The remains of a two-year-old Neanderthal who died some 41,000 years ago had been lain carefully in a grave that was covered with fresh soil, a study has concluded. The poor child’s skeleton was unearthed in 1973 from a rock shelter at the La Ferrassie dig site in Savignac-de-Miremont, Dordogne, southwest France. Researchers from France re-examined the … Read more
Light pollution is a ‘blight on the night sky’ that is obscuring our view of the stars and should be controlled for the sake of future generations, a group of MPs claim. An influential cross-party coalition of MPs and Peers have set out ‘ten dark sky policies’ they say the government should introduce to tackle … Read more
People of the Indus Valley civilisation who lived in what is now north-west India 4,000 years ago had a meat-heavy diet, new research indicates Analysis of pottery from the era reveals a preponderance of animal products, including pig, cattle, buffalo and goat meat as well as dairy. Scientists say people living in rural and urban sites … Read more
Google has launched a new smartphone app for people with speech and motor impairments that lets them use their eyes to select phrases on the screen. The new app, called Look to Speak, tracks the user’s eye movement to narrow down the desired phrase from a list, which is then spoken aloud by an automated … Read more
Charles Darwin (1809-1882) Charles Robert Darwin was born in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, the fifth of six children of wealthy and well-connected parents. One of his grandfathers was Erasmus Darwin, a doctor whose book ‘Zoonomia’ had set out a radical and highly controversial idea, that one species could ‘transmute’ into another. Transmutation is what evolution was then … Read more
Dogs struggle to detect differences between similar-sounding words like ‘dog’ and ‘dig’, according to a new study. Hungarian scientists put electrodes on doggies’ heads to measure signs of recognition from brain activity as they listened to various spoken words. The dogs listened to known words (like ‘sit’), similar but nonsense words (‘sut’) and very different … Read more
The first lockdown to slow the spread of coronavirus in the UK led to a ‘steep rise’ in cases of depression, including in children as young as seven, a new study reveals. Scientists from the Medical Research Council compared data from parents, teachers and children on the mental health of kids aged 7 to 12 … Read more
The city of Fairbanks in Alaska is deemed the best place to see the stunning Northern Lights, but one photographer took it to the next level by observing the show from space. Nate Luebbe attached a camera to a weather balloon and launched it into the stratosphere, allowing him to snap images of the greenish … Read more
Drinking a cup of coffee before working out could improve peak performance, study claims Researchers had habitual coffee drinkers have a cup before cycling three miles Some of the cyclists had a cup of coffee and others had a no caffeine placebo They found that those drinking coffee saw a small improvement in performance By … Read more
Widowers are far from useless in the kitchen – in fact, their culinary skills flourish after losing their loved one, a new study suggests. Despite the stereotype of the elderly man being rubbish in the kitchen, male seniors do cook and blossom in the kitchen once alone, Danish researchers found. Meanwhile, widows – recently bereaved women … Read more