Newsdesk Archive
It was in 2010 that Amilcar Adamy first investigated rumors of an impressive cave in southern Brazil.
A geologist with the Brazilian Geological Survey (known by its Portuguese acronym, CPRM) Adamy was at the time working on a general survey of the Amazonian state of Rondonia.
The largest known dinosaur footprints have been discovered in Western Australia, including 1.7 metre prints left by gigantic herbivores.
Until now, the biggest known dinosaur footprint was a 106cm track discovered in the Mongolian desert and reported last year.
Alt: 'Unparalleled' number of dinosaur tracks found in Australia
Life came back surprisingly quickly to the site of the impact that killed the dinosaurs, new research found.
When a 6-mile (10 kilometers) asteroid slammed into the Gulf of Mexico 66 million years ago, causing the demise of the dinosaurs as part of the largest mass extinction event in the last 100 million years, it took life on the planet at least 30,000 years to bounce back.
Plans to continue a NASA mission to intercept a small asteroid will depend on a decision due by the end of April on NASA’s 2017 budget
The report will be published in the upcoming issue of the Journal of Scientific Exploration, a journal devoted to peer-reviewed scientific studies of paranormal and anomalous phenomena. According to authors Alejandro Parra and Paola Giménez Amarilla, 55% of the Argentinian nurses surveyed reported at least one instance of a paranormal or unexplained experience related to their duties
The acting president of Brazil has reportedly moved out of his official residence because of “ghosts”.
Michel Temer, who has been running the country since Dilma Rousseff was impeached last year, told a Brazilian news magazine that he and his family were leaving the Alvorada Palace because they found it spooky.
A project to bring back the dead has itself been brought back from the dead. Project Reanima, an experiment in using stem cells to stimulate the regrowth of neurons in clinically dead patients, has overcome its failure to file the proper paperwork last year by successfully receiving institutional review board (IRB) approval to begin bringing the dead back to life in India.
Flying vehicles may just be a part of Singapore's transport network in the near future; in fact, the Ministry of Transport says that you can "bet your money" on it.
It has already taken initial steps to make it happen. The ministry's top official has told The Business Times that it is in talks with some companies to start trials on drones that can carry passengers.
A zero-emissions train that runs on just steam and condensed water has successfully completed its first test run in Germany.
Related: Norway wants to build the world’s first full-scale ship tunnel
Rice University scientists have created an efficient, simple-to-manufacture oxygen-evolution catalyst that pairs well with semiconductors for solar water splitting, the conversion of solar energy to chemical energy in the form of hydrogen and oxygen.
In a feat of quantum one-upmanship, two teams of scientists have staked new claims of linking whopping numbers of atoms at the quantum level.
Researchers from Geneva demonstrated quantum entanglement of 16 million atoms, smashing the previous record of about 3,000 entangled atoms
Experiments led by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology suggest the particles that cover the surface of Saturn's largest moon, Titan, are "electrically charged." When the wind blows hard enough (approximately 15 mph), Titan's non-silicate granules get kicked up and start to hop in a motion referred to as saltation.
Twenty-three new objects have been added to the growing collection of stars observed to have unusual dips in their light curves. A recent study examines these stars and the potential causes of their strange behavior.
Related: Mysterious isolated object investigated by astronomers
Long ago, physicists identified and categorized the components of the visible universe. Up until recently, 16 particles formed everything in the known universe. But now, thanks to the efforts of physicists at CERN working with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), we have added another particle, the Higgs boson, to the Standard Model of physics.
Very distant galaxies have surprisingly little dark matter, the invisible stuff thought to make up the bulk of matter in the universe, new observations suggest.
Stars in the outer regions of some far-off galaxies move more slowly than stars closer to the center, indicating a lack of dark matter
In the center of a distant galaxy, almost 300 million light years from Earth, scientists have discovered a supermassive black hole that is "choking" on a sudden influx of stellar debris.
So far as telescopes in space go, the European Space Agency and NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope is among the most prolific in sending back stunning images of distant stars and galaxies to Earth. And the latest image it sent back is of a nearby super star cluster which is home to one of the largest stars ever discovered.
