Newsdesk Archive
DNA might get all the attention, but proteins do the work. The recent confirmation that it is possible to extract proteins—which are encoded by DNA and perform all of the functions that keep living cells alive—from 80-million-year-old dinosaur bones has provided fodder for big questions about everything from evolution to biomaterials to extraterrestrial life.
A primitive type of human, once thought to be up to three million years old, actually lived much more recently, a study suggests.
Alt: Homo naledi is only 250,000 years old – here’s why that matters
Mohamed Sahnouni, coordinator of the Prehistoric Technology Program at the Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana (CENIEH), leads a study, published online in the journal L'Anthropologie, using fossil fauna and carbon stable isotope to reconstruct paleoenvironments of the newly discovered site of El Kherba (Algeria) dated to 1.7 million years ago, in relation with hominid behavioral activities
For decades, radiocarbon dating has been a way for scientists to get a rough picture of when once-living stuff lived. The method has been revolutionary and remains one of the most commonly used dating methods to study the past.
Charlotte Pearson says it's ready for a makeover.
After a 170-year delay, the discovery of a strange, metallic-looking rock found in the Ural Mountains in Russia in 1839 has ignited a global technology race for a cheaper, more efficient solar cell. It could seriously disrupt the world's solar market, currently dominated by China.
A chemistry professor in Florida has just found a way to trigger the process of photosynthesis in a synthetic material, turning greenhouse gases into clean air and producing energy all at the same time.
The process has great potential for creating a technology that could significantly reduce greenhouse gases linked to climate change, while also creating a clean way to produce energy.
A research team has devised a plan to make a portion of Mars more Earth-like by slamming an asteroid into it.
This Mars Terraformer Transfer (MATT) concept would create a persistent lake on the Red Planet's surface in 2036, potentially accelerating Mars exploration, settlement and commercial development, the team said.
Mars has an asteroid entourage, with nine so-called Trojans trailing in its wake. Now it seems these travelling companions all had the same violent beginning: as the innards of a mini-planet, eviscerated in a violent collision. Some remnants may even have been incorporated into the material that became Mars.
On Venus, plumes of superheated rock from near the planet's core may rise up intermittently, destroy patches of the planet's surface and create unique crown-shaped geologic features called coronae, a new study finds.
Place yourself at the south pole of Enceladus, the icy moon of Saturn. You are standing on a ridge overlooking a trench a few hundred kilometres long and 2 kilometres wide, parallel to three similar trenches – a linear pattern that planetary scientists call tiger stripes.
Scientists are attempting to identify the amino acids—building blocks that make proteins and support all life on Earth—that might feasibly form the basis of extraterrestrial life. The researchers have analyzed how an assortment of 15 amino acids, some found here on Earth in living organisms and some not found in living organisms on Earth, hold up in the face of extreme conditions found on other planets and moons.
More than 750,000 pieces of dangerous debris are now orbiting Earth and threatening the future of spaceflight, the largest ever conference on space rubbish has heard.
Related: Thousands of tiny satellites are about to go into space and possibly ruin it forever
A now famous experiment conducted by chemists Stanley Miller and Harold Urey back in 1952 showed that even if we don't know for sure how the first living cells formed, at least some of their molecular building blocks could have been produced by simple chemical reactions under conditions on ancient Earth.
About 14,500 years ago, Earth began transitioning from its cold, glacial self to a warmer interglacial state. However, partway through this period, temperatures suddenly returned to near-glacial conditions. This abrupt change (known as the Younger Dryas period) is believed by some to be the reason why hunter-gatherers started forming sedentary communities, farming, and laying the groundwork for civilization as we know it – aka. the Neolithic Revolution.
Related: Ancient carvings show comet hit Earth and triggered mini ice age
The CIA tried to decrypt it and failed. The FBI tried to break the code and also failed. Scholars, cryptologists and really smart people all over the world have been trying for 600 years to decrypt a mysterious book known as The Voynich Manuscript
The mysterious relics — an object and a piece of organic material — were traced during a decades-long genealogical study into Leonardo's family.
Stunning 800-year-old carvings have been found inside a Knights Templar cave under a crossroads in a small English town.
The carvings appear to show pictures of four patron saints as well as scenes with John the Baptist and Mary, the mother of Jesus.
For decades, the hunt for a royal tomb at the ancient Mexican city of Teotihuacán has gripped archaeologists trying to unravel the secrets of the kingdom’s extraordinary political power.
It is a mystery investigators thought they were on the verge of solving in 2015, when large quantities of liquid mercury were found amid a treasure trove of precious artefacts in a secret tunnel.
