science wire

It has a parrot-like beak, bones in its skin and an inner ear similar to a turtle. Meet Kunbarrasaurus, Australia's newest dinosaur. The skeleton of Kunbarrasaurus (koon-ba-rah-sore-rus) was discovered in 1989, but new research from a team led by University of Queensland experts has revealed the dinosaur is a distinctly different species than previously thought.

Hundreds of students, faculty and community members braved a foggy, rainy night Dec. 2 for a behind-the-scenes look at the New Horizons mission to Pluto, given by mission scientists Cathy Olkin and Ann Harch in the Schwartz Auditorium in Rockefeller Hall.

Excavation of two quarries in Wales by a UCL-led team of archaeologists and geologists has confirmed they are sources of Stonehenge's 'bluestones'- and shed light on how they were quarried and transported.

A new algorithm designed to find matching seismic signals in large earthquake databases could find previously missed microquakes. By Ker Than An algorithm inspired by a popular song-matching app is helping Stanford scientists find previously overlooked earthquakes in large databases of ground motion measurements.

Bacteria living in shallow sediment layers of permanently flooded wetlands in Asia drive arsenic release into water by feeding on freshly deposited plant material, a new study finds. Groundwater in South and Southeast Asia commonly contains concentrations of arsenic 20 to 100 times greater than the World Health Organization's recommended limit, resulting in more than 100 million people being poisoned by drinking arsenic-laced water in Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Myanmar, Vietnam and China.

For Judy Matthews , the Gardiner Expressway is "like our Berlin Wall, to be taken down psychologically and re-invented in a way that makes it a place for people.

Academics from the University of Bristol Cabot Institute are representing the University at the Conference of Parties (COP21), the United Nations climate change conference in Paris.

Prof Chris MacLeod leads team on a cruise to the Indian Ocean to drill into the Earth's interior An international team of scientists, co-led by Professor Chris MacLeod from the School of Earth and Oc

David Norman (Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences) discusses the fossil discoveries that really made a difference to science.

A rare fossil from eastern North America of a dog-sized horned dinosaur has been identified by Dr Nick Longrich. The fossil provides evidence of an east-west divide in North American dinosaur evolution. During the Late Cretaceous period, 66-100 million years ago, the land mass that is now North America was split in two continents by a shallow sea, the Western Interior Seaway, which ran from the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic Ocean.

Animations that compress 25 years of satellite images into just one second reveal the complex behaviour and flow of glaciers in the Karakoram mountain range in Asia. Frank Paul, a glaciologist at the University of Zurich in Switzerland, used images from 1990 to 2015 captured by three different Landsat satellites to create timelapse sequences of four regions in the central Karakoram: Baltoro, Panmah, Skamri-Sarpo Laggo and Shaksgam.

Scientists at the University of Melbourne's Oral Health Cooperative Research Centre have warned about the damage sugar-free drinks can do to tooth enamel.

The two ExoMars spacecraft of the 2016 mission are being prepared for shipping to the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan ahead of their launch in March.

An academic from Cardiff University's School of Planning and Geography will today (24 Nov) present her research to a cross-party group of Westminster MPs and peers looking at the issue of breastfeeding in the UK.

The intensity of Earth's geomagnetic field has been dropping for the past 200 years, at a rate that some scientists suspect may cause the field to bottom out in 2,000 years, temporarily leaving the planet unprotected against damaging charged particles from the sun.

The climatic and environmental effects of lava flows and sulfur emissions that lasted for years or decades in earth's past were likely much less severe than scientists once thought, according to a new study by scientists in Europe and the United States.

One of the thorniest questions in economic development is why sub-Saharan Africa is home to most of the world's extreme poor, who suffer from persistent, grinding poverty that can last for generations.

ESA Space in Images Title On the rim of Schiaparelli crater Released 23/11/2015 10:13 am Copyright ESA/DLR/FU Berlin, CC BY-SA 3.

The University of Bristol has been awarded the Queen's Anniversary Prize for Higher Education - the highest accolade for any academic institution - in recognition of its world-leading research in volcanology.

Siobhan Brandman '17, visiting scholar Jeffrey Guyton and Caochangdi Workstation members Wang Haian and Zhang Mengqi, work on a scene during the group's September visit to campus.

Gardner Marsh at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Arboretum is pictured in a view from a helicopter in October 2011.

The Puget Sound watershed - the area west of the Cascades Mountains that stretches from the state capitol up to the Canadian border - is warming.

Having a purpose in life can make an uphill climb seem like a walk in the park. A Cornell developmental psychologist in an outdoor laboratory has found that people with a sense of purpose are more likely to perceive a steep hill as easier to climb.

Populations of hunter-gatherers weathered Ice Age in apparent isolation in Caucasus mountain region for millennia, later mixing with other ancestral populations, from which emerged the Yamnaya culture that would bring this Caucasus hunter-gatherer lineage to Western Europe.

