As CRISPR-Cas9 starts to move into clinical trials, a new study published in Nature Methods has found that the gene-editing technology can introduce hundreds of unintended mutations into the genome.
Synthetic biology researchers have demonstrated a new method for digital information processing in living cells, analogous to the logic gates used in electric circuits. The circuits are the largest ever published to date in eurkaryotic cells and a key step in harnessing the potential of cells as living computers that can respond to disease, efficiently produce biofuels or develop plant-based chemicals.
Swiss scientists from the University of Geneva (UNIGE), Switzerland, and the University of Basel have created artificial viruses that can be used to target cancer. These designer viruses alert the immune system and cause it to send killer cells to help fight the tumor.
An antibiotic has been modified to make it more potent against bacteria, in an advance which researchers hope will help fight the threat of antibiotic-resistant infections.
The medicine, vancomycin, has been prescribed by doctors for 60 years and bacteria are only now becoming resistant to it.
Harvard researchers looked over data on more than 700,000 hospital admissions of elderly patients cared for by nearly 19,000 physicians between 2011 and 2014. They found that mortality rates crept up in step with physician age.
IBS patient Linda Buonanno knew the pills she was given contained no active drugs, yet they had an immediate effect on her condition. So can placebos play a useful medical role?
Placebos have a reputation problem. It is widely believed they are only effective when those taking them are deceived into thinking they are taking real drugs. As such, prescribing dummy or fake treatments is unethical. Yet in Buonanno’s case there was no deception. And she is not alone.
Research done by the BC Centre on Substance Use in Vancouver shows that using cannabis may enable people to consume less crack. Could marijuana become to crack what methadone is to heroin – a legal, safe and effective substitute drug that reduces cravings and other negative impacts of problematic drug use?
Medical researchers have confirmed what some desperate parents have been claiming for years—that a nonpsychoactive component of marijuana known as cannabidiol (CBD) can reduce epileptic seizures in some children.
France will introduce a law by year's end that will end prison terms for cannabis use, although consuming the drug will remain a criminal offence, a government spokesman said on Friday.
Related: We have waged war on drugs for a century. So who won?
In our research, published in the Journal of Research in Personality, we found that open people don’t just bring a different perspective to things, they genuinely see things differently to the average individual.
Once upon a time, long before wars, natural disasters and erosion took hold of the ancient Greek statues, these ivory gems vibrated with color. Ancient Greek sculptors valued animated and pulsating depictions as much as they valued perfection and realism, and it has finally become fact that these artists utilized color in their creations.
Archaeologists are trying to save the remains of a nearly 5,000-year-old city in Pakistan by burying it again.
The buried city, known as Mohenjo Daro or “mound of the dead”, was first discovered in the 1920s by an officer at the Archaeological Survey of India in what is now Sindh, Pakistan.
On a fortified hill in Scotland some 1,900 years ago, a Roman army attacked local warriors by hurling lead bullets from slings that had nearly the stopping power of a modern .44 magnum handgun, according to recent experiments.
The period between c 800 – 1200 AD saw dramatic changes in farming practices across large parts of Europe, enabling an increase in cereal production so great that it has been described as an ‘agricultural revolution’.
This ‘cerealisation’ allowed post-Roman populations not only to recover, but to boom, fueling the growth of towns and markets.
For decades, most people arranging a funeral have faced a simple choice - burial or cremation?
But in parts of the US and Canada a third option is now available - dissolving bodies in an alkaline solution.
Its technical name is alkaline hydrolysis, but it is being marketed as “green cremation”.
Cut off the head of a planarian flatworm, and a new one will grow in its place. The worm is one of many creatures that have some kind of memory for lost limbs, enabling them to regenerate what was there before.
Now it seems that this memory can be altered by meddling with the electrical activity of the animals’ cells.
The wavelike properties of quantum matter could lead to a scaled-down version of Star Trek technology. A new kind of tractor beam could use a beam of particles to reel in atoms or molecules, physicists propose in the May 5 Physical Review Letters.
It's a plane, it's a blimp … it's the world's largest aircraft.