Related: Stars born in winds from supermassive black holes
The same kind of large-scale planetary waves that meander through the atmosphere high above Earth's surface may also exist on the Sun, according to a new study led by a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).
German scientists are switching on “the world’s largest artificial sun” in the hope that intense light sources can be used to generate climate-friendly fuel.
The Synlight experiment in Jülich, about 19 miles west of Cologne, consists 149 souped-up film projector spotlights and produces light about 10,000 times the intensity of natural sunlight on Earth.
In 1912, chemist Walther Nernst proposed that cooling an object to absolute zero is impossible with a finite amount of time and resources. Today this idea, called the unattainability principle, is the most widely accepted version of the third law of thermodynamics—yet so far it has not been proved from first principles.
A high-tech cousin to the Breathalyzer may be the future of cancer detection. Trials of a simple cancer spotting breath test are underway at the University of Southern California (USC). Participants have volunteered to see if the the “BreathLink” app and it’s partner device, the Breathscanner, can detect cancer.
Drips are the bane of every wine drinker's existence. He or she uncorks a bottle of wine, tips it toward the glass, and a drop, or even a stream, runs down the side of the bottle. Sure, you could do what sommeliers in restaurants do, wrapping a napkin around the neck of the bottle to catch the liquid, but who has time for that? Much more likely, you’ll ruin the tablecloth.
Scientists have found a way to use spinach to build working human heart muscle, potentially solving a long-standing problem in efforts to repair damaged organs.
Their study, published this month by the journal Biomaterials, offers a new way to grow a vascular system, which has been a roadblock for tissue engineering.
Imagine this: you’re a physician at one of the most renowned medical institutions in the world. A patient comes in with a very aggressive form of cervical cancer and you collect her cells to study them for her particular case. But while studying her cells, you notice something odd. After a certain number of cell divisions, they don’t die like other cells in the research lab. In fact, they don’t die at all.
What if lawyers could prove that a person knowingly committed a crime by looking at scans of his or her brain? It sounds like something from a science fiction story, but a new study suggests that we may be one step closer to this reality.
SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk is backing a brain-computer interface venture called Neuralink, according to The Wall Street Journal. The company, which is still in the earliest stages of existence and has no public presence whatsoever, is centered on creating devices that can be implanted in the human brain, with the eventual purpose of helping human beings merge with software and keep pace with advancements in artificial intelligence.
Alt: Elon Musk Just Launched A Company To Merge Your Brain With A Computer
Psychologists generally define power as control over others, by providing or withholding resources, without social interference. Tapping your true nature, though, begins with feeling powerful. Getting the corner office boosts creativity and reduces conformity.
It might look like a simple chess problem, but this puzzle could finally help scientists uncover what makes the human mind so unique, and why it may never be matched by a computer.
75 years after Bletchley Park sought codebreakers in the Second World War by placing a crossword in The Telegraph, scientists are again inviting readers to pit their wits against a new conundrum to find the quickest minds.
A team of chronobiologists in Germany is experimenting with optimizing the sleep patterns of one community. In Bad Kissingen, a town in the south-central region of the country, these sleep scientists, led by Thomas Kantermann, are conducting a civic experiment with the goal of promoting “optimal sleep and recuperation in everyday life.”
Improving your sleep makes you feel as good as a lottery winner - leading to high levels of health and wellbeing over time - say University of Warwick psychologists
Alt: £120,000: That's how much a good night's sleep is worth
Are you feeling tired today? Much of the UK got up an hour earlier than usual this morning, following the start of daylight savings. But there’s evidence that the clocks changing can have much more serious effects too, including heart attacks and strokes.
When the Food and Drug Administration created controls in January on how farmers can give antibiotics to livestock, scientists concerned about antibiotic resistance and advocates for animal welfare called it a historic shift in how meat animals are raised.
?Whether it's found on a plate of sushi, grilled in our backyard, or thrown on pasta, seafood is a staple for many diets around the world, and demand is growing. And as the commercial seafood industry booms, fish stocks worldwide face perilous declines.
