Agriculture is thought to have been developed 11,000 years ago in the Levant, where Iraq, Israel and Jordan are today. But in recent years, archaeologists have discovered sites in the region suggesting hunter-gatherers were making use of crops thousands of years earlier.
In a paper published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team of researchers reveals that foragers in northeastern Jordan were baking bread from wild cereals more than 14 millennia ago. C ...read more
Astronomers can sometimes be literal to a fault. We like to call things as we see them. For example, if it’s red and it’s huge: “Red Giant.� White and small: “White Dwarf.� Massive explosion: “Big Bang.� Dark and sucks everything in: “Black Hole.� Most of the time, classifying objects this way works fine& ...read more
A paper just published reports that Republicans are more likely to have used the adultery website Ashley Madison than Democrats, while Libertarians were even more likely to do so.
That's a claim that could ruffle some feathers, but the way in which the researchers conducted this study might be even more controversial. That's because this paper is based on the 2015 Ashley Madison data leak, which exposed the personal data, including names and credit-card details, of millions of registered ...read more
It has been an unpleasant few weeks here in Colorado.
Brutal heat and air pollution have made many of my daily runs along trails like the one above challenging — to put it mildly. Recurrent poor air quality has taken a particular toll.
Smoke from eight major wildfires burning in Colorado — more than anywhere else in the contiguous United States right now — has mixedÂ&nbs ...read more
We've made it! The 2018 Geology World Cup Finals are here. One of the semifinal matches was really a squeaker while the other featured a blowout.
Final Match: Perú vs. Iceland
You'd have to say, Perú was a dark horse in this tournament. This is not to say the country doesn't have spectacular geology, but they took out Russia, Colombia and Croatia to reach the finals. Perú is known for its volcanoes, including the 1600 eruption of Huaynaputina, one of th ...read more
Though it’s been gone for nearly a year, the Cassini spacecraft continues to fuel new studies of Saturn and its many moons. In particular, Cassini’s unique and close-up view of the system during its Grand Finale orbits produced data that have revealed how plasma waves moving outward from the planet interact with both its rings and its moons.
Research based on evaluation of the data was published April 26 and June 7 in Geophysical Research Letters. Now, in ...read more
On 27 August 1883, the Earth let out a noise louder than any it has made since.
It was 10:02 AM local time when the sound emerged from the island of Krakatoa, which sits between Java and Sumatra in Indonesia. It was heard 1,300 miles away in the Andaman and Nicobar islands (“extraordinary sounds were heard, as of guns firing�); 2,000 miles away in New Guinea and Western Australia (“a series of loud reports, resembling those of artillery ...read more
More than 18,000 near-Earth asteroids have been identified, and all of them are thought to be remnants of our solar system’s formation. They each have their own unique structure and properties. But despite their distinct variations, we still come across an oddball every once in awhile. On June 26, two separate teams of scientists confirmed an unusual “equal mass� binary asteroid cruising past Earth — one of only four ev ...read more
Like Dorothy coming to Oz, doctors might finally be experiencing their world in color.
A new scanner, using technology developed by CERN for detecting subatomic particles, can produce color X-ray scans of the inside of the body, allowing doctors to see soft tissues in unprecedented detail. The technology is set for clinical trials in New Zealand soon.
X-ray Upgrade
Normal X-rays illuminate our insides in shades of grey — hard tissues like bone are white and soft t ...read more
El Niño's coming.
That's the increasingly confident forecast from the U.S. Climate Prediction Center. In its latest monthly report, the CPC continued an El Niño watch and boosted the odds of it developing during the Northern Hemisphere winter of 2018-2019 to 70 percent. Last month, the center pegged El Niño's chances at 65 percent.
This is important because El Niño has profound impacts on weather around the world.
Here ...read more
