Newsdesk Archive

Dairy cows housed indoors want to break curfew and roam free, suggests new research from the University of British Columbia, published today in Scientific Reports. Related: ?Impossible Foods to supersize production of lab-grown burger

South Africa's government is moving ahead with plans to allow a domestic trade and limited export of rhino horns, alarming many international conservationists who believe rhinos will be more vulnerable to poachers after a record slaughter in the past decade. Related: One of Africa's Last Great Tusker Elephants Was Killed by Poachers

The Ganges river, considered sacred by more than 1 billion Indians, has become the first non-human entity in India to be granted the same legal rights as people. A court in the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand ordered on Monday that the Ganges and its main tributary, the Yamuna, be accorded the status of living human entities.

Eleazer Mawasha speaks haltingly. English is not his first language, and Skype not his preferred method of communication. An elder of Guyana's Wai-Wai people, Mr Mawasha is more familiar with the sounds and rhythms of the rainforest with which its indigenous inhabitants have enjoyed a profound spiritual relationship for thousands of years.

Protecting the environment can be as easy as telling your kids to go outdoors and play, according to a new UBC study. Research by Catherine Broom, assist. prof. in the Faculty of Education at UBC Okanagan, shows that 87 per cent of study respondents who played outside as children expressed a continued love of nature as young adults. Of that group, 84 per cent said taking care of the environment was a priority.

More Americans than ever are turning to spiritual, meditative and religious retreats as a way to reset their daily life and enhance well-being. Now, researchers show there are changes in the dopamine and serotonin systems in the brains of retreat participants. Alt: Religious retreats can change the chemicals in your brain, discover scientists

The brains of almost all animals contain a network of crisscrossing nerve cells, also known as neurons. Each nerve cell consist of three main parts — the soma (cell body), an elongated axon, and several branching dendrites.

Insys Therapeutics, a pharmaceutical company that was one of the chief financial backers of the opposition to marijuana legalization in Arizona last year, received preliminary approval from the Drug Enforcement Administration this week for Syndros, a synthetic marijuana drug.

We do a strange thing when talking about mental health. Any violent offender who commits a particularly heinous crime faces the possibility of being branded 'mentally ill'. This term has become a go-to, catch-all phrase, and as a result it perpetuates an incredibly negative stereotype. The reality could not be more different; diagnosis of mental illness is increasingly broad, it affects vast numbers of the population, and as it grows, so too does the cost of treatment.

Peter Gorman’s Amazon expeditions draw guests aiming to ‘clear up ailments’ and ‘solve mid-life crises’ – and drugs are key to the transformative experience

An 80-year-old from the Tsimane (pronounced chee-MAH-nay) group had the same vascular age as an American in his or her mid-fifties, suggests a new report. The Tsimane people -- a forager-horticulturalist population of the Bolivian Amazon -- have the lowest reported levels of vascular aging for any population, with coronary atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries) being five times less common than in the US, the research shows. Alt: Is THIS the secret to a long life? Remote tribe living deep in the Amazon is found to have the healthiest arteries ever studied

Rurrenabaque, BoliviaIn the Bolivian Amazon, where vast rivers wind endlessly through mountainous terrain and a thick blanket of fog creeps through the trees, the locals say the jungle can swallow you in a second. Venture too far and you may never find your way back.

To hear the Romans tell it, the arrival of Huns at the empire's border was an unmitigated catastrophe. “The Huns in multitude break forth with might and wrath … spreading dismay and loss,” read a poem engraved on a wall in ancient Constantinople. “And naught but loss of life and breath their course shall ever stay.” Alt: Tiller the Hun? Farmers in Roman Empire converted to Hun lifestyle—and vice versa

Palatial building and luxurious imports signal that the Greek founders of Poseidonia in Italy were living high on the hog from pagan pilgrims The discovery of a monumental building and priceless ceramics imported from Greece in excavations at Poseidonia shows for the first time how rich its Greek founders were when establishing the city in Italy in the 6th century B.C.E.