If you want to detect life on another planet, look for biomarkers—spectroscopic signatures of chemicals that betray the activity of living things. And in fact we may have already found a biomarker. In 2003 Earth-based astronomers caught glimpses of methane in the Martian atmosphere. The discovery was initially controversial, so much so that the discoverers themselves held back from publishing it.
According to new research reported in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters, the 10-mile- (16 km) high Martian shield volcano called Arsia Mons produced one new lava flow at its summit every 1 to 3 million years during the final peak of activity; the last volcanic activity there ceased about 50 million years ago — around the time of Earth’s Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction.
Related: Impact crater linked to Martian tsunamis
Jason Held rekindled his love for space while lying in a ditch in Bosnia in 1996, where he was one of 16,500 US troops deployed on a peacekeeping mission at the end of the Bosnian War.
Everyday stargazers will have a shot at naming a new planet by joining Australian astronomers in the hunt for a mysterious large orb believed to be circling the fringe of the solar system.
Apparent sightings of the Tasmanian tiger in northern Australia have sparked a search for the long-extinct carnivore.
The wolf-like predators were the largest known carnivorous marsupial to have existed alongside human society, but the last known specimen died in a zoo on the island of Tasmania itself in 1936.
On a day of cozy coastal grays — soft cloud cover, a silver foil-wrap sea — a dozen gray fur balls brought visitors the most comfort.
Bobbing 20 feet from a harbor walkway, the sea otters were part of a record number in California. They once were believed to be as extinct as the dodo bird or the Tyrannosaurus rex.
Foraging for fruit may have driven the evolution of large brains in primates, according to research attempting to unpick the mystery of our cerebral heftiness.
The face of a Cambridge man who died more than 700 years ago has been reconstructed as part of a project to gain insights into the anonymous poor of the medieval city.
The 13th-century man, known as Context 958 by researchers, was among hundreds whose remains were found in a graveyard under what is now the Old Divinity School of St John’s College.
Have you ever seen a group of small birds wantonly attack a larger bird? Whether it’s chickadees, mockingbirds or crows, there’s something awe-inspiring about a bunch of tiny floofs taking on a sharp-taloned owl. This behavior is called mobbing, and it’s typically understood as a cooperative strategy that prey animals use to ward off a would-be predator—the weak rising up against the strong, David-and-Goliath style.
Animals need to measure the time of year so that they can anticipate and adapt to the arrival of a new season to align reproduction, as well as other vital functions critical for survival. A new study, conducted at the University of Bristol, has identified how animals measure annual time to control seasonal fertility.
When an individual cell needs to move somewhere, it manages just fine on its own. It extends protrusions from its leading edge and retracts the trailing edge to scoot itself along, without having to worry about what the other cells around it are doing. But when cells are joined together in a sheet of tissue, or epithelium, they have to coordinate their movements with their neighbors.
Related: Visualizing the genome: First 3-D structures of active DNA created
A small group of U.S. oil producers has been trying to exploit advances in DNA science to wring more crude from shale rock, as the domestic energy industry keeps pushing relentlessly to cut costs and compete with the world's top exporters.
At a dusty construction site here amid the limestone ridges of Provence, workers scurry around immense slabs of concrete arranged in a ring like a modern-day Stonehenge.
It looks like the beginnings of a large commercial power plant, but it is not.
Related:
The inner Van Allen belt has less radiation than previously believed, according to a recent study. Observations from NASA's Van Allen probes show the fastest, most energetic electrons in the inner radiation belt are actually much rarer and harder to find than scientists expected. This is good news for spacecraft that are orbiting in the region and can be damaged by high levels of radiation.
The appearance of supermassive black holes at the dawn of the universe has puzzled astronomers since their discovery more than a decade ago. A supermassive black hole is thought to form over billions of years, but more than two dozen of these behemoths have been sighted within 800 million years of the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago.
The huge rocks that hurtle through space may prove to be lifesavers for astronauts. Clays extracted from asteroids could be used on deep space missions to shield against celestial radiation.
