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As scientists continue finding evidence for life in the ocean more than 3 billion years ago, those ancient fossils pose a paradox. Organisms, including the single-celled bacteria living in the ocean at that early date, need a steady supply of phosphorus, but "it's very hard to account for this phosphorus unless it is eroding from the continents," says Aaron Satkoski, a scientist in the geoscience department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "So that makes it really hard to explain the fossils we see at this early era." Satkoski, who is first author of a new report on ocean chemistry from...

10 Population Y The Americas were the final frontier for human expansion. Most believe they were populated 15,000 years ago in one wave via the Bering land bridge. However, recent findings suggest a different story. Geneticists recently discovered DNA that closely resembles that of modern-day Australian Aboriginals and indigenous Papua New Guineans in the most unlikely of places: Amazonia. Experts have named this new founding group “Population Y.” These colonizers did not arrive via boat. They came in a separate wave across the Bering Strait. Their unique genetic signatures were similar but not identical to modern Austronesians—suggesting Population Y intermingled...

Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have imaged what may be water vapor plumes erupting off the surface of Jupiter's moon Europa. This finding bolsters other Hubble observations suggesting the icy moon erupts with high altitude water vapor plumes. The observation increases the possibility that missions to Europa may be able to sample Europa’s ocean without having to drill through miles of ice. “Europa’s ocean is considered to be one of the most promising places that could potentially harbor life in the solar system,” said Geoff Yoder, acting associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. “These plumes, if...

ONE GIANT LEAP FOR MANKIND Elon Musk to reveal next step in mission to build city on Mars

Abort, Euthanize, or Get Out of Medicine Bioethics discourse aims to change the practice of medicine and the thrust of public policy — usually not for the better. As I have been noting, the field is increasingly targeting the right of doctors to refuse to perform an abortion, euthanize patients, and perform other procedures or issue prescriptions that violate their religious beliefs.A bit ago, I discussed a “consensus statement” on this issue in Practical Ethics, published by Oxford. Now, two internationally influential bioethicists — Jualian Savulescu and Udo Schuklenk — join forces to advocate that society legally coerce doctors to kill. First, they deconstruct medical...

How the FDA Manipulates the Media The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has been arm-twisting journalists into relinquishing their reportorial independence, our investigation reveals. Other institutions are following suit By Charles Seife | Scientific American October 2016 Issue The deal was this: NPR, along with a select group of media outlets, would get a briefing about an upcoming announcement by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration a day before anyone else. But in exchange for the scoop, NPR would have to abandon its reportorial independence. The FDA would dictate whom NPR's reporter could and couldn't interview. “My editors are uncomfortable...

How Can We Save The Sun? Published: 23 Sep , 2016 by Fraser Cain Video Remember the movie Sunshine, where astronomers learn that the Sun is dying? So a plucky team of astronauts take a nuclear bomb to the Sun, and try to jump-start it with a massive explosion. Yeah, there’s so much wrong in that movie that I don’t know where to start. So I just won’t.Seriously, a nuclear bomb to cure a dying Sun?Here’s the thing, the Sun is actually dying. It’s just that it’s going to take about another 5 billion years to run of fuel in...

video of various sink holes of the world

It has long puzzled scientists why, after 3 billion years of nothing more complex than algae, complex animals suddenly started to appear on Earth. Now, a team of researchers has put forward some of the strongest evidence yet to support the hypothesis that high levels of oxygen in the oceans were crucial for the emergence of skeletal animals 550 million years ago. The new study is the first to distinguish between bodies of water with low and high levels of oxygen. It shows that poorly oxygenated waters did not support the complex life that evolved immediately prior to the Cambrian...

Nasa is expected to make an announcement about 'surprising activity' on Jupiter's moon, Europa, on Monday. Many speculated that Nasa could finally be announcing evidence of life beyond Earth. The space agency, however, has poured cold water over these claims, tweeting that the much anticipated announcement will not be related to aliens.

In August 1968, Soviet forces invaded their captive ally Czechoslovakia. The invasion began with an intense electronic warfare campaign against the Czech air defense network. A declassified secret US Defense Intelligence Agency report, titled “Soviet Electronic Countermeasures During Invasion of Czechoslovakia” and produced in October 1968, provided substantial detail on Soviet electronic warfare actions. It stated, “Electronic countermeasure activity was concentrated southeast and east of Prague to screen and protect Soviet air movements.” It added, “Jamming apparently was not targeted in the radio frequency range of NATO radars; the locations of chaff seeding suggests that it was not intended to...

