Newsdesk Archive
In 1722, a pet squirrel named Mungo passed away. It was a tragedy: Mungo escaped its confines and met its fate at the teeth of a dog. Benjamin Franklin, friend of the owner, immortalized the squirrel with a tribute.
The same extraordinary properties that make this plant an “ecosystem engineer” also helped save human lives
Desperate to get their hands on something sterile that would keep wounds clear of infection, doctors started getting creative.
Locals accidentally uncovered an ancient Mayan artefact while clearing debris on privately-owned land in the Mexican state of Chiapas.
Related: Three-thousand-year-old axes found in farmer's field in mid-Norway
'Herod’s megalomaniac spirit hovers over Caesarea': Discoveries lend credence to the Roman historian Josephus’ the 'Wars of the Jews'
One of the largest archaeological projects ever undertaken in Israel has exposed the ancient entrance to Caesarea. Among the discoveries are the base of an altar built in honor of the Emperor Augustus and the goddess Roma.
One of the ironies of modern construction projects is that their digging often uncovers ancient construction projects. That was the case in 2005 when workers in the modern city of Samen, Iran, uncovered artifacts that forced them to stop and turn the site over to archeologists.
Innovations in stone knapping technology during the South African Middle Stone Age enabled the creation of early projectile weapons, according to a study published April 26, 2017 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Veerle Rots from University of Liège, Belgium, and colleagues.
Once upon a time in Asia Minor, people started to tell the tale of The Smith and the Devil. The plot was simple: A craftsman trades his soul for supernatural power, then uses his magic to trap the diabolical creature with whom he made the deal.
Folklorists, including the Brothers Grimm, have long assumed the story, as well as other tales such as Rumpelstiltskin and Beauty and the Beast, is ancient. Now, there’s firm evidence for that
Everyone’s favorite creepy frozen corpse is back, this time with a new theory on how he might have died. Ötzi the Iceman has been the subject of numerous studies since his discovery in 1991.
More than a decade ago, Discover covered the concept of a coffee-maker-like device that could, overnight, turn a few animal muscle stem cells into a nice hunk of meat.
Related: Five ways the meat on your plate is killing the planet
Human activity risks contaminating pristine water stockpiled deep underground since the age of the mammoths, said a study Tuesday that warns of a looming threat to a critical life source.
Back in February, physicists announced an outlandish plan to 're-freeze' the Arctic, by installing 10 million wind-powered pumps over the ice cap to replenish the dwindling sea ice.
Glacier flow at the southern Antarctic Peninsula has increased since the 1990s, but a new study has found the change to be only a third of what was recently reported.
On April 18, Earth breached its latest climate change milestone. For the first time in human history, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were measured at 410 parts per million (ppm).
Conventional wisdom has held that forest growth will dramatically slow with high levels of rainfall. But University of Colorado Boulder researchers this month turned that assumption on its head with an unprecedented review of data from 150 forests that concluded just the opposite.
Fed up with endless encroachment on their ancestral lands, leaders of Brazil's many indigenous tribes went to the capital Brasilia to speak out this week. But they had trouble finding anyone to listen.
Related: Planned Mega-Hotel on Iconic Surfing Beach Sparks Controversy
El Salvador on Thursday became the first country in the world to ban the mining of metals in what campaigners called a landmark move for environmental protection.
US President Donald Trump signed an executive order aimed at lifting bans on drilling for oil and gas in offshore Arctic and Atlantic areas, saying it would pull in "billions of dollars" for America and create jobs.
Related: How a Border Wall Could Wreak Ecological Havoc
It was on 23 August at 17:07 GMT that spacecraft operators at the European Space Agency’s (ESA) control centre in Darmstadt, Germany, noticed something was going wrong. Their flagship Earth observation satellite, Sentinel-1A, had suddenly jumped into a slightly different orbit and a slightly different orientation.
NASA's ageing spacesuits are starting to fall apart and replacements are still several years off, according to a report from the space agency's auditor. If you've got any spare ones in your wardrobe, NASA would love to have them.