The Mesolithic period in Europe, roughly 10,000 years ago, was a tumultuous time. Small groups of hunter-gatherers were undergoing a dramatic cultural transformation, making increasingly sophisticated stone tools with wooden components. They were on the cusp of the agricultural revolution, which would grant them a broader range of nutrition sources and greater food security

The first dinosaurs may have originated in the Northern Hemisphere, possibly in an area that is now Britain. This is one of the conclusions of the first detailed re-evaluation of the relationships between dinosaurs for 130 years.

The crater made by the asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs is revealing clues to the origins of life on Earth. Scientists have drilled into the 200km-wide Chicxulub crater now buried under the Gulf of Mexico. They say its rocks show evidence of having been home to a large "hydrothermal system", where hot fluids flowed through cracks and fissures.

Scientists have discovered that a version of the Krebs cycle, the heart of the cellular metabolic network, can take place without the cellular proteins known as enzymes. Since the Krebs cycle does not require cellular proteins to occur, researchers now believe that metabolism may predate life. In fact, spontaneous chemical reactions may have served as the foundation for life on Earth.

Instead of oil, coal, or even solar energy, self-sustaining bacterial fuel cells may power the future. Researchers at Binghamton University, State University of New York have developed the next step in microbial fuel cells (MFCs) with the first micro-scale self-sustaining cell, which generated power for 13 straight days through symbiotic interactions of two types of bacteria.

A synthetic skin for prosthetics limbs that can generate its own energy from solar power has been developed by engineers from Glasgow University. Researchers had already created an 'electronic skin' for prosthetic hands made with new super-material graphene.

Researchers in Hyderabad, India, have just discovered the extraordinary self-healing properties of graphene. They hope this revelation will lead to the development of flexible sensors that can heal themselves for use in artificial skin. This would allow robots to have self-healing skin, just like their human counterparts.

Scientists at Oxford say they've invented an artificial intelligence system that can lip-read better than humans. The system, which has been trained on thousands of hours of BBC News programmes, has been developed in collaboration with Google's DeepMind AI division. Related: Real-Time Face Recognition Threatens to Turn Cops’ Body Cameras Into Surveillance Machines

The subject of centuries of scrutiny and debate, Mona Lisa's famous smile is routinely described as ambiguous. But is it really that hard to read? Apparently not. In an unusual trial, close to 100 percent of people described her expression as unequivocally "happy", researchers revealed on Friday.

Music, more than any art, is a beautiful mix of science and emotion. It follows a set of patterns almost mathematically to extract feelings from its audience. Machines that make music focus on these patterns, but give little consideration to the emotional response of their audience. Scientists have developed a new machine-learning device that detects the emotional state of its listeners to produce new songs that elicit new feelings. Related: Machine learning reveals lack of female screen time in top films

When Joshua Browder developed the chatbot for DoNotPay, the original idea was just to help people out with their traffic ticket woes. DoNotPay has since successfully overturned more than 200,000 disputable parking tickets in London, New York, and Seattle. It’s also given free legal aid to people who couldn’t afford lawyers for their emergency housing issues. The 20-year old Browder, a student at Stanford University, has now turned his robot lawyer to helping refugees seeking asylum.

A superhuman skill once the preserve of comic book heroes could soon become a reality. Scientists have used a combination of brain scanning and artificial intelligence to read the minds of 'criminals' to determine whether they are guilty of knowingly committing a crime.

A team of Syrian archaeologists in Turkey received a box in January that could have been meant for a detective agency: It contained small bottles, brushes, a sprayer and an ultraviolet light. Inside the bottles was a traceable liquid that the team hopes will deter looters from targeting Syrian artifacts, or help authorities track the artifacts if they disappear—cutting off a reported source of revenue for ISIS.

