A mind-controlling parasite found in cat feces may give people the courage they need to become entrepreneurs, researchers reported Tuesday. They found that people who have been infected with the Toxoplasma gondii parasite are more likely to major in business and to have started their own businesses than non-infected people. The parasite, which makes rodents unafraid of cats, may be reducing the fear of failure in people, Stefanie Johnson of the University of Colorado and colleagues said.

The Gaia satellite has spotted an enormous 'ghost' galaxy lurking on the outskirts of the Milky Way. An international team of astronomers, including from the University of Cambridge, discovered the massive object when trawling through data from the European Space Agency's Gaia satellite. The object, named Antlia 2 (or Ant 2), has avoided detection until now thanks to its extremely low density as well as a perfectly-chosen hiding place, behind the shroud of the Milky Way's disc. The researchers have published their results online today.

Two divers came across a spectacular site while swimming off the coast of New Zealand. They discovered a giant creature, likely a pyrosome, gently floating in the waters. While these floating colonies have been known to get caught in fishing nets, a specimen this large is an uncommon site.

Quantum physicists from the University of Alberta, Canada, announced this week that they have developed a new technique for storing quantum information into pulses of light. The physicists created "a new way to store pulses of light—down to the single-photon level—in clouds of ultracold rubidium atoms, and to later retrieve them on demand by shining a ‘control' pulse of light,” Lindsay LeBlanc, assistant professor of physics and Canada Research Chair in Ultracold Gases for Quantum Simulation, said.

Chinese archaeologists have uncovered a 2,000-year-old bronze pot that contains an alcoholic liquid believed to be wine. The discovery occurred on November 6 in China's Henan province, west of Shanghai. Shi Jiazhen, who is head of the Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology in the province's city of Luoyang, tells China's Xinhua news agency that "there are 3.5 liters of the liquid in the color of transparent yellow. It smells like wine."

Known as the ‘Icon of Evolution’ and ‘the missing link’ between dinosaurs and birds, Archaeopteryx has become one of the most famous fossil discoveries in Palaeontology. Now, as part of an international team of scientists, researchers at The University of Manchester have identified a new species of Archaeopteryx that is closer to modern birds...

One of the oldest stars in the universe is quietly hiding out in the Milky Way some 2,000 light-years from Earth. According to a new study published in The Astrophysical Journal, the tiny, 13.5-billion-year-old red dwarf contains barely any heavy elements at all, suggesting it formed out of a nearly pristine cloud of material leftover from shortly after the Big Bang. Furthermore, because the small star is just one-seventh the mass of the Sun and is made of primordial matter, it’s making astronomers reconsider the demographics of the very first stars.

Chia Min Tan, a Ph.D. Student based at the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics in Manchester's School of Physics and Astronomy, was part of an international team including fellow astronomers at Manchester, ASTRON and the University of Amsterdam. The team carried out the observations using the Low-Frequency Array (LOFAR), whose core is located in the Netherlands. Their findings were published in the Astrophysical Journal.

Our ability to see colors develops in the womb. Now scientists have replicated that process, which could help accelerate efforts to cure colorblindness and lead to new treatments for diseases.

An international team of researchers has successfully produced a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) in space for the first time. In their paper published in the journal Nature, the group describes creating a small experimental device that was carried on a rocket into space and the experiments that were conducted during its freefall.

Think of it as a biological antenna. Researchers have discovered a species of butterfly that enlarges its wing veins to pick up sounds it wouldn’t otherwise hear—a strategy that may be critical to its survival. Many butterflies possess tiny ears, often in the form of membrane-covered cavities at the base of their forewings. But scientists didn’t know the insects could boost their hearing with other parts of their bodies.

Excavators working in the Roman-era city of Pompeii, Italy, have uncovered an ancient shrine surrounded by idyllic paintings of plants, snakes and a lifelike peacock. Massimo Osanna, the archaeologist in charge of the work, said that the site was “exceptional,” citing not only “the incredible decoration of the wall painting” but also the fact that it was “very well preserved.”