Truth @ Carbon Dioxide (CO2): Patrick Moore After watching the 20 minute video revisit this clip which (preset to start)reveals:"How about the United Nations Inter-governmental panel on Climate Change? Unfortunately, they are totally conflicted by their own mandate. See, their brief is to focus on 'a change of climate which is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of the global atmosphere'. They are not required to consider the many natural factors that affect the climate. So, if the IPCC were to find that humans were not the main cause of climate change - or...

An extremely fragile, ancient Hebrew scroll has been digitally unwrapped for the first time, revealing the earliest copy ever found of an Old Testament Bible scripture. Known as the En-Gedi scroll ...

The first extensive study of Indigenous Australians' DNA dates their origin to more than 50,000 years ago, backing the claim that they are the most ancient continuous civilisation on Earth. Scientists used the genetic traces of the mysterious early humans that are left in the DNA of modern populations in Papua New Guinea and Australia to recontruct their journey from Africa around 72,000 years ago.Experts disagree on whether present-day non-African people are descended from explorers who left Africa in a single exodus or a series of distinct waves of travelling migrants.The new study supports the single migration hypothesis. It indicates that Australian...

New TV series about combat in Afghanistan

Despite the tough challenges currently facing his SpaceX company, Elon Musk has made clear that he’s as determined as ever to get humans on Mars in the next 10 years. “I’m certain that success is one of the possible outcomes for establishing a self-sustaining Mars colony, a growing Mars colony,” the SpaceX chief said in a recent interview with Y Combinator, adding that up until just a few years ago he wouldn’t have been able to make the same claim. Musk said that getting “a meaningful number of people” to Mars “can be accomplished in about 10 years, maybe sooner,...

Full title: Human skeleton discovered at Antikythera shipwreck after more than 2,000 years at the bottom of the sea Buried beneath sand and the fragments of ancient pottery, researchers have discovered the 2,000-year-old remains of a sailor who died upon the ill-fated 'Antikythera ship.' Archaeologists have investigated the famous shipwreck off a tiny Greek island for which it's named for over a century, revealing a trove of remarkable artefacts – including the mysterious 'Antikythera Mechanism,' thought to be a 'guide to the galaxy.'

Exclusive video of ISIS testing a new terror weapon. The Arabian Catapult!

The mission itself has a projected launch date of December 2021 for the robotic component and some time in the mid-2020s for the crewed mission. NASA has given the program the go-ahead to proceed to Phase B, culminating in a preliminary design review and baseline of the robotic spacecraft in late 2017. The crewed mission is still in the very early discussion phase. Administrator Bolden expanded on some of Dr. Holdren’s points, noting that it is NASA’s intent to develop technology and techniques that can later be used by private industry. All three panelists were advocates of ARM being a...

“Our work demonstrates that the gut bacterial microbiome in chronic fatigue syndrome patients isn’t normal, perhaps leading to gastrointestinal and inflammatory symptoms in victims of the disease,” said Maureen Hanson, a professor of molecular biology and genetics at Cornell. “Furthermore, our detection of a biological abnormality provides further evidence against the ridiculous concept that the disease is psychological in origin.” In a study published this month in the journal Microbiome, Cornell University researchers looked at stool and blood samples of 48 people diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome (or more formally, myalgic encephalomyelitis) and at 39 healthy volunteers. They found two...

A scientist who named a new species of parasite after President Obama defended his decision, and said that it was meant to honor Obama, not insult him. "Before you accuse me of being some kind of hater, racist or worse — as plenty have — let me be clear: I absolutely intended it as an honor," retired biology professor Thomas Platt wrote in the Washington Post late Thursday. . . Platt named his new species Baracktrema obamai, which is a flatworm that lives in the blood systems of the hosts they inhabit.

There's increasing evidence to show that trees are able to communicate with each other. More than that, trees can learn. The main reason humans cannot perceive how clever and complex they are is because we exist in such short time scales by comparison. There's a tree in Sweden for instance, a spruce, that is more than 9,500 years old. That's 115 times longer than the average human lifespan.

