Science

Wastewater gathered at treatment plants contains a wealth of information relevant to human and environmental health. A new technique known as wastewater-based epidemiology can extract this vital information and use it to monitor important health indices at a local or global scale. Credit: Biodesign Institute A treasure trove of information relevant to human and environmental health is hiding in an ... Read More »

Images of the join between the ear bones and upper jaw in the echidna at hatching. The left image shows the cartilages in blue, while the right shows the expression of type II collagen (green) and Sox9 (red), both necessary for cartilage development. Credit: Anthwal et al. (CC BY 4.0) Infant marsupials and monotremes use a connection between their ear ... Read More »

Transplanted reprogrammed skin cells repair stroke-damaged rat brains. Repairing neurological damage has never been an easy task for scientists and physicians but remains the ultimate goal for much of the research in neuroscience. For instance, transplanting neuronal stem cells into damaged or diseased areas of the brain has been touted as a potential therapeutic option, although it has been met ... Read More »

Chinese paddlefish extinct, giant species has been declared extinct. In 2003, researchers from the Chinese Academy of Fishery Sciences captured, tagged and released a female Chinese paddlefish (Psephurus gladius) that had accidentally been caught in the Yangtze River. In just 12 hours, all communication with the fish tag was lost. That was the last time scientists saw a living Chinese ... Read More »

Vampire burial Reveals Efforts to Prevent Child’s Return from Grave (Study). The discovery of a 10-year-old’s body at an ancient Roman site in Italy suggests measures were taken to prevent the child, possibly infected with malaria, from rising from the dead and spreading disease to the living. The skeletal remains, uncovered by archaeologists from the University of Arizona and Stanford ... Read More »

Burmese python devours white-tailed deer that weighed more than the python itself in Florida. Graphic photos of an 11-foot Burmese python that devoured a white-tailed deer fawn, more than that of its own weight, were released Thursday. In one of the photos, the 31-pound python could be seen with his belly inflated as it had eaten the 35-pound deer. The ... Read More »

“Mad Mike” Hughes is a former NASCAR crew chief, denier of science, and daredevil. This weekend he will launch himself over a mile in a homemade rocket. Hughes says he expects his new rocket to hurl him through the skies above the Mojave Desert ghost town of Amboy at up to 500 miles per hour for roughly one mile, attaining ... Read More »

Off the coast of northern Canada, on the very edge of the Arctic Circle, there is a bay where whales gather. Each summer bowhead whales come here en masse, and will do throughout their 200-year lifespan. “This was an incidental observation,” said Sarah Fortune, a PhD student at UBC’s Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries and lead author of a ... Read More »

Space dust from deep in the cosmos containing alien bugs may have started life on Earth, researchers have claimed. According to new study from the University of Edinburgh, tiny Earth organisms might be able to hitch a ride on interplanetary dust and travel to other worlds. The research, soon to be published in the journal Astrobiology, looks at novel mechanisms ... Read More »

Scientists believe they have broken ground in dog-human relations by demonstrating that dogs show strong emotional responses to human faces. Scientists in the Canine Mind group showed 43 dogs images of smiling and angry faces on a computer screen. Each dog was tested twice: once under the influence of oxytocin, which was administered as part of the test, and once ... Read More »

Many a man has tried to woo a woman with gifts, and it seems that this practice even occurs in dolphins. Scientists have observed male humpback dolphins presenting females with large marine sponges in an effort to mate. Scientists from UWA’s School of Biological Sciences, the University of Zurich and Murdoch University conducted a decade of boat-based research on coastal ... Read More »