Newsdesk Archive
British scientists could soon fly into space to conduct cutting edge medical experiments in zero gravity, thanks to new laws, which are slated to make way for a new era of scientific research. According to the UK Space Agency, the new regulations as well as funding will potentially see Britain constructing its very first spaceport by 2020.
You may not realize it but alien subatomic particles raining down from outer space are wreaking low-grade havoc on your smartphones, computers and other personal electronic devices.
Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are brief spurts of radio emission, lasting just one-thousandth of a second, whose origins are mysterious. Fewer than two dozen have been identified in the past decade using giant radio telescopes such as the 1,000-foot dish in Arecibo, Puerto Rico. Of those, only one has been pinpointed to originate from a galaxy about 3 billion light-years away.
It might sound trite to say that the Universe is full of mysteries. But it’s true.
Chief among them are things like Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and of course, our old friends the Black Holes. Black Holes may be the most interesting of them all, and the effort to understand them—and observe them—is ongoing.
Alt: We May Finally Get a Picture of a Black Hole
When three physicists first discovered through their calculations that a decaying atom moving through the vacuum experiences a friction-like force, they were highly suspicious. The results seemed to go against the laws of physics: The vacuum, by definition, is completely empty space and does not exert friction on objects within it. Further, if true, the results would contradict the principle of relativity, since they would imply that observers in two different reference frames would see the atom moving at different speeds
Particles of debris from car tyres are ending up in the ocean as "plastic soup", conservationists warn.
Microplastics from tyres and textiles are a bigger source of marine pollution than the breakdown of larger plastic waste in some areas, says the IUCN.
In 1893 the Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen embarked on a mission of extraordinary boldness and ingenuity. He planned to become the first person to reach the north pole by allowing his wooden vessel, the Fram, to be engulfed by sea ice and pulled across the polar cap on an ice current.
Bumblebees fitted with microchip backpacks have offered researchers a unique glimpse into the hidden world of colonies. As it turns out, when it comes to dividing up the workload, bees behave a lot like human beings.
Related: Bee decline threatens US crop production
Related: Bumblebee Buzz Literally Makes Flowers Explode With Pollen
British teens with the highest test scores are less likely to smoke cigarettes yet more likely to drink alcohol and smoke pot compared with teens with lower scores, according to a study published Wednesday in the British Medical Journal Open.
OUT of the way, human, I’ve got this covered. A machine learning system has gained the ability to write its own code.
Created by researchers at Microsoft and the University of Cambridge, the system, called DeepCoder, solved basic challenges of the kind set by programming competitions. This kind of approach could make it much easier for people to build simple programs without knowing how to write code.
The world's first piece of metallic hydrogen, created by Harvard scientists just last month, has disappeared.
The machinery used to keep the sample stable malfunctioned, leaving no sign of the metal in its wake.
Researchers have finally answered a question that has eluded scientists for years: when exposed to moderately high pressures, why does graphite turn into hexagonal diamond (also called lonsdaleite) and not the more familiar cubic diamond, as predicted by theory?
Some of the most profound predictions in theoretical physics, such as Einstein's gravitational waves or Higgs' boson, have taken decades to prove with experiments. But every now and then, a prediction can become established fact in an astonishingly short time
Quantum entanglement may appear to be closer to science fiction than anything in our physical reality. But according to the laws of quantum mechanics — a branch of physics that describes the world at the scale of atoms and subatomic particles — quantum entanglement, which Einstein once skeptically viewed as “spooky action at a distance,” is, in fact, real.
Alt: Physicists Just Showed That Quantum Entanglement Is a Physical Reality
Physicists are getting a little bit closer to answering one of the oldest and most basic questions of quantum theory: does the quantum state represent reality or just our knowledge of reality?
The world around us is mainly constructed of baryons, particles composed of three quarks. Why are there no antibaryons, since just after the Big Bang, matter and antimatter came into being in exactly the same amounts? A lot points to the fact that after many decades of research, physicists are closer to the answer to this question.
The frequency of hail storms, thunderstorms, and high wind events has decreased by nearly 50 percent on average throughout China since 1960.
