Category Archives: News & Archives

The last mammoths died on a remote island

The last woolly mammoths lived on Wrangel Island in the Arctic Ocean; they died out 4,000 years ago within a very short time. An international research team from the Universities of Helsinki and Tübingen and the Russian Academy of Sciences has now reconstructed the scenario that could have led to the mammoths' extinction. The researchers…

Poor water conditions drive invasive snakeheads onto land

The largest fish to walk on land, the voracious northern snakehead, will flee water that is too acidic, salty or high in carbon dioxide—important information for future management of this invasive species Snakeheads eat native species of fish, frogs and crayfish, destroying the food web in some habitats. They can survive on land for up to…

Harvard researchers grew meat in a lab from cow and rabbit cells. It looks a lot like the real thing

A team of Harvard bioengineers took a major step in taking cultured meat from lab to table. Researchers successfully grew cow and rabbit meat from an edible gelatin base for the first time, creating a substance that successfully mimicked the texture of natural meat, according to a new study published in the npj Science of…

These Butterflies Evolved to Eat Poison. How Could That Have Happened?

The caterpillar of the monarch butterfly eats only milkweed, a poisonous plant that should kill it. The caterpillars thrive on the plant, even storing its toxins in their bodies as a defense against hungry birds. For decades, scientists have marveled at this adaptation. On Thursday, a team of researchers announced they had pinpointed the key…

US and Canada have lost more than 1 in 4 birds in the past 50 years

A study published today in the journal Science reveals that since 1970, bird populations in the United States and Canada have declined by 29 percent, or almost 3 billion birds, signaling a widespread ecological crisis. The results show tremendous losses across diverse groups of birds and habitats -- from iconic songsters such as meadowlarks to long-distance migrants…

Vitamin C therapy linked to better survival rates after sepsis

New research led by Virginia Commonwealth University and published in the October issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association suggests that patients with sepsis and septic lung injury could have a better chance of survival and recover more quickly when treated with vitamin C infusions. Sepsis, a bodywide inflammation in response to infection, is a…

Venus may have been habitable for 3 billion years, before mysterious climate shift

The hellish planet Venus may have had a perfectly habitable environment for 2 to 3 billion years after the planet formed, suggesting life would have had ample time to emerge there, according to a new study. In 1978, NASA's Pioneer Venus spacecraft found evidence that the planet may have once had shallow oceans on its surface. Since…

Water detected in atmosphere of potentially habitable super-Earth

For the first time, astronomers have peered into the atmosphere of an exoplanet -- a planet outside our solar system -- and discovered both water vapor and temperatures that could potentially support life, according to a new study. The exoplanet, known as K2-18b, is eight times the mass of Earth and known as a super-Earth,…

Biological age of humans reversed by years in groundbreaking study, scientists suggest

Scientists might be able to reverse process of ageing, a new study suggests. Volunteers who were given a cocktail of drugs for a year actually “aged backwards”, losing an average of 2.5 years from their biological ages, according to the new study. The research showed that the marks on their genomes that represent their “epigenetic clock”, as well as their…

Here’s what happened on the day an asteroid hit Earth and killed the dinosaurs

A new study has uncovered the after-effects of an asteroid impact which wiped out 75% of life on the planet. Scientists analysed rocks which filled the gigantic impact crater left by the doomsday space rock, which caused an explosion equivalent to 10 billion of the nuclear bombs which destroyed Hiroshima in World War II. A…