Newsdesk Archive
The majority of antimatter that pervades the Milky Way may come from clashing remnants of dead stars, a new study finds.
The work may solve a 40-year-old astrophysics mystery, the study's researchers said.
A remarkable new image reveals the teething pains of an entire planetary system
Humans have cataloged the star Fomalhaut for at least two thousand years without knowing it as anything more than the 18th brightest stellar object in the night sky.
Scientists have revealed that some of Earth's atmosphere may have been brought to the planet by comets billions of years ago.
The mystery of how the Earth's atmosphere was formed has long baffled scientists.
Geologists from Tohoku University, Japan, Amherst College and Washington University in Saint Louis, the United States, say they may have found the cause of the end-Ordovician mass extinction, the first of the world’s five known mass extinctions.
On the 80th anniversary of the conflagration, mysteries still remain
"In the 20th century, there are events that cut across all our private lives,” says Tom Crouch, a curator at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. “If you were alive on May 6, the day of the Hindenburg disaster, you remember where you were."
A professor teamed with a local high school student on research that found injured plants will send out warning signals to neighboring plants. The signals are sent through airborne chemicals released mainly from leaves. In the study, neighboring plants that received the signal responded by boosting their defenses.
Scientists bring the prospect of farmers producing their own fertilizer from only air closer with a revolutionary reactor that coverts nitrogen from the atmosphere into NOx, the raw material for fertilizer.
Pseudoscientific claims that music helps plants grow have been made for decades, despite evidence that is shaky at best. Yet new research suggests some flora may be capable of sensing sounds, such as the gurgle of water through a pipe or the buzzing of insects.
Findings of a new study solve a key mystery about the chemistry of how plants tell time so they can flower and metabolize nutrients.
The process—a subtle chemical event—takes place in the cells of every plant every second of every day.
Some plants can suck up and store heavy metals. They can help clean up contaminated soil and extract valuable metals from the ground by a process of phytomining - all without a pickaxe or shovel.
As the climate warms and some tree species shift toward cooler, more hospitable habitats, new research finds soil microbes could be playing a crucial role in determining where young trees can migrate and how well they survive when they arrive.
Related: Trees in Eastern U.S. Head West as Climate Changes
Hedges are often better than trees at soaking up air pollution among tall buildings, research has suggested.
Related: The Deaths of Millions of California Trees Endanger the Lives of Thousands of California Humans
The last 10 months were the driest July to April for southern England in records stretching back more than 100 years, figures reveal.
April was “exceptionally” dry with most of the UK seeing less than half the average rainfall, the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH) said.
Heavy rain on Mars reshaped the planet’s impact craters and carved out river-like channels in its surface billions of years ago. Researchers show that changes in the atmosphere on Mars made it rain harder and harder, which had a similar effect on the planet’s surface as we see on Earth.
Alt: Mars' Raindrops May Once Have Been Bigger Than Earth's
The quest to discover whether a planet orbiting our closest neighbouring star, Proxima Centauri (4.2 light years or 25 trillion miles from Earth), has the potential to support life has taken a new, exhilarating twist.
Certain stealthy spacetime curiosities might be less hidden than thought, potentially exposing themselves to observers in some curved universes.
These oddities, known as singularities, are points in space where the standard laws of physics break down.
Stars, quasars, and other celestial objects generate photons in a random way, and now scientists have taken advantage of this randomness to generate random numbers at rates of more than one million numbers per second. Generating random numbers at very high rates has a variety of applications, such as in cryptography and computer simulations.
Back in 1993, Carl Sagan encountered a puzzle. The Galileo spacecraft spotted flashes coming from Earth, and nobody could figure out what they were. They called them ‘specular reflections’ and they appeared over ocean areas but not over land.
A metal detectorist has learned he has hit a £2m jackpot after uncovering Britain's biggest ever Viking treasure.
Derek McLennan unearthed the 10th-century collection of rare Viking artefacts in a field in Dumfries and Galloway in Scotland's south-west in 2014.
Human activities, like nuclear tests and radio transmissions, have been changing near-Earth space and weather, and have created artificial radiation belts, damaged satellites and induced auroras.
For a while now, there's been a debate in the US over how to direct NASA's next major human spaceflight initiative. Do we build an outpost on the Moon as a step towards Mars, or do we just head straight for the red planet? Which ever destination we choose, it'll be viewed as the first step toward a permanent human presence outside of the immediate neighborhood of the Earth.
