Science

There are no limits to a human’s materialistic wants and emotional feelings. Attachment is the quickest development to happen and the slowest to recede. This is possibly why archaeologists in El Salvador found a 2,800-year-old burial of a person clutching a sea turtle vessel.The Mesoamerican burial found a face-down human skeleton that may be from…

Mid-listen, you can tap a button, ask your question, hear the answer, and then pick up the story right where you left off NEW YORK: Imagine a world where you could ask a book a question as you read it. That’s the pitch from a wave of new AI tools letting readers do exactly that….

Image(s): International Mathematical Union Two Chinese mathematicians have made history by becoming the first Chinese recipients of the Fields Medal, widely regarded as the highest honour in mathematics. Hong Wang and Yu Deng were recognised for solving long-standing mathematical problems that had challenged researchers for more than a century, marking a milestone not only for…

Tasmanian devils, dogs and shellfish are some of the only animals that are known to carry naturally occurring cancers that can pass between individuals. But scientists in Vermont have discovered a new animal species that can do the same, catfish. When they researched the mysterious black skin lesions afflicting catfish in Lake Memphremagog and other…

Benjamin Franklin (Image: Wikipedia) Life gets measured in years, but it is really defined by what actually happens inside them. A line widely credited to Benjamin Franklin puts that gap sharply. “Many people die at twenty-five and aren’t buried until they are seventy-five,” it goes. It is obviously not describing literal death. It is describing…

Before major surgeries and operations, doctors often detect diseases in humans using minimally invasive methods like a blood or urine test, before symptoms become severe. Now, researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) are applying a similar concept to coral reefs. They have shown that the water surrounding reefs contains chemical and microbial signals…

Millions of tiny oysters are being returned to the Chesapeake Bay in an ambitious conservation effort that scientists hope will transform one of the United States’ most important estuaries. The Chesapeake Bay Foundation (CBF), in partnership with the Severn River Association, recently planted three million juvenile oysters in a protected sanctuary reef in Maryland’s Severn…

A team of scientists has uncovered a naturally occurring microbial process that could change how uranium-contaminated water is cleaned up. Studying bacteria living in the flooded Königstein uranium mine in Germany, the researchers discovered that certain microorganisms can transform highly soluble uranium into a rare, stable mineral that remains locked in place instead of spreading…

Two people can watch the exact same machine respond to a question and reach completely different conclusions about what just happened. One assumes anything convincing enough must be simulating a mind somewhere underneath. The other insists that convincing behaviour and actual thought are two entirely separate things, no matter how good the imitation gets. Alan…

Researchers clipped a few wing and tail feathers of wild Alaskan kittiwakes (AI enhanced image. Credit: Nature Counts) Researchers who clipped a few wing and tail feathers of wild black-legged kittiwakes in Alaska to make flying harder, have found that the effects lasted well beyond a single breeding season. The birds struggled to raise chicks…

Two hundred years ago, you wouldn’t have been able to find them outside of South America. But since then, Nutria, one of the world’s largest rodents, has taken over US. These rodents were initially brought to North America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, primarily for fur farming, since their soft underfur was…

How Fossilised wood shows the history of Europe Imagine you are holding a piece of fossilized wood. It might, at first sight, seem to be nothing more than a well-preserved relic of some ancient forest. But within its crystalline framework is a geological diary, quietly recording the rise and fall of continents, extreme underground temperatures…