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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...

Up until now, scientists had only recognized a single species of giraffe made up of several subspecies. But, according to the most inclusive genetic analysis of giraffe relationships to date, giraffes actually aren't one species, but four. For comparison, the genetic differences among giraffe species are at least as great as those between polar and brown bears. The unexpected findings reported in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on September 8 highlight the urgent need for further study of the four genetically isolated species and for greater conservation efforts for the world's tallest mammal, the researchers say. "We were extremely...

A Chinese firm has claimed that they have developed radar technology that can detect stealth jets. The quantum radar was reportedly created by Intelligent Perception Technology, a branch of defence and electronics firm CETC. They claim it is capable of detecting a target at a range of 60 miles and according to the Xinhua news agency, it was successfully tested last month.