"The possibility that a large ocean once occupied the Martian northern plains is one of the most important and controversial hypotheses to have originated from the exploration of Mars," the researchers wrote in the study.
Alt: Did an asteroid trigger ancient tsunamis on Mars?
What caused the largest glaciation event in Earth's history, known as 'snowball Earth'?Geologists and climate scientists have been searching for the answer for years but the root cause of the phenomenon remains elusive.
Now, Harvard University researchers have a new hypothesis about what caused the runaway glaciation that covered the Earth pole-to-pole in ice.
Enormous volcanoes vomited lava over the ancient Earth much more often than geologists had suspected. Eruptions as big as the biggest previously known ones happened at least 10 times in the past 3 billion years, an analysis of the geological record shows.
Hodder & Stoughton imprint Coronet is publishing two further books from Graham Hancock, both focusing on the Americas: America Before and the fourth in the War God series.
A society still silent and secreted beneath the earth of the Himalayas, the earliest civilization associated with Hindu/Indian art history is the Indus Valley Civilization (IVC). This society is dated approximately to 2600-1900 BC, and the sites of importance were Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa. Scholars have determined that the IVC did have a form of writing, but it is undecipherable—not unlike the Linear A script of the Minoans in modern day Crete.
No one knows for certain why the Clovis people and iconic beasts — mastodon, mammoth and saber-toothed tiger — living some 12,800 years ago suddenly disappeared. However, a discovery of widespread platinum at archaeological sites across the U.S. by three University of South Carolina archaeologists has provided an important clue in solving this enduring mystery.
If you knew a catastrophic event were set to wipe out society as we know it, how would you act in the days leading up to the ‘end of the world’?
It’s a question that many have considered as apocalyptic narratives cling to popularity – and, researchers say players’ behaviour in a video game could tell us what to expect.
A study has found that 98% of people think they’re among the nicest 50%. And this delusion seeps into everything from how we rate our attractiveness to our driving
Cancer can be caused by tobacco smoke or by an inherited trait, but new research finds that most of the mutations that lead to cancer crop up naturally.
The authors of the study published Thursday poked a hornet's nest by suggesting that many cancers are unavoidable.
Some parts of the body – including the tissues of the brain and testes – have long been considered to be completely hidden from our immune system.
Last year scientists made the amazing discovery that a set of previously unseen channels connected the brain to our immune system
Fancy a little more heat in your curry? Then reach for the Red Hot Chili Peppers – or even the Spice Girls.
Scientists have found that listening to fast-paced, energetic music can increase the perceived spiciness of food by up to ten per cent.
A new study of hundreds of human genomes has revealed that groups in various regions of the world have evolved for diets with different amounts of meat and vegetables. People from Europe, particularly its southern regions, are optimized for a high-plant diet. But people from other areas, such as the Inuit of Greenland, have a biochemistry that is better able to process lots of meat fat.
Monash University's Biomedicine Discovery Institute researchers have led an international study that found - for the first time - that a diet yielding high amounts of the short-chain fatty acids acetate and butyrate provided a beneficial effect on the immune system and protected against type 1 or juvenile diabetes.
Should the Irish Giant be allowed to rest in peace?
That's the question swirling around the bones of Charles Byrne, a literal giant from Ireland who was an 18th century celebrity.
The roof of a seaside Roman palace destroyed by a volcanic eruption more than 2,000 years ago has been restored by scientists.
Broken timber from the brightly-coloured three-story building was unearthed by archaeologists working on a beach near the ruined city of Herculaneum in Italy.
Egyptologists at the University of Bonn discovered rock art from the 4th millennium BC during an excavation at a necropolis near Aswan in Egypt. The paintings were engraved into the rock in the form of small dots and depict hunting scenes like those found in shamanic depictions. They may represent a link between the Neolithic period and Ancient Egyptian culture.
