Research challenges popular theory on origin of languages
New research published today in the journal Nature, led by University of Adelaide ancient DNA researchers and the Harvard Medical School, shows that at least some of the Indo-Europea...
Pennies reveal new insights on the nature of randomness
The concept of randomness appears across scientific disciplines, from materials science to molecular biology. Now, theoretical chemists at Princeton have challenged traditional inter...
New technique allows analysis of clouds around exoplanets
Statistical comparison of more than 1,000 atmospheric models show that these clouds are most likely made of Enstatite, a common Earth mineral that is in vapor form at the extreme tem...
How animals survive Norwegian winter nights
For birds and animals that must live out in Norway’s frigid winters, every second has to be spent finding enough food not just to survive the day, but also the long hard night. Durin...
Hawking’s latest black-hole paper splits physicists
As a result, once the black hole was gone, the information carried by anything that had previously fallen into the hole would be lost to the Universe. “That paper was responsible for...
Gorilla origins of the last two AIDS virus lineages confirmed
Scanning electron micrograph of an HIV-infected H9 T cell. Credit: NIAID Two of the four known groups of human AIDS viruses (HIV-1 groups O and P) have originated in western lowland...
Core work: Iron vapor gives clues to formation of Earth and Moon
The Z machine is in Albuquerque, N.M., and is part of the Pulsed Power Program, which started at Sandia National Laboratories in the 1960s. Credit: Randy Montoya Recreating the viol...
Controversial dark-matter claim faces ultimate test
Within three years, the experiments will be able to either confirm the existence of dark matter — or rule the claim out once and for all, say the physicists who work on them. All wil...
What is Mars made of?
The interior of Mars, showing a molten liquid iron core similar to Earth and Venus. As a result, the planet lacks a magnetic field and is constantly bombarded by radiation. Credit: N...
Volcanologists discover how bubbles accumulate in magma
Tambora on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa: the explosive eruption of this volcano 200 years ago cooled the climate and lead to a year without a summer. Together with other scientis...
Physicists quantify the usefulness of ‘quantum weirdness’
Recently, physicists have been developing ways to measure the amount of quantum coherence in a system. The new measurement method can answer questions such as how useful will a syste...
Neanderthals: Facts About Our Extinct Human Relatives
It is theorized that for a time, Neanderthals probably shared the Earth with other Homo species. It took a little bit longer for the brain to grow in Neanderthals than in modern huma...
Manipulation complexity in primates coevolved with brain size and terrestriality
This stage was then followed at later ages by performing actions on multiple objects, indicating that manipulating one object is less complex than manipulating two objects. Thumb opp...
International Space Station panoramic tour
Node-3 Tranquillity provides life-support for the International Space Station. Previous releases: Explore Zvezda module via Flickr, Facebook or Youtube. Explore Unity module via Fli...
How can space travel faster than the speed of light?
The light from these distant objects has been traveling for so long that, when we finally see it, we are seeing the objects as they were billions of years ago. The Hubble Volume Red...
Genome’s tale of ‘conquer and enslave’
Credit: University of Toronto Toronto scientists uncovered how viral remnants helped shape control of our genes. Genes are switched on or off by proteins called transcription factor...
Diet affects the evolution of birds
Credit: João Quental How diet has affected the evolution of the 10,000 bird species in the world is still a mystery to evolutionary biology. How such diverse dietary preferences ult...
Are humans the new supercomputer?
Our results are here to demonstrate that there is still a difference between the abilities of a man and a machine, explains Jacob Sherson. At the interface between quantum physics an...
A new superweapon in the fight against cancer
Cancer is a very clever, adaptable disease. To defeat it, says medical researcher and educator Paula Hammond, we need a new and powerful mode of attack. With her colleagues at MIT, H...
A molecular compass for bird navigation
Researchers have established that birds can sense the earth’s magnetic field and use it to orient themselves. Behavioral experiments have shown that even subtle disruptions to the ma...
Your kids might live on Mars. Here’s how they’ll survive
It sounds like science fiction, but journalist Stephen Petranek considers it fact: within 20 years, humans will live on Mars. In this provocative talk, Petranek makes the case that h...
Why meteors light up the night sky
Meteorite: fall vs find When scientists study newly recovered meteorites, they break them up into two types – falls and finds. Because the debris is moving in the same direction as ...
Why does the Milky Way rotate?
Credit: NASA We live in a galaxy that is called the Milky Way. It’s spinning at 270 kilometers per second (168 miles per second) and takes about 200 million years to complete one ro...
What Is the Greenhouse Effect?
However, 97 percent of climate scientists agree that humans have changed Earth’s atmosphere in dramatic ways over the past two centuries, resulting in global warming. The greenhouse ...
Schizophrenia: Impaired activity of the selective dopamine neurons
Schizophrenia is not only associated with positive symptoms such as hallucinations and delusions, but also with negative symptoms e.g. cognitive deficits and impairments of the emoti...