Chongye Valley is known also as Tibet’s Valley of the Kings. This site adjoins the Yarlung Valley (about 180 km (111.85 miles)) to the Tibetan capital, Lhasa. The Chongye Valley is famed for its burial mounds.
The UN honored Egyptologist and former Egyptian Antiquities Minister Zahi Hawass on Thursday for his role in protecting antiquities, on the occasion of his appointment as United Nations Ambassador for Culture and Antiquities.
Iowa farmer Karl Fox is drowning in corn.
Reluctant to sell his harvest at today's rock-bottom prices, he has stuffed storage bins at his property full and left more corn piled on the ground, covered with a tarp.
Related: Circular runways: Engineer defends his proposal
The 700 cows on Brett Reinford's dairy farm are making more than just milk.
Each day, the girls are producing 7,000 gallons of manure. And that smells exactly like you'd imagine. "We had gotten complaints from neighbors in the past that had said, 'Hey, it stinks too much. Can you do something about it?' " Reinford says.
Related: North Carolina Republicans Are Trying to Keep Residents From Suing Hog Farms
The Industrial Revolution left a deep mark on our world. Its dawning saw the start of the widespread burning of coal for factories and steam engines and, as a result, the beginning of significant outputs of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Our climate is now warming noticeably as these emissions have accumulated across the planet.
The pollution coming out of your tailpipe could be recycled into high-quality ink according to a group of researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
A rechargeable battery made from materials sourced from recycled glass bottles has been shown to store almost four times more energy than conventional ones.
Used glass bottles can be ground into a fine powder to create silicon based anodes.
A trip to a coral reef off the coast of the Florida Keys, an outdated nautical chart and an argument with a boat captain led biogeochemist Kimberly Yates to make a starting discovery: The seafloor around parts of the continent is breaking away, much more than scientists had previously assumed.
Roadside verges are becoming the last refuge for some of the the rarest wild flowers and plants in the UK, according to a conservation charity.
Plantlife is calling for better management of grassy verges to preserve a wealth of different flowering plants.
Looking to improve your overall life satisfaction? Try regularly hiking in a forest or otherwise engaging with the natural environment.
New research at Oregon State University empirically demonstrates that a variety of mechanisms for engaging nature significantly contribute to a person's overall well-being.
Nongenuine chuckles cause a specific cortical region to “light up” more
Most of us will laugh at a good joke, but we also laugh when we are not actually amused. Fake chuckles are common in social situations—such as during an important interview or a promising first date. “Laughter is really interesting because we observe it across all human cultures and in other species,
A new article posted on preprint site bioRxiv has generated a lot of interest among neuroscientists on Twitter. The article reports the existence of ‘functional connectivity‘ between surgically disconnected distant brain regions using fMRI, something that in theory shouldn’t be possible.
Scans taken of people born with only one hand have revealed areas of the brain typically associated with the 'missing hand' are taken over by other parts of the body, radically changing our thinking on how our brain operates.
Australian Aboriginals living in desert climates have a genetic variant, developed in the past 10,000 years, that allows them to adjust more easily to extreme high temperatures. Prehistorically, most humans, like other mammals, could digest milk only in infancy—we had genes that turned off the production of the milk-digesting enzyme when we were weaned.
a team of researchers has set out to solve the myths of the being they call Ci'tonga, an Omaha Indian name for what is commonly known as bigfoot or sasquatch.
Brothers Barry Webster Sr. and Derek Webster co-founded Rez Squatching Research seven years ago, setting out to prove the creature's existence. Their discoveries and experiences in the woods on the Omaha Indian Reservation have convinced them that Ci'tonga is real.
Make note of the name Etzanoa, a long-lost city. Donald Blakeslee says he’s found it.
The discovery could put south-central Kansas on the map as the second-biggest settlement of Native Americans found in the United States, Blakeslee said. And it’s now, finally, the known location of a 1601 battle pitting outnumbered Spaniards firing cannon into waves of attacking Indian warriors.
Alt: Lost City of the Wichita Nation Found in Kansas
What makes us human? Is war an inevitable part of the human condition? These are some of the questions that anthropologist Augustín Fuentes explores in his new book, The Creative Spark: How Imagination Made Humans Exceptional. Harnessing the latest findings in evolution, biology, and archaeology he creates a new synthesis to show that the great drivers of human progress have been creativity and cooperation, and that many of the things we believe about ourselves, from religion to race, are wrong.
