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The Boknis Eck Observatory might've been "forcibly removed" from a bay in Germany, the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research in Kiel said. Data transmission from the underwater sensors suddenly cut out one night in August, GEOMAR said. When divers went to investigate at the observatory site, they found nothing but a shredded cable that once anchored it. The observatory, planted in Kiel's Eckernförde Bay in 2016, consists of two "desk-sized" racks: One acts as a power source, tethered to the coast by a cable, and the other contains the sensors that transmit data back to shore. Both were missing...

Scientists have found that increasing oxygen levels are linked to the rise of North American dinosaurs around 215 M years ago. A new technique for measuring oxygen levels in ancient rocks shows that oxygen levels in North American rocks leapt by nearly a third in just a couple of million years, possibly setting the scene for a dinosaur expansion into the tropics of North America and elsewhere... The US-based scientists have developed a new technique for releasing tiny amounts of gas trapped inside ancient carbonate minerals. The gases are then channelled directly into a mass spectrometer, which measures their composition....

Researchers have found that continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) treatment of obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) can improve depression symptoms in patients suffering from cardiovascular diseases. Using data from the Sleep Apnea Cardiovascular Endpoints (SAVE) trial led by Flinders University, the new study has found a significant decrease in cases of depression after patients received CPAP treatment for their sleep apnea. This is by far the largest trial of its type and one of very few studies reporting such an effect, says Professor Doug McEvoy from Flinders University.

In the 1990s, the remains of six Neanderthals -- two adults, two adolescents and two children -- were found in a small cave at Baume Moula-Guercy in the Rhône valley in southern France. The bones bear many of the hallmarks of cannibalism: cut marks made by stone tools, complete dismemberment of the individuals, and finger bones that look as if they've been gnawed by Neanderthal teeth, rather than by other carnivores. Remains from other sites in Croatia, Spain and Belgium also show evidence of cannibalism. But in each case, there has been a lack of evidence to answer the question...

In two previous studies, researchers analyzed isotopes (an element that has a different number of neutrons than normal in its nucleus) in the women's remains, so they could piece together where the women had lived. But now, new research finds that these analyses were likely contaminated by modern agricultural lime... However, the researchers of the original studies are standing by their work... Both Bronze Age women are well known by archaeologists; the remains of Egtved Girl (the possible priestess) and Skrydstrup Woman were found in Denmark in 1921 and 1935, respectively. More recently, the Freis and their colleagues found that...

In France, the Bell Beaker period lasted from around 2500 to 1800 BCE... But ceramics from as far back as the middle Neolithic -- around 5500 BCE -- and as recently as the Iron Age -- around 1000 BCE -- have also been found at the site... James and colleagues date a further eight individuals, using teeth from seven adults and one child. [Six of the teeth were from the Bell Beaker period, but one was much older -- dating to between 3650 and 3522 BCE -- and one much younger -- from 1277 to 1121 BCE... It's not known...

"Having studied the skull of one of the men who went down with the Mary Rose, we found the bone structure was consistent with someone who had North African features, and DNA evidence seems to back this up," he said. "Today, with a much more mobile world population, it would have been harder to isolate, but in the 16th Century it's easier to pinpoint facial characteristics to a specific location. "Henry, as we've named him, had a broad nose bridge and wide cheek bones which are far more similar to skeletons found in Morocco or Algeria than those of the...

PORTLAND, OREGON—Venus flytraps have a well-known way of dispatching their victims: They snare inquisitive insects that brush up against trigger hairs in their fly-trapping pods (above). But now, physicists have discovered that the triggering process may involve the release of a cascade of exotic chemicals similar to the whiff of ozone that tingles your nose after a lightning bolt. To study this process, scientists used an electrical generator to ionize air into a “cold plasma,” which they then gently blew toward a flytrap in their lab. Normally, the flytrap’s closure is caused by an electrical signal created when two or...

Billions of years ago... our planet’s primordial atmosphere was toxic to life as we know it, consisting of carbon dioxide, nitrogen and other gases. However, by the Paleoproterozoic Era (2.5–1.6 billion years ago), a dramatic change occurred where oxygen began to be introduced to the atmosphere – known as the Great Oxidation Event (GOE). [S]cientists were not sure if this event – which was the result of photosynthetic bacteria altering the atmosphere – occurred rapidly or not. ... Based on newly-discovered geological evidence, the team concluded that the introduction of oxygen to our atmosphere was “more like a fire hose”...

Aluminium oxynitride or AlON is a ceramic composed of aluminium, oxygen and nitrogen. It is marketed under the name ALON by Surmet Corporation. AlON is optically transparent (≥80%) in the near-ultraviolet, visible and midwave-infrared regions of the electromagnetic spectrum. It is 4 times harder than fused silica glass, 85% as hard as sapphire, and nearly 15% harder than magnesium aluminate spinel. Since it has a cubic spinel structure, it can be fabricated to transparent windows, plates, domes, rods, tubes and other forms using conventional ceramic powder processing techniques. ALON is the hardest polycrystalline transparent ceramic available commercially. Combination of optical...