Alt: Ancient Rock Carvings Depicting Masked People Discovered in Egypt
A "unique" carved alabaster statue that may represent King Tut's grandmother ? Queen Tiye ? has been unearthed on the west bank of Luxor along the Nile River, archaeologists with Egypt's Ministry of Antiquities announced yesterday
A Spanish team of archaeologists has unearthed a 4,000-year-old unopened tomb in West Aswan, Egypt. The tomb belongs to the brother of Sarenput II, one of the most dominant and powerful Pharaonic governors of the 12th Dynasty in ancient Egypt.
Remnants of a royal palace in southern Mexico, dating to between around 2,300 and 2,100 years ago, come from what must have been one of the Americas’ earliest large, centralized governments, researchers say.
Employees should be allowed ‘breathing breaks’ throughout the day to increase their productivity and happiness, a leading expert has said.
Author and happiness guru Max Strom, who offers lunchtime breathing workshops for office workers in central London, claims that calming the breath can have a huge impact on well-being.
Maintaining a healthy sex life at home boosts employees' job satisfaction and engagement at the office, underscoring the value of a strong work-life balance, an Oregon State University researcher has found.
More than 10 million UK workers are at high risk of being replaced by robots within 15 years as the automation of routine tasks gathers pace in a new machine age.
A report by the consultancy firm PwC found that 30% of jobs in Britain were potentially under threat from breakthroughs in artificial intelligence (AI). In some sectors half the jobs could go.
Related: Rise in insecure work means universal basic income needed more than ever, Government told
A robot that can lay bricks six times faster than a builder is set to arrive on building sites in the UK within two years after already starting work in the US.
The Semi-Automated Mason, nicknamed Sam, can lay 3,000 bricks a day, while a builder's average is 500.
Ray Kurzweil, Google’s Director of Engineering, is a well-known futurist with a high-hitting track record for accurate predictions. Of his 147 predictions since the 1990s, Kurzweil claims an 86 percent accuracy rate. Earlier this week, at the SXSW Conference in Austin, Texas, Kurzweil made yet another prediction: the technological singularity will happen sometime in the next 30 years.
Japan, perhaps more than any nation on Earth, has a deep history with autonomous drones. Its companies have been using them for decades to assist with agriculture, infrastructure inspection, and construction.
Related: Get Your First Look at Amazon’s New Delivery Drones
It’s sometimes practically impossible to tell similar colours apart. Even side by side, they look the same. A special pair of spectacles gives us new power to see more distinct colours, and could one day help to spot counterfeit banknotes or counteract camouflage.
Slow wi-fi is a source of irritation that nearly everyone experiences. Wireless devices in the home consume ever more data, and it’s only growing, and congesting the wi-fi network. Researchers at Eindhoven University of Technology have come up with a surprising solution: a wireless network based on harmless infrared rays. The capacity is not only huge (more than 40Gbit/s per ray) but also there is no need to share since every device gets its own ray of light.
Astronomers from Bonn and Tautenburg in Thuringia (Germany) used the 100-m radio telescope at Effelsberg to observe several galaxy clusters. At the edges of these large accumulations of dark matter, stellar systems (galaxies), hot gas, and charged particles, they found magnetic fields that are exceptionally ordered over distances of many million light years. This makes them the most extended magnetic fields in the universe known so far.
Astronomers have found evidence of a star that whips around a likely black hole twice an hour. This could be the tightest orbital dance ever seen by a black hole and a companion star in our own Milky Way galaxy.
Alt: Astronomers Just Found a Star Orbiting a Black Hole at 1 Percent the Speed of Light
Astronomers have uncovered a supermassive black hole that has been propelled out of the center of a distant galaxy by what could be the awesome power of gravitational waves.
Though there have been several other suspected, similarly booted black holes elsewhere, none has been confirmed so far
Satellite images have revealed more than 200 strange, bright blue lakes in Russia's Arctic regions that are bubbling "like jacuzzis" as a result of leaking methane gas.
Related: 'Going deep' to measure Earth's rotational effects
We live in an unprecedented "age of information," but we use very little of it. Dieters prefer not to look at the calories in their tasty dessert, people at high risk for disease avoid screenings and people choose the news source that aligns with their political ideology.