People with obesity could benefit from magnetic or electric stimulation of the brain that helps them to eat less, a new review of studies finds.
In the review, researchers looked at the latest work on two noninvasive brain-stimulation techniques, and found that for people with obesity, both electrical and magnetic pulses yielded promising, though very preliminary, results.
New research suggests that excess sugar—especially the fructose in sugary drinks—might damage your brain.
Related: Study claims a link between diet sodas and stroke and dementia
Obesity resulted in as much as 47 percent more life-years lost than tobacco, and tobacco caused similar life-years lost as high blood pressure, new research has shown.
A diet high in animal protein was associated with a higher risk of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), a condition in which fat builds up in the liver, new research has found. These findings demonstrated that fructose consumption per se might not be as harmful as previously assumed.
The foods we choose to put on our plates — or toss away – could have more of an ecological impact than many of us realize.
On Earth Day, here are some ways to consider how our diet impacts the planet.
Seafood is a big part of humanity’s diet, and it’s been that way for a very long time. According to archaeological evidence, Homo sapiens mastered the art of fishing somewhere around 40,000 years ago — and we’ve been eating seafood ever since.
Throughout the past 40 years, the Earth has lost a third of its arable land to erosion and degradation. China’s efforts to fight the problem have seen mixed results.
Meet Steve, a newly discovered atmospheric phenomenon that’s so strange it still doesn’t have a formal scientific description, hence the placeholder name. Thanks to the work of aurora enthusiasts and atmospheric scientists, we’re now learning more about Steve, but many questions remain.
At the center of the Centaurus galaxy cluster, there is a large elliptical galaxy called NGC 4696. Deeper still, there is a supermassive black hole buried within the core of this galaxy.
Caltech physicists at the Institute for Quantum Information and Matter have discovered the first 3D quantum liquid crystal.
This is a new state of matter they expect will have applications in ultrafast quantum computing, and the researchers believe this discovery is just the 'tip of the iceberg'.
Black holes are weird: insanely dense objects that are crammed into such a small space they cause space-time to distort and the laws of physics to break down into a singularity.
For the first time, physicists have experimentally demonstrated the violation of "bilocal causality"—a concept that is related to the more standard local causality, except that it accounts for the precise way in which physical systems are initially generated
Experimental evidence of melting in two-dimensional substances has finally been gained by researchers. Findings from the study could be used to support technological improvements to thin film materials such as graphene.
Ever since Ötzi’s mummified body was found in the Italian Alps in 1991, researchers have been trying to pin down how the 5,300-year-old Tyrolean Iceman died. It now looks like this Copper Age hunter-gatherer simply froze to death, perhaps after suffering minor blood loss from an arrow wound to his left shoulder
The identity of the mysterious Homo floresiensis, aka the hobbit, has once again been turned on its head. New research suggests the tiny hominin evolved from an unknown ancestor that was the first to ever venture out of Africa.
Alt: Origins of Indonesian hobbits finally revealed
A discovery made in a remote mountain village high in the Peruvian Andes suggests that the ancient Inca used accounting devices made of knotted, colored strings for more than accounting.
Analysis of Egyptian fossils has identified a new species of extinct carnivorous mammals called hyaenodonts, according to a new study
Related: UFOs Over Ancient Egypt? Revealing the Mysterious Story of the Tulli Papyrus
New technology has been used to obtain the secrets of two ancient mummy's excavated from their graves in the Altai Mountains in 1949.
The pair are seen as a local chieftain from the Pazyryk culture and his wife or concubine who was incarcerated alongside him, evidently with cannabis burning in the burial chamber.
Tiny wooden figurines have stood upright "weaving" at appropriately sized looms for more than 2,100 years in a Chinese tomb containing the remains of a middle-age woman, a new study finds.
High-tech tools divulge new information about the mysterious and violent fates met by these corpses
If you’re looking for the middle of nowhere, the Bjaeldskovdal bog is a good place to start. It lies six miles outside the small town of Silkeborg in the middle of Denmark’s flat, sparse Jutland peninsula. The bog itself is little more than a spongy carpet of moss, with a few sad trees poking out. An ethereal stillness hangs over it. A child would put it more simply: This place is really spooky.
Here’s some news out of Iran that has to do with winds that aren’t the winds of war. A strong dust and sand storm in late March uncovered ruins and relics from an ancient lost city in the remote Fahraj Rural District in Kerman Province in southeastern Iran. The relics include pottery and bones and the area is now under police and military protection until their significance can be determined.
