The child caught the infection from its mother around the time of birth GETTY IMAGES A nine-year-old infected with HIV at birth has spent most of their life without needing any treatment, say doctors in South Africa. The child, whose identity is being protected, was given a burst of treatment […]
The discovery was made in a rock shelter in the Northern Territory DOMINIC O BRIEN/GUNDJEIHMI ABORIGINAL CORPORATION Archaeologists have found the first evidence to suggest that Aboriginal people have been in Australia for at least 65,000 years. The discovery indicates their arrival on the continent was up to 18,000 years […]
Back in 2013, a Nature Reviews Neuroscience paper appeared called Power failure: why small sample size undermines the reliability of neuroscience. This paper got a lot of attention at the time and has since been cited a dizzying 1760 times according to Google. ‘Power Failure’ made waves for its stark […]
When researchers looked at the DNA of a human population, the mutation rate taught them something about the evolutionary value of sex. OLENA SHMAHALO/QUANTA MAGAZINE FOR A SPECIES whose numbers show no signs of collapsing, humans have a shockingly high mutation rate. Each of us is born with about 70 […]
Two separate teams of scientists from the CfA have identified major challenges for the development of life in TRAPPIST-1. The TRAPPIST-1 system, depicted here in an artist’s conception, contains seven roughly Earth-sized planets orbiting a red dwarf, which is a faint, low-mass star. This star spins rapidly and generates energetic […]
Famine, economic collapse, a sun that cooks us: What climate change could wreak — sooner than you think. Fossils by Heartless Machine In the jungles of Costa Rica, where humidity routinely tops 90 percent, simply moving around outside when it’s over 105 degrees Fahrenheit would be lethal. And the effect […]
The green-and-black poison dart frog is native to Central America and the north-west part of South America SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY The huge diversity of frogs we see today is mainly a consequence of the asteroid strike that killed off the dinosaurs, a study suggests. A new analysis shows that frog […]
The Great Basin bristlecone pine is found in the western United States / GETTY IMAGES Mayflies live a day, humans live a century, if we’re lucky, but what is the oldest living organism on the planet? For scientists, accurately proving the age of any long-lived species is a hard task. Under […]
Oldest-known Homo sapiens fossils unearthe Newly-discovered fossils have shattered the notion that early humans emerged from a “Garden of Eden” region in east Africa 200,000 years ago, by strongly suggesting that our ancestors had already spread across the continent and taken major steps in their evolution some 100,000 years earlier. […]
ISS and Endeavour seen from the Soyuz TMA spacecraft. / Credit: NASA This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com’s Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. When we think about the difficulties of colonising another planet, the last thing we probably worry about about […]