News
New research by economists at the Universities of Warwick and Oxford in the UK has provided surprising insight into just how much people hate a winner. It also shows what lengths human beings are prepared to go to damage a winner out of a sense of envy or fairness. The res...
British scientists have discovered the world's oldest fossilized vomit, believed to have come from a large marine reptile 160 million years ago. The vomit contains the remains of dozens of belemnites-squid-like shellfish that lived in abundance in the seas around what is n...
The University of Cambridge was in the news this week when dinosaur tracks, said to be amongst the best preserved and most extensive in the world, were found in Ardley Quarry, near Oxford, by researchers from Cambridge's Department of Earth Sciences. Most importantly, one ...
You must have noticed that when a smell comes your way, initially, you can smell it very strongly, but as time passes you notice it less and less, such as when you walk into someone else's house for instance, or into a restaurant. Scientists call this process 'adaptation',...
Having sex where 2 adults come together and give rise to one offspring is a pretty inefficient way to reproduce. We could increase our numbers much faster if we could simply copy ourselves. Indeed, having sex is downright dangerous for some animals - just ask a male spider...
The number of accidents involving radioactive materials in the UK has doubled over the past decade, according to the National Radiological Protection Board. In 2000 38 incidents were reported, compared with only 19 ten years earlier, in 1999. In one reported case 30 indust...
It's one thing to be a guinea pig for medicine, but in 1996, Jim Finn agreed to be part pig. Finn was a victim of Parkinson's disease and allowed surgeons to inject his brain with 12 million brain cells from a pig. Researchers hoped that the foetal pig cells might replace ...
Common frogs in the South East of England are being wiped out in their thousands by a killer virus brought by goldfish imported from America, according to frog conservation group Froglife Trust. It sounds very unpleasant - the frogs die slowly, developing sores all over th...
A new image of Saturn - the Lord of the Rings - shows just how quickly ground-based telescopes are catching up with those in space. The stunning image was taken by a new detector that corrects for distortion introduced by the Earth's turbulent atmosphere, based at the Para...
A security hole has been discovered in one of the world's most popular file-swapping programs which allows anyone to gain private information about its millions of users. Using the Morpheus file-sharing program, people can swap music, videos or movies with other users of t...
