Science

[:eu]Using satellite imagery, a new study has found hidden forests all over the world—almost enough for a second Amazon—in areas with little moisture known as drylands. [:]

[:eu]A creature reminiscent of much earlier human ancestors such as H. habilis lived at the same time as modern humans were emerging in Africa and Neandertals were evolving in Europe.[:]

[:eu]The Amazon rainforest is a treasure trove of biodiversity, containing 10% of the planet’s species in its 6.7 million square kilometers. How it got to be that way has been fiercely disputed for decades. Now, a new study suggests that a large section of the forest was twice flooded by the Caribbean Sea more than…

[:eu]“See you in the Supreme Court!” President Donald Trump tweeted last week, responding to lower court holds on his national security policies. But is taking cases all the way to the highest court in the land a good idea? Artificial intelligence may soon have the answer. A new study shows that computers can do a…

[:eu]Lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries are everywhere these days: laptops, cars, power tools, and cellphones, including Samsung’s infamous smoldering Galaxy Note 7. Now, researchers have come up with a new way to prevent these rechargeables from going haywire—a zinc-nickel battery that provides nearly the same electrical jolt, but not the fire risk of Li-ion cells. The new…

[:eu]A remarkably complete skeleton that was introduced in 2010 as “the best candidate” for the immediate ancestor of our genus Homo may just be a pretender. Instead of belonging to the human lineage, the new species of Australopithecus sediba is more closely related to other hominins from South Africa that are on a side branch…

[:eu]The aluminum hatches are the only clue to what lies beneath. Buried amid the corn and wheat fields of Fürstenfeldbruck, a sleepy monastery village 20 kilometers from Munich, Germany, is an inverted pyramid of concrete, steel pipes, and precision sensors, as deep as a three-story building. Last month, when lasers began coursing around the edges…

[:eu]For decades, particle physicists have yearned for physics beyond their tried-and-true standard model. Now, they are finding signs of something unexpected at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s biggest atom smasher at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland. The hints come not from the LHC’s two large detectors, which have yielded…

[:eu]A precious collection of ice cores from the Canadian Arctic has suffered a catastrophic meltdown. A freezer failure at a cold storage facility in Edmonton run by the University of Alberta (UA) caused 180 of the meter-long ice cylinders to melt, depriving scientists of some of the oldest records of climate change in Canada’s far…