Newsdesk Archive
Are you nervous about entrusting your life to a self-driving car? What if you could telepathically communicate with the vehicle to instantaneously let it know if it makes a mistake?
A trio of researchers affiliated with several institutions in Singapore, the U.S. and Hong Kong, has conducted a study examining the accident rates of blue versus yellow taxis being driven in Singapore and has found taxis painted yellow have lower accident rates.
The fabled Silk Road may be one of the most famous and important trade networks in Earth's history, but a new study suggests that this ancient web of paths spanning Asia had its roots in trails dating back much further than anybody realised.
Alt: Ancient nomadic herders beat a path to the Silk Road
More than half a millennium after the collapse of the Mayan civilization, the members of a neighboring Central American society suddenly gathered their most sacred belongings, buried them in the center of town, and vanished.
How a toxic debate over the first Americans hobbled science for decades
Bluefish Caves directly challenged mainstream scientific thinking. Evidence had long suggested that humans first reached the Americas around 13,000 years ago, when Asian hunters crossed a now submerged landmass known as Beringia, which joined Siberia to Alaska and Yukon during the last ice age.
Alt: What Happens When an Archaeologist Challenges Mainstream Scientific Thinking?
In his famous book, “The History of the America Indians” eighteenth century explorer and trader, John Adair stated that several hundred Cherokees, living in the North Carolina Mountains, spoke an ancient Jewish language that was nearly unintelligible to Jews from England and Holland. From this observation, Adair extrapolated a belief that all Native Americans were the descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel.
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 United States by three University of South Carolina archaeologists has provided an important clue in solving this enduring mystery.
Through age determinations that are using the radioactive decay of uranium, scientists have discovered that one of the greatest mass extinctions was due to an ice age and not to a warming of Earth temperature
The Arctic Ocean could become free of sea ice for the first time in 100,000 years even if action is taken to keep global warming to within two degrees Celsius, scientists have warned.
/UK carbon dioxide emission levels are at their lowest since the 1920s, down 36 percent from 1990, according to a report from the non-profit Carbon Brief.
The achievement is attributed to the UK's multi-pronged approach, which includes shifting away from coal, expanding renewable energy, and taxing coal carbon.
The ability of trees to offset carbon emissions has been questioned after a Western Sydney University study found common Australian trees are unable to store as much carbon as previously thought.
Published in the Nature Climate Change journal, the research found that Australia's iconic Eucalyptus forests are likely to need additional soil nutrients in order to grow and take advantage of extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
The remains of a 13 thousand year old pine forest was found in Leusden in the province of Utrecht, the University of Utrecht said on its website. According to researchers from Utrecht University and the Netherlands Cultural Heritage Service, the discovery is very important as the trees give an accurate picture of the effects of an abrupt and drastic change in climate.
Children are not often invited to speak to the United Nations General Assembly. But there stood Felix Finkbeiner, German wunderkind in his Harry Potter spectacles, gray hoodie, and mop-top haircut—with a somber question about climate change.
A naturally occurring gene in house mice may help eliminate their invasive cousins that live on islands
One might mistake mice for monsters. They've wreaked havoc on delicate native ecosystems—consuming rare and endemic plants, insects, and even unsuspecting seabirds. But it's not fair to blame the mice—they were just doing what mice do.
Leaf-cutting ants can learn which plants are not suitable for the fungus gardens that supply their food before they even leave the colony, according to a study published March 8, 2017 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Andrés Arenas and Flavio Roces from University of Wurzburg, Germany.
The giant panda's distinct coloring is loved by wildlife enthusiasts, but researchers have never had a satisfactory explanation as to what made their coloring pattern so unique – until now.
An unknown moth, collected from Portugal 22 years ago, has finally been named and placed in the tree of life thanks to the efforts of an international team of scientists.
Three species and three genera of birdeater spiders are described as new to science. In a new study, Brazilian spider experts report the diversity of the oldest tarantula genus, whose name derives from a famous 18th century illustration. Despite comprising a great number of species, the genus has remained a mystery for more than 200 years.
