A familiar table salt ingredient has been hiding in plain sight on the surface of Jupiter's moon Europa, finds a recent analysis. Using a visible light spectral analysis, planetary scientists have discovered that the yellow color visible on portions of the surface of Europa is actually sodium chloride, a compound known on Earth as table salt, which is also the principal component of sea salt.

The discovery suggests that the salty subsurface ocean of Europa may chemically resemble Earth's oceans more than previously thought, challenging decades of supposition about the composition of those waters and making them potentially a lot more interesting for study.

Cannabis, known as marijuana in the U.S., Cannabis has been cultivated for millennia in East Asia and like many drugs exported from there to become one of the most widely used psychoactive drugs in the world today.

But now archaeologists have tracked down its earliest known use: 2,500-year-old funerary incense burners from the Jirzankal Cemetery in the eastern Pamirs. 

Each year, 1 million men in the U.S. undergo biopsies to determine whether they have prostate cancer because ultrasound imaging cannot clearly display the location of tumors in the prostate gland.

Ultrasound has been used to visualize the prostate in order to take a representative sampling of tissue to biopsy but with MRI doctors can see specific lesions in the prostate and only take tissue samples from those spots.

Why aren't those two sampling methods used in combination?

A multidisciplinary team has found that biopsy guided by magnetic resonance imaging increases the rate of prostate cancer detection.

If you read the Harry Potter series of novels or saw the films, you've known that fiction has people moving in and out of photographs - now that magic has been brought to real life.

The University of Washington algorithm Photo Wake-Up was posted in preprint form on arXiv in December and created a buzz because it can take a person from a 2D photo or a work of art and make them run, walk or jump out of the frame. The system also allows users to view the animation in three dimensions using augmented reality tools. Next week at the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition in Long Beach, California, the researchers will be showing results.

The Neolithic period, the end of the Stone Age and the beginning of civilizations, began about 12,000 years ago with the advent of agriculture in the Epipalaeolithic Near East. It spread to other parts of the world.

It provides not just the first evidence of farming, it also provides early evidence of gender inequality. according to a paper by researchers from the Department of Prehistory and Archaeology at the University of Seville who study prehistoric societies in the Neolithic Period in the Iberian Peninsula.

When we think of agriculture, we don't think of nomadic hunter-gatherers who simply followed nature rather than harnessing it. 

But they engaged in trade also. Millet, originally domesticated in China, was likely consumed at low levels by pastoralists inhabiting the far-flung regions of Siberia and southeastern Kazakhstan, possibly as early as the late third millennium but with the expansion of trans-regional networks across the steppe, when objects and ideas were first regularly exchanged over long-distances, millet consumption began to increase.