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Archaeologists have uncovered evidence that there were hundreds of villages in the rainforest away from major rivers, and they were home to different communities speaking varied languages who had an impact on the environment around them. Archaeologists from the University of Exeter found the remains of fortified villages and mysterious earthworks called geoglyphs – man-made ditches with strange square, circular or hexagonal shapes. Experts still don’t know the purpose of these earthworks, as some show no evidence of being occupied....

Scientists measure precise proton radius to help resolve decade-old puzzle, resulting in York University research that confirms protons are smaller than expected. York University researchers have made a precise measurement of the size of the proton – a crucial step towards solving a mystery that has preoccupied scientists around the world for the past decade. Scientists thought they knew the size of the proton, but that changed in 2010 when a team of physicists measured the proton-radius value to be four percent smaller than expected, which confused the scientific community....

The scientific community has largely assumed that planets covered in a deep ocean would not support the cycling of minerals and gases that keeps the climate stable on Earth, and thus wouldn’t be friendly to life. But the study, published August 30 in The Astrophysical Journal, found that ocean planets could stay in the “sweet spot” for habitability much longer than previously assumed. The authors based their findings on more than a thousand simulations....

It’s very difficult to kick a star out of the galaxy. In fact, the primary mechanism that astronomers have come up with that can give a star the two-million-plus mile-per-hour kick it takes requires a close encounter with the supermassive black hole at the galaxy’s core. So far astronomers have found 16 of these “hypervelocity” stars. Although they are traveling fast enough to eventually escape the galaxy’s gravitational grasp, they have been discovered while they are still inside the galaxy....

Brown dwarfs are too small to sustain the hydrogen fusion process that fuels stars and allows them to remain hot and bright for a long time. After formation, brown dwarfs slowly cool down and contract over time—at some point shifting from heavily cloud covered to having completely clear skies. Because they are freely floating in space, the atmospheric properties of brown dwarfs are much easier to study than the atmospheres of exoplanets, where the light of a central star can be completely overwhelming....

Thin, blade-like walls, some as tall as a 16-story building, dominate a previously undocumented network of intersecting ridges on Mars, found in images from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The simplest explanation for these impressive ridges is that lava flowed into pre-existing fractures in the ground and later resisted erosion better than material around them. “Finding these ridges in the Medusae Fossae region set me on a quest to find all the types of polygonal ridges on Mars,” said Laura Kerber of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, lead author of the survey report published this month in the journal Icarus....

Astronomers have now used a single gravitational wave event (GW170817) to measure the age of the universe. CfA astronomers Peter Blanchard, Tarreneh Eftekhari, Victoria Villar, and Peter Williams were members of a team of 1314 scientists from around the world who contributed to the detection of gravitational waves from a merging pair of binary neutron stars, followed by the detection of gamma-rays, and then the identification of the origin of the cataclysm in a source in the galaxy NGC4993 spotted in images taken with various time delays at wavelengths from the X-ray to the radio....

Aging individual stars helped date an early merger event. The best evidence to date into the timing of how our early Milky Way came together, including the merger with a key satellite galaxy has been revealed by new research. Using relatively new methods in astronomy, the scientists were able to identify the most precise ages currently possible for a sample of about a hundred red giant stars in the galaxy. With this and other data, the researchers were able to show what was happening when the Milky Way merged with an orbiting satellite galaxy, known as Gaia-Enceladus, about 10 billion years ago....

Among the 4,200-odd species of animals described by Linnaeus in his book (as well as over 9,000 plant species) was the silky anteater Cyclopes didactylus. Known in Brazil as tamanduaí, or pygmy anteater, it is a cute, shy, small animal with two toes, a short snout, nocturnal habits, and a preference for inhabiting tree crowns, where it feeds solely on ants. It is found in tropical forests in South and Central America, as well as in the few remaining fragments of Atlantic rainforest in Northeast Brazil....

In November, researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine implanted a pacemaker-like device into the brain of a patient in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. This device provides deep brain stimulation and has been used in thousands of people with Parkinson’s disease. It is seen as a possible way of boosting memory and reversing cognitive decline. The surgery marks a new direction in clinical research and it’s designed to slow or halt the ravages of Alzheimer’s....