Ancient DNA traces from the family of viruses that cause a rare type of leukaemia have been found in the genomes of bats, filling the "last major gap" in retrovirus fossil record.
Mining for metals began as early as 12,000 years ago in the Stone Age in Upper Silesia, in present-day Poland, research on peat bogs has found.
Scientists found the evidence for mining in the ancient layers of bog in Miasteczko ?l?skie near Tarnowskie Góry in southern Poland.
It is a case that has intrigued historians, psychiatrists and theologians for the last 80 years, but an academic has found what may be the oldest known attempt to diagnose Margery Kempe’s erratic religious behaviour.
A jumble of stones uncovered here offers undisputed evidence of a burial mound dating from the mid-seventh century that very likely was the final resting place of an emperor, researchers say.
During wartime, precious historical sites are often caught in the crossfire. Last year, for instance, it was revealed that all six of Syria’s UNESCO World Heritage Sites—among them a Roman amphitheater, a crusader castle, and a 2,000-year-old temple—had been damaged or destroyed during the country’s civil war.
At the world’s oldest monastery, new technology is making long-lost manuscripts available to anyone with an Internet connection
Sometime in the eighth century, a monk at St. Catherine’s Monastery in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula was preparing to transcribe a book of the Bible in Arabic and needed fresh parchment. New parchment was an expensive commodity at the time and was difficult to obtain
Archeological artefacts, such as the Jupiter Column of Ladenburg, a town with an impressive Roman history, hold many as yet undiscovered secrets. Discovered in 1973, the history of the monument that is more than 1800 years old is still unclear.
Archaeologists in Mosul, Iraq may have stumbled upon a momentous find that could shed light on the world’s first empire: a previously undiscovered 600 B.C. palace buried deep under a shrine demolished by ISIS
Two partial archaic human skulls, from the Lingjing site, Xuchang, central China, provide a new window into the biology and populations patterns of the immediate predecessors of modern humans in eastern Eurasia.
Alt: Ancient skulls give clues to China human history
These days, climate scientists are looking hard at Arctic maps. As winter sea ice shrinks and cracks appear, they try to understand the reasons for these changes, and determine what we should expect in the future. Centuries ago, though, when people tried to map the Arctic, they weren’t too concerned with what was happening to it—they just wanted to know what the heck was up there. And, if they didn’t know, they pretty much made it up.
An alloy, which according to Greek legend was mined on the ancient mythical island of Atlantis, has been discovered on a shipwreck which sank off the coast of Sicily 2,600 years ago. Some 47 ingots of ‘orichalcum’ have so far been recovered from the ancient underwater find.
MIT physicists have created a new form of matter, a supersolid, which combines the properties of solids with those of superfluids.
By using lasers to manipulate a superfluid gas known as a Bose-Einstein condensate, the team was able to coax the condensate into a quantum phase of matter that has a rigid structure—like a solid—and can flow without viscosity—a key characteristic of a superfluid.
The next generation of transportation is here: autonomous cars. And this innovation isn’t exclusively available within the ranks of Tesla — it can also be found in the humble guise of a Honda Civic parked on the campus of the University of Nebraska, Omaha.
Virginia has made robotics history. The commonwealth is the first state to pass legislation allowing delivery robots to operate on sidewalks and crosswalks across the state.
The new law goes into effect on July 1 and was signed into law by the governor last Friday.
Moderation seems to be a better approach than greed—for foragers, at least.
One of the grand questions in life is when it’s time to move on. Whether you’re a hunter-gatherer rapidly depleting the berries in your area or an oil company considering leaving one well to start up another, from the point of view of a mathematician, you face the same basic dilemma: “When should you go to where the grass is greener?”
Since its invention around 100 B.C. in China, paper as a material for spreading information has greatly contributed to the development and spread of civilization. Even in today’s information age, with electronic media omnipresent in homes, offices and even our pockets, paper still plays a critical role.
