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Just a cosmic hop, skip and jump away, an Earth-size planet orbits the closest star to our sun, Proxima Centauri. Ever since the discovery of the exoplanet — known as Proxima Centauri b— in 2016, people have wondered whether it could be capable of sustaining life. Now, using computer models similar to those used to study climate change on Earth, researchers have found that, under a wide range of conditions, Proxima Centauri b can sustain enormous areas of liquid water on its surface, potentially raising its prospects for harboring living organisms. "The major message from our simulations is that there's...

Archaeologists from Aarhus University and Southwest Jutland Museums (Denmark) have been excavating... down to three metres... Thousands of items discovered beneath the streets of Ribe... everything from beads, amulets, coins, and lost combs, to dog excrement and gnawed bones... a piece of a lyre (a harp-like stringed instrument), complete with tuning pegs. This discovery alone gives the Viking trading city of Ribe a whole new soundtrack.Another extraordinary find is the discovery of runic inscriptions...The people who lived here weren't primarily farmers for household purposes but were craftsmen, seafarers, tradesmen, innkeepers, and maybe even lyrists...The early period of Ribe is a...

A study commissioned by the Democratic National Committee at George Washington University projected that at least 20,000 people would die as a result of Hurricane Florence. GWU used the Climate Change Model perfected by Global Warming professors Jones, Hansen and Mann to calculate their projections of 20,000 deaths. Although the actual number of deaths to date are less than 20, when the Puerto Rico model (3,000 estimated deaths) was updated with the Florence statistics and tweaked several times, the death estimates rose to 20,000. GWU defended their results stating that several factors influenced the estimates. Many of the estimated deaths...

A NASA satellite designed to precisely measure changes in Earth’s ice sheets, glaciers, sea ice and vegetation was launched into polar orbit from California early Saturday. A Delta 2 rocket carrying ICESat-2 lifted off from Vandenberg Air Force Base at 6:02 a.m. and headed over the Pacific Ocean. NASA Earth Science Division director Michael Freilich says that the mission in particular will advance knowledge of how the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica contribute to sea level rise. The melt from those ice sheets alone has raised global sea level by more than 1 millimeter (0.04 inch) a year recently,...

Stephen Pates, a researcher from Oxford University’s Department of Zoology, has uncovered secrets from the ancient oceans. With Dr Rudy Lerosey-Aubril from New England University (Australia), he meticulously re-examined fossil material collected over 25 years ago from the mountains of Utah, USA. The research, published in a new study in Nature Communications, reveals further evidence of the great complexity of the oldest animal ecosystems. Twenty hours of work with a needle on the specimen while submerged underwater exposed numerous, delicate microscopic hair-like structures known as setae. This revelation of a frontal appendage with fine filtering setae has allowed researchers to...

In new study, UChicago astronomers find no evidence for extra spatial dimensions to the universe based on gravitational wave data. Credit: Courtesy of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center CI Lab While last year's discovery of gravitational waves from colliding neutron stars was earth-shaking, it won't add extra dimensions to our understanding of the universe—not literal ones, at least. University of Chicago astronomers found no evidence for extra spatial dimensions to the universe based on the gravitational wave data. Their research, published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, is one of many papers in the wake of the extraordinary...

Analysis of bones, from what was once the world's largest bird, has revealed that humans arrived on the tropical island of Madagascar more than 6,000 years earlier than previously thought... A team of scientists led by international conservation charity ZSL (Zoological Society of London) discovered that ancient bones from the extinct Madagascan elephant birds (Aepyornis and Mullerornis) show cut marks and depression fractures consistent with hunting and butchery by prehistoric humans. Using radiocarbon dating techniques, the team were then able to determine when these giant birds had been killed, reassessing when humans first reached Madagascar. Previous research on lemur bones...

Life will find a way, as Jeff Goldblum's character puts it in Jurassic Park. Researchers at the University of Kent in the U.K. say they’ve discovered the genetic secret of how dinosaurs came to dominate Earth for 180 million years. The team of scientists used mathematical techniques to identify possible genetic characteristics of the first dinosaurs. They worked backwards from birds and turtles, which are the closest modern-day relatives of dinosaurs. The results of their work, published in Nature Communications in May, suggest that birds today have very similar DNA to ancient dinosaurs. Dinosaur DNA was likely organized into chunks...

ampires, it seems, have gone mainstream. According to The New York Post, “drinking young people’s blood could help you live longer and prevent age-related diseases.” (It could also cause you to develop sensitivity to light, sleep in some unusual places, and morph into a small flying rodent, but beggars can’t be choosers.) Actually, though, the Post’s claim is somewhat misleading. Patients don’t really have to drink the blood, they can receive it via transfusion. Technology has advanced, it seems, even for vampires. Jesse Karamazin, the California "doctor" behind this anti-aging regimen, doesn’t actually have a license to practice medicine, but...