Researchers looking to identify the last known victim of Jack the Ripper have hit a low-tech roadblock that will likely prevent them from unleashing their DNA testing technology on any potential remains. Alt: Jack the Ripper's final victim is lost forever: Experts say efforts to find the remains of Mary Jane Kelly would be a 'Herculean effort' unlikely to ever succeed

Scientists have discovered that there is a "very real risk" that the holiest site in Christianity may collapse if nothing is done to shore up its unstable foundations.

Microscopic, bear-shaped animals called tardigrades are one of the most resilient animals on earth. Known colloquially as water bears, they can survive freezing temperatures, radiation, even a trip to outer space.

If your parrot is feeling glum, it might be tweetable. Wild keas spontaneously burst into playful behaviour when exposed to the parrot equivalent of canned laughter – the first birds known to respond to laughter-like sounds. The parrots soared after one another in aerobatic loops, exchanged foot-kicking high fives in mid-air and tossed objects to each other, in what seems to be emotionally contagious behaviour.

A trio of researchers from the U.K., the Netherlands and the U.S. has filmed a grown female chimpanzee cleaning her son's teeth after he died. In their paper published in the journal Scientific Reports, Edwin van Leeuwen, Katherine Cronin and Daniel Haun offer a description of the circumstances under which they shot the video and their ideas on why the female was behaving the way she was.

The distinction of “persons,” not “people,” is important. Part of the apparent absurdity is that on the surface, arguing for personhood might sound like saying a chimpanzee should have the same rights as an adult human, like the right to own property and vote in elections. Instead, the category of “person” is a legal one referring to a being entitled to certain fundamental rights. Alt: Animal rights lawyer will argue chimpanzees should have 'personhood rights' at New York's Supreme Court

The odd legal status is intended to help prevent pollution and other abuses IT SOUNDS, admits Chris Finlayson, like a “pretty nutty” idea. Yet the new law that declares the Whanganui river, New Zealand’s third-longest, a legal person, in the sense that it can own property, incur debts and petition the courts, is not unprecedented. Alt: New Zealand river recognised as 'legal person'

The Great Barrier Reef in Australia has long been one of the world’s most magnificent natural wonders, so enormous it can be seen from space, so beautiful it can move visitors to tears. But the reef, and the profusion of sea creatures living near it, are in profound trouble.

On the remote Pacific island of Rarotonga, some fish are fleeing to land. Scientists have long suspected that blenny fish leapt out of water to escape the many sea creatures that seek to eat them, but the blennies' true motivations remained a mystery.

Spiders feed on an estimated 400 to 800 million tons of insects and other pests annually; in comparison, all humans consume about 400 million tons in meat and fish

Charming might not be the best way to describe a spider, but researchers at the University of Cincinnati are finding a wide spectrum of personality in a creature whose behavior was thought to be inflexible and hardwired in its genes.

It’s official: For the first time in the United States, a bumblebee species has been declared endangered. Related: Planting more flowers in your garden in the spring and summer could quadruple the survival rate of under threat bees Related: Emails Reveal Monsanto's Tactics To Defend Glyphosate Against Cancer Fears

Almost six million Adelie penguins are living in East Antarctica, more than double the number previously thought, scientists said Wednesday in findings that have implications for conservation. Related: Some penguins mooch off parents after leaving the nest

The sinking of the RMS Titanic may have been caused by an enormous fire on board, not by hitting an iceberg in the North Atlantic, experts have claimed, as new evidence has been published to support the theory.

‘Ma’agan Michael II’ gets set to sail down the coast from Haifa to Herzliya as part of project to crack mystery of ancient seafaring The archaeologists involved in the project seek to learn how ancient mariners sailed against the winds and currents with the technology existing at the time, a quandary that historians still don’t understand despite vast evidence that Mediterranean seafaring existed for centuries before the Ma’agan Michael ship sank.

