Apple has officially pushed into the fitness industry with its new Fitness+ streaming service set to launch December 14, but the tech giant is taking it to the next level by adding workout gear to its online store. The lineup includes yoga accessories, including a mat that costs $120, a smart bike helmet for $250 … Read more
A small dragon-like species of wingless reptile that lived 237 million years ago has been identified as one of the earliest ancestors of pterosaurs in a new study. Similarities between fossils of the so-called lagerpetids, which were wingless but had characteristically long hind-legs, and winged pterosaurs were revealed in CT scans. Although one could fly and the other … Read more
The world will soon consist of more ‘stuff’ made by humans than it does living things, according to new research. It reveals the world’s biomass in 2020 is likely to be exceeded by the cumulative amount of concrete, bricks, metals and other materials people have manufactured. Human-generated mass is expected to exceed 3 teratonnes by … Read more
Scientists say they’ve found a previously unknown whale species – a ‘one tonne’ mammal the size of a horse and may have been on the planet as long as humans. Three specimens of the as-yet-unnamed species, a type of beaked whale, were seen in waters near the San Benito Islands off the coast of Mexico. … Read more
The remains of a two-year-old Neanderthal who died some 41,000 years ago had been lain carefully in a grave that was covered with fresh soil, a study has concluded. The poor child’s skeleton was unearthed in 1973 from a rock shelter at the La Ferrassie dig site in Savignac-de-Miremont, Dordogne, southwest France. Researchers from France re-examined the … Read more
Light pollution is a ‘blight on the night sky’ that is obscuring our view of the stars and should be controlled for the sake of future generations, a group of MPs claim. An influential cross-party coalition of MPs and Peers have set out ‘ten dark sky policies’ they say the government should introduce to tackle … Read more
People of the Indus Valley civilisation who lived in what is now north-west India 4,000 years ago had a meat-heavy diet, new research indicates Analysis of pottery from the era reveals a preponderance of animal products, including pig, cattle, buffalo and goat meat as well as dairy. Scientists say people living in rural and urban sites … Read more
Google has launched a new smartphone app for people with speech and motor impairments that lets them use their eyes to select phrases on the screen. The new app, called Look to Speak, tracks the user’s eye movement to narrow down the desired phrase from a list, which is then spoken aloud by an automated … Read more
Dogs struggle to detect differences between similar-sounding words like ‘dog’ and ‘dig’, according to a new study. Hungarian scientists put electrodes on doggies’ heads to measure signs of recognition from brain activity as they listened to various spoken words. The dogs listened to known words (like ‘sit’), similar but nonsense words (‘sut’) and very different … Read more
Charles Darwin (1809-1882) Charles Robert Darwin was born in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, the fifth of six children of wealthy and well-connected parents. One of his grandfathers was Erasmus Darwin, a doctor whose book ‘Zoonomia’ had set out a radical and highly controversial idea, that one species could ‘transmute’ into another. Transmutation is what evolution was then … Read more