Simulated Mars soil can be packed together into a solid brick-like material — without needing any added ingredients to hold it together. That might mean real Martian soil could be easily used as a tool for building structures like habitats on the Red Planet’s surface, which could make human missions to Mars less complicated to pull off.
Though the undertaking will no doubt include many challenges, NASA is finally ready to make humanity's dream of sending people to Mars a reality. To that end, the agency has shared its five-part plan for reaching the Red Planet.
Mars enjoyed about 400 million years of relative peace between two giant-impact epochs long ago, a new study suggests.
Researchers determined that there were likely no gigantic impacts on the Red Planet between about 4.5 billion years ago and the "Late Heavy Bombardment" (LHB) era, which is thought to have lasted from 4.1 billion to 3.8 billion years ago.
Astronomers have used data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory to study the properties of dark matter, the mysterious, invisible substance that makes up a majority of matter in the universe. The study, which involves 13 galaxy clusters, explores the possibility that dark matter may be more "fuzzy" than "cold," perhaps even adding to the complexity surrounding this cosmic conundrum.
Physicists have come up with what they claim is a mathematical model of a theoretical "time machine" - a box that can move backwards and forwards through time and space.
One of the most mysterious anomalies astronomers have detected in space is the CMB “Cold Spot,” a massive void in space where no cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB) is found. Cosmic background radiation – energy left over from the Big Bang – is believed to spread throughout the entire universe.
Reality could be an illusion based on what our brains expect to see, according to controversial research.
Our internal mental simulation of the external world is only informed occasionally by real data from our senses, the theory claims.
Psychologists have occasionally given people psychedelic drugs such as LSD or magic mushrooms to induce altered states, in an attempt to treat mental illness. Today, many of those drugs are illegal, but if clinical trials testing their efficacy yield positive results, a handful could become prescription medicines in the next decade.
Depression is challenging to manage, especially since many antidepressants can take weeks to work and simply fail for nearly one-third of sufferers. New research presented in April at the Psychedelic Science 2017 conference in Oakland, California, suggests psychedelic drugs can help people battling depression and other psychiatric disorders that defy conventional therapies.
Mexico's Lower House of Congress passed a bill on Friday to legalize the use of marijuana and cannabis for medical and scientific needs, a step closer to outright legalization in a country long scarred by warring drug cartels.
Upon using medical cannabis, patients in pain and those suffering from other medical conditions reduced their use of opioids, antidepressants, sleep medications, alcohol, and other dangerous substances, according to a new study published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology.
Related: Spice ruins lives and costs taxpayers a fortune. It doesn’t have to be this way
When it comes to retirement, experts recommend that everyone do some hard thinking. By this, they mean you should plan your finances responsibly, consider carefully where to live, and decide what colour beach chair to sit in all day as you sip strawberry daiquiris in the sun. But there’s another reason to think hard about these details: hard thinking by itself – a strenuous mental workout – is good for your ageing brain.
Humans are still evolving, So, where will evolution take us in 1,000 years?
Chances are we’ll be taller. Humans have already seen a boom in height over the last 130 years.
In 1880 the average American male was 5’7’’. Today, he’s 5’10’’.
A new study examining the muscular system of bonobos provides firsthand evidence that the rare great ape species may be more closely linked, anatomically, to human ancestors than common chimpanzees. Previous research suggested this theory at the molecular level, but this is the first study to compare in detail the anatomy of the three species.
The DNA of extinct humans can be retrieved from sediments in caves - even in the absence of skeletal remains.
Researchers found the genetic material in sediment samples collected from seven archaeological sites.
How might the ancient relative of humanity dubbed "Lucy" have given birth? In a manner in between that of chimpanzees and humans, with newborns undergoing a bit of tilting in the birth canal as they were born, a new study finds.
I was in Jakarta, Indonesia in 2008 and lucky enough to examine the bones of one of the most controversial hominin species that has ever been discovered. The skeletal remains belonged to an ancient people with tiny brains, and so short that they have been nicknamed “hobbits”.