The Kaikoura earthquake of November 2016 had a measured magnitude of 7.8 and cost the lives of two people on New Zealand's south island. However, the local council in the resort town of Kaikoura says that coastal uplift caused by the quake raised 120 km (75 miles) of coastline by between one to eight metres (3-26 feet), potentially putting previously at-risk infrastructure out of harm's way from sea erosion
The UK is set to have its first ever working day without coal power generation since the Industrial Revolution, according to the National Grid.
The control room tweeted the predicted milestone on Friday, adding that it is also set to be the first 24-hour coal-free period in Britain.
The subterranean rodents are able to switch to a fructose-based metabolic system previously only observed in plants, a new study reveals
Alt: Naked mole-rats turn into plants when oxygen is low
Bruce Friedrich is about to up the ante in the effort to get more people eating plant-based and cell-cultured meat. With a staff that will soon exceed 30, Friedrich’s DC-based firm is expanding its attention from the United States to the entire world.
Related: Eating Dogs Banned in Taiwan—A First in Asia
Flowers that were thought to have evolved to lure hummingbirds, actually have combinations of traits that discourage wasteful visits by bumblebees
People who are exposed to pesticides may face an increased risk of liver cancer, a new meta-analysis suggests.
Pesticide exposure was associated with a 71 percent increased risk of liver cancer
Related: Larger doses of vitamin C may lead to a greater reduction in common cold duration
Related: Does Vitamin D decrease risk of cancer?
On paper alone you would never guess that I grew up poor and hungry.
My most recent annual salary was over $700,000. I am a Truman National Security Fellow and a term member at the Council on Foreign Relations.
If biology has an Indiana Jones, it is Christopher Ramsden: he specializes in excavating lost studies, particularly those with the potential to challenge mainstream, government-sanctioned health advice.
Sergey Leshchinskiy, paleontologist, head of TSU's Laboratory of Mesozoic and Cenozoic Continental Ecosystems, has studied the remains of Yakut mammoths collected on one of the largest locations in the world of mammoth fauna, Berelyokh. His study showed that almost half of the bones of these ancient mammals have signs of serious pathologies typical for the human skeletal system.
Ancient stone carvings confirm that a comet struck the Earth around 11,000BC, a devastating event which wiped out wooly mammoths and sparked the rise of civilisations.
Experts at the University of Edinburgh analysed mysterious symbols carved onto stone pillars at Gobekli Tepe in southern Turkey, to find out if they could be linked to constellations.
Alt: Ancient stone confirms date of comet strike
Alt: Research Paper
Irreplaceable Indigenous rock art at a site in remote Western Australia has been vandalised with graffiti, treated with contempt by outsiders, and placed under threat by an invasive weed, an inquiry has heard.
It may be necessary to add another large nation of Native Americans to the list of peoples wiped out by the rapacious and genocidal Spanish conquistadors after they arrived in the Americas. The location of the lost city of Etzanoa, found recently in Kansas, mystified historians for 400 years.
Piecing together the language of the Miami tribe, linguists Daryl Baldwin and David Costa are creating a new generation of speakers
We're getting very close to a Babel fish era, where you can just stick something in your ear and converse fluently with any human on Earth. But in the meantime, we have our smartphones.
Related: Bad language: why being bilingual makes swearing easier
Related: Why our emotions are cultural – not built in at birth
An Italian court has ruled that excessive, work-related use of a mobile phone caused an executive to develop a benign brain tumour.
In what could become a landmark ruling, the court in the northern town of Ivrea awarded the plaintiff a state-funded pension.
Researchers have developed a new solution to tracking objects hidden behind scattering media by analyzing the fluctuations in optical "noise" created by their movement.
Just as ancient Greeks fantasized about soaring flight, today’s imaginations dream of melding minds and machines as a remedy to the pesky problem of human mortality. Can the mind connect directly with artificial intelligence, robots and other minds through brain-computer interface (BCI) technologies to transcend our human limitations?
Social network says it’s assembled a team to build technology that allows you to ‘think’ commands at your smartphone. But what if you think that’s scary?
Alt: Facebook is building brain-computer interfaces for typing and skin-hearing
Tesla Inc (TSLA.O) founder and Chief Executive Elon Musk said his latest company Neuralink Corp is working to link the human brain with a machine interface by creating micron-sized devices.
On Thursday, a Chinese Long March 7 rocket successfully lifted off from the Wenchang Satellite Launch Center, carrying the Tainzhou-1 spacecraft.
Astronomers who have been listening for signals from alien civilisations in the most intensive hunt for extraterrestrials yet have found no evidence of life in its first year in operation.