All of that indecision, according to a new book called Beyond Earth, is misguided. Either of these destinations presents so many challenges and compromises that attracting and supporting anything more than short-term visitors will be difficult.
The first-ever private mining operation on the moon is scheduled to kick off in 2020, when a landing craft sent by Florida-based Moon Express will ferry a single scoop of lunar dirt and rocks back to Earth.
Alt: Mining the moon for rocket fuel to get us to Mars
Waste material from the paper and pulp industry soon could be made into anything from tennis rackets to cars.
"We have overcome one of the industry's most challenging issues by discovering how to make good quality carbon fiber from waste,"
Nowhere is safe from plastic. A tiny South Pacific island 5000 kilometres from the nearest human occupation has the highest density of washed-up plastic rubbish known anywhere in the world.
The Ocean Cleanup has announced an update to its pollution-collecting technology. Company founder Boyan Slat claims it will be able to clean up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in as few as five years.
PassivDom uses a 3D printing robot that can print the walls, roof, and floor of a 380-square-foot model home in about eight hours. When complete, the homes are autonomous and mobile, meaning they don't need to connect to external electrical and plumbing systems.
Lowe's and Virginia Tech partnered to develop a wearable robotic suit with lift-assist technology to help employees more easily move products and avoid muscle fatigue.
Related: Robotic exoskeleton could prevent falls among the elderly
People in a minimally conscious state have been “woken” for a whole week after a brief period of brain stimulation. The breakthrough suggests we may be on the verge of creating a device that can be used at home to help people with disorders of consciousness communicate with friends and family.
Related: Could Magnetic Brain Stimulation Help People with Alzheimer’s?
In a rather shocking experiment, Chinese researchers grafted the head of a smaller rat onto a bigger one while keeping the brain safe from possible damage due to blood loss. Their technique could one day be useful for human head transplants.
MIT engineering students have invented a portable device that translates text into braille in real time, and they hope to sell it for less than $200. This cheap alternative to existing technologies will make both books and braille more accessible to the blind community.
When we look at a painting, how do we know it's a genuine piece of art?
Everything we see with the unaided eye in a painting – from the Australian outback images of Albert Namatjira or Russell Drysdale, to the vibrant works of Pro Hart – is thanks to the mix of colours that form part of the visible spectrum.
At an undisclosed location, Dominican priest Fr. Najeeb Michaeel is painstakingly digitizing his collection of ancient manuscripts documenting Iraq’s cultural heritage, including its Christian history
The centre of a powerful ancient civilisation, Mohenjo Daro was one of the world's earliest cities—a Bronze Age metropolis boasting flush toilets and a water and waste system to rival many in modern Pakistan.
Near the city of Gaza, 3,000 years ago, laid a city unlike any other in the world. The Greeks called it Rhinocolura, named for strange faces of the people who lived there – because every person there had no nose.
According to archaeologists, a reopened grave usually indicates grave robbery. Martine van Haperen, however, draws a different conclusion. Mediaeval people presumably reopened graves to strengthen the ties with their family ancestors
A gigantic monument at the bottom of the Sea of Galilee, as well as several mysterious structures, including a gigantic stone wheel and a moon-shaped monument, were recently found in northern Israel.
Evidence of human sacrifice to try to ensure the success of ancient construction projects has been found for the first time at a Korean site, officials said Tuesday.
The mystery of the origin of 22 iron beads discovered in an earthen mound in 1945 has been solved. The adornments were found among more than 1,000 shell and pearl beads just south of Havana, Illinois, when the Illinois State Museum excavated a group of Native American mounds dating to around 2,000 years ago.
As soon as you fit the words “Bible” and “history” into the same sentence, people start reacting. Most people are in one of two camps: either every word of the Bible is completely, literally true, or else the whole thing is a made-up fairy tale.
Training software to accurately sum up information in documents could have great impact in many fields, such as medicine, law, and scientific research.
A firm has created facial recognition software that works together with surveillance cameras to identify emotions on faces. This may allow for real time crime prevention as violent facial expressions are recognized.
UK police in the city of Durham, England, are prepared to go live with a predictive artificial intelligence system that will determine whether a suspect should be kept in custody
Engineering researchers at the University of Minnesota have developed a revolutionary process for 3D printing stretchable electronic sensory devices that could give robots the ability to feel their environment. The discovery is also a major step forward in printing electronics on real human skin.
For the first time ever, physicists have managed to directly detect a hydrogen bond within a single molecule - meaning we can now observe the smallest and most abundant element in the Universe in ways that scientists could only ever theorise about.
