News Desk

A new species of non-photosynthesizing parasitic plant, Sciaphila sugimotoi, has been discovered on the subtropical island of Ishigaki in Okinawa, Japan

Even a single urban tree can help moderate wind speeds and keep pedestrians comfortable as they walk down the street, according to a new study that also found losing a single tree can increase wind pressure on nearby buildings and drive up heating costs.

The number of Australians living in high-rise apartments doubled between 1991 and 2011 and that trend has continued since then. The quarter-acre dream is fast disappearing and larger blocks and family gardens along with it. As more people move from country areas to the city and as land to build homes near the city centre becomes scarce, we’re getting further and further away from nature. It turns out this isn’t great for our health.

African hunter-gatherers created the first “affluent society.” They were rich in time.

Every year automation and computerization squeeze out new segments of the labor force. In response, trade unions and workers anxiously wring their hands while savvy politicians demonize the “sinister” forces of globalization and make promises about job retention that they almost certainly won’t be able to keep.

Antidepressants have been linked to 28 reports of murder and 32 cases of murderous thoughts, in cases referred to the UK medicines regulator over the past 30 years, a BBC investigation has discovered.

Stem cells in the brain could be the key to extending life and slowing ageing. These cells — which are located in the hypothalamus, a region that produces hormones and other signalling molecules — can re­invigorate declining brain function and muscle strength in middle-aged mice

A chance to remember? Forgotten memories have been reawakened in mice with Alzheimer’s disease, suggesting that the condition may not actually destroy our memories, but instead impair our ability to recall them.

It has long been assumed that Alzheimer’s disease completely erases memories. The condition involves clumps of proteins known as amyloid plaques and tau tangles accumulating in the brain, where they are thought to destroy the neurons that store our memories.

One of the primary open questions of astrobiology is whether there is extant or extinct life elsewhere the Solar System. Some scientists such as Penn State astrophysicist Jason Wright, a member of the Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds, have considered the possibility that a technological species could have existed in the Solar System prior to humanity’s rise on Earth.

This week we all had a good laugh at the expense of Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.), who asked NASA scientists during a committee hearing whether it was possible that a civilization existed on Mars thousands of years ago. “Would you rule that out?” he asked. “See, there’s some people… Well, anyway.”

Last week, astronomers at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico announced they had picked up some strange radio signals coming from a small red dwarf star, and they couldn’t quite figure out what was causing them. Now, it seems they have an answer: it turns out these bizarre radio signals most likely came from the transmissions of a couple of satellites.

Correlated noise in the two LIGO gravitational-wave detectors may provide evidence that the universe is governed by conformal cyclic cosmology (CCC) which assumes that the universe consists of a succession of aeons, says Roger Penrose of the University of Oxford. Penrose proposes that the apparent noise is actually a real signal of gravitational waves generated by the decay of hypothetical dark-matter particles predicted by CCC.

A large spinning hunk of hot, vaporized rock that forms when rocky, planet-sized objects collide

Earth may have taken on a jelly doughnut shape early in its history. The rocky planet was spinning through space about 4.5 billion years ago when it smacked into a Mars-sized hunk of rotating rock called Theia, according to one theory

Ancient hot springs may have bubbled up at a spot just south of the Martian equator. Left-behind mineral deposits described in a new study are not the first evidence of such features on Mars. But if confirmed, the discovery could affect where NASA’s Mars 2020 mission rover lands to start its hunt for signs of life.

The Trojan asteroids that follow Mars in its orbit might have come from the planet itself, blown off in an ancient impact rather than being late arrivals, a new study suggests.

The vast deposits of water ice likely lurking at the moon’s poles could be tapped to help spur a sustainable economic and industrial expansion into space, researchers say.

Physicists believe they have discovered a particle that is both matter and anti-matter, an idea that was first theorised 80 years ago.

When the Big Bang created the universe out of nothing, scientists believe the explosion created equal amounts of matter and anti-matter.

And, if they were ever to meet, they would annihilate each other – returning to ‘nothing’ apart from a burst of energy.