In 2nd century AD Egypt, the legendary Greco-Roman scientist Claudius Ptolemy put the extent of the known world onto paper. From his home in Alexandria, he gathered reports from sailors who had made perilous journeys to India and possibly beyond. Though details were sparse, a voyager named Alexander described a distant port called Kattigara on the Sinus Magna (Great Gulf) to the east of the Golden Chersonese peninsula - widely considered to be mainland Malaysia. Halfway across the world around the same time, the bustling seaport Oc Eo was part of the flourishing Funan Kingdom, the earliest known pre-Angkorian civilisation...

As in flying insects, the robot's flapping wings, beating 17 times per second, not only generate the lift force needed to stay airborne but also control the flight via minor adjustments in the wing motion. Inspired by fruit flies, the robot's control mechanisms have proved to be highly effective, allowing it not only to hover on the spot and fly in any direction but also be very agile. Apart from being a novel, autonomous micro-drone, the robot's flight performances, combined with its programmability also make it well suited for research into insect flight. To this end, TU Delft has collaborated...

The earliest known drawing made by a human has been found in a South African cave and it looks very similar to a hashtag, the grouping and search feature made popular by the Jack Dorsey-led Twitter. The drawing is basically six red lines crossed by three other slightly curved lines. It appears on a tiny flake of mineral crust measuring only about 1.5 inches long and about half an inch tall. It's evidently part of a larger drawing because lines reaching the edge are cut off abruptly there, researchers said. "Before this discovery, Palaeolithic archaeologists have for a long time...

Radio observations using a combination of NSF’s Very Long Baseline Array, the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array and the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope have revealed that a fast-moving jet of particles broke out into interstellar space after a pair of neutron stars merged in NGC 4993, a lenticular galaxy approximately 130 million light-years from Earth.-snip- Called GW170817, the merger of two neutron stars sent gravitational waves rippling through space. It was the first event ever to be detected both by gravitational waves and electromagnetic waves, including gamma rays, X-rays, visible light, and radio waves.The aftermath of the...

Ten years ago, the world's largest scientific instrument was turned on and the start of a research dynasty began. On Sept. 10, 2008, a beam of protons was shot for the first time around the entire 16.5-mile-long (27 kilometers) ring of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) — the world's largest and highest energy atom smasher ever constructed. Located at the CERN laboratory, just outside Geneva, Switzerland, the LHC was constructed to smash highly energetic beams of protons together at near the speed of light. The stated goal was to create and discover the Higgs boson, the last missing piece of...

Last year's mysterious outburst of deep-space light flashes was even more frenzied than previously thought, a new study reports. On Aug. 26, 2017, astronomers with the Breakthrough Listen project — a $100 million effort to hunt for signs of intelligent alien life — spotted 21 repeating light pulses called fast radio bursts (FRBs) emanating from the dwarf galaxy FRB 121102 within the span of 1 hour. Some scientists think FRBs come from fast-rotating neutron stars, but their source has not been nailed down. And that explains Breakthrough Listen's interest: It's possible that the bursts are produced by intelligent extraterrestrials, perhaps...

Erik Rintamaki was searching for rocks on a Michigan beach last summer when he made what he calls a "mind blowing" discovery. Resting among the thousands of pebbles covering the Lake Superior beach, Rintamaki saw a glowing rock. The gem and mineral dealer told CBS News he often goes rock hunting. But on this particular June night, he found a rock unlike any other — a florescent orb that he later named "Yooperlite." Like lava glowing through cracks in the earth, a glowing light seeped out of the lines in the small rock. Rintamaki knew this couldn't be the only...

This cheap little project for signal detection on Earth was to find RF sources interfering with SETI signal detection. http://www.seti.net/notebook/volume-8/chap57/chap57.php

A molecule produced during fasting or calorie restriction has anti-aging effects on the vascular system, which could reduce the occurrence and severity of human diseases related to blood vessels, such as cardiovascular disease, according to a study led by Georgia State University. "As people become older, they are more susceptible to disease, like cancer, cardiovascular disease and Alzheimer's disease," said Dr. Ming-Hui Zou, senior author of the study, director of the Center for Molecular and Translational Medicine at Georgia State and a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Molecular Medicine. "Age is the most important so-called risk factor for human...

Elon Musk is no stranger to making headlines with his comments. But he might have just recorded one of his most quotable interviews ever. In a 2.5-hour candid interview with comedian Joe Rogan for "The Joe Rogan Experience", Musk talks about why we're likely living in a simulation, how flamethrowers are "a terrible idea", smokes a joint, calls The Boring Company a "hobby", and issues a stark warning against our use of coal and artificial intelligence. And that's just scratching the surface of the unwieldy but incredibly entertaining interview, which you can watch in full below. Musk's Matrix-style simulation hypothesis...

The display comes weeks after the country announced an ambitious timeline to launch its first crewed mission by 2022 in time to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the country's independence. The human-spaceflight program is called Gaganyaan and will build on the legacy of India's first astronaut, Rakesh Sharma, who flew in 1984. But this time, India is developing every aspect of the program, which means tackling problems like spacesuit design. The spacesuits, which have been in the works for two years, are each equipped with an oxygen cylinder that can support an astronaut for an hour, local reports added. The...