As we start to 3D-print everything — including houses, of all things — it's pretty impressive that a company built one in just 24 hours.
Located in Russia, this 400-square-foot home (37 square meters) was built in just a day, at a cost of just over $10,000.
Fashion trends are not just a modern construction. In ancient Egypt, looking fashionable was an important part of everyday life, especially for the elite members of society. One of the high class fashions was the bead-net dress. Although historians were aware of artistic depictions of females wearing bead-net dresses, it wasn’t until the 1920s that real examples were actually discovered.
Advanced radar technology could offer hope for the collapsing monuments in the ancient city of Angkor Wat in Cambodia.
Using radar and satellite imagery, researchers can now study how changes in groundwater is causing the widespread decay of these unique monuments.
Maybe it’s because I grew up watching the Indiana Jones films, but for me, nothing beats a good ol’ fashioned unexplained ancient lost city mystery. The Cambodia Daily has reported that a team of international archaeologists have begun studying a mysterious ancient staircase in the Phnom Kulen mountain range north of Angkor Wat.
Did Buddhists of ancient times use shamanic plants and mushrooms in their sacred rituals? This is the question that Mike Crowley attempts to answer in his new book Secret Drugs of Buddhism. The book looks at the central role which psychedelics have played in Indian religions, beginning with the legendary soma, and follows the trail all the way to amrita, the sacramental drink of Vajray?na Buddhism.
A British billionaire, three former presidents and a renowned Aids researcher have called for all drugs to be decriminalized at a press conference that was sharply critical of the United Nations’ latest drug policy agreement, adopted this week.
The cabinet approved on Sunday the decriminalized use of marijuana in Israel.
First-time offenders will face $270 fine if caught using marijuana in a public place, but criminal charges will only be brought if person re-offends four times.
Researchers have long known that people who have more sex are generally happier than the those who get lucky less often, but the chicken and egg question remained: Does sex actually make you happier, or do happier people just have more sex? According to a new study, sex really does make you happier, but it was the time spent cuddling after sex, and not the joy of orgasm, that made people happy.
For three of the four patients, EEG activity ceased before the heart stopped beating – up to 10 minutes before, in the case of patient #2. However, patient #4 showed a slightly different pattern, with electrical activity (delta wave bursts) occuring up to 10 minutes after the final heartbeat.
These bizarre events put one in mind of a simple but arresting thesis: that we are living in the Matrix, and something has gone wrong with the controllers. This idea was, I’m told, put forward first and most forcibly by the N.Y.U. philosopher David Chalmers: what is happening lately, he says, is support for the hypothesis that we are living in a computer simulation and that something has recently gone haywire within it.
We have yet to explore all of what the ocean has to offer, but a recent find has suggested that aliens may have already beaten us to it - if a group of alien hunters are to be believed.
Related: An explanation for those mysterious pinging sounds in Canada’s Arctic
Related: Brightly-lit orange UFO filmed hovering over French coastal town baffles residents
Related: Paranormal phenomena exists in another dimension that 'our consciousness connects with'
One of the biggest mysteries in physics is why there's matter in the universe at all. This week, a group of physicists at the world's largest atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider, might be closer to an answer: They found that particles in the same family as the protons and neutrons that make up familiar objects behave in a slightly different way from their antimatter counterparts.
One of the highest-resolution maps of dark matter ever created has now been revealed, offering a detailed case for the existence of cold dark matter -- sluggish particles that comprise the bulk of matter in the universe.
Three high-energy neutrinos have been spotted traveling in tandem.
The IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica detected the trio of lilliputian particles on February 17, 2016. This is the first time the experiment has seen a triplet of neutrinos that all seemed to come from the same place in the sky and within 100 seconds of one another.
A group of researchers from the Faculty of Physics at the University of Warsaw has shed new light on the famous paradox of Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen after 80 years. They created a multidimensional entangled state of a single photon and a trillion hot rubidium atoms, and stored this hybrid entanglement in the laboratory for several microseconds
European researchers have detected optical flickering from a distant symbiotic star known as EF Aquilae (EF Aql for short). The new findings, presented Feb. 27 on the arXiv pre-print server, offer important hints on the nature and composition of this binary star.
