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About 100 million years ago an infant lizard's life was cut short when it crawled into a sticky situation.
A paper by UC Santa Cruz professors of economics and astrophysics has attracted widespread attention in the financial world over its analysis of the "flash crash" nearly six years ago that saw the Dow Jones Industrial Average ...
Today's longer campaign cycles, filled with numerous televised debates and constant news reporting and social media coverage, are causing the rise of extremist politicians, according to a new study from the University of ...
Reproducibility is an important measure of validity in all fields of experimental science. If researcher A publishes a particular scientific result from his laboratory, researcher B should be able to follow the same protocol ...
Famed for their gentle, slow-moving nature, sea cows (manatees and dugongs) are aquatic mammals closely related to the elephant. Now, their bone chemistry can be revealed for the very first time, after researchers from The ...
Because most of the evidence of early humans derives from the fossil record, it is difficult to discern a great deal about their lifestyles and habits. Scientists can make inferences from skeletal morphology—jaw and teeth ...
The production of formal bone tools, defined as artefacts that were cut, carved, polished or otherwise modified to produce fully shaped points, awls, harpoons and wedges, appears relatively late in human history, and is only ...
New research suggests that the feeding strategy of Kolponomos, an enigmatic shell-crushing marine predator that lived about 20 million years ago, was strangely similar to a very different kind of carnivore: the saber-toothed ...
Many technologies used in human societies are beyond the inventive capacities of individuals. Instead, technologies result from a cumulative process where innovations are gradually added across many generations—think from ...
People who see God as a "secure base" for intimacy and attachment are more likely to be emotionally committed to their workplace and satisfied with their jobs. They also tend to see their work as a calling from God, which ...
Future fluctuations in oil prices could be forecast using a combination of previous statistics and complex computer algorithms, according to new research.
Researchers have found one of the oldest and most detailed fossils of the central nervous system yet identified, from a crustacean-like animal that lived more than 500 million years ago. The fossil, from southern China, has ...
An unidentified fossilised bone in a museum has revealed the size of a fearsome abelisaur and may have solved a hundred-year old puzzle.
Paleontologists in Argentina have announced the discovery of a major Jurassic-era fossil site four years after it was first discovered.
A pair of researchers has found that a dinosaur unearthed in Arizona back in 1942, had a record number of injuries and bone growth problems. In their paper published in the open access site, PLUS ONE, Phil Senter, with Fayetteville ...
An 11,000 year old engraved shale pendant discovered by archaeologists during excavations at the Early Mesolithic site at Star Carr in North Yorkshire is unique in the UK, according to new research.
What makes human morality unique? One important answer is that we care when other people are harmed. While many animals retaliate when directly mistreated, humans also get outraged at transgressions against others. And this ...
Archaeological and genetic analysis may indicate that three skeletons buried in medieval graves in France may have been Muslim, according to a study published February 24, 2016 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Yves ...
The ancient copper mines in Timna are located deep in Israel's Arava Valley and are believed by some to be the site of King Solomon's mines. The arid conditions of the mines have seen the remarkable preservation of 3,000-year-old ...
Monash University-led research has shown that the evolution of human teeth is much simpler than previously thought, and that we can predict the sizes of teeth missing from human fossils and those of our extinct close relatives ...
The first animal to appear on Earth was very likely the simple sea sponge.
Shame is a painful emotion we do our best to avoid. And yet it is universal among cultures. Why would we evolve something that makes us lie, evade and worse? One prominent theory holds it's a malfunction, an ugly pathology ...
A 90-million-year-old fossil fish, which has been on display at the Perot Museum of Nature and Science in Dallas, turns out to be a new species. Research conducted by Kenshu Shimada, Ph.D., professor at DePaul University ...
Mathematical models are used to predict just about everything from traffic and weather to plant metabolism and industrial biotechnology.
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If you could travel back in time to South America thousands of years ago, you might have caught a glimpse of an animal known as a glyptodont living alongside giant ground sloths and saber-toothed cats. Glyptodonts looked ...
(Phys.org)—Under ancient Jewish law, if a suspect on trial was unanimously found guilty by all judges, then the suspect was acquitted. This reasoning sounds counterintuitive, but the legislators of the time had noticed ...
Using several different methods of DNA analysis, an international research team has found what they consider to be strong evidence of an interbreeding event between Neanderthals and modern humans that occurred tens of thousands ...
Zipf's law in its simplest form, as formulated in the thirties by American linguist George Kingsley Zipf, states surprisingly that the most frequently occurring word in a text appears twice as often as the next most frequent ...
A Rutgers scientist has identified a flower trapped in ancient amber as belonging to a species completely new to science.
(Phys.org)—For many Americans, the single biggest problem facing the country is the growing wealth inequality. Based on income tax data, wealth inequality in the US has steadily increased since the mid-1980s, with the top ...
(Phys.org)—As one of Australia's most infamous cold case mysteries, the enigma of the Somerton Man deals with a haunting situation: a man is found dead on a beach, and no one steps forward to identify him. While it's common ...
(Phys.org)—This is the second part of a two-part story about the forensic investigation of the Somerton Man. Read "Part 1: History and Code" here.
Since 2010 scientists have known that people of Eurasian origin have inherited anywhere from 1 to 4 percent of their DNA from Neanderthals.
Women can perform neurosurgery, sit on the Supreme Court and run for president. But when it comes to selling something on eBay, they might want to ask a guy for help.
It's official: There really was a giant, flightless bird with a head the size of a horse's wandering about in the winter twilight of the high Arctic some 53 million years ago.
An international team including scientists at the University of St Andrews has unlocked the secret of one of the great events of Earth's evolution – the Cambrian explosion.