The findings, published in Scientific Reports, are based on one of the most comprehensive studies on trends in local severe weather patterns to date.
A series of storms have inundated California over the past few weeks, and the latest deluge is currently swelling rivers and reservoirs that are already spilling over. Vast swathes of California continue to be at risk for flooding as the storm runoff makes its way through river systems, the National Weather Service warns.
Related: A Forgotten Group Of Grains Might Help Indian Farmers – And Improve Diets, Too
Two of the most influential groups in the food industry are asking companies to change those pesky "expiration" or "sell by" labels on packaged food.
The labels, you see, don't mean what they appear to mean. Foods don't "expire." Most foods are safe to eat even after that "sell by" date has passed.
Almost 20 per cent of the food made available to consumers is lost through over-eating or waste, a study suggests. The world population consumes around 10 per cent more food than it needs, while almost nine per cent is thrown away or left to spoil, researchers say.
Researchers have made two new breakthroughs in creating lab-grown meat, making it easier to develop stem cells into the preferred state and then nurture tissue growth.
Though the process is currently still expensive and unrefined, lab-created meat could eventually be cheaper and better for the environment than traditional sources of meat.
Lab-grown meat could be on your plate within the next five years. For the past few years, the barrier to getting test-tube meat into the hands of consumers has been the cost of production. In 2013, it was around $325,000 to make this stuff in a lab, but the process has been refined, and the cost now is just $11.36.
In a radical plan to preserve rare varieties such as the Nankin, Scots Dumpy and Sicilian Buttercup, scientists at the the University of Edinburgh’s Roslin Institute have bred genetically modified chickens designed to act as surrogates that would be capable of laying eggs from any rare breed.
We all do it; we all need it -- humans and animals alike. Sleep is an essential behavior shared by nearly all animals and disruption of this process is associated with an array of physiological and behavioral deficits.
Related: Congo river fish evolution shaped by intense rapids
Related: Giant Amazonian Catfish Is a Record-Breaking Traveler
A study using CBS Trials has provided new insight into the biological basis of intelligence. Sleep spindles—short neural oscillations that occur during non-rapid eye movement sleep—have previously been linked to IQ test performance.
It’s a cliche to claim that a novel can change your life, but a recent study suggests almost a fifth of readers report that fiction seeps into their daily existence.
Researchers at Durham University conducted a survey of more than 1,500 readers, with about 400 providing detailed descriptions of their experiences with book.
Living with a cat during childhood does not cause mental illness later in life, a new study from University College London suggests, disputing earlier studies that caused alarm by linking cats to human mental illness.
There is little doubt that humans and dogs are naturally inclined to be best friends. But when and how did this dynamic duo first emerge? Conventional wisdom holds that agrarian man domesticated scavenger canines about 15,000 years ago. However, recent archaeological discoveries and DNA analyses show that not only is our friendship closer to 30,000 years old (possibly 40,000 years) but also that man did not master and breed wolves into companionable dogs.
On August 5, 1949, an earthquake struck the small town of Guano in Ecuador, causing buildings to crack open and crumble. The disaster led to the strange discovery of the Mummy of Guano.
During the earthquake, the walls of the old church Asunción de Guano were destroyed and knocked down to the floor, and there, tucked away inside a large jar inside one of the walls of the church was the Mummy of Guano. Why it was buried in such a unique way inside the walls of the church remains a mystery to many people today as nothing like it had been seen before.
Malta’s picturesque capital has been used as the set of Gladiator, Troy and King’s Landing in Game of Thrones – but it is also riven by subterranean passages that go back to the legendary Knights of Malta. As the city prepares to be European Capital of Culture, should the tunnels be opened to the public?
Scientists working on behalf of Edinburgh University’s School of Geosciences have discovered that a set of tunnels and caves beneath the town of Glimerton near Edinburgh are much more extensive than previously thought and could indicate the existence of a hidden underground druid temple.
A team of archaeologists have recently uncovered a large, puzzling labyrinth from the Neolithic period in Denmark. Some researchers suggest that it could have been used as an ancient sun worship site, but for now the structure’s exact purpose remains a mystery.