Mars may have been a wetter place than previously thought, according to research on simulated Martian meteorites conducted, in part, at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab).
Shannon Dangle finished her PhD ready to take on a new challenge and set her sights on research to help make Mars colonization possible. But she isn't pursuing research on rocket fuels or space suits. She's using synthetic biology to improve biomanufacturing of needed resources using simple inputs like sunlight, water, and CO2.
Scientists have discovered what they say could be fossils of some of the earliest living organisms on Earth.
They are represented by tiny filaments, knobs and tubes in Canadian rocks dated to be up to 4.28 billion years old.
Alt: Oldest fossil ever found on Earth shows organisms thrived 4.2bn years ago – and provides strongest evidence yet for similar life on Mars
One major mystery about life's origin is how phosphate became an essential building block of genetic and metabolic machinery in cells, given its poor accessibility on early Earth. In a study published on March 9 in the journal Cell, researchers used systems biology approaches to tackle this long-standing conundrum, providing compelling, data-driven evidence that primitive life forms may not have relied on phosphate at all.
Temperatures across Earth’s mantle are about 60 degrees Celsius higher than previously thought, a new experiment suggests. Such toasty temperatures would make the mantle runnier than earlier research suggested, a development that could help explain the details of how tectonic plates glide on top of the mantle, geophysicists report in the March 3 Science.
In a fiery reminder of its presence and its power, Mount Etna roared to life this week on the island of Sicily, sending red-hot fountains of molten rock and ash high into the air and down the slopes of Europe’s largest and most active volcano.
Fitbit-style tracking of two wild African elephants suggests their species could break sleep records for mammals. The elephants get by just fine on about two hours of sleep a day. Much of that shut-eye comes while standing up — the animals sleep lying down only once every three or four days, new data show.
A study from Stockholm University have now established what was previously suspected, that the high levels of brominated flame retardants measured in cats are from the dust in our homes. The study has been published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology.
Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have found that up to 90 percent of predatory fish are gone from Caribbean coral reefs, straining the ocean ecosystem and coastal economy. The good news? They identified reefs, known as supersites, which can support large numbers of predator fishes that if reintroduced, can help restore the environmental and economic setback inflicted by overfishing.
"Although perhaps incidentally collected, the novel use of plastics in the nests of bees could reflect ecologically adaptive traits necessary for survival in an increasingly human-dominated environment," the authors quote an earlier study.
Related: Hundreds of North American bee species face extinction: study
Two friends have unearthed jewellery which could be the oldest Iron Age gold discovered in Britain.
Mark Hambleton, who went back to metal detecting after advice from his late father, made the find with Joe Kania, on Staffordshire Moorlands farmland.
Related: Uncovered after 2,000 years: gold torcs fit for an Iron Age queen
In The Economy of Ancient Greece, historian Darel Engen describes how the Athenian unit of money – the talent (about 26kg of silver) – could purchase nine years of a skilled man’s labour. If we assume 250 working days in a year, that works out at about 11.5g of silver per day – a little under 0.3 of a troy ounce.
Archaeologists excavating the ancient city of Munigua in southern Spain have found a vast Roman copper mining operation built on an older mine dating back thousands of years.
Alt: Valuable Enough to Kill For: 4,000-Year-Old Mine Which Was Hijacked by Foreign Forces Uncovered in Spain
A 4,000-year-old table-like stone structure, known as a dolmen, inscribed with unprecedented mysterious art, was recently discovered next to Kibbutz Shamir in the Upper Galilee.
Alt: Israeli experts find 'mystery' Bronze Age dolmen
Our investigations into understanding life and death for the elite individuals buried in the Tombos pyramid/chapel structures at Tombos have been very successful this season. The focus on two large tombs has uncovered a wealth of interesting grave goods.
