Science Glance
One in three Americans doesn't believe in evolution, according to new survey results from the Pew Research Center.
The results, released Monday in report on views about human evolution, show that 33 percent of Americans think "humans and other living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time."
Surprising Number Of Americans Still Don't Believe In Evolution
NASA astronauts begin urgent spacewalking repairs
Astronauts have stepped out on the first of a series of urgent repair spacewalks at the International Space Station.
The two Americans on the crew floated outside Saturday morning. They will disconnect an ammonia pump that contains a bad valve. The breakdown has crippled the space station's critical cooling system for the past 1 1/2 weeks.
The pump replacement is a huge undertaking attempted only once before, in 2010. NASA has ordered up three spacewalks to complete the job. The next one will be Monday.
Life may have originated miles underground
New studies suggest the beginnings of life on this planet could have occurred deep underground, the Independent reports.
Researchers have found microbes up to 3.1 miles below the Earth's surface — tiny organisms that are almost exactly the same on opposite sides of the planet. That points to a possible common ancestor about 3.5 billion years ago, which is when earthly life began, the paper explains.
Astronomers find strange planet orbiting where there shouldn't be one
A team of astronomers led by a U.S. graduate student has discovered a planet that shouldn't be where it is, raising questions about how planetary systems form.
The giant planet orbiting its star at 650 times the average Earth-sun distance if the most distantly orbiting planet found to date around a single, sun-like star, a University of Arizona release said Thursday.
400,000-year-old leg bone gives up oldest human DNA
The discovery of DNA in a 400,000-year-old human thigh bone will open up a new frontier in the study of our ancestors.
That's the verdict cast by human evolution experts on an analysis in Nature journal of the oldest human genetic material ever sequenced.
The femur comes from the famed "Pit of Bones" site in Spain, which gave up the remains of at least 28 ancient people. But the results are perplexing, raising more questions than answers about our increasingly complex family tree.
Researchers Discover the Hot New Technology: Throwing Javelins
iPhones, staplers, aluminum foil. Humans are surrounded and defined by their technologies. We might even say: Technology makes us human.
But that’s not quite true, because we know that other animals employ and deploy tools, too. Primates use twiggy Roto-Rooters to search for bugs. All sorts of creatures make homes for themselves; bowerbirds sculpt fantastical ones.
And now we know it’s not quite true either, historically. New archeological evidence indicates that our ancestors used a certain kind of tool—a “complex tool,” in the parlance of anthropologists—when they were still our ancestors.
That is: They threw spear-tipped javelins, to catch and kill animals.
Scientists witness massive gamma-ray burst, don't understand it
An exploded star some 3.8 billion light-years away is forcing scientists to overhaul much of what they thought they knew about gamma-ray bursts – intense blasts of radiation triggered, in this case, by a star tens of times more massive than the sun that exhausted its nuclear fuel, exploded, then collapsed to form a black hole.
Last April, gamma rays from the blast struck detectors in gamma-ray observatories orbiting Earth, triggering a frenzy of space- and ground-based observations. Many of them fly in the face of explanations researchers have developed during the past 30 years for the processes driving the evolution of a burst from flash to fade out, according to four research papers appearing Friday in the journal Science.
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