An Imperial team is carrying out research to help with the clean-up of nuclear waste following the Fukushima nuclear accident in Japan.

We welcome your feedback Please help us improve The University of Manchester website by completing a short questionnaire at the end of your visit.

David Pollard spends his days with numbers. Lots and lots of numbers. Pollard researches how the Earth's ice sheets have changed and evolved, using data on ice extents - the amount of land and ocean that's covered by ice - and sea levels to predict how they'll continue to change in the future.

For the next six weeks, University of Washington scientists will be working with NASA to study precipitation in one of the rainiest parts of the country, during one of its rainiest seasons.

At the University of Melbourne, a rare, eight-carat diamond has been smashed to smithereens in a bid to discover the secrets of its origin and a potential 'mother lode' of diamonds.

ESA Space in Images Title Isolation ends Released 06/11/2015 10:35 am Copyright ESA/IPEV/PNRA-B.

The anticipated melting of the massive West Antarctic Ice Sheet could be slowed by two big factors that are largely overlooked in current computer models, according to a new study. The findings suggest that the impact on global sea levels from the retreating ice sheet could be less drastic - or at least more gradual - than recent computer simulations have indicated.

Scientists at King's College London have received funding from the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) to use drones to measure how Indonesian wildfires made worse by El Niño affect the atmosphere.

Scientists have unraveled the complex ocean and atmospheric behaviour that caused rapid seesawing of the global climate coming out of the most recent ice age. An international team of climate researchers studied the abrupt changes to the global climate 14,700 years ago that caused Antarctica to suddenly stop warming and cool down for around 1,500 years, while the Northern Hemisphere warmed rapidly.

ESA Space in Images Title Destination: Venus Released 09/11/2015 11:28 am Copyright ESA/VIRTIS-Venus Express/INAF-IAPS/LESIA-Obs.

The University of Nottingham has used a drone to survey a 200-million-year-old red sandstone pillar in Nottinghamshire to determine if it was made by prehistoric humans or is a natural feature.

Perhaps you have heard the adage "think globally, act locally." An MIT-led project taking that idea to heart has demonstrated a new method for getting local citizens and leaders to agree on the best ways of managing the immediate and long-term effects of climate change.

Scientists at the University of Birmingham have discovered that there is a sharp reduction in visibility caused by fireworks and bonfires on Guy Fawkes' night.

Nina Lanza was selected as one of eight members for the 2015-2016 field campaign of the Antarctica Search for Meteorites (ANSMET) program. Los Alamos scientist part of NASA's select few LOS ALAMOS, N.M. Nov. 3, 2015-Nina Lanza, of Los Alamos National Laboratory's Space and Remote Sensing group, was selected as one of eight members for the 2015-2016 field campaign of the Antarctica Search for Meteorites (ANSMET) program, which is supported by NASA.

A large team of scientists has nearly completed the first map of the mantle under the tectonic plate that is colliding with the Pacific Northwest and putting Seattle, Portland and Vancouver at risk of the largest earthquakes and tsunamis in the world.

Archaeologists from the UK working in the Channel Island of Jersey have found the remains of a 14,000 year old hunter-gatherer settlement offering great views over landscapes now drowned by the English Channel. The site, called Les Varines, is located in the Jersey parish of St Saviour and has produced over 5,000 scattered stone artefacts during the past five years of excavation, but in the summer of 2015 the team unearthed denser concentrations of tools and burnt bone and, for the first time, fragments of engraved stone.

Experts from The University of Manchester are working to understand the significance of the finds, on Jersey, which could represent some of the first hunter-gatherer communities Archaeologists from t

By Claire Daly Harry Glicklich first set foot on the Appalachian Trail at summer camp almost 10 years ago.

ESA Space in Images Title Manicouagan Crater, Canada Released 30/10/2015 10:00 am Copyright Copernicus Sentinel data (2015)/ESA Description This false-colour image featuring the Manicouagan Crater was captured by the Sentinel-1A satellite on 21 March.

A billion billion, i.e. 10 18 computer operations per second is the level of performance that the next generation of supercomputers should be able to deliver.

Even fish look forward to retirement. After making an exhausting migration from river to ocean and back to river - often multiple years in a row - one species of Alaskan trout decides to call it quits and retire from migrating once they are big enough to survive off their fat reserves.

Professor Simon Redfern (Department of Earth Sciences) discusses the devastating earthquake that struck Afghanistan on October 26 and the geological triggers that caused it.

The Alpine-Himalayan belt, which stretches from the Mediterranean to the Pacific, is one of the world's most seismically active regions.

ESA Space in Images Title Mexico city Released 23/10/2015 10:00 am Copyright Copernicus Sentinel data (2015)/ESA Description This natural-colour Sentinel-2A image features Mexico City and surroundings.