Thousands of years ago, glaciers covered much of the planet. Oceans receded as water froze in massive sheets of ice blanketing the North American continent. As the ice age ended, glaciers melted. Massive river deltas flowed out across the continental shelf. The oceans rose, and fresh water was trapped in sediments below the waves. Discovered while drilling for oil offshore in the 1970s, scientists thought these “isolated” pockets of fresh water were a curiosity. They may instead prove to be a parched world’s newest source of fresh water.

A new type of computer memory which could solve the digital technology energy crisis has been invented and patented by Lancaster scientists. 

Researchers may have found the dense remains of a massive asteroid buried under the surface of the moon.

Is anybody home? Astronomers have pinpointed two planets orbiting a nearby star that meet pretty much every requirement for supporting life. They're almost exactly the same mass as the Earth, they are billions of years old (which means life could have had time to evolve), and they're orbiting their star at a distance that would support things like water flow and habitable temperatures.

And a hundred more small worlds may be awaiting discovery, astronomers predict, thanks to a new method for combing through NASA data.

If you hate wasabi-flavoured snacks, you are not alone. All things in the animal kingdom, down to worms and flies, naturally avoid allyl isothiocyanate (AITC), the compound responsible for wasabi’s pungent taste. But now researchers have discovered the first species immune to the burning pain caused by exposure to AITC, raising the prospect of new pain relief in humans and boosting our knowledge of evolution.

When did the first complex multicellular life arise? Most people, being a bit self-centered, would point to the Ediacaran and Cambrian, when the first animal life appeared and then diversified. Yet studies of DNA suggest that fungi may have originated far earlier than animals.

A strange seismic event off the coast of Africa has led scientists to a mighty finding: the discovery of the largest underwater volcanic eruption ever recorded. The eruption also may explain a weird seismic event recorded in November 2018 just off the island of Mayotte, located between Madagascar and Mozambique in the Indian Ocean. Researchers described that event as a seismic hum that circled the world, but no one could figure out what sparked it.

Russian scientists have found the furry head of an Ice Age wolf perfectly preserved in the Siberian permafrost. The head of a wolf, which died 40,000 years ago, was discovered in the Russian Arctic region of Yakutia. Valery Plotnikov, a top researcher at the local branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, said the animal belonged to an ancient subspecies of wolf that lived at the same time as the mammoths and became extinct alongside them. Scientists said it was an adult, about 25% bigger than today’s wolves, but did not say whether it was male or female.

You almost certainly have animals living on your face. You can't see them, but they're there. They are microscopic mites, eight-legged creatures rather like spiders. Almost every human being has them. They spend their entire lives on our faces, where they eat, mate and finally die. Before you start buying extra-strong facewash, you should know that these microscopic lodgers probably aren't a serious problem. They may well be almost entirely harmless. What's more, because they are so common they could help reveal our history in unparalleled detail.

On a blizzarding March day on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, Alvin "Willy" Crawford's heart gave out. Among the many things his brother Darrell "Dusty" Crawford wanted to tell him before he died, one thing, in particular, is needling him. At Willy's urging, Crawford had his DNA tested. "He's the one who encouraged me to do this, and he wanted to compare our results," Crawford said. "I just wish I could have shown it to him. It would have blown him away."

When José Capriles arrived in 2008 at the Cueva del Chileno rock shelter, nestled on the western slopes of Bolivia’s Andes, he didn’t know what he would find within. Sweeping aside layers of fresh and ancient llama dung, he found the remains of an ancient burial site: stone markers suggesting a body had once been interred there and a small leather bag cinched with a string. Inside was a collection of ancient drug paraphernalia—bone spatulas to crush the seeds of plants with psychoactive...

Scientists have discovered a new material that could hold the key to unlocking the potential of hydrogen powered vehicles. As the world looks towards a gradual move away from fossil fuel powered cars and trucks, greener alternative technologies are being explored, such as electric battery powered vehicles.

Tiny fossils found in mudrock in the barren wilderness of the Canadian Arctic are the remains of the oldest known fungus on Earth, scientists say. The minuscule organisms were discovered in shallow water shale, a kind of fine-grained sedimentary rock, in a region south of Victoria island on the edge of the Arctic Ocean. Tests on the shale, which accumulated over millions of years in a river or lake, revealed that it formed between 900m and 1bn years ago in what is now the Northwest Territories.

Mourners gathered at a cemetery in what’s now western China around 2,500 years ago to inhale fumes of burning cannabis plants that wafted from small wooden containers. High levels of the psychoactive compound THC in those ignited plants, also known as marijuana, would have induced altered states of consciousness.

Images from the surface of Mars reveal the presence of mushrooms, a group of scientists claim in a controversial new study. It states some images captured by NASA's Curiosity show fungi is growing on the surface of the supposedly barren planet. The claims have yet to be confirmed or refuted by NASA.

The beginning of the end started with violent shaking that raised giant waves in the waters of an inland sea in what is now North Dakota. Then, tiny glass beads began to fall like birdshot from the heavens. The rain of glass was so heavy it may have set fire to much of the vegetation on land. In the water, fish struggled to breathe as the beads clogged their gills.

The European Southern Observatory has just revealed there will be a huge announcement next week. Yes, we know how that sounds - but as far as we can tell, it appears the world is about to finally see the first ever photo of a black hole's event horizon. Of course, we won't know for sure until the press event itself, which we will cover live on our site. But here's a massive clue: according to the advance statement, the researchers will be discussing the "first result from the Event Horizon Telescope."