Paleontologists have dug up a 130,000-year-old mastodon skeleton that looks like it was smashed apart by humans. But they found it in America, where people were not supposed to have arrived for another 100,000 years.
Alt: Remarkable New Evidence for Human Activity in North America 130,000 Years Ago
Alt: Neanderthals in California? Maybe so, provocative study says
A blue monster, a winged horse and a nude deity known as the master of wind are just a few examples of fantastic images that archaeologists recently discovered in a 1,400-year-old tomb in China.
Studies of grape pips point to wine production in Denmark during the time of the Vikings.
The Vikings liked alcohol, but while it is easy enough to grow crops and produce beer in the Danish climate, wine is a different challenge and was thought to have always been imported from southern parts of Europe to northern countries.
The reasons behind why people are gay, straight, or bisexual have long been a source of public fascination. Indeed, research on the topic of sexual orientation offers a powerful window into understanding human sexuality.
Numbers do not exist in all cultures. There are numberless hunter-gatherers embedded deep in Amazonia, living along branches of the world's largest river tree. Instead of using words for precise quantities, these people rely exclusively on terms analogous to "a few" or "some."
“Somewhere at Google there is a database containing 25 million books and nobody is allowed to read them.”
You were going to get one-click access to the full text of nearly every book that’s ever been published. Books still in print you’d have to pay for, but everything else—a collection slated to grow larger than the holdings at the Library of Congress, Harvard, the University of Michigan, at any of the great national libraries of Europe—would have been available for free at terminals that were going to be placed in every local library that wanted one.
An AI has learned to tackle one of the toughest Atari video games by taking instructions in plain English.
Related: Video Games Help Model Brain’s Neurons
New human rights that would protect people from having their thoughts and other brain information stolen, abused or hacked have been proposed by researchers.
Intelligent machines of the future will help restore memory, mind your children, fetch your coffee and even care for aging parents.
It will all be part of a brave new world of the not-so-distant future, in which innovative smart machines, rather than being the undoing of people—as some technophobes have long feared—actually enhance humans.
Some 1.6 million people in the U.S. live with limb loss, according to a 2008 study, and that number could more than double by 2050. Modern prostheses enable replacements of limbs lost to injury or disease. But people who lose functionality in an otherwise healthy arm or leg have had few options.
Whoever named the sea cucumber after a vegetable didn’t give it enough credit. Yes, sea cucumbers are soft, warty tubes that scoot eyelessly along the seafloor. But they aren’t helpless. Some secrete a poison that’s deadly to other animals. And some, when threatened, shoot sticky threads out of their anuses to tangle up predators. When researchers collected these bizarre weapons and tested them in the lab, they discovered a material that’s unique among sea creatures.
Newborn humpback whales and their mothers whisper to each other to escape potential predators, scientists reported Wednesday, revealing the existence of a previously unknown survival technique.
"They don't want any unwanted listeners," researcher Simone Videsen, lead author of a study published in Functional Ecology, told AFP.
Blood Falls is one of the most famous and ominously-named landmarks in Antarctica. Discovered in 1911 by Griffith Taylor, the red waterfall occasionally pours its stunning blood-like water down a wall of pristine white ice that attracts both photographers and scientists trying to determine its cause and its source. The color is no longer a mystery
Related: Mystery of the missing mercury at the Great Salt Lake
A team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in Spain and Italy studying the aftermath of the eruption of the Tagoro underwater volcano in 2011 and 2012 has found that colonies of bacteria living in filaments attached to the volcano surface (named Thiolava veneris which is Lation for Venus' hair) were the first organisms to colonize the volcano after the eruption
Related: Japan volcanic island may hold key to coral survival
Norwegian scientists have put forward a new theory to explain the inspiration behind one of the most famous works of art ever produced.
The cave located at Altamira was inhabited thousands of years ago and contains remarkable examples of sophisticated art from Prehistory. The first paintings appeared there most probably around 35600 years ago. The exquisite site is often compared to the famous cave of Lascaux, but Altamira tells its own story about the first people of Cantabria.