Newly uncovered skulls in China have both human and Neanderthal features, a mix that so far hasn't been seen in a hominid fossil.
Writing in the journal Science, researchers described the Pleistocene-era skulls as having "a morphological mosaic with differences from and similarities to their western contemporaries."
Paleontologists at the University of Alberta have developed a new theory to explain why the ancient ancestors of dinosaurs stopped moving about on all fours and rose up on just their two hind legs.
"Show me your teeth and I'll tell you who you are." These words, attributed to 19th-century naturalist George Cuvier, couldn't be more correct. The pearly whites we use every day over and over and over again are clues not just to our own individual lives but also to our evolutionary history.
The last woolly mammoths to walk the Earth were so wracked with genetic disease that they lost their sense of smell, shunned company, and had a strange shiny coat.
Alt: Woolly Mammoth DNA Mutations Piled Up Pre-Extinction
Years ago, Formozov and his colleagues took some mummified squirrel tissue and extracted their DNA. They did it three or four times, only to end up with three or four different results.
In a birth announcement of sorts, the Smithsonian National Zoo and the Nashville Zoo released a joint statement Thursday saying that a male clouded leopard cub was born on March 1. The cub is the first of his species to be born from artificial insemination using frozen (and then thawed) semen.
Rest easy, folks. Armies of genetically modified super-species are unlikely to conquer Earth anytime soon.
In a paper recently appearing in the journal Genetics, a University of Kansas researcher and colleagues from Cornell University have revealed daunting challenges to changing the DNA of entire populations of species via the most promising techniques available today to produce "gene drive."
Humanity may soon generate more data than hard drives or magnetic tape can handle, a problem that has scientists turning to nature's age-old solution for information-storage—DNA.
For the first time ever, the World Health Organization has drawn up a list of the highest priority needs for new antibiotics — marching orders, it hopes, for the pharmaceutical industry.
The list, which was released Monday, enumerates 12 bacterial threats, grouping them into three categories: critical, high, and medium.
A recent Yale study has called into question the safety of vaccines and could lend fuel to anti-vaccine advocates
The study, published last month in the journal Frontiers in Psychiatry, reports that patients diagnosed with neuropsychiatric disorders like obsessive-compulsive disorder and anorexia nervosa were more likely to have received vaccinations three months prior to their diagnoses.
We may think getting mad about injustices in the world shows how selfless we are.
But a new study claims it's just the opposite - it showcases our self-serving nature.
Researchers have found that self-guided positive imagery training can successfully combat negative emotions in our daily lives. This tool is so powerful that it also changes the way our brain functions.
Related: Why Mind Wandering Can Be So Miserable, According to Happiness Experts
It wasn’t the first time that Mohab Ibrahim’s brother, Wael, had called complaining of a headache. Ibrahim suggested that he take some ibuprofen.
Wael declined his brother’s advice. “No, I’m going to go and sit among the trees, and that will make me feel better,” he said.
Vines are antisocial climbers. They send out tendrils to taste nearby plants, identifying and then steering clear of similarly weak-stemmed varieties.
Climbing plants are known to have a highly attuned sense of touch, which helps them scale other plants and structures. As soon as their tendrils brush up against a potential scaffold, they coil tightly around it.
Organic farmers can use a combination of cover crops and no-till methods to improve soil health, suppress weeds, and retain moisture, suggests a new report.
Scientists now understand how the carbon and methane emissions from our cars, livestock and electricity use are helping drive dramatic shifts in our climate through their contribution to the greenhouse effect. But they’re just beginning to untangle the effects of some of the other pollutants we produce.
Artificial intelligence boosters predict a brave new world of flying cars and cancer cures. Detractors worry about a future where humans are enslaved to an evil race of robot overlords.
The illegal dumping of waste mixed with mass untreated sewage in India’s Silicon Valley is creating a water crisis which threatens residents’ health – and is causing the city’s famous lakes to catch fire
Every summer for the past 20 years, Pascal Lee has traveled to the remote Canadian Arctic to pretend he’s on Mars. This cold, dry, pockmarked and essentially lifeless environment is one of the closest to the red planet that you can find on Earth—making it a great practice ground for driving Mars rovers.