Scientists at the University of Central Florida say they’ve figured out how to make pulses of light travel 30 times as fast as usual — or even backward. “We’re able to control the speed of the pulse by going into the pulse itself and reorganizing its energy such that its space and time degrees of freedom are mixed in with each other,” researcher Ayman Abouraddy said in a statement. “We’re very happy with these results, and we’re very hopeful it’s just the starting point of future research.”

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LIGO is back at it. Having just turned back on after months of upgrades on 1 April, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory has already spotted another pair of black holes colliding. Gravitational waves are ripples in space-time that occur whenever massive objects move, like the wake behind a boat travelling across a lake. LIGO announced the first-ever observations of gravitational waves in 2016 and has now spotted a total of 12 gravitational signatures of pairs of enormous objects smashing together.

An international team of researchers have uncovered the remains of a new species of human in the Philippines, proving the region played a key role in hominin evolutionary history. The new species, Homo luzonensis is named after Luzon Island, where the more than 50,000 year old fossils were found during excavations at Callao Cave. Co-author and a lead member of the team, Professor Philip Piper from The Australian National University (ANU) says the findings represent a major breakthrough in our understanding of human evolution across Southeast Asia.

Orange you glad you've just seen the first-ever image of a black hole? Today (April 10), a global collaboration of more than 200 astronomers presented the first image of a directly-observed black hole. The picture of a glowing orange-yellow ring around a dark core, was compiled from observations by eight ground-based radio telescopes known collectively as the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT).

In 1864, our understanding of what it means to be human changed when Neanderthals were identified as a distinct species of hominin. At the time, it was immensely scandalous to presume Homo sapiens weren’t uniquely human; now it’s obvious that we are one of many. On Thursday, scientists report in Cell that it may be time to add another member to our list of ancient kin.

Excitement about exoplanets skyrocketed when rocky Earth-like planets were discovered orbiting in the habitable zone of some of our closest stars – until hopes for life were dashed by the high levels of radiation bombarding those worlds. Proxima-b, only 4.24 light years away, receives 250 times more X-ray radiation than Earth and could experience deadly levels of ultraviolet radiation on its surface. How could life survive such a bombardment? Cornell astronomers say that life already has survived this kind of fierce radiation, and they have proof: you.

Simple tandem design uses perovskite layer to feed photons to silicon cell

Old EGYPTIANS WERE getting inked up sooner than we suspected. Another examination of two mummies demonstrates the pair were wearing tattoos. The mummies have a place with a gathering of six found in 1900. They were named the Gebelein mummies after the district in which they were found. Presently in the ownership of the British Museum, they were reanalyzed as a component of a continuous undertaking to reevaluate important ancient rarities.

The raw materials from a comet have been found sealed inside a pristine, primitive meteorite. The meteorite was found in the LaPaz icefield of Antarctica and has weathered very little since the time it crashed to Earth. According to a new study published today (April 15) in the journal Nature Astronomy, researchers found that this sample of space rock contains something strange: bits of the building blocks of a comet that became trapped in the meteorite's parent asteroid just 3 million years after the solar system formed.

A superflare ten times more powerful than anything seen on our Sun has erupted on an ultra-cool star almost the same size as Jupiter–potentially changing our understanding of stellar activity. The star —an L Dwarf type named ULAS J224940.13–011236.9 — is the coolest and smallest yet observed to give off a rare white-light superflare. In fact, the body may be so small it can’t be considered to be a star at all!

They knew it had to exist, but they just couldn't find evidence of it. Now, after decades of searching, astrophysicists have found verification of the first molecule that formed minutes after the Big Bang. The helium hydride ion (HeH+) the scientists detected wasn't the original one created just after the Big Bang, but it has the same molecular structure — helium combined with hydrogen — they theorized formed at the time.

Everything has a beginning. That’s true for stories, for people, for the universe and even for chemistry. The Big Bang itself produced just a handful of elements (variations of hydrogen, helium and lithium nuclei), so researchers have a pretty good sense of what the first atoms and molecules might have been. But the very first molecular bond to form, linking together atoms of different elements in a single molecule, has long been missing in action.

In 2015, our Serbian-Canadian archaeological research team was working at a cave site named Pešturina, in Eastern Serbia, where we had found thousands of stone tools and animal bones. One day, an excited Serbian undergrad brought us a fossil they had uncovered: a small molar tooth, which we immediately recognized as human.

Share Scientists have spotted a mind-blowing phenomenon that has never been seen so far. There’s a black hole that’s about 8,000 light years away from Earth which has caught the eye of astronomers due to its really strange nature. V404 Cygni black hole  The Daily Mail reports that the black hole is called V404 Cygni …

The first humans to settle in Scandinavia over 10,000 years ago left their DNA behind in ancient chewing gums, which are masticated lumps of birch bark pitch. There are only a few human bones of this age in Scandinavia, and most have not preserved enough DNA for genetic studies. In fact, the DNA from these newly examined chewing gums is the oldest human DNA sequenced from this area so far. The DNA derived from three individuals, two females and one male, creates an exciting link between material culture and human genetics. This new research was conducted at Stockholm University and published in Communications Biology.

An international team of scientists identified the snake and its range, which includes Turkey, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, Iraq, Iran, and Russia including a small region extending into the corner of Europe. Based on the genetic and morphological data, the researchers were able to say that the Blotched Rat Snake (Elaphe sauromates) is actually comprised of two different species and includes a cryptic species that has been named after the old kingdom of Urartu.