news 2017

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Nancy Karrels relishes solving the mysteries behind the paintings and objects we see in art museums. Karrels - a doctoral student in art history at the University of Illinois who also has two law degrees - investigates the backgrounds and histories of objects to trace their path from creator through each owner.

A team of international scientists led by the University of Oxford has combined ancient DNA analyses with statistical modelling to pinpoint the timing of the selection for traits associated with modern chickens. They found that medieval Christians who fasted may have played a part in producing less aggressive farm birds.

New research shows that a volcano in northeastern Australia last erupted around 7000 years ago - and stories passed down by the Gugu Badhun Aboriginal people suggest they were there to see it happen. In a paper published in the journal Quaternary Geochronology, geologists based in Scotland and Australia outline how they used a sophisticated rock dating technique to determine when the eruption occurred.

A lot of the older studies only looked at females, but there's men with these scars, so there has to be something else going on. Research from The Australian National University (ANU) has cast doubt on a method used in forensic science to determine whether skeletal remains are of a person who has given birth.

ANN ARBOR'An Ice Age paleontological-turned-archaeological site in San Diego preserves 130,000-year-old bones and teeth of a mastodon that show evidence of modification by early humans. Analysis of these finds dramatically revises the timeline for when humans first reached North America, according to a paper to be published in the April 27 issue of the journal Nature.

Researchers have used data on skeletal remains to calculate how the average height of Englishmen rose or fell over 2,000 years of history. They reasoned that height, which is linked with childhood nutrition, is a good alternative measure of wellbeing and can be estimated accurately from the length of a full grown man's femur.

How did environmental and climatic changes early on in human history influence cultures - and what conclusions can be drawn relative to climate change today? These questions are the subject of a three-week expedition aboard the research vessel METEOR that will take an international team of geoscientists and archaeologists, led by researchers from Heidelberg University, into the eastern Mediterranean.

German-Canadian-Japanese Team of Researchers Published Findings about Okhotsk Culture in PLOS ONE Science Journal ' 062/2017 from Mar 30, 2017 According to a study conducted by paleontologists and archaeologists, the diets of prehistorical and early historical hunter-gatherer societies were more diverse than previously thought.

Archaeologists have helped solve a centuries' old medical mystery which could change the way doctors today view the common condition of prostate stones. An international team of researchers, including experts at Durham University, used neutron beam technology to identify three stone-like objects found during excavations of a prehistoric grave in Central Sudan.

Ancient DNA traces from the family of viruses that cause a rare type of leukaemia have been found in the genomes of bats, filling the "last major gap" in retrovirus fossil record.‌‌‌ The research offers conclusive evidence that these viruses are between 20 and 45 million years old. The findings represent the first concrete piece of evidence that the 'Deltaretrovirus' group has a truly ancient origin in mammals.

An international team of ecologists and social scientists, including french researchers from IRD, Cirad and Inra, has shown in a new study published on 3 March 2017 in the journal Science that tree species domesticated and distributed throughout the Amazon basin by indigenous peoples before 1492 continue to play an important role in modern-day forests.

A new book by Dr Sarah Chaney from Queen Mary University of London charts the delicate and often misunderstood history of self-harm in Britain. Taking the reader from the Victorian era to modern Britain, Psyche on the Skin challenges the idea that self-harm is a phenomenon that can be attributed to 'how we live now'.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — A new study contradicts decades of thought, research and teaching on the history of corn cultivation in the American Bottom, a floodplain of the Mississippi River in Illinois.

Biologists and archaeologists hoping to improve the lives of threatened species rediscover remnants of the facility for petty criminals on Old Page Mill Road. University biologists and archaeologists working to improve the lives of threatened species recently discovered remnants of a long-forgotten jail.

A new, historically accurate portrait of the most admired and revered romantic leading man in literary history, Fitzwilliam Darcy, has been unveiled for the first time, following new research co-led by QMUL's Professor Amanda Vickery. The new portraits paint a very different picture of the literary heartthrob when compared to modern day TV depictions, portrayed by Hollywood actors such as Colin Firth, Elliot Cowan and Matthew MacFadyen.

In a pioneering project, researchers studied the development of school curricula in Switzerland's three main language regions.

New guidelines have been developed that it is hoped will help to progress research into vascular cognitive impairment (VCI) following a study led by academics at the University of Bristol that brought together the views of over 150 researchers in 27 countries. VCI refers to a decline in mental abilities, such as memory, thinking and planning, caused by problems with the blood supply to the brain.

The spread of introduced bird species around the world has mirrored the rise of global power and wealth, according to a new study that has mapped the movement of alien bird species. The international collaborative study found that Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, USA, Caribbean, UK, and Persian Gulf States were notable global hotspots for alien bird species.

What could be learnt about the world if you could read the news from over 100 local newspapers for a period of 150 years? This is what a team of researchers from Cardiff University and the University of Bristol have done using of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to analyse 150 years of British regional newspapers.

A team of scientists from the University of Bristol has suggested that we need to use a fresh approach to analyse relationships in the fossil record to show how all living and extinct species are related in the 'tree of life'. The researchers from the Bristol Palaeobiology Group , part of the School of Earth Sciences , studied the best way to understand relationships of extinct animals to other extinct species as well as those alive today.