The latest assessment of Atlantic cod stocks, whose collapse crushed the economy of Newfoundland and Labrador, has scientists worried the species will never recover without drastic change within the federal Fisheries Department. The federal governmentreport shows the stock continues tocling for life in what officials classify as the critical zone,...
A DNA research traces the homeland of modern humans to the Makgadikgadi-Okavango wetland. Professor Vanessa Hayes, a geneticist at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Australia, said: "It has been clear for some time that anatomically modern humans appeared in Africa roughly 200,000 years ago.” "What has been long debated...
NASA wants to enlist private companies to build hardware that can gather lunar surface samples and prepare them for return to Earth at a later date. While NASA is working aggressively to meet our near-term goal of landing the first woman and next man on the Moon by 2024, our...
Researchers at the University of Tsukuba use computer calculations to propose a new way to rearrange the carbon atoms in a diamond to make it even harder, which may be useful in industrial applications that rely on synthetic cutting diamonds. Researchers at the University of Tsukuba used computer calculations to...
Paleontologists have identified a new dinosaur with a crocodile-like snout that hunted in inland seas more than 60 million years ago. Gavialimimus almaghribensis, a species of mosasaur, was catalogued by an international team led by Catie Strong, a researcher at the University of Alberta in Canada. The marine predator’s remains were...
A government research organisation in China has outlined plans to design and build "ultra-large" spacecraft, potentially miles-wide and assembled piecemeal in space. The National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) has recently published a five-year plan articulating the "urgent need" to invest in studies on space exploration equipment. This equipment could...
Few sites in the world preserve a continuous archaeological record spanning millions of years. Wonderwerk Cave, located in South Africa's Kalahari Desert, is one of those rare sites. Meaning "miracle" in Afrikaans, Wonderwerk Cave has been identified as potentially the earliest cave occupation in the world and the site...
SPACE experts have completed the most detailed survey of the southern sky ever attempted with radio waves. Approximately one million undiscovered galaxies beyond the Milky Way have been added to an unprecedentedly detailed map of a section of space. Previous surveys of the cosmos usually take years to complete, but...
The carnivorous plant Venus flytrap (Dionaea muscipula) captures and digests small animals and absorbs nutrients with its characteristic insectivorous leaves. Six sensory hairs on the inner surface of each leaf sense a visiting prey and cause the trap to close. A single contact event with a sensory hair is...
Mussels could serve as a global bioindicator for microplastic pollution, as the creatures don’t move and reside on the seabed where plastic ends up. And a new study from the Norwegian Institute for Water Research (NIVA) uncovered plastic in 76.6 percent of individual blue mussels they tested. Reuters pointed to...