Human history more than matches the best soap operas and Hollywood thrillers. The latest blockbuster is a tale of sex and war on an epic scale but from an era that pre-dates conventional historical analysis. It comes from the world of anthropology where researchers are piecing together the twists and turns using the latest genome…
For centuries, the people of the Gilbert Islands in the central Pacific Ocean have crafted weapons from shark teeth. Joshua Drew, a conservation biologist at Columbia University in New York, has used these teeth to show that the waters around the islands were once home to three species of shark that no longer live in…
As it turns out, Mars and Earth may be more similar than previously thought in one momentous way: Mars appears to have plate tectonics —giant pieces of the planet’s crust that move, break apart and smash into each other, forming such features as mountains, canyons and volcanoes — and experiences earthquakes, according to a new…
After a full week on the Red Planet, NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity is celebrating with a little rest and relaxation. The 1-ton rover began beaming home photos and testing out its 10 science instruments almost immediately after its dramatic landing on Mars on the night of Aug. 5. But Curiosity is now in the middle…
A first-of-its-kind “crowdsourced and crowdfunded” archaeological dig at Cambridgeshire’s Flag Fen has finished. It is the site of a Bronze-Age “causeway” of millions of preserved timbers that are rotting away as groundwater recedes from the site. The not-for-profit Digventures team raised £27,000 from members of the public who then joined in an expert-led dig to…
During the Neolithic Age (approximately 10000 BCE), early man evolved from hunter-gatherer to farmer and agriculturalist, living in larger, permanent settlements with a variety of domesticated animals and plant life. This transition brought about significant changes in terms of the economy, architecture, man’s relationship to the environment, and more. Now Dr. Ran Barkai of Tel…
In 2010, observers reported the most massive stars ever seen, exceeding what many astronomers thought was a ceiling around 150 times the mass of our sun. The most flagrant violator had about twice the legal limit. The heavyweight champs resided 160,000 light-years from Earth in Radcliffe 136, a dense star cluster within the Large Magellanic…
Results from an expedition to far eastern Russia that set out to find the origin of naturally occurring quasicrystals have provided convincing evidence that they arrived on Earth from outer space. Writing in Reports on Progress in Physics, Paul J Steinhardt and Luca Bindi reveal that new, naturally occurring quasicrystal samples have been found in…
An international team of researchers have developed a new technique to measure dark matter, using a state-of-the-art simulation of the Milky Way to test their mass-measuring method before applying it to real data. This threw up a number of surprises: they noticed that standard techniques used over the past twenty years were biased, always tending…
The world is depleting underground water reserves faster than they can be replenished due to over-exploitation, according to scientists in Canada and the Netherlands. The researchers combined groundwater usage data from around the globe with computer models of underground water resources to come up with a measure of water usage relative to supply. That measure…