By making so much information so accessible, social media has drastically changed the way we consume information and form opinions in the modern era. The danger, however, is that social media creates an “echo chamber” that filters the information people receive so that it largely supports their existing opinions.
Examining an issue as a debate or dialogue between two sides helps people apply deeper, more sophisticated reasoning, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
How an individual sperm swims, against all the odds, through fluid to reach the fallopian tubes has been revealed - and it's all about rhythm.
Related: A healthy diet improves sperm quality and fecundability of couples
Why are all of these humpback whales all suddenly hanging out? No one really knows.
In a new study, scientists report spotting as many as 200 humpbacks at a time gathering off South Africa. That's bizarre for a species previously believed to be loners.
Take half a dozen retired Navy dolphins and put them in a huge tank with a trainer and some oversized hula hoops for six months and what do you get? Potential clues to unraveling the mysteries behind why some marine mammals are susceptible to mass strandings, scientists hope.
It’s even worse than we thought. An unexpected coral bleaching event in the South China Sea shows that reefs can heat up substantially more than the surrounding ocean, making them more vulnerable to climate change.
Studies in Canada show that microfibers used in garments such as yoga pants have become a huge threat to aquatic life. Microfibers made up 95 percent of the plastic pollution in waterways as compared to microbeads which constituted only 5 percent.
A few months ago, at her office in Houston, Kate Rubins was feeling weird.
She was dizzy, she says — "staggering around like a 2-year-old who had just learned to walk." She was constantly looking at her desk to make sure the objects on top weren't floating away.
Thousands of people could be living in floating space colonies orbiting the Earth in 20 years’ time, according to the head of a project by the British Interplanetary Society (BIS).
And, while life in space might sound unappealing to some, Jerry Stone believe it could actually be healthier than planet Earth, enabling people to live longer and, eventually, grow taller.
Every now and then a scientific paper makes a real splash. We had one recently, to judge from recent headlines. “Moon rises to claim its place as a planet” said The Sunday Times on February 19, while the Mail Online asked “Is this lunarcy?”.
Alt: Scientists make the case to restore Pluto's planet status
If you want to be one of the first human beings to visit Mars, you better have a strong stomach. Scientists in Germany are testing ways in which urine and sweat could help astronauts grow food on the Red Planet.
Stephen Hawking is going to go to space. The cosmologist and physicist will leave the Earth on board Richard Branson's spaceship, he has said.
Professor Hawking told Good Morning Britain that he'd never dreamed he'd be able to head into space. But "Richard Branson has offered me a seat on Virgin Galactic, and I said yes immediately", he said.
The Large Hadron Collider has discovered new sub-atomic particles that could help to explain how the centres of atoms are held together.
The particles are all different forms of the so-called Omega-c baryon, whose existence was confirmed in 1994.
The distant past. A long time ago. Right now. Right here. With the way we speak about time and space highlighting their deep parallels, is it any wonder science keeps uncovering new similarities between the two?
Time is weird – in spite of what we think, the Universe doesn't have a master clock to run by, making it possible for us to experience time differently depending on how we're moving or how much gravity is pulling on us.
Alt: Physicists Have Uncovered a Weird Problem While Measuring Time
A drug that can reverse aspects of ageing has been successfully trialled in animals, say scientists.
They have rejuvenated old mice to restore their stamina, coat of fur and even some organ function.
Purging retired cells from the body has been shown to undo the ravages of old age in a study that raises the prospect of new life-extending treatments .
When mice were treated with a substance designed to sweep away cells that have entered a dormant state due to DNA damage their fur regrew, kidney function improved and they were able to run twice as far as untreated elderly animals.
A protein can boost blood stem cells, making them behave like those of younger people. Is it the key to harnessing young blood’s rejuvenating power?
Parenthood is associated with a longer life than childlessness, particularly in older age, according to a study led by Karolinska Institute researcher Karin Modig. By the age of 60, the difference in life expectancy, which does not seem to be influenced by the sex of the child(ren), may be as much as two years.