When it comes to exploring exoplanets, it may be wise to take a snorkel along. A new study, published in a paper in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, has used a statistical model to predict that most habitable planets may be dominated by oceans spanning over 90% of their surface area.
In most biology textbooks, there’s a clear separation between the three domains of cellular organisms – Bacteria, Archaea, and Eukaryotes – and viruses. This fault line is also typically accepted as the divider between life and non-life
We don’t eat food off dirty floors. We dutifully wash our hands. We steer away from the clearly infected. It's all part of avoiding things likely to make us sick, and new research shows our primate cousins do it too.
The impact of environmental change can be passed on in the genes of tiny nematode worms for at least 14 generations -- the most that has ever been seen in animals -- scientists have discovered.
Decades ago, scientists surgically attached pairs of rats to each other and noticed that old rats tended to live longer if they shared a bloodstream with young rats.
It was the beginning of a peculiar and ambitious scientific endeavor to understand how certain materials from young bodies, when transplanted into older ones, can sometimes improve or rejuvenate them.
Alt: Young human blood makes old mice smarter
The oldfield mouse doesn’t seem extraordinary. With soulful black eyes and tiny teacup ears, the rodent lives a humdrum life scurrying about meadows and beaches in the Southeast.
Promiscuity mixes up the gene pool and dilutes genetic differences between populations, slowing down the evolution of new species, says new research by an international team led by the University of Bath's Milner Centre for Evolution.
Some say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and if that is true, perhaps it’s better off that naked mole-rats are pretty much blind. The tiny, hairless, subterranean dwelling creatures are a marvel of biology.
Researchers have uncovered molecular details of how pathogenic bacteria fight back against the human immune response to infection.
A high concentration of indolepropionic acid in the serum protects against type 2 diabetes, shows a new study. Indolepropionic acid is a metabolite produced by intestinal bacteria, and its production is boosted by a fibre-rich diet.
That wonderful moment when the solution to a problem suddenly pops into your head might actually be signaled beforehand by your eyes, a new study finds.
If you’re the kind of person who relishes adventure, you may literally see the world differently. People who are open to new experiences can take in more visual information than other people and combine it in unique ways. This may explain why they tend to be particularly creative.
What makes a great singer in the tradition of jazz, rock, or blues?
It is not only vocal quality and emotional expression, but the actual notes sung—and not just the usual notes on the piano keyboard. In the words of the late Marvin Gaye: “There’s got to be other notes some place, in some dimension, between the cracks on the piano keys.”
One of the most common reasons people go to the doctor is lower back pain, and one of the most common reasons doctors prescribe powerful, addictive narcotics is lower back pain.
Could shining bright lights on comatose patients to encourage their natural circadian rhythms help them awaken? A small study from Austria says yes.
A low-cost plastic material has now been developed that could become the basis for clothing that cools the wearer, reducing the need for energy-consuming air conditioning.
In the first such continent-wide survey, scientists have found extensive drainages of meltwater flowing over parts of Antarctica's ice during the brief summer. Researchers already knew such features existed, but assumed they were confined mainly to Antarctica's fastest-warming, most northerly reaches. Many of the newly mapped drainages are not new, but the fact they exist at all is significant
The world’s oceans are littered with trillions of pieces of plastic — bottles, bags, toys, fishing nets and more, mostly in tiny particles — and now this seaborne junk is making its way into the Arctic.
Related: The Arctic Ocean May Soon Have Its Very Own ‘Garbage Patch’
The operators of proposed satellite mega-constellations can greatly mitigate the risk of future collisions by rapidly de-orbiting their spacecraft at the end of service.
The growing popularity of small satellites as well as the upcoming deployment of low-Earth orbit mega-constellations will likely greatly increase the amount of space junk as well as the frequency of catastrophic collisions, a study led by the United Kingdom's University of Southampton suggests.
Astronomers have found a temperate planet a bit bigger and bulkier than Earth orbiting a small star just 40 light-years away. The newly announced world could be among the best targets to search for signs of life elsewhere in the cosmos.
A large asteroid the size of the Rock of Gibraltar has passed safely by Earth.
The object, measured to be almost a kilometre wide, came within five times the distance between the Earth and the Moon.
Metro Skyway, a subsidiary of the Tel Aviv-based Urban Aeronautics, just introduced its plans to build a four-person, hydrogen-powered “flying car” that it hopes will be buzzing above skyscrapers by 2022.
Related: Watch this all-electric ‘flying car’ take its first test flight in Germany
Related: Are ultra-long airplane flights bad for your health?