According to new research, more mystical and insightful psychedelic drug experiences may be linked to an enduring reduction in anxiety and depression symptoms. Researchers conducted a machine learning analysis of data from nearly 1,000 respondents to a survey about their previous non-clinical experiences with psychedelic drugs. The analysis suggests that individuals who scored the highest on questionnaires assessing the mystical and insightful nature of their experiences consistently reported improvements in their anxiety and depression symptoms....

Increasing breathlessness and claustrophobia reported at higher exercise intensities. A cloth face covering reduces exercise performance and physical capacity, reveals the results of a small clinical trial, published online in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. Wearers also reported increasing shortness of breath and claustrophobia at higher exercise intensities, prompting the researchers to suggest modifying the frequency, intensity, duration and type of exercise done when wearing a cloth face mask....

As growing numbers of people are using cannabis to treat post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a new University College London study reports that prescriptions are not backed up by adequate evidence. The systematic review, published in the Journal of Dual Diagnosis, finds that the active components of cannabis, called cannabinoids, may hold promise as a treatment for PTSD, particularly for reducing nightmares and helping people sleep, but more research is needed to determine whether these drugs should be used in routine clinical practice....

The ants were discovered in 2013 thanks to a yearly campaign set to count hibernating bats in the same bunker. The scientific report was published in 2016 and also in the Journal of Hymenoptera Research. At that time, the scientists estimated the presence of at least several hundred thousand workers, arguably close to a million. The insects ended up in this situation as a result of large numbers of wood ants continuously falling down a ventilation pipe to never return to their nest on top of the bunker....

The WHO announced this in a bulletin. Analysis of the deceased patient is still ongoing. The new coronavirus is worrisome because it’s related to SARS. On November 13, the UK’s Health Protection Agency announced that it had achieved a complete genome of the virus obtained in London. It’s closely related to a coronavirus isolated from bats in the Netherlands several years ago. The WHO statement doesn’t give ages, genders of places of residence for the new cases, and it says nothing about the way that they were infected....

The night side of Mimas is gently illuminated by “Saturnshine,” sunlight reflected from the planet’s cloud tops. Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to create this natural color view, taken at a distance of approximately 1.7 million miles (2.7 million kilometers) from Saturn. The Cassini spacecraft ended its mission on September 15, 2017 The Cassini mission is a cooperative project of NASA, ESA (the European Space Agency) and the Italian Space Agency....

The question that remained unanswered was whether this increase in fires in 2019-2020 was an exceptional case or a trend that will get worse as the Arctic warms. Now, a new study published in Science and led by Adrià Descals and Josep Peñuelas, both scientists from the Spanish Council for Scientific Research (CSIC) and from CREAF, shows that the increase in temperature is driving an exponential increase in fires in the Arctic....

Scientists have proposed that the missing mass could be hidden in gigantic strands or filaments of warm (temperature less than 100,000 Kelvin) and hot (temperature greater than 100,000 K) gas in intergalactic space. These filaments are known by astronomers as the “warm-hot intergalactic medium” or WHIM. They are invisible to optical light telescopes, but some of the warm gas in filaments has been detected in ultraviolet light. The main part of this graphic is from the Millennium simulation, which uses supercomputers to formulate how the key components of the Universe, including the WHIM, would have evolved over cosmic time....

These páramos play a crucial role in maintaining a reliable water supply for millions of people in Bogotá and Medellín. And along with the forests below, they also protect the cities from flooding. Colombia’s second rainy season of the year began in September. Some parts of the country have had little respite from the deluge. Scientists believe that climate change is a factor in the flooding, and it has affected three-quarters of Colombia in the past two years....

Colchicine, a cheap drug normally used to treat gout, helps to cut the need for oxygen therapy and hospital stay in COVID-19 patients, reveal the results of a small clinical trial, published in the online journal RMD Open. The findings prompt the Brazilian researchers to suggest that although it’s not possible to confirm whether colchicine can alter the risk of death, it may nevertheless be worth adding it to standard treatment for hospital patients with moderate to severe COVID-19 infection....