Are viruses life forms or not? Scientists have been fighting about it for years, and Anthony has more on the latest wrinkle in this seemingly simple yet age-old debate.
One of the world’s leading ice experts has predicted the final collapse of Arctic sea ice in summer months within four years. In what he calls a “global disaster” now unfolding in northern latitudes as the sea area that freezes and melts each year shrinks to its lowest extent ever recorded, Prof Peter Wadhams of…
The world’s deep seafloors are dark and airless places, but vast swaths may pulse gently with energy conducted through a type of newly discovered bacteria that forms living electrical cables. The bacteria were first detected in 2010 by researchers perplexed at chemical fluctuations in sediments from the bottom of Aarhus Bay in Denmark. Almost instantaneously…
A 520-million-year-old, three-inch fossil has yielded evidence that complex brains evolved much earlier than previously thought. The preserved external skeleton of Fuxianhuia protensa, an extinct type of arthropod, is the earliest known fossil to show a complex brain, according to a study published in the journal Nature. “No one expected such an advanced brain would…
People have dreamed of colonizing the Red Planet for more than a century. USA Today takes a look at NASA’s most recent Mars plan for landing astronauts there about 2035. The first outposts could come after 2060. “Mars has captured the human imagination certainly since people started gazing up at the sky,” says NASA science…
The discovery of the first alien planet with two suns — like the “Star Wars” world Tatooine — residing in its parent star’s habitable zone is good news for the search for life beyond Earth, scientists say. The planet, known as Kepler-47c, is a gas giant and therefore probably not suitable for life as we…
A new neural analysis suggests that our social networking tendencies most likely have their neural roots in some of our early vertebrate ancestors. The findings were published online in the journal Science. “There is ancient circuitry that appears to be involved in social behavior across all vertebrates,” Hans Hofmann, an associate professor of integrative biology…