Greek archaeologists have found the ancient military harbor of the island of Salamis — the very physical space from which the largest and most decisive naval battle ever fought in antiquity was launched.

Everyone has heard of the ancient Jewish religious scrolls discovered at Qumran by the Dead Sea in the middle of the 20th century. But who is aware that nearly 100 legal papyri have been found in the same region, or that they allow unparalleled access to the ancient social world of Judea and Nabatea in the period 100 BCE to 200 CE? Related: Raising Ramses: Archaeologists lift 3,000-year-old statue of Egyptian Pharaoh considered 'one of the most important discoveries ever' from muddy ditch in Cairo slum

New research investigating the transition of the Sahara from a lush, green landscape 10,000 years ago to the arid conditions found today, suggests that humans may have played an active role in its desertification. Alt: African Neolithic Populations Helped Create Sahara Desert, Research Suggests

Dust to dust. The mysterious dark flows on Mars may not be water after all. Instead, they could be rivulets of sand, set in motion by sunlight on the Martian surface. The dark streaks form on Mars’s slopes during warm seasons, and are known as recurring slope lineae. While there is no direct evidence of water near these areas, the leading theory is that they are caused by briny water streaming down the sides of craters and hills.

It's possible that Mars had rings at one point and may have them again someday. That's the theory put forth by Purdue University scientists have developed a model that suggests that debris that was pushed into space from an asteroid or other body slamming into Mars around 4.3 billion years ago and alternates between becoming a planetary ring and clumping up to form a moon.

Over the past decade, the international Cassini mission has revealed intense activity at the southern pole of Saturn's icy moon, Enceladus, with warm fractures venting water-rich jets that hint at an underground sea. A new study, based on microwave observations of this region, shows that the moon is warmer than expected just a few metres below its icy surface.

Using a satnav to get to your destination 'switches off' parts of the brain that would otherwise be used to simulate different routes, reveals new UCL research. The study, published in Nature Communications and funded by Wellcome, involved 24 volunteers navigating a simulation of Soho in central London while undergoing brain scans.

Cities shape how we think, feel and behave. Can we create cities that improve our brain health? Not quite four decades ago the Chinese settlement of Shenzhen was a modest fishing village, with a population of roughly 30,000. Today, thanks to a policy begun in 1979 that encouraged foreign investment, that sleepy community is a manufacturing hub with about 10 million people.

Scientists have uncovered a method for improving short-term working memory, by stimulating the brain with electricity to synchronise brain waves. Researchers at Imperial College London found that applying a low voltage current can bring different areas of the brain in sync with one another, enabling people to perform better on tasks involving working memory.

A less strenuous form of exercise known as whole-body vibration (WBV) can mimic the muscle and bone health benefits of regular exercise in mice, according to a new study. WBV consists of a person sitting, standing or lying on a machine with a vibrating platform. When the machine vibrates, it transmits energy to the body, and muscles contract and relax multiple times during each second.

Many cultures swear by the benefits of a hot bath. But only recently has science began to understand how passive heating (as opposed to getting hot and sweaty from exercise) improves health. At Loughborough University we investigated the effect of a hot bath on blood sugar control (an important measure of metabolic fitness) and on energy expended (number of calories burned).

Scientists have long warned that rising global temperatures may impact public health in a devastating way because climate change is associated with deadly weather events, the spread of infectious diseases and even food shortages. Related: A Clinical Trial Just ‘Reversed’ Type 2 Diabetes in 40% of Participants

Scientists at the IDIBAPS Biomedical Research Institute and at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona) lead a study in which they have designed a new strategy to get genetically modified viruses to selectively attack tumor cells without affecting healthy tissues.

For the next two decades, the US Navy will inject hundreds of thousands of pounds of flares and billions of metal-coated glass fibers into ocean waters off the coasts of Washington and Oregon.