Workers will lose their jobs as Europe shifts to a green economy, European Commission Vice-President Maroš Šef�ovi� has admitted, amid warnings the world faces political and economic turmoil not witnessed since the 1930s. Šef�ovi� made an impassioned plea for national governments to make sure that no one was thrown on the scrapheap of the green revolution. But, he added, “climate change is here and it poses an imminent danger.” “We should not create obstacles by not taking good care of people who may be intimidated by this transformation,” he said before calling for social programs such as retraining those made...

Paleontologists have teamed up with a paleoartist to create a model which challenges everything you thought you knew about the typical dinosaur. Dr. Jacob Vinther ofa Psittacosaurus — nicknamed a "parrot-lizard" — is about the size of a turkey, has bristles on its tail and a birdlike beak. In other words, a bit weird, but also pretty cute. It's also quite likely that the animal had feathers and a horn on each cheek, the experts say. Quite aptly, Psittacosaurus belongs to the group ceratopsians, which basically means "horned faces" in Greek. It's the same group that contains Triceratops. The scientists...

Never before in human history have babies and children grown up so cleanly, and our diets have lost many of the elements most crucial to the health of our guts. We have become very bad hosts to our microbes. [snip] Babies and toddlers often aren’t allowed to play in the dirt or sand, and when they are, they are wiped clean immediately. Phrases like, “Yuck! Don’t play in the mud!” or “Don’t touch that bug, it’s dirty!” have become second nature. We need to unlearn these habits. By preventing babies and children from following their innate impulse to get dirty,...

The sugar industry began funding research that cast doubt on sugar’s role in heart disease — in part by pointing the finger at fat — as early as the 1960s, according to an analysis of newly uncovered documents. The analysis published Monday is based on correspondence between a sugar trade group and researchers at Harvard University, and is the latest example showing how food and beverage makers attempt to shape public understanding of nutrition. In 1964, the group now known as the Sugar Association internally discussed a campaign to address “negative attitudes toward sugar” after studies began emerging linking sugar...

I turn 45 in November and was just diagnosed with a Bicuspid Aortic Valve. I have no symptoms whatsoever. My doc heard a murmur last month and I had an echocardiogram yesterday. Nurse called me today with the news. I do have pretty high cholesterol, and my blood pressure is usually around 135/80. Any Freepers or their loved ones have this? Any comments are appreciated as I'm continuing my research on the subject.

Remember “weaselpecker,” that hard-to-believe photo of a weasel riding a bird, Rescuers-style? Those types of animal interactions go viral because they seem rare to us. Yet the phenomena of species riding other species isn’t actually that unusual. In 2004 and 2006, researchers documented two instances of a humpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae) giving a lift to a bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus) near Hawaii... Here are some other instances of animal-on-animal action...

The most precise map of the night sky ever assembled is taking shape. Astronomers working on the Gaia space telescope have released a first tranche of data recording the position and brightness of over a billion stars. And for some two million of these objects, their distance and sideways motion across the heavens has also been accurately plotted. Gaia's mapping effort is already unprecedented in scale, but it still has several years to run. Remarkably, scientists say the store of information even now is too big for them to sift, and they are appealing for the public's help in making...

Every morning Alyssa Fairbanks takes a palmful of pills. Twelve to be exact. Green, white, brown, yellow, purple — calcium, vitamin D, magnesium and potassium for muscle cramps. Diuretics to keep toxins flushing, fluids moving. They tend to pool in her abdomen, which became so distended in May she was airlifted to Salt Lake City to drain the liquid from her petite frame. She takes her medication upstairs in her bedroom, a loft directly above where two parents are trying to feed a tableful of kids. It’s not private, there is no door. But it is home for now, and...

The opioid epidemic in America has captured the attention and efforts of policymakers. The Obama administration seeks to allocate $1.1 billion to fight opioid abuse. States are requiring prescribers check databases as part of prescription drug monitoring programs to identify patients who may have dependency or abuse problems. Canada has taken a slightly different approach to help treat addicts: prescribing pharmaceutical-grade heroin.