Alt: Physicists Got Their First Look at the Bond That Holds Most of Our Universe Together
FORGET fuel-powered jet engines. We’re on the verge of having aircraft that can fly from the ground up to the edge of space using air and electricity alone.
Traditional jet engines create thrust by mixing compressed air with fuel and igniting it. The burning mixture expands rapidly and is blasted out of the back of the engine, pushing it forwards.
Two teams working independently have conducted studies with similar results suggesting the possibility that some of the cosmic rays striking the Earth arise from dark matter particles colliding with one another.
Since the late 1920s, astronomers have been aware of the fact that the Universe is in a state of expansion. Initially predicted by Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, this realization has gone on to inform the most widely-accepted cosmological model – the Big Bang Theory.
It's very early days, but two papers published today have detected hints of elusive dark matter within data collected at the International Space Station (ISS).
UBC physicists may have solved one of nature's great puzzles: what causes the accelerating expansion of our universe?
For the first time, scientists have detected evidence of a magnetic field that's associated with the vast intergalactic 'bridge' that links our two nearest galactic neighbours.
If you could travel back in time 41,000 years to the last ice age, your compass would point south instead of north. That’s because for a period of a few hundred years, the Earth’s magnetic field was reversed. Magnetic reversals have happened repeatedly over the planet’s history, sometimes lasting hundreds of thousands of years. We know this from the way it affects the alignment of magnetic minerals, that we can now study on the Earth’s surface.
For centuries sailors told stories of enormous waves tens of metres tall. They were dismissed as tall tales, but in fact they are alarmingly common
Related: Oceans ‘on verge of mass extinction event’, scientists warn
When it comes to removing very dilute concentrations of pollutants from water, existing separation methods tend to be energy- and chemical-intensive. Now, a new method developed at MIT could provide a selective alternative for removing even extremely low levels of unwanted compounds.
When plastic garbage makes its way to the sea, it eventually breaks down into tiny fragments that return to us in salty seasonings, Malaysian researchers report in Scientific Reports.
Related: Phthalates increase the risk of allergies among children
Do not panic. This is the main message from a team of scientists who conducted a global survey on the radiation exposure caused by the meltdown of the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear plant reactors.
A planned coal fired mega power plant in India has been scrapped because the government wants to focus on green energy.
Gujarati state officials had planned a 4,000-Megawatt ultra-mega power project (UMPP).
On April 30, 85 percent of the electricity consumed by the European nation was generated by renewable sources like wind, solar, and hydroelectric power. “Most of Germany’s coal-fired power stations were not even operating on Sunday, April 30
Transporting methane from gas wellheads to market provides multiple opportunities for this greenhouse gas to leak into the atmosphere. Now, an international team of researchers has taken the first step in converting methane directly to electricity using bacteria, in a way that could be done near the drilling sites.
Smart glass, transitional lenses and mood rings are not the only things made of liquid crystals; mucus, slug slime and cell membranes also contain them. Now, a team of researchers is trying to better understand how liquid crystals, combined with bacteria, form living materials and how the two interact to organize and move.
A pair of researchers, one with Vrije Universiteit Brussel and the other Trier University in Germany has found that splash-back poison frog tadpoles willingly seek out any adult that comes near them to escape their cannibalistic siblings.
A species of vulture has been filmed putting on make-up for the first time – a rare phenomenon in birds, known as cosmetic colouration.
These vultures dip their heads in red soil and swipe from side to side, carefully dyeing their head, neck and chest red.
Related: The Startling Intelligence of the Common Chicken
Humans set themselves apart from other animals in a number of ways, including our ability to make tools. When the anthropologist Jane Goodall discovered that wild chimpanzees frequently make and use tools, her advisor Louis Leakey famously quipped that “now we must redefine tool, redefine man, or accept chimpanzees as humans”.
Related: Watch a Problem-Solving Raven Outsmart a Trash Can
Yes/no binary decisions by individual ants can lead to a rational decision as a collective when the individuals have differing preferences to the subject
Honey bees are known to "dance" with varying levels of enthusiasm depending on the quality of nectar they find. The more attractive the nectar is, the stronger they dance, appealing to other members. As a result, the majority of the members, and later the entire colony, gather to the better option.
For the first time, an extremely rare ant has been seen alive.
Tyrannomyrmex rex (T. rex for short) had eluded scientists since 2003, when entomologist Fernando Fernández revealed that a single dead ant from Malaysia represented a never-before-seen ant genus.