B vitamins may offer some protection against the impacts of air pollution, a small scale human trial suggests. Researchers in the US found that high doses of these supplements may "completely offset" the damage caused by very fine particulate matter. Related: Link between Vitamin D treatment and autism prevention Related: Sensory links between autism and synesthesia pinpointed

It marks five consecutive years of CO2 increases of at least 2 parts per million, an unprecedented rate of growth The number is significant because the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 280 parts per million from about 10,000 years ago until the start of the Industrial Revolution.

A newly rediscovered rare plant – thought to have become extinct almost 200 years ago – has sparked a legal action in Sydney’s west against a development that threatens the flower’s only known location.

The air pollution that lingered over eastern China for nearly a month in 2013 has been linked to the loss of Arctic sea ice the previous autumn. A study says the haze lasted much longer because the melting ice and increased snowfall altered wind circulation patterns.

The origins of plants may go back hundreds of millions of years earlier than previously thought, according to fossil evidence. Ancient rocks from India suggest plants resembling red algae lived 1.6 billion years ago in what was then shallow sea.

24 feet tall and three feet wide, these giant spires dotted the ancient landscape From around 420 to 350 million years ago, when land plants were still the relatively new kids on the evolutionary block and “the tallest trees stood just a few feet high,” giant spires of life poked from the Earth.

A set of chemical reactions occurring spontaneously in Earth’s early chemical environments could have provided the foundations upon which life evolved. The discovery that a version of the Krebs cycle, which occurs in most living cells, can proceed in the absence of cellular proteins called enzymes suggests that metabolism is older than life itself.

It was around 1.6 billion years ago that a community of small, bright red, plantlike life-forms, flitting around in a shallow pool of prehistoric water, were etched into stone until the end of time. Or at least until a team of Swedish researchers chipped their fossilized remnants out of a sedimentary rock formation in central India.

Phosphorus is an essential element which is contained in many cellular compounds, such as DNA and the energy carrier ATP. All life needs phosphorus and agricultural yields are improved when phosphorus is added to growing plants and the diet of livestock. Consequently, it is used globally as a fertiliser – and plays an important role in meeting the world's food requirements. In order for us to add it, however, we first need to extract it from a concentrated form – and the supply comes almost exclusively from phosphate mines in Morocco

No, Antarctica isn't busting out the green beer for St. Patrick's Day. But a new satellite image of the continent shows strange green ice floating in the Ross Sea. Photosynthetic plankton called phytoplankton (and algae) grow all around Antarctica in summer. Related: Forget snow, rain will become main precipitation in the Arctic Related: Boaty McBoatface to go on its first Antarctic mission

Last year, researchers in Siberia's remote Bely Island made the bizarre discovery that the ground had started bubbling in certain places, and was squishy under the locals' feet like jelly. At the time, just 15 of these swollen bubbles had been identified, but an investigation in the wider region of the Yamal and Gydan peninsulas has revealed that 7,000 or so of them have cropped up, and the concern now is that they could explode at any moment. Alt: Siberia permafrost: Over 7,000 methane-filled bubbles 'ready to explode' discovered in Arctic

Fifty-six million years ago, about 10 million years after the dinosaurs went extinct, something strange happened to our planet. It got hot. Really hot. Hotter than it had ever been since the Earth formed a few billion years earlier.

As the human species evolved over the last six million years, our resident microbes did the same, adapting to vastly different conditions on our skin and in our mouths, noses, genitalia and guts.

Italian researchers examining a medieval painting may have found the earliest visual depiction of dracunculiasis, a horrifying parasitic infection in which a worm up to 3 feet long creeps out of the skin.

A strap for a medieval false leg has been uncovered by archaeologists digging at Gloucester Cathedral. Metal pieces from a prosthesis band were found with a skeleton in the old lay cemetery.

Was Alfred the Great really that great? If we judge him on the basis of new findings in landscape archaeology that are radically changing our understanding of warfare in the Viking Age, it would seem not. It looks like Alfred was a good propagandist rather than a visionary military leader.

