Science

The Perseid meteor shower is here again, and the 2016 cosmic display may be one of the best shows in recent history, according NASA. The Perseids will be in “outburst” mode this month, which means they’ll appear at double the normal rates. Forecasters expect the outburst to be double normal rates on the nights of August 11 and 12. Instead …

The green jewel beetle known as emerald ash borer has arrived in Philadelphia. This half-inch-long insect had destroyed over 100 million ash trees in Detroit in 2002. Currently, it is spotted in Philadelphia and threatens the ash trees of the city. The Emerald Ash Borer is responsible for the destruction of tens of millions of ash trees in 27 states. …

Researchers have discovered a brand-new, bright-blue fire tornado that behaves unlike any flame ever created. The blue fire was given the name “blue whirl” by researchers at the University of Maryland’s A. James Clark School of Engineering that discovered it. Researchers said this previously unobserved flame phenomenon evolves from typical yellow fire whirls, but are smaller, very stable and completely …

Researchers have uncovered what may be the largest royal tomb found in more than a century of work on Maya ruins in Belize. Archaeologists working in Belize have been digging through the remains of the city of Xunantunich, a ceremonial and administration centre on the Mopan river which controlled parts of western Belize around 700AD. They recently discovered a royal …

Scientists have found the oldest evidence of the hunting activities of early humans by extracting proteins from Stone Age tools that are 250,000 years old. A study in the Journal of Archaeological Science has found firm evidence that hominins used tools to butcher and prepare animals for eating as long as 250,000 years ago, or at least 50,000 years before …

Vienna Zoo is celebrating the birth of a rare giant panda, The baby bear was born Sunday to mother Yang Yang and father Long Hui. It’s their fourth cub, after Fu Long, Fu Hu and Fu Bao. The ten-centimetre-long baby panda was born around 5am on Sunday morning and was captured on camera being licked clean and cradled by the …

Scientists at the MDI Biological Laboratory are studying the genetics of the lower organisms, which retain the ability to regenerate form and function of almost any tissue after injury, to find out how regenerative mechanisms might be activated in humans. The ability of animals to regenerate body parts has fascinated scientists since the time of Aristotle. But until the advent …

A killer whale nicknamed “Granny” that was born a year before the Titanic sank and is thought to be the oldest in the world has been spotted off the coast of Washington state in the Pacific Ocean. Heather MacIntyre of the Orca Network photographed Granny and other orcas last week near False Bay in the San Juan Islands of Washington. …

You may have heard of plans to use drones for delivering packages, monitoring wildlife, or tracking storms. But painting murals? That’s the idea behind a project in Paul Kry’s laboratory at McGill University’s School of Computer Science. Prof. Kry and a few of his students have teamed up to program tiny drones to create dot drawings – an artistic technique …

Scientists have found that whales’ ultrasonic hearing has an ancient history. Their high-frequency hearing abilities arose earlier than anticipated. Morgan Churchill of New York Institute of Technology in Old Westbury, New York, said that the high-frequency hearing of whales may have preceded the emergence of echolocation. The inner-ear fossil, estimated at 24 to 27 million years of age and uncovered …

Researchers have just identified what might just be the most surreal thing to emerge from the ice: the remnants of a covert U.S. Army base teeming with radioactive waste, abandoned decades ago in northwestern Greenland. A lot of messy stuff threatens to be exposed as the ice disappears, including some 200,000 litres of diesel fuel, 240,000 litres of sewage and …