Fungus-like life forms have been found in rocks dating back 2.4 billion years.
The fossils, drilled from rocks that were once beneath the seafloor, resemble living fungi.
Scientists say the discovery could push back the date for the oldest fungi by one to two billion years.
Alt: Earliest Fungus-Like Fossils Discovered in 2.4 Billion-Year-Old South African Bedrock
From the Bronze Age until the Viking Age, burial mounds could be placed on top of the remains of three-aisled longhouses. The internal posts that served as roof-supporting beams were sometimes removed before the house was set on fire. Once the house had burned to the ground, one or more burial mounds were placed on top of its remains.
Around 1450 CE, the Incas attacked so fast that many of the Colla people of the hill fort of Ayawiri in Peru didn't have time to take their valuables with them as they abandoned their homes.
Putting a number on how quickly people abandoned settlements hundreds of years ago is tricky using methods like radiocarbon dating, which are not very precise on those time scales.
Scientists have extracted DNA from the skeletal remains of several 19th-century sailors who died during the ill-fated Franklin Expedition, whose goal was to navigate the fabled Northwest Passage.
Related: Why the RAF destroyed a ship with 4,500 concentration camp prisoners on board
Thousands of kilometres of the Arctic and Antarctic sea floors have been charted in an ambitious and highly detailed atlas of the polar seabed. Several strange shapes gouged out of the sea floor reveal some of the more dramatic periods of the poles' past.
It's often said that we know more about the surface of Mars than we do about the Earth's ocean floors. What we do know about the seabed here on Earth is perhaps at its scantiest in the remote polar regions.
Professor Wright is an associate professor in astronomy and astrophysics at Pennsylvania State University.
In a new paper, titled 'Prior Indigenous Technological Species', Professor Wright suggests that ancient aliens could have lived on either Mars, Venus or even Earth.
Alt: Research paper
Related: Is NASA hiding ET? Conspiracy theorists spot a transparent ‘alien cylinder’ on a live feed of the ISS
Related: People Are Seeing U.F.O.s Everywhere, and This Book Proves It
Dust and rock particles that mimic regolith on the surfaces of the Moon and Mars have been turned into 3D printer inks, offering a glimpse into how humans might one day use local materials in situ to construct and maintain extraterrestrial outposts.
It will take more than six years to get there. But if long-anticipated signs of life are found on Europa, a newly-proposed joint American-European trek to the enigmatic moon of Jupiter will have been worth it.
China is talking with the European Space Agency about collaborating on a human settlement on the moon.
The secretary general for China's space agency, Tian Yulong, disclosed the talks today in Chinese state media.
NASA is all about solving challenges, and the goal of having a prolonged presence in space, or a colony on Mars or some other world, is full of challenges, including the necessity of growing food. Scientists at Kennedy Advanced Life Support Research are working on the Prototype Lunar/Mars Greenhouse Project to try and meet that challenge.
Many stars show tails that trail behind them like a comet’s tail, supporting the idea that our own Solar System has one too. However, new evidence from NASA’s Cassini, Voyager and Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) missions suggests that the trailing end of the Solar System may not be stretched out in a long tail.
A supervoid is unlikely to explain a 'Cold Spot' in the cosmic microwave background, according to the results of a new survey, leaving room for exotic explanations like a collision between universes.
Weapons-grade fuel in a nuclear reactor emits a steady rate of telltale antineutrinos that could be detected by a newly designed portable device
Solar cells convert the sun's energy into electricity by converting photons into electrons. A new solar cell design could raise the energy conversion efficiency to over 50% by absorbing the spectral components of longer wavelengths that are usually lost during transmission through the cell.
Synthetic rubber and plastics - used for manufacturing tires, toys and myriad other products - are produced from butadiene, a molecule traditionally made from petroleum or natural gas. But those manmade materials could get a lot greener soon, thanks to the ingenuity of a team of scientists from three U.S. research universities.
