Whether in Davos or almost anywhere else that leaders are discussing the world’s problems, they are missing by far the biggest issue: the rapidly deteriorating global environment and its ability to support civilization. The situation is pretty much an endgame. Unless pressing issues of the biology of the planet and of climate change generated by…
A series of storms that hit Scotland’s Shetland Islands over the holidays revealed what archaeologists believe could be 2,000-year-old human remains. Local archaeologist Chris Dyer said the ancient skeleton looked as if it were contemporary with the remains of Iron Age structures revealed nearby. Researchers then identified evidence of one or possibly two more burials…
New astonishing pictures by the European Space Agency have revealed a 1,500km long and 7km wide river that once ran across Mars. The agency’s Mars Express imaged the striking upper part of the remnants of Reull Vallis river on Mars with its high-resolution stereo camera, ESA said. Reull Vallis, is believed to have formed when…
It may not be self-aware (yet) but this computing monster is ready to take over the world. Well, at least a telescope in Chile. Say hello to the correlator for the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submilimeter Array, or ALMA. The correlator is the computer that runs at the backend of an array of radio telescopes called an…
Scientists have shed light on a peculiar tentacled marine creature that lived 520 million years ago. Experts thought that Cotyledion tylodes may have belonged to the jellyfish-like cnidarian group. But new anatomical evidence from the animal’s fossilised remains suggests the species was an early member of the group of small marine organisms called entoprocts. The…
The first drill sample ever collected on Mars will come from a rockbed shot through with unexpected veins of what appears to be the mineral gypsum. Delighted members of the Curiosity science team announced that the rover was now in a virtual “candy store” of scientific targets—the lowest point of Gale crater, called Yellowknife Bay,…
Australia experienced a wave of migration from India about 4,000 years ago, a genetic study suggests. It was thought the continent had been largely isolated after the first humans arrived about 40,000 years ago until the Europeans moved in in the 1800s. But DNA from Aboriginal Australians revealed there had been some movement from India…
A new way of determining hair and eye from modern forensic samples can also be used to identify details from ancient human remains, European researchers say. Researchers in Poland and the Netherlands who developed the system dubbed HIrisPlex for forensic analysis said it is sufficiently robust to successfully work on older and more degraded samples…
A newly discovered galactic structure is so large that it means one of our basic assumptions about the nature of the universe could be wrong.
It’s hard to imagine how this teeny little rock — it’s not even a whole rock, it’s just a grain, a miniscule droplet of mineral barely the thickness of a human hair — could rewrite the history of our planet. But that’s what seems to be happening. This piece of Zircon, an extremely durable mineral…