Science

Astronomers, for the first time, believe they have witnessed the birth of a black hole. The black hole is believed to be a remnant of a supernova, 50 million light years from Earth, which was spotted by an amateur astronomer in 1979. NASA announced this on Monday. According to NASA researchers, although the information they have collected is consistent with the birth of a baby black hole, they cannot rule out other possibilities. "If our interpretation is correct, this is the nearest example...

Scientists in the US are more likely to publish fake research than their colleagues from other countries, a study has revealed. The findings appear in the November 16 online issue of the Journal of Medical Ethics. R Grant Steen, Medical Communications Consultants, delved through the PubMed database for every scientific research paper that had been withdrawn in the 2000-2010 period. Research papers that are withdrawn are usually removed from public records. The PubMed database is the only...

The extraordinary biodiversity seen in the Amazon rainforest — one of the most species-rich ecosystems on Earth — may have evolved mainly due to the rise of the Andes. And it is older than earlier thought. An international team of scientists, including a leading evolutionary biologist from the Academy of Natural Sciences, says that the origin of rich biodiversity in the Amazon likely goes back more than 20 million years when the Andean mountains were rising. The findings of the study, which is...

This is bad news for males. Female boa constrictors can produce babies without mating. Scientists have found that the babies produced from this asexual reproduction have attributes previously believed to be impossible. Males are not needed anymore. This is the first time that asexual reproduction, known in scientific terms as parthenogenesis, has been attributed to boa constrictors, according to scientists from the North Carolina State University (NCSU). They have published their findings online...

The plague pathogen originated in or near China. Then it evolved and emerged multiple times to cause global pandemics. And it spread far and wide, an international team of scientists has found using DNA fingerprinting analyses. Researchers from Ireland, China, France, Germany and the United States, examined the past 10,000 years of global plague disease events. Their collaborative research traced the roots to somewhere in or around present-day China. The plague spread over various historical...

The universe is getting more crowded by the day. New telescopes and technologies are allowing astronomers to discover new astronomical objects all the time, such as ten new galaxy clusters found recently by the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT). An international team of scientists led by Rutgers University astrophysicists have discovered these 10 new massive galaxy clusters from a large, uniform survey of the southern sky. They found the galaxies using a breakthrough technique that detects...

Sleep can help both learn a new piece of information, as well as get the brain to file it away for later retrieval. Sleep helps people remember a newly learned word and incorporate new vocabulary into their mental lexicon, according to researchers. The study, conducted by researchers at the University of York and Harvard Medical School, has just been published in the Journal of Neuroscience. Researchers taught volunteers new words in the evening, followed by an immediate test. They slept...

Infant dinosaur footprints have been discovered in the foothills west of Denver, Colorado, near the town of Morrison. These tracks were made about 148 million years ago, before the Rocky Mountains rose, when the savanna was full of dinosaurs. According to Matthew Mossbrucker, director of the Morrison Natural History Museum, who discovered the prints, the fossil tracks represent infant sauropods. Sauropods were giant, herbivorous long-necked dinosaurs, sometimes known as "brontosaurs." The...

British scientist Robert Edwards, who helped revolutionise the treatment of human infertility, has won the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, the Nobel Assembly at Sweden's Karolinska Institute in Stockholm has announced. Edwards, 85, won the prestigious prize for his work on in-vitro fertilisation (IVF), which has helped millions of infertile couples to have a child. "His contributions represent a milestone in the development of modern medicine," the Nobel Assembly at the Swedish...

There is hope yet for the orangutan in forest plantations and sustainably logged forests. Selectively logged forests and timber plantations can serve as habitat for orangutans, and populations of the ape may be more resilient than previously believed. A team of researchers led by Erik Meijaard of Jakarta-based People and Nature Consulting International has found roughly equivalent population densities between natural forest areas and two plantation concessions in East Kalimantan, Indonesian...