Researchers in a remote jungle in Indonesia have discovered a giant rat and a tiny possum that are apparently new to science, underscoring the stunning biodiversity of the Southeast Asian nation, scientists said Monday.
Unearthing new species of mammals in the 21st century is considered very rare. The discoveries by a team of American and Indonesian scientists are being studied further to confirm their status.
New research on blind subjects has bolstered evidence that the human eye has two separate light-sensing systems — one that perceives the familiar visual signals that allow us to see and a second, separate system that tells our body when it is day or night.
Researchers have long known that the eye performed both functions but until recent years it had been thought that both vision and the management of the circadian rhythm that tells us when to be sleepy and when to be alert had been done all at once through the retina’s rods and cones that enable us to see.
Scientists think they have discovered the energy source of auroras borealis, the spectacular color displays seen in the upper latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere.
New data from NASA's Themis mission, a quintet of satellites launched this winter, found the energy comes from a stream of charged particles from the sun flowing like a current through twisted bundles of magnetic fields connecting Earth's upper atmosphere to the sun.
NASA said the shuttle Atlantis will launch no earlier than Saturday after Thursday's launch was scrubbed when a pair of fuel gauges in its big external tank failed to work, a recurring problem since the Columbia disaster. Preliminary indications were that the problem might be with an open circuit rather than the gauges themselves -- perhaps a spliced line or bad connector -- which would be easier to fix.
China has dismissed internet gossip that its first photo of the moon taken from a lunar orbiter might have been plagiarised from Nasa, local media said yesterday.
The country launched its first lunar probe, the Chang'e 1, in October and released a photo featuring a patch of grey moon surface splotched with craters last week, hailing the mission a "complete success".
The European Science Foundation said it will propose a comprehensive mental health research effort of a size similar to that of the Human Genome Project. The proposal -- to be discussed during the Foundation's annual EuroBioForum in Lisbon, Portugal -- is aimed at making Europe the global leader of research in the critical role of neurotransmitters in brain disorders. Foundation officials said the project would bring together the efforts of scientists from a broad array of specialized areas, such as biochemistry, molecular biology, psychopharmacology and imaging techniques.
Think you're smarter than a fifth-grader? How about a 5-year-old chimp? Japanese researchers pitted young chimps against human adults in tests of short-term memory, and overall, the chimps won. That challenges the belief of many people, including many scientists, that "humans are superior to chimpanzees in all cognitive functions," said researcher Tetsuro Matsuzawa of Kyoto University.
Announced today, the MIT Clean Energy Entrepreneurship Prize is being funded by utility company NStar Electric & Gas Corp. and the U.S. Department of Energy. "The ultimate goal of this contest is to find innovative solutions to transform today's energy systems into tomorrow's sustainable energy future," said MIT President Susan Hockfield in a statement.
23andMe, a Google-funded online company selling a $999 ($NZ1314) DNA test, launched as a kind of genetics-based MySpace or Facebook that also has the more serious aim of allowing medicine someday to target its users' ills more precisely.
Users sign up for the DNA saliva test online and receive and return it by mail. Four to six weeks later, the results are online, allowing them to learn about their inherited traits, their ancestry and - likely with the help of a professional to look at the data - some of their personal disease risks.
Human skin cells have been reprogrammed by two groups of scientists to mimic embryonic stem cells with the potential to become any tissue in the body.
The breakthrough promises a plentiful new source of cells for use in research into new treatments for many diseases.
Crucially, it could mean that such research is no longer dependent on using cells from human embryos, which has proved highly controversial.