Every continent save Antarctica is ringed by vast stretches of seagrass, underwater prairies that together cover an area roughly equal to California.
Seagrass meadows, among the most endangered ecosystems on Earth, play an outsize role in the health of the oceans. They shelter important fish species, filter pollutants from seawater, and lock up huge amounts of atmosphere-warming carbon.
In a land where survival is precarious, Komodo dragons thrive despite being exposed to scads of bacteria that would kill less hardy creatures. Now in a study published in the Journal of Proteome Research, scientists report that they have detected antimicrobial protein fragments in the lizard’s blood that appear to help them resist deadly infections
Many of the secrets of cancer and other diseases lie in the cell's nucleus. But getting way down to that level—to see and investigate the important genetic material housed there—requires creative thinking and extremely powerful imaging techniques.
Science is facing a "reproducibility crisis" where more than two-thirds of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist's experiments, research suggests.
Married people are healthier than those who are single, divorced or widowed, research has found. Now a new study provides the first biological evidence to explain how marriage impacts health
Related: 'Tis better to give, to your spouse
Related: How Good Posture May Help with Depression Symptoms
A new study, soon to be published in the Journal of Women’s Health, provides fresh evidence that people who stay single instead of getting married, or who get divorced instead of staying married, are especially likely to be healthy.
Life expectancy will soon exceed 90 years for the first time, scientists have predicted, overturning all the assumptions about human longevity that prevailed at the beginning of the 20th century.
A new study by Lomonosov Moscow State University and Stockholm University focuses on the role of mitochondria in the aging of organisms.
According to researchers, the study opens the way to the treatment of aging with mitochondrially targeted antioxidants.
People who eat diets high in sugar could be at greater risk of Alzheimer's disease, a new study suggests.
For the first time, scientists have established a "tipping point" link between blood sugar glucose and the degenerative neurological condition.
Brain scans can detect autism long before any symptoms start to emerge, say scientists.
The earliest that children tend to be diagnosed at present is at the age of two, although it is often later.
Researchers from Japan's Kyoto University have documented just the second case in chimpanzees of a genetic disorder similar to Down syndrome in humans.
The ancient Egyptians were renowned for their worship of animals, and one of these was the baboon. In ancient Egyptian mythology, baboons are best known for their association with Thoth, the god of wisdom. In addition to their role in mythology, baboons also had a place in the society of ancient Egypt. They are commonly known to have been kept as pets
A project exploring the role of East Africa in the evolution of modern humans has amassed the largest and most diverse collection of prehistoric bone harpoons ever assembled from the area. The collection offers clues about the behaviour and technology of prehistoric hunter-gatherers.
Remains of miraculously preserved camp by the Sea of Galilee included brush huts, grains and stone tools that show farming began far earlier than thought.
Agriculture is believed to have dawned around 12,000 years ago, in the Levant or southern Turkey. Now remains of a 23,000-year-old camp, including flint sickle blades and extraordinarily preserved botanical remains, found on the shore of the Sea of Galilee throws back the start of cereal cultivation by thousands of years.
Call it an ancient thousand man march. Early Bronze Age men from the vast grasslands of the Eurasian steppe swept into Europe on horseback about 5000 years ago—and may have left most women behind. This mostly male migration may have persisted for several generations, sending men into the arms of European women who interbred with them, and leaving a lasting impact on the genomes of living Europeans.
Related: The Carnoustie Bronze Age Hoard
Carbon emissions across all nine Amazon nations have been fully matched by carbon absorption by mature Amazon forests since the 1980s, new research shows.
Study lead author Professor Oliver Phillips, from the University of Leeds, said: “Since 1980 roughly 430 million tonnes of carbon has been absorbed by pristine Amazon rainforest each year, which is almost four times the UK emissions for 2016.
Researchers at the University of Minnesota and University of Milano-Bicocca are bringing the dream of windows that can efficiently collect solar energy one step closer to reality thanks to high-tech silicon nanoparticles.
