Ancient tools and bones discovered in Shangchen in the southern Chinese Loess Plateau by archaeologists suggest early humans left Africa and arrived in Asia earlier than previously thought. The artefacts show that our earliest human ancestors colonised East Asia over two million years ago. They were found by a Chinese team that was led by Professor Zhaoyu Zhu of the ...

Scientists have measured the nutritional value of herbivore dinosaurs’ diet by growing their food in atmospheric conditions similar to those found roughly 150 million years ago. Previously, many scientists believed that plants grown in an atmosphere with high carbon dioxide levels had low nutritional value. But a new experimental approach led by Dr Fiona Gill at the University of Leeds ...

Death due to heart-related disease is on the rise in India, causing more than one-fourth of all deaths in the country in 2015 and affecting significantly rural populations and young adults the most, suggests a study. This work is the first nationally representative study to measure cardiovascular mortality in India, led by Dr. Prabhat Jha, director of the Centre for ...

In a good and bad news to tiger conservationists, scientists estimate that 84 highly endangered Amur leopards are roaming in the wild across its current range along the southernmost border of Primorskii Province in Russia and Jilin Province of China. This new estimate of the Amur leopard population was recently reported in the scientific journal, Conservation Letters by scientists from China, Russia, ...

The Joint Entrance Examination (Mains) and the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) will be conducted twice a year instead of just once, and the best score will be taken into account for admissions. Union Minister of Human Resource Development Prakash Javadekar announced it on Saturday that the National Testing Agency (NTA) would conduct of these exams and not the ...

Samsung India will open its new manufacturing in India that would be the largest mobile manufacturing unit in the world, beginning Monday, July 9, 2018. With this, China’s lead in making mobile phones will come down. Built in a 35-acre complex at Sector 81 in Noida, Uttar Pradesh but almost in Delhi, the new factory will be inaugurated by the ...

Want to be a supercentenarian? The chances of reaching the ripe old age of 110 are within reach – if you survive the perilous 90s and make it to 105 when death rates level out, according to a study of extremely old Italians led by the University of California, Berkeley, and Sapienza University of Rome. Researchers tracked the death trajectories ...

What if a large class of algorithms used today — from the algorithms that help us avoid traffic to the algorithms that identify new drug molecules — worked exponentially faster? Computer scientists at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have developed a completely new kind of algorithm, one that exponentially speeds up computation by ...

IMAGE: This is a female specimen of the newly described rare spider species Islandiana lewisi. Credit: Dr. Marc Milne Spiders are ubiquitous within our forests, fields, and backyards. Although you may be used to seeing the beautiful yellow and black spiders of the genus Argiope in your garden, large ground-scurrying wolf spiders in your yard, or spindly cellar spiders in your ...

IMAGE: On June 28 at 4:59 p.m. EDT (2059 UTC) the AIRS instrument aboard NASA’s Aqua satellite showed powerful storms with very cold cloud top temperatures (purple). Credits: NASA JPL, Heidar Thrastarson Infrared NASA satellite imagery provided cloud top temperatures of thunderstorms that make up Tropical Storm Emilia. Comparing those NASA temperature readings with another satellite’s data obtained the following day, forecasters ...

At Tal Chhapar, a wildlife sanctuary in the heart of the Thar desert, a strange drama is staged twice every year. In the blistering heat of summer from March to April and the post-monsoon months of September and October, up to a hundred blackbuck males stake out territories on the flat land to entice females to mate with them in ...

Self-monitoring of type 2 diabetes used in combination with an electronic feedback system results in considerable savings on health care costs especially in sparsely populated areas, a new study from the University of Eastern Finland shows. Self-monitoring delivers considerable savings on the overall costs of type 2 diabetes care, as well as on patients’ travel costs. Glycated hemoglobin testing is ...

Forests, one of the most dominate ecosystems on Earth, harbor significant biodiversity. Scientists have become increasingly interested in how this diversity is enhanced by the sheltering microclimates produced by trees. A recent University of Montana study suggests that a warming climate in the Pacific Northwest would lessen the capacity of many forest microclimates to moderate climate extremes in the future. ...

From pugs to labradoodles to huskies, dogs are our faithful companions. They live with us, play with us and even sleep with us. But how did a once nocturnal, fearsome wolf-like animal evolve over tens of thousands of years to become beloved members of our family? And what can dogs tell us about human health? Through the power of genomics, ...

When the Global Precipitation Measurement mission or GPM core satellite passed over the Northwestern Pacific Ocean, it saw very heavy rainfall occurring in one part of Tropical Storm Prapiroon. Tropical Depression 09W was located east of the Philippines when it was upgraded early today, June 29, to Tropical Storm Prapiroon. The tropical storm is in a favorable environment for intensification. ...

A volcano in Ecuador with a deep cylindrical crater might be the largest musical instrument on Earth, producing unique sounds scientists could use to predict its eruption, said a new study. New infrasound recordings of Cotopaxi volcano in central Ecuador witnessed eruptions in 2015 and its crater changed shape. Now the deep narrow crater makes air to reverberate against the ...

Variability in El Niño cycles was long considered a reliable tool for predicting winter precipitation in the Southwest United States, but its forecasting power has diminished considerably over the years. Scientists at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) have found a new link to predict wet or dry conditions for the winter far ahead. “Influences between the hemispheres promise earlier and ...

Meteorologists have long known for wrong rainfall forecasts but now researchers from the University of Missouri have developed a system that improves the precision of forecasts by accounting for evaporation in rainfall estimates, particularly for locations 30 miles or more from the nearest National Weather Service radar. “Right now, forecasts are generally not accounting for what happens to a raindrop ...

Tropical Storm Maliksi formed in the Philippine Sea, off the northeastern coast of the Philippines as NASA’s Aqua satellite passed overhead. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer or MODIS instrument aboard Aqua captured an image of the storm on June 8 that showed the circulation center over open waters of the Philippine Sea. Bands of thunderstorms circling the center extended over ...

The Karnataka Coomon Entrance Test 2018 has withdrawn the proposed schedule dates for verification of documents for admission to engineering and allied courses in the state. The new schedule will be announced on its official website, said Karnataka Examinations Authority (KEA) in a statement. “Schedule published for commencement of verification of documents at all the helpline centres from 7-06-2018 for ...