Around 24.8 million miles of roads crisscross the surface of Earth. And hundreds of millions of barrels of oil have been used for that development. Engineer Toby McCartney came up with a solution to that waste of natural resources and the growing plastic pollution problem. His company, Scotland-based MacRebur, lays roads that are as much as 60 percent stronger than regular asphalt roads and last around 10 times longer – and they’re made with recycled plastic.
Suppose all the wildest theories and historical conspiracies of novelist Dan Brown were proven true. And the mind-reading, spoon-bending claims of Israeli psychic Uri Geller all turned out to be real as well.
That wouldn’t be half as extraordinary as the announcement in an obscure scientific journal this month that vindicated 20 years of maverick research and best-selling books by the eccentric archaeologist Graham Hancock.
Plastic bags need hundreds of years to biodegrade, but wax worms break them down in no time.
The researchers confirmed that the worms’ digestion process was breaking down the plastic, breaking polyethylene’s chemical bond and converting it to ethylene glycol, an organic compound used in the production of polyethylene that itself biodegrades in a few weeks.
Alt: This Bug Can Eat Plastic. But Can It Clean Up Our Mess?
The ants of the genus Sericomyrmex - literally translated as 'silky ants' - belong to the fungus-farming ants, a group of ants that have figured out how to farm their own food. The silky ants are the less well-known relatives of the famous leaf-cutter ants - well-studied, photogenic model organisms that you simply cannot avoid if you take a trip to the Neotropics.
Could fasting boost your brainpower? A stomach hormone that stimulates appetite seems to promote the growth of new brain cells and protect them from the effects of ageing – and may explain why some people say that fasting makes them feel mentally sharper.
Neuroscientists have, for the first time, shown that gut bacteria "speak" to the brain to control food choices in animals. In a study publishing April 25 in the Open Access journal PLOS Biology, researchers identified two species of bacteria that have an impact on animal dietary decisions.
Zapping the brain with just a bit of electricity at the right time may help to improve memory function in some people, according to a new study.
Languages are constantly evolving, and many have come and gone during the course of human history. Is Icelandic about to head into obscurity? The Associated Press reported it could be in danger of dying just like Latin, the language spoken by the once powerful ancient Romans. Blame technology.
Human beings have a long history of persecuting apex predators such as wolves, tigers and leopards. The loss of these predators—animals at the top of the food chain—has resulted in ecological, economic and social impacts around the globe. Rarely do the predators fully recover from human oppression, and when they do, we often lack data or tools to assess their recovery.
Up to 730,000 elephants are 'missing' from Africa's protected areas amid fears they have been slaughtered, a report has found.
Conservationists in South Africa have blamed 'pervasive poaching' for the dramatic reduction in numbers across 73 designated areas spanning 21 African countries.
The world's last surviving male northern white rhino - stripped of his horn for his own safety - is now under 24-hour armed guard in a desperate final bid to save the species.
Sudan is guarded day and night by a group of rangers who risk their lives on a daily basis as they try to keep the rhino from poachers lured by the rising price of ivory.
Related: Last male northern white rhino joins Tinder to raise money
Millions of people around the world rely on social media platforms like Twitter to receive minute-to-minute updates on news breaking globally. It isn’t every day though that a single tweet can cause a domino effect that led to the rescue of a severely endangered Sumatran Rhino named Puntung.
Bat-detecting drones could help us find out what the animals get up to when flying. Ultrasonic detectors on drones in the air and on the water are listening in on bat calls, in the hope of discovering more about the mammals’ lives beyond the reach of ground-based monitoring devices.
You may not think of the buzz and whine of insects as musical, but the distinctive pitch of mosquito wingbeats could tell us how to fight malaria
Tablets made from dried leaves of the Artemisia annua plant cured 18 critically ill patients in a Congo clinic. The results suggest a new and inexpensive treatment option for the mosquito-borne disease that affects 212 million people worldwide.
In a significant public health victory, Mexico has succeeded in eliminating a disease which is the leading cause of blindness worldwide.
The Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) and the World Health Organization (WHO) announced Monday that Mexico is the first country in the Americas to eliminate trachoma as a public health issue.
