Archaeologists have been discovering how Romans lived 2,000 years ago, by studying what they left behind in their sewers.
A team of experts has been sifting through hundreds of sacks of human excrement.
They found a variety of details about their diet and their illnesses — via redwolf.newsvine.com
On its journey to the stars, the Voyager 1 spacecraft has hit an unexpected, knife’s-edge region at the boundary between the solar system and interstellar space.
In short, Voyager 1 is in a spot where the sun’s winds have, in effect, stopped blowing — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Melbourne researchers have developed smart bandages that change colour to reveal the state of the wound beneath.
Their invention could reduce the $500 million cost of chronic wound care in Australia.
We hope that the dressing could lead to more rapid and effective treatment of chronic wounds such as leg ulcers, saving time and money, as well as improving patient well-being,
says the lead inventor Louise van der Werff, a CSIRO materials scientist and Monash University PhD student — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Most spiders are web-building, solitary creatures. So the social huntsman spiders, which live in webless retreats
with hundreds of other spiders, are very unusual — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Scientists using the world’s largest atom smasher have made some of the hottest and densest matter ever achieved on Earth.
The state of matter called a quark gluon plasma existed in the milliseconds after the big bang 13.7 billion years ago — via redwolf.newsvine.com
A study into a deadly snake found on the Eyre Peninsula may unlock the secret of why the species comes in two different colours.
Death adders are one of the world’s most venomous snakes and come in grey and red varieties — via redwolf.newsvine.com
For more than a month now, a slow-motion landslide
near the New York/Vermont border has been dismantling a small town, day by day, square foot by square foot. The landslide is oozing slowly
, New York state geologist Andrew Kozlowski explains to National Public Radio, no faster than three feet per day. But it’s so big that scientists have been arriving from all over the country to study it
— via BLDGBLOG
The purpose of eye-catching web decorations created by certain spiders has mystified scientists for decades, but new research suggests they help prevent unintentional damage.
Researchers from the University of Melbourne in Australia have found that the bold silk cross constructed by the St. Andrew’s Cross Spider (Argiope keyserlingi) in the centre of their web is actually a visual warning of the web’s presence.
“The frequency and size of the cross’s increased as a response to heavy web damage, providing an explanation to the debated decorations,” said the lead author of the paper published in Behavioural Ecology and Sociobiology, Andre Walter from the Department of Zoology — via redwolf.newsvine.com
During recent research into how cuttlefish adopt camouflage positions, a common cuttlefish raises two of its eight arms in apparent mimicry of artificial algae placed in its tank. The animal reacted similarly when shown a photo of green algae, said biologist Roger Hanlon — via redwolf.newsvine.com
A committee of international chemists and physicists has officially added two new elements to the periodic table: the ultraweighty elements 114 and 116.
They’re the heaviest members yet of the periodic table, with whopping atomic weights of 289 and 292 atomic mass units respectively. The previous heavyweight winners were copernicium (285) and roentgenium (272).
The two new elements are radioactive and only exist for less than a second before decaying into lighter atoms. Element 116 will quickly decay into 114, and 114 transforms into the slightly lighter copernicium as it sheds its alpha particles — via redwolf.newsvine.com
South Americans helped colonise Easter Island centuries before Europeans reached it. Clear genetic evidence has, for the first time, given support to elements of this controversial theory showing that while the remote island was mostly colonised from the west, there was also some influx of people from the Americas.
Easter Island is the easternmost island of Polynesia, the scattering of islands that stretches across the Pacific. It is also one of the most remote inhabited islands in the world — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Many things are too small to be seen by the naked eye. And some are even too small to be seen through a conventional microscope.
But a super resolution fluorescence microscope is no ordinary microscope.
A team at the University of New South Wales led by Associate Professor Katharina Gaus and PhD candidate David Williamson have used the only super resolution fluorescence microscope of its kind in Australia to reveal a crucial feature that enables T cells to function — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Australian researchers have developed a new way of recovering usable fingerprints from old evidence.
The scientists, at the University of Technology in Sydney, believe it is a world first, that could help police reopen unsolved cases.
They used nanotechnology to detect dry and weak fingerprints, which are not revealed by traditional techniques.
Nanotechnology reveals much sharper detail of amino acid traces from old fingerprints than existing methods.
Their aim is to detect fingerprints of any age on any surface — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Researchers have developed a new dating technique that has given the first detailed picture of the emergence of an agricultural way of life in Britain more than 5,000 yearsago.
A new analysis of artefacts recovered from the first monuments built in Britain shows that the Neolithic period had a slow start followed by a rapid growth in trade and technology.
Scientists say the new approach can be used to unravel the detailed sequence of events of many more important moments in human pre-history — via redwolf.newsvine.com
In 1939, University of Iowa graduate student Mary Tudor began an experiment with local orphans, warning them that they were showing signs of stuttering and lecturing them whenever they repeated a word. The children became acutely self-conscious, and many began to stutter, fulfilling the theory that the affliction is caused by the diagnosis
— via redwolf.newsvine.com
Maybe antimatter is finally ready for its close-up. A team of physicists has succeeded in producing rudimentary atoms of antimatter and holding on to them for several minutes, an advance that holds hope for detailed comparisons of how ordinary atoms of matter compare with their exotic antimatter counterparts.
The researchers, from the ALPHA antimatter experiment at CERN, the European laboratory for particle physics, reported last year the first trapping of antihydrogen, the simplest antimatter atom. But the antihydrogen had at that time been confined for less than two tenths of a second. That interval has now been extended by a factor of more than 5,000. In a study published online 5 June in Nature Physics, the ALPHA group reports having confined antihydrogen for 16 minutes and 40 seconds. The more relevant number for physicists, who often deal in powers of 10, is 1,000 seconds — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Several of Australia’s top climate change scientists at the Australian National University have been subjected to a campaign of death threats, forcing the university to tighten security.
Several of the scientists in Canberra have been moved to a more secure location after receiving the threats over their research — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Researchers (and some cat-owners) wanted to know: What do feral and free-roaming house cats do when they’re out of sight? A two-year study offers a first look at the daily lives of these feline paupers and princes, whose territories overlap on the urban, suburban, rural and agricultural edges of many towns.
The study used radio telemetry and a sophisticated activity-tracking device to capture the haunts and habits of dozens of owned and un-owned cats living at the southern edge of Champaign and Urbana, neighbouring cities in Central Illinois. Together, the 42 adult cats originally radio-tracked for the study ranged over a territory of 2,544 hectares (6,286 acres) — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Inspired by comic strips and hated by font designers, new research suggests Comic Sans may help people remember what they read.
Comic Sans was released by Microsoft in 1994, as a font that looked friendly and childlike but most importantly did not look techie
.
But the font does not enjoy overwhelming support. A few years ago there was an internet campaign to have it banned, and there are forums where designers and typographers whinge about the font’s awkward weighting and haphazard kerning — via redwolf.newsvine.com
These days the pretence of fair play is all but gone. The default position of the Opposition is to smear and traduce anyone who has the temerity to disagree with them or express any sympathy with a government policy. One wonders what Joyce would have said if Blanchett’s name was Gina Hancock. You suspect her free enterprise spirit and entrepreneurial flair would have been proclaimed loudly and long.
The dumbed-down populism of the tabloid press is nothing new but it has about it now a vehemence and viciousness that can still surprise, especially in its casual, off-hand dismissal of an Australian citizen’s right to speak her mind — via redwolf.newsvine.com
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