|
Author of the Month
|
|
To sign up to the Graham Hancock newsletter mailing list, please click here.
Page: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 next >>>
They arrived in the Stone Age and transformed Europe's population. A genetic study reveals that many Europeans are descended from people who moved out of the Iberian peninsula – present-day Spain and Portugal – in a massive wave of migration that began around 6000 years ago.
Modern hunter-gatherers arrived in Europe around 45,000 years ago, followed much later by the first farmers, who arrived from the Middle East 10,000 years ago. Over the next few millennia, society changed rapidly as hunter-gatherers declined, replaced by farmers who developed powerful chiefdoms and technologies for working with metal.
The recent discovery of two potentially ‘habitable’, nearly Earth-sized, planets in a five-planet system around the very distant star Kepler-62 reinforces the fact that astronomers are edging closer and closer to finding worlds that have a chance of resembling our home world in some way. But there are so many unknowns that it’s tremendously difficult to state with any certainty what the surface environment might be on such planets, much less what the odds are for life and a functioning biosphere. Still, what these discoveries do provide us with is a set of new questions. |  |
The strong earthquake that struck China's Sichuan province at 8:47 a.m. local time Saturday (April 20) probably hit along the same fault as the region's devastating 2008 earthquake, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. |  |
During routine archaeological research as part of the Ancient Egypt Leatherwork Project (AELP) carried out by Salima Ikram, Professor of Egyptology at the American University in Cairo (AUC) and Andre Veldmeijer, head of the Egyptology section at the Netherlands Flemish Institute in Cairo, a collection of 300 leather fragments of an Old Kingdom chariot were uncovered at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.
Ikram describes the discovery as very important and the collection as “extremely rare.” Only a handful of complete chariots are known from ancient Egypt, and of these, only one heavily restored in Florence and one in the Egyptian Museum have any significant amount of leather.
Ants have a complicated social structure, so much so that it's almost impossible to track their interactions. Now, researchers have individually tagged every single worker ant within an entire colony and tracked them with a computer in order to learn more about how they network. The result is the largest-ever data set of ant interactions.
Astronomers have finally found direct proof that almost all water present in Jupiter’s stratosphere was delivered by comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, which struck the planet in 1994. The result is based on new data from Herschel that revealed more water in Jupiter’s southern hemisphere, where the impacts occurred, than in the north as well as probing the vertical distribution of water in the planet’s stratosphere.
A private Mars colony project will do its best to avoid disturbing potential Red Planet life rather than aggressively hunt it down. |  |
Organizers of the Dutch-based Mars One project opened up their website on Monday to take applications for a one-way trip to Mars in 2022. |  |
When asked, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” many kids say, “Astronaut!” More than a few adults would say the same.
And why not? We are captivated by the idea of exploring new worlds, having adventures in space, or just floating weightless in zero gravity. After all, zero-g makes mundane things like wringing a wet towel out into mind-blowing experiences.
Astronomers using an observatory in Hawaii kicked off a month-long campaign to study the northern lights on Saturn study Sunday (April 21) in a live webcast from Hawaii's iconic Keck Observatory. |  |
Ocean biology alters the chemical composition of sea spray in ways that influence its ability to form clouds over the ocean. That's the conclusion of a team of scientists using a new approach to study tiny atmospheric particles called aerosols that can influence climate by absorbing or reflecting sunlight and seeding clouds. By engineering breaking waves of natural ocean water under purified air in the lab, they were able to isolate and analyze aerosols from the spray and determine how life within the water altered the chemistry of the particles.
BEIJING — The boy’s chronic cough and stuffy nose began last year at the age of 3. His symptoms worsened this winter, when smog across northern China surged to record levels. Now he needs his sinuses cleared every night with saltwater piped through a machine’s tubes.
The boy’s mother, Zhang Zixuan, said she almost never lets him go outside, and when she does she usually makes him wear a face mask. The difference between Britain, where she once studied, and China is “heaven and hell,” she said.
A major global cooling event 34 million years ago chilled land as well as sea, according to climate clues found in an unusual place: fossil snail shells. |  |
Some say the marshes of southern Iraq are the origin of the Garden of Eden story. Why did Saddam Hussein drain them? |  |
California's giant redwoods will now be found in six foreign countries. A new non-profit group is shipping 18-inch (46 centimeters) saplings of the trees for people to plant to help fight deforestation and climate change, according to USA Today. |  |
New research finds that double cropping—planting two crops in a field in the same year—is associated with positive signs of economic development for rural Brazilians. The research focused the state of Mato Grosso, the epicenter of an agricultural revolution that has made Brazil one of the world's top producers of soybeans, corn, cotton, and other staple crops. That Brazil has become an agricultural powerhouse over the last decade or so is clear. What has been less clear is who is reaping the economic rewards of that agricultural intensification—average Brazilians or wealthy landowners and outside investors.
A single equation grounded in basic physics principles could describe intelligence and stimulate new insights in fields as diverse as finance and robotics, according to new research. |  |
Doctors may begin regularly using computer predictions in judging how to treat cancer patients after scientists constructed mathematical formulas that outperformed human experts in forecasting how sufferers will respond to treatment.
A computer model of lung cancer made consistently better predictions of the future symptoms suffered by a set of patients undergoing radiotherapy or chemotherapy than the doctors who actually treated them, scientists said, in a study that demonstrates the increasingly important role of mathematics in cancer medicine.
Welding bits and pieces from various microbes and the camphor tree into the genetic code of Escherichia coli has allowed scientists to convince the stomach bug to produce hydrocarbons, rather than sickness or more E. coli. The gut microbe can now replicate the molecules, more commonly known as diesel, that burn predominantly in big trucks and other powerful moving machines. |  |
Darwin and Freud walk into a bar. Two alcoholic mice — a mother and her son — sit on two bar stools, lapping gin from two thimbles.
The mother mouse looks up and says, “Hey, geniuses, tell me how my son got into this sorry state.”
“Bad inheritance,” says Darwin.
“Bad mothering,” says Freud.
For over a hundred years, those two views — nature or nurture, biology or psychology — offered opposing explanations for how behaviors develop and persist, not only within a single individual but across generations.
Page: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 next >>>
Enjoy the newsdesk? Please tell others about it:
TweetSite design by Amazing Internet Ltd, maintenance by Synchronicity. Site privacy policy. Contact us.
Dedicated Servers and Cloud Servers by Gigenet. Invert Colour Scheme / Default
