Turtle embryos tune in to heartbeats

Turtle embryos tune into each others' heartbeats so they are able to hatch at roughly the same time.

Play develops similarly in chimps and humans

The re­search­ers found that chim­pan­zee sol­i­tary play peaks in in­fan­cy, and the time spent in so­cial play is about the same be­tween in­fants and ju­ve­niles. But the type of so­cial play changed quite a bit as the an­i­mals grew up, in terms of meas­ures like com­plex­ity and play­mate choice.

Prehistoric “art workshop”

An ar­chae­o­log­i­cal site dis­cov­ered three years ago was ap­par­ent­ly a work­shop in which ear­ly hu­mans made, mixed and stored ochre, the ear­li­est form of paint.

“Dark matter” mystery deepens

Like all ga­lax­ies, most as­tro­no­mers be­lieve ours is filled with a strange, in­vis­i­ble sub­stance that be­trays its pres­ence only through its gravita­t­ional pull. The gal­ax­y’s stars would fly apart with­out this so-called dark mat­ter hold­ing them to­geth­er.  But the na­ture of “dark mat­ter” is a riddle—and a new study has only deep­ened the mys­tery.

“Junk DNA” may help explain human-chimp differences

For years, sci­en­tists thought an ex­plana­t­ion would soon turn up for the vast dif­fer­ences be­tween hu­mans and their clos­est rel­a­tives among the an­i­mals, such as chim­panzees. The dif­fer­ence must be in the genes, bi­ol­o­gists rea­soned.  But this hy­poth­e­sis ran in­to trou­ble when it lat­er emerged that hu­man and chimp genes are nearly iden­ti­cal.

First teeth grew outside of the body

The world's first teeth grew outside of the mouth before later moving into the oral cavity, new research on Early Devonian fish suggests.

Solar system may have ejected a giant planet

The so­lar sys­tem may have giv­en up a gi­ant plan­et and spared the Earth.

Physicists extract light from seeming emptiness

Phys­i­cists in Swe­den say they have man­aged to cre­ate light from vac­u­um, the clos­est thing to emp­ty space known to ex­ist.

Eris

A “d­warf plan­et” or­bit­ing our sun three times fur­ther away than the dis­tant dwarf plan­et Plu­to is around the same size as that better-known, frig­id world, as­tro­no­mers have found.

Surprisingly complex organic matter identified in space

Or­gan­ic mol­e­cules of un­ex­pected com­plex­ity — si­mi­lar to those that serve as the in­gre­di­ents of life — ex­ist through­out the uni­verse.

Embryonic solar system brimming with water

New find­ings sug­gest an em­bry­on­ic so­lar sys­tem con­tains thou­sands of oceans’ worth of wa­ter — so wa­ter-covered plan­ets like Earth may be com­mon.

Seeing An Object Vs Focusing Attention On It

Our brain's primary visual cortex probably focuses our attention rather than recognising what we see, a new study has found.

Shape-Shifting Material Reacts To Radiation

Physicists have engineered a new kind of artificial substance, called a magnetoelastic metamaterial, that can change its structure in response to varying levels of electromagnetic radiation, such as microwaves or visible light.

Palaeolithic Cave-Painters Were "Realists"

Ancient cave painters who drew spotted horses were depicting what they saw around them and were not, as often believed, being abstract or symbolic, suggests a new study.

Concestor Of All Crocodilians

An enormous prehistoric crocodile-like creature with a shield-like bony plate on its head, could be the last common ancestor of animals related to crocodiles and alligators.

Supermassive Black Hole Ripping Apart Entire Worlds

Sagittarius A, which is 4,000,000 times the mass of the Sun, is destroying planets and asteroids that have formed in a torus of dust and gas around the black hole.

Law Of Nature Not So Constant

According to standard model, the strength of electromagnetism - one of the four fundamental forces of nature - should be constant throughout the cosmos …

Primitive Planetesimal

A rare opportunity to observe the primordial asteroid Lutetia at close quarters has unveiled a remarkable rock that seems to be a precursor of a planet.