News Articles

Egyptian coffins and mummy cases have been found covered in a mysterious 'black goo'. What is this goo made from and what can it reveal about Egyptian funerary practice? The British Museum's Kate Fulcher has detailed answers but you can read a summary below.Djedkhonsiu-ef-ankh died almost 3,000 years ago in ancient Egypt. He was a priest in the temple of Amun at Karnak, where he was an ‘Opener of the Doors of Heaven’ - permitted to open the temple sanctuary which contained the image of their deity.

An annotated list of 219 pathogens that infect plants in Brazil, including many agriculturally important species, shows just how precarious things can be when it comes to maintaining an affordable, sustainable food supply.

We eat various foods and our metabolism converts it to energy our bodies can use. This is a hallmark of life, across plants, animals, algae and bacteria. Energy is a defining characteristic of living.

A lava tube is just what it sounds like; a cave created when the surface of lava hardens but continues to flow underneath. When that trickles to a halt, the cave is left behind.These remaining caves exist on Earth and high-resolution pictures taken by interplanetary probes inferred lava tubes on Mars and Luna by observing linear cavities and sinuous collapse chains where the galleries cracked. A new paper measured the size and gathered the morphology of lunar and Martian collapse chains (collapsed lava tubes), using digital terrain models obtained through satellite stereoscopic images and laser altimetry taken by interplanetary probes.

Scientists have sequenced the genome of the tuatara, a single species reptile which originated in the Triassic period around 250 million years ago but is now only found in New Zealand, and it revealed an unusual architecture - it is mammal and reptile. Its genome shares features with those of mammals such as the platypus and echidna.Some sequences of DNA move or jump location, they are even referred to as 'jumping genes', and those found in the tuatara are most similar to those found in platypus while others are more similar to those in lizards.

Evidence of prehistoric fluting techniques, using hammering or pressure to create a groove, has been found on the Arabian peninsula from 8,000 years ago.Archeological finds are not new on the Arabian peninsula. There is evidence for lithics (stone tools) but evidence showed they were less advanced than northeast Africa or the Levant. In Europe, the Levant and Africa, the Middle Paleolithic showed use of Levallois flaking methods, including predetermined forms of flaking products. Like spear tips, which gave hunters a big advantage in food. But new work also shows fluting, which was more common n Arabia.

Experts asked to rank 20 ways Artificial Intelligence could be used to facilitate crime over the next 15 years, in order of concern, listed "deepfakes" - fake audio or video content so real it would have been considered conclusive just a few years ago - as number one.The 20 ways were ranked in order of concern based on the harm AI could cause, the potential for criminal profit or gain, how easy they would be to carry out and how difficult they would be to stop.

The public was sold a false bill of goods by “grassroots” anti-vaping activists when they crusaded against e-cigarettes and e-cigarette flavors in front of city councils, state houses and the U.S. Congress throughout 2019.We were told that the seductively delicious flavors of Juuls and other e-cigarettes were luring youngsters to dangerous nicotine products. To curb underage vaping, the government needed to get rid of the flavored nicotine replacement products.

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to rampant new use of personal protective equipment (PPE) but we're also facing a problem of more garbage in landfills. It could be trivial but in a world where people people about Keurig K-cups, technology to turn billions of items of disposable PPE from its polypropylene (plastic) state into biofuels mean it can be a viable consideration.A study in Biofuels explains that the transformation into biocrude, a type of synthetic fuel, will not just prevent the severe after-effects to humankind and the environment but also produce a source of energy.

A world-famous psychological experiment with over 5,000 citations may be another reason for the increased skepticism about psychology claims.used to help explain the brain's understanding of the body, as well as scores of clinical disorders, has been dismissed as not fit-for-purpose in a new academic paper from the University of Sussex.The Rubber Hand Illusion, where synchronous brush strokes on a participant's concealed hand and a visible fake hand supposedly give the impression of illusory sensations of touch and of ownership of the fake hand, has been considered accepted science for more than 20 years. Psychologists believe it increases knowledge of the brain's understanding of the body, as well as scores of clinical disorders. 

Viruses have strategies. They may not be dominated by politics or people who have desire to work in government but they are strategies just the same.Unable to reproduce on their own, viruses replicate by infecting a living organism's cells and getting the cells to make copies of them. Two main options exist for copies of a virus's genetic structure made in the cell: stay in the cell as a template for making even more copies or get packaged as a new virus and leave in an attempt to infect other cells. The stay strategy initially produces copies of the genetic code faster, while the leave strategy emphasizes newly infecting cells. How do they evaluate these opposing evolutionary strategies? 

The world's most species-rich temperate alpine biota occurs in the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, Himalaya, and the Hengduan Mountains.It has continuously existed far longer than any other alpine flora on Earth, which can infer how modern biotas have been shaped by past geological and climatic events.