The candidate for political office stood in a plaza, naked, bracing himself against the punches and kicks. The crowd roared, pulsing around him like a beating heart. People for whom he had risked his life in war after war hurled blows and insults from all directions. The candidate breathed deeply. Trained as a warrior, he knew he had to stay calm to reach the next phase of his candidacy.

In a lab in Frick Hall at California University of Pennsylvania, archaeology students sift through the finds of digs stored for as much as four decades. They are searching for clues to civilizations as much as two millennia old.

Alternative history' researcher and author Graham Hancock has long postulated that a cataclysm some 12,000 years ago might have wiped out advanced civilisations. In his most recent book Magicians of the Gods he discusses at length the Younger Dryas period (c. 12,900 to c. 11,700 calendar years ago), which began when temperatures plummeted over the course of just a few decades - and the 'heretical' theory that this event may have been caused by a comet impact. Now, two new papers recently published in respected journals may perhaps provide material support for that idea.

Lying at the 'crossroads' for north-south movements between the Sahara and the Mediterranean, Tunisia is one of the world's key regions for under early human travels. Researchers have now discovered animal bones and stone tools in the land that once formed a giant lake in Tunisia.

At one point, any new human fossil from hundreds of thousands of years ago might have drawn intrigue. If the new bones looked different from others that had been found before, they may have even been hailed as a new archaic human species, and given a taxonomic name in the genus Homo. But some scientists say evidence is mounting that paleoanthropologists in the past may have been too quick to categorize hominin fossils as distinct species. Alt: 400,000-year-old fossil human cranium is oldest ever found in Portugal

The evolution of bipedalism in fossil humans can be detected using a key feature of the skull -- a claim that was previously contested but now has been further validated by researchers at Stony Brook University and The University of Texas at Austin.

Big, small, broad, narrow, long or short, turned up, pug, hooked, bulbous or prominent, humans inherit their nose shape from their parents, but ultimately, the shape of someone's nose and that of their parents was formed by a long process of adaptation to our local climate, according to an international team of researchers.

More than 1,000 years ago, several dotted, flake-shaped sections of the Great Wall stood in Xinjiang, protecting the border and the trade road. Recently, researchers from the China Institute of Remote Sensing and Digital Earth (RADI) under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) analyzed the distribution of ancient Great Wall sections in Xinjiang using remote sensing technology. They also used the technology to "restore" the wall's appearance.

A 1,000-year-old circular tomb, whose walls are decorated with colorful murals, has been discovered in Datong City, in northern China. Because the tomb's entranceway is sealed off with bricks, archaeologists had to enter through a hole in the deteriorating arch-shaped roof.

Archaeologists have unearthed a pyramid-shaped tomb under a construction site in central China. Residents are amazed after the unusual ancient burial site was discovered in Zhengzhou, Henan Province, with one calling it 'magical'.

Ancient Egypt is known for many technological and artistic achievements, constructing pyramids and temples, inventing a system of writing, hieroglyphs, and making advancements in medicine, astronomy, and many other fields. One area for which the Egyptians are particularly famous, of course, is their stone working. A particularly controversial issue is how the ancient Egyptians were able to cut and bore through solid granite - which is considerably more difficult to do than cutting through softer, sedimentary rock such as limestone or sandstone. Related: Egyptian statue recently unearthed is not Ramses II

The Nile River Delta, once known as the bread basket of the world, may soon be unable to support even the population of Egypt. According to a multi-year study published in the Geological Society of America this week, the area where the Nile river drains out to the sea is suffering from decreased water flow, rising sea levels, and salt water intrusion—all of which damage food production and fresh water supplies.

Rock samples from northeastern Canada retain chemical signals that help explain what Earth's crust was like more than 4 billion years ago There is much about Earth's ancient crust that scientists don't understand. This is because most of the planet's original crust simply isn't around any longer to be studied directly—it has either sunk back into the planet's interior due to the action of plate tectonics or been transformed by geological activity at Earth's surface to make new, younger rocks.