Amazon is exploring what role autonomous-vehicle technology could have in its business, the Wall Street Journal reported today (paywall). The research is still in an early, exploratory phase, the Journal said, but hints at a larger plan of Amazon and its CEO Jeff Bezos: to own the delivery and logistics chain for its packages, and make it as efficient as possible.
3D printing may not be the home phenomenon many hoped for, but the technology continues to find a place in the world of industrial manufacturing. Reuters reports that Boeing will start using 3D-printed titanium parts in the construction of its 787 Dreamliner jet airliner.
Related: 4D printing makes objects that assemble themselves when heated
An artificial womb designed to support critically premature babies has been demonstrated successfully in animals for the first time, in an advance that could transform the lives of the most fragile newborns.
The tech industry, as we are often told, is fond of disrupting things, and lately the automakers have been a big target. Cars that use artificial intelligence to drive themselves, for example, have been in development for a few years and can be spotted on roads in a number of cities. And now, coming onto the radar screen, are flying machines that do not exactly look like your father’s Buick with wings.
Related: This is the first footage of Larry Page’s ‘flying car’
When Uber first announced its crazy-sounding plan to explore “on-demand urban aviation” — essentially a network of flying taxis that could be hailed via a smartphone app and flown from rooftop to rooftop — the company made it clear that it never intended to go it alone.
Waymo—Alphabet's self-driving car division—is launching a "trial" of a self-driving taxi service in the Phoenix, Arizona, metropolitan area. The Google spinoff's fleet of self-driving cars is descending on Phoenix and offering free rides to anyone in its "early rider program," which is currently accepting new members.
You probably know that walking does your body good, but it's not just your heart and muscles that benefit. Researchers found that the foot's impact during walking sends pressure waves through the arteries that significantly modify and can increase the supply of blood to the brain.
PTSD will affect about 8 percent of people during their lives. A new study suggests that passively inhaling orange essential oil could offer a nonpharmaceutical option to relieve symptoms.
In New Orleans in the small hours of the morning on Monday, workers wearing bulletproof vests and scarves that obscured their faces removed the first of four prominent Confederate monuments.
A 17th-century Dutch old master painting stolen by the Nazis is to be auctioned in Vienna next week, provoking outrage from the heirs of the owners from whom it was looted who have accused the auction house of moral bankruptcy.
Yhe black market in antiquities is part of an illicit art industry estimated between $4.5 and $7 billion annually, making it third only to the black market in narcotics and arms.
High on a rocky outcrop, just 50 miles from the fighting that is wrecking historic sites across Iraq, workers are busy laying out floor tiles, determined to save at least one ancient structure amidst the turmoil.
The team is rebuilding the last remains of the fortified citadel in the Iraqi-Kurdish capital of Erbil, constructed on top of the world's longest continuously-occupied site according to UNESCO, parts of it up to 8,000-years-old.
A vast battlefield landscape of tunnels and trenches dug to train troops for the first world war has been discovered on army land being cleared for housing.
An unwelcome development is the return of cold war chatter about “local” nuclear wars – the idea that a few warheads tossed around east Asia might be locally unpleasant but manageable on a planetary scale. This idea needs to be quashed. Quite apart from the difficulty in preventing a local conflict from growing into a large-scale multinational war, those who study nuclear war scenarios say millions of tonnes of smoke would gush into the stratosphere, resulting in a nuclear winter that would lower global temperatures for years. The ensuing global crisis in agriculture – dubbed a “nuclear famine” – would be devastating.
Pirates in Somalia are being driven to the seas by a devastating drought, says the top U.S. military commander in Africa.
A spate of pirate attacks have occurred off the coast of Somalia in recent months after a five-year hiatus in the region
Climate change is predicted to cause a series of maladies for world oceans including heating up, acidification, and the loss of oxygen.
Related: As Rising Seas Erode Shorelines, Tasmania Shows What Can Be Lost
The tropical rain belt, also known as the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ), is in a state of constant migration. It continuously changes position in response to the seasons and follows the sun's zenith, with a slight delay. This in turn determines the wet and dry periods in the tropics and subtropics over the course of the year.