Duke University researchers have developed tiny nanoparticles that help convert carbon dioxide into methane using only ultraviolet light as an energy source.
Having found a catalyst that can do this important chemistry using ultraviolet light, the team now hopes to develop a version that would run on natural sunlight, a potential boon to alternative energy.
Pulling uranium out of seawater could be a cost-effective way to source nuclear fuel, scientists have found, and the technique could pave the way for coastal countries to switch to nuclear power.
A ‘nuclear sniffer’ plane has been sent to monitor radioactivity levels in Europe following the detection of mysterious spikes of radiation across the continent.
Alt: No One Can Figure Out What's Behind a Mysterious Radiation Spike Across Europe
Related: Unexplained Nuclear Activity Detected in the Arctic
Who says exercise is always good for you? Cycling to work in certain highly polluted cities could be more dangerous to your health than not doing it at all, according to researchers.
In cities such as Allahabad in India, or Zabol in Iran, the long-term damage from inhaling fine particulates could outweigh the usual health gains of cycling after just 30 minutes.
A new paper shows that the ancient ancestors of termites found in northern Australia crossed vast distances over oceans, and then followed an evolutionary path similar to humans, migrating from tree-tops to the ground.
One is a massive black ant, the other is a tiny, only distantly related, brown ant. But together they form a perfect team to build and guard a shared nest.
This insect odd couple is found in the forests of the Lamto Ecological Reserve in Ivory Coast.
When army ants stream into the jungles of Costa Rica, they leave death and destruction in their wake. These nomadic group predators eat everything from millipedes to other ants, and they even raid wasps' nests for eggs and larvae.
Related: Ants use Sun and memories to navigate
A rare rodent isn’t just blind as a bat: it may navigate like one too. The tree-climbing Vietnamese pygmy dormouse seems to make ultrasonic calls to guide its motion. If that’s confirmed, it would be the first arboreal mammal known to use echolocation.
Apart from bats, dolphins, whales, rats and shrews – which use calls in the audible range – few mammals echolocate as vision is usually more efficient.
Today’s explorers and scientists are identifying new species at a rate that would’ve amazed Charles Darwin
It’s sunset on an unnamed mountain, in an unexplored corner of one of the greenest countries on earth. We’ve arrived by helicopter across a rumpled landscape of swamps and hills, and it feels as if we’re the first humans ever to pass the night here.
Last year, headlines in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Scientific American and other outlets declared that a decades-old paleontological mystery had been solved. The "Tully monster," an ancient animal that had long defied classification, was in fact a vertebrate, two groups of scientists claimed.
An enormous, elongated polar bear skull emerged in 2014 from an eroding archaeological site southwest of Utqia?vik in Alaska. Experts claim that it is quite different from most modern polar bear skulls and reassure that it is one of the biggest polar bear skulls ever found.
A previously undiscovered species of an extinct primordial giant worm with terrifying snapping jaws has been identified by an international team of scientists.
In a Mexican cave system so beautiful and hot that it is called both fairyland and hell, scientists have discovered life trapped in crystals that could be 50,000 years old.
Alt: Naica's crystal caves hold long-dormant life
A new study theorizes that in 540 CE, a small and until recently seemingly unremarkable volcano in southern Mexico, El Chichón, was responsible for plunging the Maya civilization into a hundred years of chaos.
The Ancient One, also known as Kennewick Man, was reburied early Saturday in the high desert of the Columbia Plateau, ending 20 years of legal battles and scientific study.
The face of a Pictish man who was "brutally killed" 1,400 years ago has been reconstructed by Dundee University researchers.
Archaeologists found the man's skeleton buried in a recess of a cave in the Black Isle, Ross-shire.
Some South Americans, a new report finds, share a last common ancestor with modern populations in Asia – a result that suggests multiple waves of migration into the Americas.
Listening to five minutes of West African or Indian pop music can give the listener more positive attitudes towards those cultures, research from the Universities of Oxford and Exeter has found.