Such a shield could leave Mars in the relatively protected magnetotail of the magnetic field created by the object, allowing the Red Planet to slowly restore its atmosphere. About 90 percent of Mars's atmosphere was stripped away by solar particles in the lifetime of the planet, which was likely temperate and had surface water about 3.5 billion years ago.
Mars has many characteristics that put one in mind of Earth. Consider its polar ice caps, which are quite similar to the ones in the Arctic and Antarctic circle. But upon closer examination, Mars’ icy polar regions have numerous features that hint at some unusual processes. Consider the northern polar ice cap, which consists predominantly of frozen water ice, but also a seasonal veneer of frozen carbon dioxide (“dry ice”).
Related: New Mars research shows evidence of a complex mantle beneath the Elysium volcanic province
Volcanoes that belch hydrogen could bump up the number of potentially habitable planets in the universe.
Ramses Ramirez and Lisa Kaltenegger, both of Cornell University, modeled the atmospheres of planets blemished with hydrogen-spewing volcanoes.
Non-stop vomiting, a puffy face and the constant need to pee: Volunteers for a week-long loop around the Moon may be in for a rough ride even if all goes to plan.
In the week that SpaceX announced it would launch two tourists to skirt Earth's satellite in 2018, experts agreed the health effects would chiefly be minor and short-lived.
Our mighty Sun bathes Earth in a tender glow. Reach overhead on a cloud-free, summer day, and it almost feels like you can catch a few of its caressing rays. While your relaxing efforts will technically be unsuccessful, it should warm your heart to know that scientists have literally caught some of the Sun's rays. And you know what's even cooler? There's a place on Earth where you can actually hold a piece of the Sun!
Artificial human life could soon be grown from scratch in the lab, after scientists successfully created a mammal embryo using only stem cells.
Cambridge University mixed two kinds of mouse stem cells and placed them on a 3D scaffold.
Two University of Oxford biomedical researchers are calling for robots to be built with real human tissue, and they say the technology is there if we only choose to develop it.
Scientists have created an artificial synapse, the space over which neurons communicate. It could help computers better recreate the way the human brain processes information and lead to improvements in brain-machine technologies.
It is no mystery why poker is such a popular pastime: the dynamic card game produces drama in spades as players are locked in a complicated tango of acting and reacting that becomes increasingly tense with each escalating bet.
Related: Robotics and artificial intelligence will continue to improve – but without political change such as a tax, the outcome will range from bad to apocalyptic
Facebook is trialling new tools to help with suicide prevention efforts. One approach will use artificial intelligence to identify concerning posts and make it easier for other people to report them.
Facebook says it will use pattern recognition algorithms to spot posts that could indicate someone is suicidal
One DNA research pioneer's new Human Longevity company offers an extensive $25,000 physical exam that includes MRIs, ultrasounds, blood tests, and cognitive exams.
By gathering this data from enough people, he hopes to be able to get a more complete picture of when death may occur and how to postpone it.
It's a cheering thought for anyone heading towards their golden years. Research from the Babraham Institute has shown that ageing can be beneficial - albeit so far only in yeast.
The tomb of a medieval king whose murder changed the course of Scottish history in a real-life "Game of Thrones" could be unearthed in a new hi-tech project launched Saturday.
The deadly scourge goes back for centuries, but how many?
The smallpox came in the mail, in a little piece of 350-year-old human skin. And the surprise discovery is dramatically rewriting the history of one of the most notorious diseases to plague humankind.
A thousand years ago, for reasons we will never know, the residents of a tiny farmstead on the coast of central Norway filled an old well with dirt.
Newly discovered evidence is upending our understanding of how early settlers made a life on the island — and why they suddenly disappeared
On the grassy slope of a fjord near the southernmost tip of Greenland stand the ruins of a church built by Viking settlers more than a century before Columbus sailed to the Americas.