The teeth of Tyrannosaurus rex have been called "killer bananas," and a new study in the journal Scientific Reports shows just how hard those fearsome chompers could clamp down.
An ancient sink hole in eastern Tennessee holds the clues to an important transitional time in the evolutionary history of snakes. Among the fossilized creatures found there, according to a new paper, is a new species of snake that lived 5 million years ago.
Related: A Rare Public Display of a 17th-Century Mayan Manuscript
It is becoming clear that the 15km-wide asteroid could not have hit a worse place on Earth.
The shallow sea covering the target site meant colossal volumes of sulphur (from the mineral gypsum) were injected into the atmosphere, extending the "global winter" period that followed the immediate firestorm.
Had the asteroid struck a different location, the outcome might have been very different.
Alt: If that asteroid had been 30 seconds late, dinosaurs might rule the world and humans probably wouldn’t exist
Around 4,500 years ago, a mysterious craze for bell-shaped pottery swept across prehistoric Europe. Archaeologists have debated the significance of the pots — artefacts that define the ‘Bell Beaker’ culture — for more than a century. Some argue that they were the Bronze Age’s hottest fashion, shared across different groups of people. But others see them as evidence for an immense migration of ‘Beaker folk’ across the continent.
Chaco Canyon is a land of extremes. Summer heat scorches the desert canyon, which is sandwiched between sandstone cliffs nearly two kilometers above sea level in New Mexico’s northwestern corner. Bitter cold sweeps in for winter. Temperatures can swing as many as 28 degrees Celsius during the course of a day.
Exactly 115 years ago today, divers looking for sponges discovered the wreck of a 2,000-year-old vessel off the Greek island Antikythera. Scattered among the wreck’s treasures — beautiful vases and pots, jewelry, a bronze statue of an ancient philosopher — was the most peculiar thing: a series of brass gears and dials mounted in a case the size of a mantel clock.
Archaeological workers in Egypt unearthed an ancient human burial site with at least 17 intact mummies near the Nile Valley city of Minya, according to news agency reports.
In what is quite an amazing discovery, scientists have confirmed that a bracelet found in Siberia is 40,000 years old. This makes it the oldest piece of jewelry ever discovered, and archeologists have been taken aback by the level of its sophistication.
Scientists unveiled the first evidence on Tuesday that early humans co-existed in Africa 300,000 years ago with a small-brained human-like species thought to already be extinct on the continent at that time.
Related: Did This Mysterious Ape-Human Once Live Alongside Our Ancestors?
Related: Possible human ancestor turns out to have shared Earth with us
In 2013, an ASU research team found the oldest known evidence of our own genus, Homo, at Ledi-Geraru in the lower Awash Valley of Ethiopia. A jawbone with teeth was dated to 2.8 million years ago, about 400,000 years earlier than previously known fossils of Homo. After the discovery, attention turned to reconstructing the environment of this ancient human ancestor to understand why there and why then.
The beginnings of agriculture changed human history and has fascinated scientists for centuries.
Researchers from the Grantham Centre for Sustainable Futures at the University of Sheffield have shed light on how hunter-gatherers first began farming and how crops were domesticated to depend on humans.
Researchers may have an overconfident view of their profession's objectivity
What's your mental image of a scientist? Chances are you picture not only a wild-haired, bespectacled, older man in a lab coat but also someone who is more rational, objective and intelligent than other people. Yet do scientists themselves subscribe to this stereotype?
Researchers from around the world are scratching their heads over a newly discovered radio burst detected on Earth, but with a completely unknown origin. A new report describing the event and the subsequent investigation is now available online, but the key takeaway is that despite our best efforts and wealth of technology employed to discover the source, humanity has simply come up short. What’s even more bizarre is that this isn’t the first time it’s happened.
Heavy rain on Mars reshaped the planet's impact craters and carved out river-like channels in its surface billions of years ago, according to a new study published in Icarus. In the paper, researchers from the Smithsonian Institution and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory show that changes in the atmosphere on Mars made it rain harder and harder, which had a similar effect on the planet's surface as we see on Earth.
Related: The Mars Mystery: The Secret Connection Between Earth and the Red Planet, by Graham Hancock
Research suggests that gravitational interactions forced Mars out of the asteroid belt and toward the sun about 120 million years after the birth of the solar system.