New Study Shows Awe Bad for ‘Science’ (If by ‘Science’ You Mean Atheism) Douglas Axe Psychology professors from Claremont McKenna, Yale and Berkeley have just published a study that should be “disconcerting to those interested in promoting an accurate understanding of evolution.” Specifically, they’ve identified an insidious factor that has crept into science films and videos, undermining the ability of viewers to be good Darwinists.Awe is the culprit, they say. All those jaw-dropping nature documentaries have been messing with our minds.Most wildlife shows are packaged with the usual Darwinian narrative, spoken in an authoritative tone that isn’t supposed to be...

A research team led by the University of Bristol has found magma build-up beneath Japan's Aira caldera and Sakurajima volcano may indicate a growing threat to Kagoshima city and its 600,000 inhabitants. Sakurajima is one of Japan's most active volcanoes with small, localised eruptions nearly every day, but the history of the volcano is even more ferocious. In 1914, a large explosive eruption killed 58 people and caused widespread flooding in the adjacent city of Kagoshima as the ground subsided due to the withdrawal of magma from the subsurface. Continued measurements of the ground movement since that eruption show that...

Some meteorites are so big they need a name. Meet the Gancedo meteorite, a gigantic space rock extracted from the ground over the weekend using heavy machinery. It was found near the village of Gancedo in Argentina in an area known as Campo del Cielo ("Field of Heaven"). Campo del Cielo is rife with iron meteorites estimated to have fallen around 4,000 years ago. What makes Gancedo unusual is its massive size, with a weight estimated at around 68,000 pounds (31,000 kilograms). News organization Compacto Nea posted a video of the meteorite extraction on YouTube Monday. It was a complicated...

Bodily fluids such as tears, saliva, vomit, urine or stool may have the potential to transmit Zika, suggest the findings of an investigation into a highly irregular Zika case in Utah which produced the first death from the Zika virus in the United States.

Motherless babies could be on the horizon after scientists discovered a method of creating offspring without the need for a female egg. The landmark experiment by the University of Bath rewrites 200 years of biology teaching and could pave the way for a baby to be born from the DNA of two men.

"These sound symbolic patterns show up again and again across the world, independent of the geographical dispersal of humans and independent of language lineage," said Dr Morten Christiansen, professor of psychology and director of Cornell's Cognitive Neuroscience Lab in the US where the study was carried out. "There does seem to be something about the human condition that leads to these patterns. We don't know what it is, but we know it's there." ... "It doesn't mean all words have these sounds, but the relationship is much stronger than we'd expect by chance," added Dr Christiansen. Other words found to...

It is often said that, given an infinite amount of time, monkeys hitting random keys on a typewriter will eventually type the works of Shakespeare. While it may seem far fetched, an unusual experiment has achieved the fabled task. To illustrate how paralysed people can type using a device called a ‘brain-computer interface’, scientists used monkeys to show how it can be done. Two rhesus macaque monkeys (stock picture) typed a passage from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, as well as portions of the New York Times, at 12 words per minute.

Microsoft researchers have teamed up with physicists from the University of California, Santa Barbara, to show how time crystals might be possible. First proposed by Nobel-prize winning theoretical physicist Frank Wilczek, time crystals are hypothetical systems that spontaneously break time-translational symmetry (TTS) – a fundamental symmetry in physics. In plain language, they exhibit tiny movements without using energy. Crystals have a rigid arrangement of atoms that break translational symmetry. Their structure is not symmetrical in space, unlike a sphere, which looks the same from all directions. Time crystals break the symmetry of space and time. Wilczek considered a group of...

All earthquakes start very small. But the idea that’s presented in this study is that the added stress from a strong tidal force can help push a fault — already loaded up and strained to nearly its breaking point — over the edge, pushing a small earthquake to evolve into a monster. “When tides are very large, small earthquakes tend to grow a little larger,” Ide said. The magnitude 9.1 Indonesia earthquake in 2004 and magnitude 8.8 earthquake in Chile in 2010, which both produced damaging tsunami, occurred around the time of a full moon, close to the peak time...