A huge artificial island with its own airstrip and harbour could be built in the North Sea to power Europe by 2050, if plans are approved later this month. Related: Environmentally friendly, almost electricity-free solar cooling—also serves as a heat pump

Renewable energy is now Australia’s cheapest energy option, even when the cost of storage to make the intermittent power sources reliable is added.

In the US, a number of major milestones occurred on the electric grid in 2016, almost all of them involving wind power. Now the Energy Information Administration is confirming that's because of a big overall trend: wind power is now the largest source of renewable energy generating capacity, passing hydroelectric power in 2016.

Geologists couldn't account for the strange landforms of eastern Washington State. Then a high school teacher dared to question the scientific dogma of his day It was geological heresy. For almost a century, ever since Charles Lyell’s 1830 text Principles of Geology set the standards for the field, it had been assumed that geological change was gradual and uniform—always the product of, as Lyell put it, “causes now in operation.” And floods of quasi-Biblical proportions certainly did not meet that standard. It didn’t matter how meticulous Bretz’s research was, or how sound his reasoning might be; he seemed to be advocating a return to geology’s dark ages, when “scientists” used catastrophic explanations for the Earth’s features to buttress theological presumptions about the age of a Creator’s divine handiwork. It was unacceptable. How did canyons and cataracts form? By rivers, of course, over millions of years. Not gigantic floods. Period.

From all this, it can be concluded that roughly three and a half billion years ago, the mouth of the Kasei Valles region still had water on its surface – possibly still in liquid form but most likely in the form of ice. Volcanic activity – which Mars was still experiencing at the time – then triggered the release of flood waters, which created debris and erosion features throughout the region. Related: Mineral Points To A Water Rich Mars

Both chambers of Congress just passed the NASA Authorization Act of 2017. With this transformative development, the space agency got a lot more than just $19.508 billion in funding. They also got a very clear mandate: Get humanity to Mars.

The hellishly hot planet fries spacecraft electronics, so NASA scientists devised a machine inspired by ancient technology

The odds of life spreading between the worlds of the newly-discovered seven-planet TRAPPIST-1 system are up to 1,000 times greater than in our own solar system. That’s the conclusion of a new analysis posted March 2 to the arXiv, an online repository of scientific papers.

On the dwarf planet Ceres, volcanoes rage — but instead of hot lava coming out of them as on Earth, they spew brine and ice. Alt: Brightest ‘Spot’ on Ceres is Likely a Cryovolcano

The discovery of young stars in old star clusters could send scientists back to the drawing board for one of the Universe's most common objects. Dr Bi-Qing For, from the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research in Perth, said our understanding of how stars evolve is a cornerstone of astronomical science.

Asteroids may not hit our planet at regular intervals after all. Scientists have reached this conclusion after analyzing impact craters formed in the last 500 million years, concentrating on precisely dated events.

A recently discovered "asteroid pair" is the youngest such duo known in Earth's solar system, and it appears to have sprouted twin comet-like tails, new observations reveal. Related: Tiny Asteroid Zips By Earth, Won't Be Back for More Than 100 Years

A prototype space-based gravitational wave detector performed far better than expected during its trial run, raising prospects that a follow-on observatory to listen for echoes from the biggest crashes in the cosmos will be launched ahead of schedule.

Time travel is possible, in a way. Astrophysicists are about to make the sci-fi fantasy a reality using a giant infrared telescope that can peer at star formations 13 billion light years away, seeing them just like they were that many years ago, and illuminating the recipe for the soup that is the universe.

A bizarre new state of matter known as a time crystal seems to suspend the laws of thermodynamics almost indefinitely, two new experiments suggest. Alt: Bizarre forms of matter called time crystals were supposed to be physically impossible. Now they’re not