Chimpanzees have made headlines in recent years for several unprovoked attacks against humans, the latest just recently at the Jane Goodall Institute Chimpanzee Eden in South Africa. The severely injured victim, University of Texas graduate student Andrew Oberle was mauled by chimpanzees as he gave a lecture to about a dozen tourists. Oberle remains in…
It’s time to get serious about science in space, and the International Space Station is the perfect place to start, NASA officials said. “We are in a position in space research and space exploration where we have to push the ball and advance forward or we’re about ready to retreat from space,” William Gerstenmaier, NASA’s…
Tiny molecules called microRNAs are tearing apart traditional ideas about the animal family tree.
From David Barash at The Chronicle’s Brainstorm blog: When it comes to evolution and human beings, what we don’t know is if anything more interesting than what we do. Among these mysteries, of course, is religion, and among the reasonable hypotheses thus far adduced, there are several based on what I call “overshoot.” The basic…
Within a sliver of a second after it was born, our universe expanded staggeringly in size, by a factor of at least 10^26. That’s what most cosmologists maintain, although it remains a mystery as to what might have begun and ended this wild expansion. Now scientists are increasingly wondering if the most powerful particle collider…
Invasive species such as kudzu, privet and garlic mustard can devastate ecosystems, and, until now, scientists had little reason to believe that native plants could mount a successful defense. A new University of Georgia study shows that some native clearweed plants have evolved resistance to invasive garlic mustard plants—and that the invasive plants appear to…
Scientists from CERN will announce on July 4 whether the tantalizing “hints” of the Higgs Boson which they presented in December have been strengthened or grown weaker over the past six months. Although the results may not be strong enough to declare an official discovery, they are rumored to show very similar signals to those…
University of Alberta researchers have uncovered physical proof that animals existed 585 million years ago, 30 million years earlier than all previous established records show. The researchers found fossilized tracks of a centimeter-long, slug-like animal left behind 585 million years ago in a silty sediment. The research team determined that the tracks were made by…
Pottery fragments found in a south China cave have been confirmed to be 20,000 years old, making them the oldest known pottery, archaeologists say. The findings add to recent efforts that have dated pottery piles in East Asia to more than 15,000 years ago, rebutting conventional theories that the invention of pottery correlates to the…
Rice University researchers have come up with a way to spray-paint a lithium-ion battery onto pretty much any smooth surface—even a beer stein. Published in Nature’s online journal, Scientific Reports, the invention means that batteries could be added to just about any object without significantly affecting its design. The Rice team, led by graduate student…