At the end of a stressful day, you pop on a pair of headphones, hit “play” on your favorite song—and your mood instantly improves. This emotional response occurs, a new study suggests, because music activates a chemical reward system in your brain: the same system that makes yummy food, vigorous exercise, and opioid drugs feel good.
Fascinating study suggests treating “psychache”
The idea that suicide is caused by psychological pain may seem self-evident, but recognizing this was a departure for psychiatry.
Related: Alcohol leads to more violence than other drugs, but you’d never know from the headlines
Soldiers could be cured of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) by erasing the individual memories of disturbing events, scientists believe.
Three people with paralysis have learned to type by thought alone using a brain implant – at the fastest speeds recorded using such a system.
Two have motor neurone disease, also known as ALS – a degenerative disorder that destroys neurons associated with movement – while the other has a spinal cord injury.
Drivers in a restive Chinese province will be required to install GPS trackers on their cars, the Associated Press reports, as part of a public safety measure that the government announced this week.
A team of researchers has developed a facial recognition system that can identify individual lemurs in the wild with high levels of accuracy.
The plan is to use the technology to help radically improve the way the endangered species is tracked.
A taste for reddish young leaves might have pushed howler monkeys toward full-spectrum color vision. The ability to tell red from green could have helped howlers pick out the more nutritious, younger leaves, researchers reported February 19 at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. That’s a skill their insect-eating close relatives probably didn’t need.
Chimps with little social status influence their comrades’ behavior to a surprising extent, a new study suggests.
In groups of captive chimps, a method for snagging food from a box spread among many individuals who saw a low-ranking female peer demonstrate the technique, say primatologist Stuart Watson of the University of St. Andrews in Fife, Scotland, and colleagues.
Walking on our heels, a feature that separates great apes, including humans, from other primates, confers advantages in fighting, according to a new University of Utah study
Related: Football headers 'linked to brain damage'
PEOPLE in a south American desert have evolved to detoxify potentially deadly arsenic that laces their water supply.
For settlers in the Quebrada Camarones region of Chile’s Atacama desert some 7000 years ago, water posed more than a bit of a problem.
Before they disappeared in 1130, the Chacoans of New Mexico were a society on par with the Mayans.
Without a writing system to speak of, they maintained complex trade partnerships with nearby populations.
Alt: Girl power! Mysterious ancient human society was run by a 'female elite' and lived in sprawling stone mansions
Related: Were the Women of Petra More Important Than Men?
More than a century after the great sandstone monuments of New Mexico’s Chaco Canyon were first studied, archaeologists are finally learning about the Ancestral Puebloan leaders who built them.
Larger than London or Paris in its time, what is now America’s heartland had a magnificent city between 1030 and 1200 CE. Now known as Cahokia, the city occupied the wide floodplain where the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers meet, near present-day St. Louis.
A longtime anthropology professor who studies violence among prehistoric people in California has published his work, outlining that there are two views related to the origins of violence and warfare in humans. One view suggests that humans in earlier times were peaceful and lived in harmony, and a second view that there has always been competition for resources, war and violence.
The skeletons of two men who were buried apparently hand in hand during an outbreak of the Black Death have been excavated from a plague burial ground in London.
The men, believed to have been in their 40s, were buried in the early 15th century in a carefully dug double grave, in identical positions, with heads turned towards the right and the left hand of one man apparently clasping the right hand of the other.
In a 16-year period during which changes in state marriage laws were sweeping the nation, states that adopted laws allowing same-sex marriage saw an immediate decline in suicide attempts by gay, lesbian and bisexual high school students — a group in which attempted suicide is two to seven times more common than among their heterosexual peers.
There's a multi-billion-dollar industry devoted to products that fight signs of aging, but moisturizers only go skin deep. Aging occurs deeper -- at a cellular level -- and scientists have found that eating less can slow this cellular process.
Taxing junk food and subsidising healthier options could save Australia billions of dollars by preventing people from getting sick. A study that looked at consumer habits finds that the two-pronged approach should be more effective than one based on taxes alone.