Our top story is a historic natural disaster in a country that's not too prone to earthquakes. Magnitude 5.1 and 5.8 tremors jolted Korea's southeastern region. This is the strongest quake to rattle the nation's inland since the country started collecting data in 1978. Our Hwang Ho-jun is in Gyeongju the epicenter of the quake he 's live on the phone with us. Hojun what have we got so far? Daniel. We have so far felt two tremors here in Gyeongju. The initial 5.1 foreshock was detected at 7:44 p.m., to be followed by a very strong earthquake measuring 5.8...

NPR correspondent Jennifer Ludden profiled some of my work in procreative ethics with an article entitled, “Should we be having kids in the age of climate change?,” which summarized my published views that we ought to consider adopting a “small family ethic” and even pursuing fertility reduction efforts in response to the threat from climate change. ... Perhaps many of us in rich countries (the “us” who might be reading this) will be largely protected from these early harms; but that doesn’t make them less real to the vulnerable citizens of, say, Bangladesh, Kiribati or the Maldives. In fact, it...

(CNN)A Russian river located by the Arctic town of Norilsk turned bright red Tuesday, looking more like an enormous blood vessel than a body of water. Stunned residents shared photos online of the bizarre scene at Daldykan River. Authorities are trying to determine why the river changed colors and are evaluating possible environmental damages.

This week Apple launched a new iPhone without a headphone jack and stirred up an understandable furor of discontent. But you won’t hear any headphone companies complaining about the move, even though it takes away their familiar entry point into the Apple ecosystem. Most of them have already been preparing for this change for months ... I spoke with a few of the major headphone manufacturers ... to gauge their reaction to the news. The universal response has been a mix of sunny optimism ... and practicality. Most companies ... recognize that there's plenty of opportunity in having ... Apple...

President Obama has more than 130 days left before he leaves office, but already his name adorns a dozen schools, at least eight streets in the United States, one avenue in Tanzania and a mountain in Aruba. If most of those seem tediously conventional, consider that his name is also attached to a parasitic hairworm that afflicts crickets, an Amazonian puffbird and a footlong carnivorous lizard that went extinct roughly 66 million years ago.

Scotland’s 5,000-Year-Old Cochno Stone Revealed Wednesday, September 07, 2016 Scotland Cochno Stone(University of Glasgow) CLYDEBANK, SCOTLAND—BBC News reports that Kenny Brophy of Glasgow University is leading a team of researchers in a new study of the Cochno Stone. “This is the biggest and, I would argue, one of the most important Neolithic art panels in Europe,” he said. The stone, which measures about 26 feet by 42 feet and is located in an urban area, was buried in 1965 to protect it from the weather, foot traffic, and vandals who carved graffiti into its surface. As a first step, the...

A new species of blood fluke was found infecting the lungs of turtles in Malaysia. This parasitic flatworm has been dubbed Baracktrema obamai, in honor of the President of the United States (who is the fifth cousin twice removed of one of the discovering scientists). More...

“A ballerina yesterday. An engineer today. Let’s get them ready for tomorrow,” one ad read. The ads were intended to celebrate the aspirations of young people, but fell short of the goal, the company said in an apology on its Twitter account. “An actor yesterday. A botanist today. Let’s get them ready for tomorrow,” another ad read. The bank, which is based in San Francisco and has its largest employment hub in Charlotte, tweeted out an apology Saturday. The bank said it gave $93 million last year in support of the arts, culture and education. We offer our sincere apology...

A two-hour launch window opens Thursday at 7:05 p.m. for the Origins Spectral Interpretation Resource Identification Security Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) mission aboard a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V-411 rocket. Over the next two years, OSIRIS-REx will travel to the 1,650-foot-wide near-Earth asteroid 101955 Bennu. The spacecraft will then spend two years studying the asteroid and collecting a pristine surface sample for return to Earth in September 2023, the first U.S. mission to do so and the largest sample of an extraterrestrial body since the Apollo missions.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (Reuters) - A U.S. space probe was cleared for launch on Thursday to collect and return samples from an asteroid in hopes of learning more about the origins of life on Earth and perhaps elsewhere in the solar system, NASA said on Tuesday. A United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket was scheduled to blast off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida to dispatch the robot explorer Osiris-Rex on a seven-year mission. United Launch Alliance is a partnership of Lockheed-Martin and Boeing. Osiris-Rex is headed to a 1,640-foot (500-meter) wide asteroid named Bennu, which circles the...