The asteroid Oumuamua ("scout from the distant past" in Hawaiian) was discovered on October 19, 2017 by astronomers at thr Pan-STARRS1 survey when it came close to Earth's orbit, within the orbit of Mercury, about a month after its closest approach to the Sun It was called an asteroid - but it ...

A cosmic crash 8 billion to 10 billion years ago was a defining event in the early history of the Milky Way and reshaped the structure of our galaxy.The Sausage Galaxy lost and the Milky Way won, fashioning both its inner bulge and its outer halo. The wreckage is all around us and the paths of ...

By using infrared wavelengths, the HAWK-I infrared imager mounted on ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile was able to capture this image of the star cluster RCW 38.RCW 38 is over 5,00 light years away (look toward the constellation Vela) and is composed of several short-lived massive stars ...

In Ely, about 250 north of Las Vegas, Nevada is scheduled to hold its first execution in 12 years.Nothing controversial about that, because in 2002 Scott Dozier murdered Jeremiah Miller after he traveled to Las Vegas where Dozier had promised to help him make methamphetamine. Dozier dumped him ...

A key part of palaeontology is reconstructing long-extinct creatures to understand what they were like when they were alive. Such knowledge allows us to answer fundamental questions about how they moved and interacted with their environment. How did they feed and reproduce? Which of today's organisms ...

A new analysis estimates that if greenhouse gas emissions continue unabated, sea-level rise will endanger coastal wetlands across the United Kingdom.That conclusion was derived by estimating salt-marsh vulnerability using the geological record of past losses in response to sea-level change. Data ...

Seabirds love fish and fishing nets are a ready source of food. Peru's gillnet fleet comprises the largest component of that nation's small-scale fleet and is conservatively estimated to set 100,000 kilometers of net per year in which thousands of turtles and seabirds die as "bycatch" or unintentionally ...

Five years ago, California set out to be a world leader in adopting ambitious greenhouse gas reduction targets and created the world's fourth-largest carbon-trading program. Not bad for one state.Except it isn't helping the state, it is subsidizing others. And some of the emissions targets are ...

Fear is a healthy response, kept intact over eons of evolution, but sometimes it can be irrational. A new brain circuit discovery may help make sense of the madness. The study details the role of dopamine in ensuring that rats stop being afraid when there isn't anything to be afraid of anymore ...

Mounting levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide reduce the medicinal properties of milkweed plants that protect monarch butterflies from disease, according to a recent experiment.Milkweed leaves contain bitter toxins that help monarchs ward off predators and parasites. The study looked at how elevated ...

If you want to understand the spread of antibiotic resistance across Europe, sexually transmitted diseases seem to be a decent barometer.Gonorrhea, caused by the bacterium Neisseria gonorrhoeae, is the second most prevalent bacterial sexually transmitted disease globally. The WHO estimates that ...

Francisella tularensis bacteria are the cause of tularemia, a life-threatening disease spread to humans via contact with an infected animal or through the bite of a mosquito, tick or deer fly. The bacteria are able to suppress host inflammation when infecting mouse and human cells - and lipids ...

Blood thinning drugs are preventing 7,000 strokes each year, according to an analysis of general practice records of five million patients from 2000 to 2016 to find out how many people have a diagnosis of atrial fibrillation and how many are receiving treatment to prevent strokes. Atrial fibrillation ...

Genetic testing has been overcome by companies selling hype. Even 23andMe, arguably the most prominent, was chastised by FDA for promising peace of mind when they couldn't do anything of the kind.What about actual research involving the testing of human biospecimens? Should individual research ...

Like many Americans, like many people in all rich nations, New Yorkers somehow still have a lot of be depressed about. And they are getting obese. And not sleeping enough. In 2006, New York declared if they just banned trans fats, diabetes would go down, but rates actually went up, and outside ...

There has been recent concern about the impact of vaping flavors on young people but the numbers are fuzzy. The US FDA has rightly cracked down on companies flagrantly violating copyright in packaging but cartoon characters don't lead young people to vaping. Instead, former smokers note, young ...

Worldwide poverty has dropped dramatically, we are in the Long Peace when it comes to war, the old cycles of famine boom and bust have leveled off, science has made it possible for everyone to live better for longer and spend less on basic necessities.The world continues to improve. Why, then, ...

The oldest colors in the geological record have been discovered. At 1.1 billion-years-old, the bright pink pigments extracted from marine black shales of the Taoudeni Basin in Mauritania, West Africa, are actually molecular fossils of chlorophyll that were produced by ancient photosynthetic ...

A new study using a massive database of scientific articles, 486,644 articles with two to nine authors published in medical journals by U.S. scientists between 1946 and 2009, suggests that minority women are not double penalized by being minorities and women, but they do have what might be called ...

What accounts for modern peace? There are varying ideas. When America won World War II and occupied Germany and Japan in 1945, two militant cultures were off the table, while psychologist Steven Pinker argues in 2011's "The Better Angels of Our Nature" argues that there has been a continuous decline ...

There is talk in America of adding even more nutrition information to food labels, but as long as entire industries are exempt from evidence-based claims, it won't do much good. It will still be woo central in the supplement, holistic, and weight-loss camps.The European Association for the ...

A.I. - artificial intelligence - has seen a resurgence of buzzword activity. It's the Internet of Things for 2018. But if the limitation is the algorithm underneath, it's not really AI.However, smarter algorithms can help in medical diagnostics, because they really don't perform any better than ...

Suicide rates in the U.S. have increased nearly 30 percent in less than 20 years, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported June 7. These mind-numbing statistics were released the same week two very famous, successful and beloved people committed suicide – Kate Spade, a tremendous ...

It can't have been easy for former environmental activist Mark Lynas to change sides. His friends were on the anti-science side, he was a dutiful reader of The Guardian, where activists and environmental trade groups reign supreme, and he was adored there.But he had an ethical dilemma. How could ...