News Articles

Lucy, Australopithecus afarensis, was not walking around Africa alone three million years ago.  Biologists knew that, of course, the neatly linear line from critter to modern man does not exist, it happened in fits and starts and sometimes different ways numerous times. But as the study of evolution becomes more multi-discplinary our chances of finding new fossils increases, and ideas of what ancestors looked like go from theoretical to real.

A chemical analysis of lunar soil collected by Apollo astronauts forty years disputes the belief that a giant collision between Earth and a Mars-sized object gave birth to the moon 4.5 billion years ago.In the giant-collision scenario, computer simulations suggest that the moon had two parents: Earth and a hypothetical planetary body called “Theia” but a comparative analysis of titanium from the moon, Earth and meteorites indicates the moon’s material came from Earth alone.

Women take longer to give birth today than did women 50 years ago, according to an analysis of nearly 140,000 deliveries conducted by researchers at the National Institutes of Health which finds that women take longer to give birth today than did women 50 years ago, despite many technological advances in medicine. The researchers compared data on deliveries in the early 1960s to data gathered in the early 2000s. They found that the first stage of labor had increased by 2.6 hours for first-time mothers. For women who had previously given birth, this early stage of labor took two hours longer in recent years than for women in the 1960s. The first stage of labor is the stage during which the cervix dilates, before active pushing begins.

Solar tornadoes several times as wide as the Earth can be generated in the solar atmosphere and one such solar tornado was discovered using the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly telescope on board the Solar Dynamic Observatory (SDO) satellite.The Atmospheric Imaging Assembly saw superheated gases as hot as 50,000–2,000,000 Kelvin sucked from the root of a dense structure called the prominence, and spiral up into the high atmosphere and travel about 200,000 kilometers along helical paths for a period of at least three hours. The tornadoes were observed on September 25th, 2011. The hot gases in the tornadoes have speeds as high as 300,000 km per hour. Gas speeds of terrestrial tornadoes only reach a comparatively mild 150 km per hour.

How do you know a scientist was right a lot? When an entire cottage industry exists to try and prove him wrong.Einstein's view of the Universe has gotten some new respect; the most accurate measurement ever made of the distance to the time when the expansion of Universe began to accelerate. It means that the phenomenon can be explained using just Einstein’s general theory of relativity and the cosmological constant - the simplest theoretical explanation for the acceleration of the Universe. The results will be used to understand what is causing the acceleration and why, and could shed new light on 'dark energy' – the adopted name of the little-known fundamental agent driving the acceleration.

The atmosphere contained little carbon dioxide (CO2) during the last Ice Age 20,000 years ago. Why did it rise when the Earth’s climate became warmer? Processes in the ocean are responsible for this, says a new study based on newly developed isotope measurements.Around 20,000 years ago, the atmospheric CO2 concentration was distinctly lower than in the following warm period, showed measurements from Antarctic ice cores. An international team of glaciologists looked even further back and found that the close connection between carbon dioxide and temperature has existed over the past 800,000 years: with low CO2 concentrations during the Ice Ages and higher CO2 values during warm periods.

Vincent van Gogh's series of sunflower paintings, while spectacular to fans of his work, have also intrigued scientists because they depict a mutation whose genetic basis was a mystery. In a new study, a team of University of Georgia scientists reveal the mutation behind the distinctive, thick bands of yellow "double flowers" that the post-Impressionist artist painted more than 100 years ago.

SCUBA-2, the most powerful camera ever developed for observing light at ‘sub-mm’ wavelengths (light that has a wavelength 1000 times longer than we can see with our eyes), has begun a revolutionary new study of cosmic star-formation history.

Are you ugly?  Maybe that's something else to blame your mother about.Female cognitive ability can impact how handsome males become over evolutionary time, say biologists from The University of Texas at Austin, Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. Males across the animal world have evolved elaborate traits to attract females, from huge peacock tails to complex bird songs and frog calls. But there is a price - predators are attracted to increased elaboration, placing an enormous cost to males with these sexy traits. In a new paper, a group of biologists have shown that females can also limit the evolution of increased elaboration.

The region around the Hubble Deep Field (HDF), originally captured by the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) in the mid 1990s, led to the discovery of numerous galaxies billions of light years distant and provided direct visual evidence of the evolution of the Universe. First results from the new imaging, which uses observations from the UK's newly upgraded e-MERLIN radio telescope array together with the EVLA radio array based in New Mexico, show galaxies some 7 billion light years away in unprecedented detail. 

After WikiLeaks released classified and sensitive government documents, predictions of the scale and significance of their impact were overstated.The desire/hope of proponents that the WikiLeaks disclosures of 2010 meant conventional mechanisms for controlling government-held information wee breaking down, heralding a new world of 'radical transparency', were short-lived. Old-style secrecy is still there, argues Alasdair Roberts of Suffolk University Law School.  Leak, publish, and wait for the inevitable outrage is easily defeated in practice.It turns out radical transparency is hard to achieve and  a technological fix alone will not do it.

A device the size of a home washing machine uses bacteria growing in municipal sewage to make electricity - and also clean up the sewage at the same time. Current wastewater treatment technology involves a number of steps designed to separate the solid and liquid components of sewage and clean the wastewater before it is released into a waterway. This often involves settling tanks, macerators that break down larger objects, membranes to filter particles, biological digestion steps and chemicals that kill harmful microbes. One estimate puts their energy use at 2 percent of overall consumption in the U.S.