Related: Pizza, burgers and the like: A single high-fat meal can damage the metabolism
Related: The Nasty Ingredient in Fast-Food Wrappers
The amount of effort required to do something influences what we think we see, finds a new study, suggesting we're biased towards perceiving anything challenging to be less appealing.
Science is demonstrating what we intuitively know: Nature makes us happy.
When we first see Elizabeth Bennett, in the 2005 film of Pride and Prejudice, she is walking through a field, surrounded by birdsong and trees. Nature, for Jane Austen’s heroines, is always a source of solace and inspiration. And as Florence Williams shows in her new book, The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative, modern technology is now revealing what goes on in our brains when we step outdoors—and why nature is so good for us.
It may seem like a doomed attempt to mix business and pleasure. But a growing number of young professionals in Silicon Valley insist that taking small doses of psychedelic drugs simply makes them perform better at work – becoming more creative and focused. The practice, known as “microdosing”, involves taking minute quantities of drugs such as LSD, psilocybin (magic mushrooms) or mescaline (found in the Peyote cactus) every few days.
Seemingly countless self-help books and seminars tell you to tap into the right side of your brain to stimulate creativity. But forget the "right-brain" myth -- a new study suggests it's how well the two brain hemispheres communicate that sets highly creative people apart.
For the first time since the Viking missions to Mars in the 1970s, NASA is making the search for evidence of life on another world the primary science goal of a space mission. The target world is Jupiter’s moon Europa, considered possibly habitable because of its subsurface ocean.
The ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) is about to go surfing — at the Red Planet.
Through 13 months of delicate maneuvers, the spacecraft will carefully skim above Mars' atmosphere to refine its orbit. Once that's finished in 2018, TGO will be all set to do science at Mars — and also ready to communicate with robots on the surface, such as the upcoming ExoMars rover.
Despite humanity's reliance on the sun to survive, not much is known about the blazing star at the center of the universe. In fact, it’s one of the least understood objects in the solar system. NASA announced a plan to change that, not just to better understand the sun, but to prevent possibly deadly threats from solar weather.
Over the past decades, scientists have wrestled with a problem involving the Big Bang Theory. The Big Bang Theory suggests that there should be three times as much lithium as we can observe. Why is there such a discrepancy between prediction and observation?
To get into that problem, let’s back up a bit.
NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has revealed the first known system of seven Earth-size planets around a single star. Three of these planets are firmly located in the habitable zone, the area around the parent star where a rocky planet is most likely to have liquid water.
In a few million years, Mars’s moon Phobos will be shredded into pieces that will settle into a flat ring like Saturn’s. But bits of Mars’s two moons may already be circling the Red Planet, some of it in the form of nascent rings.
Astronomers have long thought it was possible for Mars to be encircled by rings made of bits of rock kicked up from its moons Phobos and Deimos, but no one had ever observed them.
Researcher Dr. Mary Bourke from Trinity College Dublin have discovered a patch of land in an ancient valley in Mars’ Lucaya Crater that appears to have held water in the not-too-distant past, making it a prime target to search for past life forms on the Red Planet. Signs of water past and present pop up everywhere on Mars from now-dry, wriggly riverbeds snaking across arid plains to water ice exposed at the poles during the Martian summer.
The Earth's core consists mostly of a huge ball of liquid metal lying at 3000 km beneath its surface, surrounded by a mantle of hot rock. Notably, at such great depths, both the core and mantle are subject to extremely high pressures and temperatures.
An "atmospheric river" is a colorful term for a sinuous plume of moisture that travels up from the tropics — a single plume can carry more water than the Mississippi River at its mouth. But new research shows that atmospheric rivers are also among the most damaging weather systems around.
Each year, 2 to 16 percent of hydraulically fractured oil and gas wells spill hydrocarbons, chemical-laden water, hydraulic fracturing fluids and other substances, according to a new study. The analysis identified 6,648 spills reported across Colorado, New Mexico, North Dakota and Pennsylvania during a 10-year period.
Related: These Are the Defiant "Water Protectors" of Standing Rock
As 3D printing continues to transform manufacturing, doctors are hoping it could also help the 30 million people worldwide in need of artificial limbs and braces