During the 1960s, Freeman Dyson and Nikolai Kardashev captured the imaginations of people everywhere by making some radical proposals. Whereas Dyson proposed that intelligent species could eventually create megastructures to harness the energy of their stars, Kardashev offered a three-tiered classification system for intelligent species based on their ability to harness the energy of their planet, solar system and galaxy, respectively.
A curious chilly area of space may have been created when a parallel universe crashed into our own, scientists have suggested, the first evidence that we may be part of a multiverse.
KU researcher Adrian Melott examines the effects of a supernova on Earth's biology in new research to appear in Astrophysical Journal. The KU researcher and colleagues argue the estimated distance of the supernova thought to have occurred roughly 2.6 million years ago should be cut in half.
Spending $50 million a year is a pittance in terms of managing this existential risk.
When the asteroid named 2014 J025 passed by the Earth in April, it came within 1.1 million miles of the planet -- a close shave by cosmic standards and also the nearest in more than a decade. And J025 was big. At nearly a mile across, it could have killed tens of millions if it had hit a heavily populated area.
Solar astronomers have uncovered the magnetic secrets behind one of the sun's most mysterious eruptions: a coronal mass ejection that seems to come from nowhere.
The finding shows that oxygen can be generated in space without the need for life, and could influence how researchers search for signs of life on exoplanets.
Surf’s up on Jupiter’s moon. Magma waves travelling both clockwise and anticlockwise have been spotted on the surface of a lava lake on Io, the most volcanically active body in the solar system.
Related: Saturn's mysterious hexagonal storm gets its moment in the sun: Stunning new Cassini image shows giant jet stream twice the diameter of the Earth
Every state in the nation has breached the Safe Drinking Water Act combining in 80,000 safety violations affecting 77 million people's drinking water.
A common parasite that lives in fish eyeballs seems to be a driver behind the fish’s behaviour, pulling the strings from inside its eyes.
When the parasite is young, it helps its host stay safe from predators. But once the parasite matures, it does everything it can to get that fish eaten by a bird and so continue its life cycle.
Related: Popularity of sushi has brought rise in parasitic infections, warn doctors
In a scientific first, researchers have discovered a bizarre inter-species relationship in which salamanders and algae cozy up together to share cells. Scientists aren’t entirely sure why these two very different organisms have adopted such an intimate arrangement, but the discovery could represent a completely new form of symbiotic relationship.
The humble mussel could soon help us prevent scarring. A sticky substance naturally secreted by the marine animal is one element of a glue that closes skin wounds seamlessly in rats. The glue could be used to prevent unsightly scars after accidental cuts or surgical operations.
She was the only white wolf living in the park, though there had been two others before her. She was 12 years old when she was killed, twice the average age of wolves in Yellowstone.
Polar bears are ditching seafood in favour of scrambled eggs, as the heat rises in the Arctic melting the sea ice. A changing coastline has made it harder for the predators to catch the seals they favour and is pushing them towards poaching goose eggs.
Related: Never Before Seen: Deer Spotted Eating Human Bones
A new study in Current Biology found that simple vertical lines can cause headache-inducing brain activity even in healthy people and could induce migraines or seizures in those with photosensitive epilepsy.
Categories of colour are not born of language but are rooted in biology, according to research that shows babies divide colours up into red, blue, green, yellow and purple.
New evidence suggests that the earliest traces of a language can stay with us into adulthood, even if we no longer speak or understand the language itself. And early exposure also seems to speed the process of relearning it later in life.
UK scientists have released the first batch of "groundbreaking" medical scans that reveal step-by-step how the human brain develops in babies.
Researchers around the world can use the data to understand what healthy growth looks like, say the Developing Human Connectome Project experts.
Einstein's "spooky action at a distance" persists even at high accelerations, researchers of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the University of Vienna were able to show in a new experiment
Related: New materials bring quantum computing closer to reality
Signatures of extra dimensions that don’t normally affect the four dimensions we can observe could show up in the way they warp ripples in space-time
Physicists have long wondered why gravity is so weak compared with the other fundamental forces. This may be because some of it is leaking away into extra dimensions beyond the three spatial dimensions we experience.
Alt: Epic Discovery of Gravitational Waves --"Echoes of Hidden Dimensions in the Cosmos"
If humans can’t yet achieve immortality, the next best thing would be finding a way to slow down or even reverse the process of aging. While there’s an entire industry devoted to so-called “anti-aging,” the biological truth is that our fate is written in our DNA. Specifically, the end bits which are called telomeres.