When Oxygen, the television network for women, rebranded itself as a true crime channel last year, it leaned into TV’s time-tested approach: a focus on gruesome and mysterious killings, disproportionately involving white female victims and sensationalized by self-serious narrators. But Oxygen also began experimenting with a new way to cover those crimes. It started a comedy podcast, “Martinis & Murder,” in which the two hosts get tipsy on homicide-themed cocktails, audibly squirm over the gory details, make catty judgments about the suspects’ life choices and use particulars of the crimes as setups for sarcastic jokes. Here’s a sampling of dialogue...

NEW DELHI — One by one, the infants and children slipped away Thursday night, their parents watching helplessly as oxygen supplies at the government hospital ran dangerously low. At least 30 children died Thursday and into Friday at a hospital in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh after its supply of liquid oxygen was disrupted over an unpaid bill, officials said. A Home Ministry spokesman told the Press Trust of India, citing police reports, that 21 of the deaths were directly linked to a shortage of oxygen. Witnesses described a chaotic scene between 11 p.m. and 2 a.m. as...

The F-35 is getting slammed hard once again, this time due to the sudden grounding of 55 of the stealth jets based at Luke AFB following a series of in-flight life support issues. These issues included bouts of hypoxia and other incidents that made it hard for pilots to breathe. The truth of the matter is that the F-35—still a relatively new weapons system that remains deep in testing regardless of how the USAF portrays its status—is the least flagrant offender when it comes to operational aircraft that manifest these anomalies. But the fact that the prized jet is now...

The 56th Fighter Wing at Luke Air Force Base in Arizona suspended all F-35A flights Friday after the five pilots experienced hypoxia-like symptoms, Air Force spokesman Capt. Mark Graff said in a statement. The pilots all used their backup oxygen to land the planes safely. “In order to synchronize operations and maintenance efforts toward safe flying operations we have canceled local F-35A flying,” said Brig. Gen. Brook Leonard, commander of the 56th Fighter Wing. “The Air Force takes these physiological incidents seriously, and our focus is on the safety and well-being of our pilots. We are taking the necessary steps...

The world's oceans close to being starved of oxygen - and even that could lead to mass sea life extinction which could last a million years. University of Exeter scientists fear the modern ocean is 'on the edge of anoxia' - when the oceans are depleted of oxygen. [snip] Lead researcher PhD student Sarah Baker said it was now 'critical' for modern humans to limit carbon emissions to prevent this.

EXCLUSIVE: More than 100 U.S. Navy instructor pilots are refusing to fly in protest of what they say is the refusal of top brass to adequately address an urgent problem with training jets’ oxygen system, multiple instructor pilots tell Fox News. ADVERTISEMENT The boycott started late last week and has effectively grounded hundreds of training flights. “The pilots don’t feel safe flying this aircraft,” one instructor pilot told Fox News. Among the hundreds of student pilots affected is Marine 1st Lt. Michael Pence, son of Vice President Pence – a factor that could put added pressure on the Pentagon to...

Life on Earth may have made its mark on the moon billions of years before Neil Armstrong’s famous first step.Observations by Japan’s moon-orbiting Kaguya spacecraft suggest that oxygen atoms from Earth’s upper atmosphere bombard the moon’s surface for a few days each month. This oxygen onslaught began in earnest around 2.4 billion years ago when photosynthetic microbes first flourished (SN Online: 9/8/15), planetary scientist Kentaro Terada of Osaka University in Japan and colleagues propose January 30 in Nature Astronomy.The oxygen atoms begin their incredible journey in the upper atmosphere, where they are ionized by ultraviolet radiation, the researchers suggest. Electric...

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...

But good luck breathing in the bone-crushing gravity.A newly discovered star is unlike any ever found. With an outermost layer of 99.9 percent pure oxygen, its atmosphere is the most oxygen-rich in the known universe. Heck, it makes Earth's meager 21 percent look downright suffocating. The strange stellar oddity is a radically new type of white dwarf star, and was discovered by a team of Brazilian astronomers led by Kepler de Souza Oliveira at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil. The star is unique in the known pool of 32,000 white dwarf stars, and is the...

Scientists Debate Signatures of Alien Life Searching for signs of life on faraway planets, astrobiologists must decide which telltale biosignature gases to target. Photo illustration by Olena Shmahalo/Quanta Magazine February 2, 2016 Comments (5) Share this: facebooktwitterredditmail PDF Print Huddled in a coffee shop one drizzly Seattle morning six years ago, the astrobiologist Shawn Domagal-Goldman stared blankly at his laptop screen, paralyzed. He had been running a simulation of an evolving planet, when suddenly oxygen started accumulating in the virtual planet’s atmosphere. Up the concentration ticked, from 0 to 5 to 10 percent.“Is something wrong?” his wife asked.“Yeah.”The rise of...