A new University of Florida study that determined the age of skeletal remains provides evidence humans reached the Western Hemisphere during the last ice age and lived alongside giant extinct mammals. The study published online in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology addresses the century-long debate among scientists about whether human and mammal remains found at…
The human population is growing at such a staggering rate that we are organizing ourselves more like ant supercolonies, with new research finding that we have more in common now with some ants than we do with our closest living animal kingdom relatives. The new study, published in the journal Behavioral Ecology, points out that…
A sprawling collection of galaxies and star clusters surrounding our own Milky Way is challenging long-standing theories on the existence of dark matter, the mysterious substance thought to pervade the universe. The structure of satellite galaxies and star clusters around the Milky Way is so vast that it reaches across a million light-years – 10…
A global science assessment panel for biodiversity, modelled on the International Panel on Climate Change, was launched in Panama City in April. The Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystems (IPBES) was agreed to in June 2010 by more than 230 government representatives from more than 80 countries. Its aim is to influence global policy by…
Researchers studying Oetzi, a 5,300-year-old body found frozen in the Italian Alps in 1991, have found red blood cells around his wounds. Blood cells tend to degrade quickly, and earlier scans for blood within Oetzi’s body turned up nothing. Now a study in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface shows that Oetzi’s remarkable preservation…
Geomagnetic storms generated by the interaction between the electrically charged solar particles and the earth’s own magnetic field could have serious consequences. They are able to overload electricity supply networks and cause breakdowns, cause communications and navigation satellites to fail, and endanger astronauts.
Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest laws continue to shape human evolution in the modern age, research has shown.
A new estimate of the number of habitable planets orbiting the most common type of stars in our galaxy could have huge consequences for the search for life. According to a recent study, tens of billions of planets around red dwarfs are likely capable of containing liquid water, dramatically increasing the potential to find signs…
Alu elements infiltrated the ancestral primate genome about 65 million years ago. Once gained an Alu element is rarely lost so comparison of Alu between species can be used to map primate evolution and diversity. New research published in BioMed Central’s open access journal Mobile DNA has found a single Alu, which appears to be…
An entirely new type of particle has been discovered by scientists using the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), near Geneva, Switzerland. The discovery of the new particle, called “neutral Xi_b^star baryon,” was made by the CMS experiment, one of six separate particle physics experiments running at the LHC….