A newly discovered distant relative of the duck has just been hailed as an ancestor of the biggest bird the world has ever known by a group of Australian palaeontologists.
(Phys.org)—A pair of researchers has conducted a phylogenetic analysis on common fairy tales and has found that many of them appear to be much older than has been thought. In their paper published in Royal Society Open ...
Researchers believe the discovery of a new genus and two new species of extinct non-hopping kangaroos could shed light on the ancestry of all kangaroos and wallabies living today.
Beliefs about all-knowing, punishing gods—a defining feature of religions ranging from Christianity to Hinduism—may have played a key role in expanding co-operation among far-flung peoples and led to the development of ...
Duke assistant professor Doug Boyer's office is more than 8,000 miles away from the vault at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, where the fossil remains of a newly discovered human ancestor, Homo ...
Diminutive humans that died out on an Indonesian island some 15,000 years ago were not Homo sapiens but a different species, according to a study published Monday that dives into a fierce anthropological debate.
Every two years or so, computer speed and memory capacity doubles—a head-spinning pace that experts say could see machines become smarter than humans within decades.
(Phys.org)—Sometimes when a star collapses into a supernova, it releases an intense, narrow beam of gamma rays. Gamma-ray bursts often last just a few seconds, but during that time they can release as much energy as the ...
Records of Spanish shipwrecks combined with tree-ring records show the period 1645 to 1715 had the fewest Caribbean hurricanes since 1500, according to new University of Arizona-led research. The study is the first to use ...
The sole secondary mirror that will fly aboard NASA's James Webb Space Telescope was installed onto the telescope at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, on March 3, 2016.
A group of researchers from the UK, including academics from Cardiff University, has demonstrated the first practical laser that has been grown directly on a silicon substrate.
Scientists have long been puzzled about what makes Mercury's surface so dark. The innermost planet reflects much less sunlight than the Moon, a body on which surface darkness is controlled by the abundance of iron-rich minerals. ...
Arundo donax, a giant reed that grows in the Mediterranean climate zones of the world, isn't like other prolific warm-weather grasses, researchers report. This grass, which can grow annually to 6 meters (nearly 20 feet) in ...
Researchers at U of T Engineering have developed a new way of growing realistic human tissues outside the body. Their "person-on-a-chip" technology, called AngioChip, is a powerful platform for discovering and testing new ...
A study led by the University of Tennessee and the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory could soon pay dividends in the development of materials with energy-related applications.
Millions of people - particularly infants in underdeveloped countries—suffer from the serious life threatening illnesses of meningitis, pneumonia and influenza. These are due to infection by microbes such as N. meninigitidis, ...
From beach shallows to the ocean depths, vast numbers of chemical compounds work together to reduce and store atmospheric carbon in the world's oceans.
Space weather scientist Liz MacDonald has seen auroras more than five times in her life, but it was the aurora she didn't see that affected her the most.
Richard Wool was a pioneer in green engineering and author of the first book to systematically describe the chemistry and manufacture of bio-based polymers and composites derived from plants.
Google on Monday opened its Project Fi mobile phone service to anyone in the United States using its latest model Nexus smartphones.
A team of physicists from the University of California, San Diego and The University of Manchester is creating tailor-made materials for cutting-edge research and perhaps a new generation of optoelectronic devices. The materials ...
Brigham Young University mechanical engineering professors Larry Howell and Spencer Magleby have made a name for themselves by applying the principles of origami to engineering. Now they're applying their origami skills to ...
(Phys.org)—A team of researchers with the National Center for Nanoscience and Technology and Beihang University, both in China, has developed a biodegradable triboelectric nanogenerator for use as a life-time designed implantable ...
Scientists developing fusion energy experiments have solved a puzzle of why their million-degree heating beams sometimes fail, and instead destabilise the fusion experiments before energy is generated.
One of the most critical questions surrounding climate change is how it might affect the food supply for a growing global population. A new study by researchers from Brown and Tufts universities suggests that researchers ...
Scientists from NOAA's National Marine Fisheries Service (NOAA Fisheries) and the University of Massachusetts Boston have found evidence of Atlantic bluefin tuna spawning activity off the northeastern United States in an ...
The Universe is constantly expanding. It changes, creating new structures that merge. But how does our Universe evolve? Physicists at the University of Geneva (UNIGE), Switzerland, have developed a new code of numerical simulations ...
Supervolcanoes capable of unleashing hundreds of times the amount of magma that was expelled during the Mount St. Helens eruption of 1980 are found in populated areas around the world, including the western United States.
Agriculture in parts of sub-Saharan Africa must undergo significant transformation if it is to continue to produce key food crops, according to a new study published today in Nature Climate Change.
On a cool, fog-shrouded mountain of Costa Rica, University of California, Irvine biologist Caitlin Looby is finding that warming temperatures are becoming an increasing problem for one of the most ecologically diverse places ...
Luxury automaker BMW AG is showing off a sleek concept car aimed at a future in which drivers choose between the pleasures of high-performance driving and letting the car take control.
The genome of a slowly evolving fish, the spotted gar, is so much like both zebrafish and humans that it can be used as a bridge species that could open a pathway to important advancements in biomedical research focused on ...
Chimney-like mineral structures on the seafloor could have helped create the RNA molecules that gave rise to life on Earth and hold promise to the emergence of life on distant planets.
Like an albatross scanning for pods of squid in a vast ocean, molecules on solid surfaces move in an intermittent search pattern that provides maximum efficiency, according to new research from the University of Colorado ...
Sometimes, a nematode worm just needs to take a nap. In fact, its life may depend on it. New research has identified a protein that promotes a sleep-like state in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. Without the snooze-inducing ...
A joint research project being undertaken by Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has achieved a breakthrough in fundamental research in the field of potential future ...
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