A new lightweight substance is as strong as wood yet lacks its standard vulnerabilities to fire and water. To create the synthetic wood, scientists took a solution of polymer resin and added a pinch of chitosan, a sugar polymer derived from the shells of shrimp and crabs. They freeze-dried the solution, yielding a structure filled with tiny pores and channels supported by the chitosan. Then they heated the resin to temperatures as high as 200 degrees Celsius to cure it, forging strong chemical bonds.

Scientists have unearthed the fossilised remains of a piranha-like species that they say is the earliest known example of a flesh-eating fish. This bony creature, found in South Germany, lived about 150 million years ago and had the distinctive sharp teeth of modern-day piranhas. These Jurassic marauders used their razor teeth to tear chunks of flesh and fins off other fish.

Look at that iceberg. It's beautiful. Perfectly rectangular. An object of near geometric perfection jutting into a polar sea of the usual squiggly, chaotic randomness of the natural world. It calls to mind the monolith from "2001: A Space Odyssey." But, unlike the monolith from that very weird movie, this iceberg was not deposited on this world by space aliens. Instead, as Kelly Brunt, an ice scientist with NASA and at the University of Maryland, explained, it was likely formed by a process that's fairly common along the edges of icebergs.

Archaeologists from Zadar have come across a variety of finds dating back to the Middle Bronze Age in the sea between the Isle of Ricul in the Pasman Channel and the coastal resort of Turanj, including numerous 3,500-years-old olive pits, which speak to the oldest olive groves along Croatia’s Adriatic. In northern Dalmatia, little was known about the Middle Bronze Age until archaeologists began underwater explorations several years ago.

The seafloor is one of the last unexplored regions of our watery planet. On a recent expedition dubbed Deep Search 2018, a group of ocean researchers discovered 85 miles of deep-sea coral reef off the coast of the southeastern US. "Good news is too rare these days, and this is a victory that we can all share. We have found a pristine coral reef in our own backyard," Erik Cordes, the chief scientist on the expedition and a deep-sea ecologist at Temple University, wrote in a mission summary.

For the first time, astronomers have witnessed a fast-moving jet of material shooting outward from a neutron star with an extremely powerful magnetic field — one that is some 10 trillion times stronger than the Sun's. The surprising discovery not only caught researchers off guard, but is also forcing them to fundamentally rethink their current theories regarding how jets form throughout the cosmos.

According to the study, the hands of the Neanderthals, in contrast to the predicted, were too curvy to hold objects between the thumb and the other fingers. The Neanderthals could hold objects between the thumb and the other fingers, just as we would hold our pencil, because their hands were much more curved than they thought. The finding helps explain the activities that require a large number of skills, such as the Neandertals, tool making, painting cave walls, drawing patterns on the bird’s bones, and twine.

Miner Henry Dole was in for a shock when he went into the Beta Hunt mine in southwestern Australia after the workers set off some explosives. "Everything was covered in dust, and as I watered the dirt down there was just gold everywhere, as far as you could see," he told Australia's ABC News. "There was chunks of gold in the face, on the ground, truly unique I reckon. ... I nearly fell over looking at it ... we were picking it up for hours."

Astronomers have announced the possible discovery of the first known moon outside our Solar System. This "exomoon" is not like any in our cosmic neighbourhood: it's the size of Neptune and orbits a planet the size of Jupiter - but with 10 times the mass. The object was spotted in data from Nasa's Kepler spacecraft, and later observed using the Hubble telescope. Astronomers David Kipping and Alex Teachey have published their results in Science Advances journal.

A 22-pound rock that has been propping open a door in Michigan for decades turns out to be a meteorite valued at $100,000, according to Central Michigan University. Mona Sirbescu, a CMU geology professor, gets asked all the time by people to examine the rocks they bring her -- but none ever turn out to be an official space rock. "For 18 years, the answer has been categorically 'no' -- meteor wrongs, not meteorites," Sibescu said in a statement from CMU on Thursday.