A massive airship dubbed the Airlander 10 recently completed a successful test flight, bringing the helium-filled behemoth one step closer to commercial use.
They replaced those distinctive red and black cases with transparent ones — built out of a kind of UV-cured resin that's often used in nail art, according to a press release from the university. The artificial wing case, called an elytron, allowed the researchers to watch how the wing folded.
The early ancestors of 100-foot-long blue whales were dolphin-sized, according to new research that explains how they and other whale giants got to be so big.
Where, an old joke asks, does a 400-pound gorilla sleep? Anywhere it wants to, the superannuated gag answers. In keeping with that line of reasoning, a 400-pound gorilla should similarly hum anytime it wants to. The scientifically verified answer, however, is that the gorilla in question actually hums when he's eating—if the gorilla in question is a socially prominent male, anyway
When it comes to breast-feeding, orangutans are the champs.
Past studies of orangutans in the wild have found that mothers nurse their offspring for up to seven years, longer than any other primate.
For many hours a day they pluck dirt, debris and bugs from each other’s fur. Between grooming sessions they travel in troops to search for food. When ignored by mom, they throw tantrums; when not ignored by zoo-goers, they throw feces.
Declaw surgery (onychectomy) is illegal in many countries but is still a surprisingly common practice in some. It is performed electively to stop cats from damaging furniture, or as a means of avoiding scratches. Previous research has focused on short-term issues following surgery, such as lameness, chewing of toes and infection, but the long-term health effects of this procedure have not to date been investigated.
Bears do it; bats do it. So do guinea pigs, dogs and humans. They all yawn. It's a common animal behavior, but one that is something of a mystery.
Related: Dog Meat Sales Reportedly Banned at Infamous Festival
If Americans would eat beans instead of beef, the United States would immediately realize approximately 50 to 75 percent of its GHG reduction targets for the year 2020.
An invasive is any species introduced by human intervention that has caused economic or ecological damage by growing superabundant in a nonnative habitat. Invasives can be fish, bivalves, mammals or plants. They can be as sinister as kudzu (“the plant that ate the South”) or innocuous as dandelions.
It is one of the biggest waves ever recorded - and could reveal the secrets of the southern ocean.
Researchers from MetOcean Solutions testing out a newly deployed bouy were stunned to find it recorded a whopping 64 foot wave on Saturday.
A team of scientists from Sapienza University in Rome, Italy, and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, has developed a new approach to assist in the ongoing development of timely tsunami detection systems, based upon measurements of how tsunamis disturb a part of Earth’s atmosphere.
For millennia, scientists and Christians alike have been searching for evidence the story was in fact gospel.
A team of evangelical Christian explorers found what they claim is “99.9 per cent” certainly evidence of Noah’s Ark beneath snow and volcanic debris on Mount Ararat in Turkey.
Related: Conservationists plan expedition to secret ‘Noah’s Ark’ in Sumatra
New studies show that there is no such thing as "pure" European—or anyone else. Almost all of us are the children of repeated ancient migrations, according to researchers who study ancient human origins. Indigenous Europeans, for example, descend from at least three major migrations in the past 15,000 years, including two from the Middle East. Those migrants swept across Europe, mingled with previous immigrants, and then remixed to create the peoples of today.
Researchers have developed a new method to read imperfections in teeth caused by a lack of sunlight, creating a powerful tool to trace events ranging from human evolution and migration out of Africa to the silent damage of vitamin D deficiency that continues to affect 1 billion worldwide.
Homo sapiens is a very moody species. Even though sadness and bad moods have always been part of the human experience, we now live in an age that ignores or devalues these feelings.
Sleep loss in mice sends the brain’s immune cells into overdrive. This might be helpful in the short term, but could increase the risk of dementia in the long run
Related: How does poor sleep affect our ability to learn? Study investigates
Beauty sleep is a real thing, according to researchers who have shown that people who miss out on sleep do appear less attractive to others.
A couple of bad nights is enough to make a person look "significantly" more ugly, their sleep experiments suggest.
Over the past 30 years, research on attractiveness has paid too much attention to the importance of the face and body, ignoring the crucial role of smell and sound in the interaction between two people.