Archaeologists have discovered the oldest hominid remains ever found in Poland. “The bones discovered by our team at Jaskinia Ciemna [a cave in the southern Małopolska region] are the oldest hominid remains from the area of Poland,” Professor Paweł Valde-Nowak of the Jagiellonian University of Kraków told PAP.

Materials scientists have sussed out the physical phenomenon underlying the promising electrical properties of a class of materials called superionic crystals. A better understanding of such materials could lead to safer and more efficient rechargeable batteries than the current standard-bearer of lithium ion. Becoming a popular topic of study only within the past five years, superionic crystals are a cross between a liquid and a solid.

The grave of a 'vampire child' buried more than 2,000 years ago has been excavated by stunned archaeologists who found the body had been weighed down, over fears it would rise from the dead. Evidence of a ritualistic burial was found deep underground when a team in Rome, Italy, dug up the remains of a child aged 10, which had a stone placed in its mouth.

In a discovery that raises questions about long-held ideas about how planets form, astronomers have detected several enormous planets in orbit around a young star — in this case CI Tau, a 2-million-year-old star about 500 light-years away in the constellation Taurus. This is the first time multiple gas giant planets have been observed orbiting a "toddler" star. Our Milky Way galaxy is filled with stars that have been around for billions of years; our sun is about 4.5 billion years old.

Scientists have heard strange "singing" noises coming out of the ice shelf. The low-frequency noises – which sound a little like moaning when sped up – could help researchers track the ice shelves as they collapse. The singing tones come out of the surface of the massive Ross Ice Shelf when the winds blowing across the snow dunes cause it to vibrate. That means they produce the "tones" almost constantly, and now scientists have found they can listen to them.

A distant galaxy appears filled with dark matter. The outermost stars in the Cosmic Seagull, a galaxy 11.3 billion light-years away, race too fast to be propelled by the gravity of the galaxy’s gas and stars alone. Instead, they move as if urged on by an invisible force, indicating the hidden presence of dark matter, astrophysicist Verónica Motta of the University of Valparaíso in Chile and her colleagues report August 8 at arXiv.org.

Rickets is mostly seen as a 19th-century disease, but research has revealed that the Romans also had a big problem with getting enough vitamin D. Researchers from Historic England and McMaster University in Canada examined 2,787 skeletons from 18 cemeteries across the Roman empire and discovered that rickets was a widespread phenomenon 2,000 years ago.

In the darkest and coldest parts of its polar regions, a team of scientists has directly observed definitive evidence of water ice on the Moon's surface. These ice deposits are patchily distributed and could possibly be ancient. At the southern pole, most of the ice is concentrated at lunar craters, while the northern pole's ice is more widely, but sparsely spread.

Once upon a time, two early humans of different ancestry met at a cave in Russia. Some 50,000 years later, scientists have confirmed that they had a daughter together. DNA extracted from bone fragments found in the cave show the girl was the offspring of a Neanderthal mother and a Denisovan father.

Scientists have been looking for years for the proteins that convert the mechanical movement of inner ears’ hair cells into an electrical signal that the brain interprets as sound. In a study published today (August 22) in Neuron, researchers have confirmed that transmembrane channel-like protein 1 (TMC1) contributes to the pore of the so-called mechanotransduction channel in the cells’ membrane.

NASA’s Cassini mission and Hubble Space Telescope provided information that suggest a form of chemical energy, that life can feed on, appears to exist on Saturn's moon Enceladus.

It has people, and its people call it Big. And doesn’t everyone who is fawned over and photographed like a celebrity have people? Not Mr. Big, as in “Sex and the City,” or Big Daddy or Big Mama, as in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” And not Biggie, like Biggie Smalls, the Notorious B.I.G. Just Big.

The weird hexagon swirling around Saturn's north pole is much taller than scientists had thought, a new study suggests. Researchers have generally regarded the 20,000-mile-wide (32,000 kilometers) hexagon — a jet stream composed of air moving at about 200 mph (320 km/h) — as a lower-atmosphere phenomenon, restricted to the clouds of Saturn's troposphere.