Deep in the Congolese jungle is a band of apes that, according to local legend, kill lions, catch fish and even howl at the moon. Local hunters speak of massive creatures that seem to be some sort of hybrid between a chimp and a gorilla. Their location at the centre of one of the bloodiest conflicts on the planet, the civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, has meant that the mystery apes have been little studied by Western scientists.
A mathematical problem that remained unsolved for more than a century has finally been cracked by an international team of 18 scientists. The puzzle, which is so complex that its handwritten proof would cover an area the size of Manhattan, took researchers four years to unravel.
Scientists have developed a test for the early diagnosis of lung cancer. They hope that analysis of the genes that are switched on and off in cells lining the airways leading to the lungs can be used to diagnose patients sooner and make treatments more effective.
A limitless supply of spare organs, hard evidence of aliens and a machine that puts you in the mind of an animal. These are some of the predictions made about the world of 2056 by a batch of the planet’s most prominent scientists, including psychoÂlogist Steven Pinker, philosopher Dan Dennett and astronomer Sir Martin Rees.
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/ 11 December 2006
The richest 1% of adults in the world own 40% of the planet’s wealth, according to the largest study yet of wealth distribution. The report also finds that those in financial services and the internet sectors predominate among the super-rich. Europe, the United States and some Asia Pacific nations account for most of the extremely wealthy.
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/ 1 December 2006
People who use Ecstasy for the first time could suffer impaired memory and harm to their brains, a new study of the dance drug’s effects reveals. Even low doses can cause changes to the brain, according to the first study to compare users before and after they took the drug for the first time. It found blood flow to parts of the brain was reduced and that users struggled in memory tests.
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/ 24 November 2006
It was conceived as the ultimate tribute to human ingenuity and international cooperation — an orbiting space lab that would play host to some of the most talented and highly trained individuals on the planet, doing cutting-edge science. But 20 years and more than -billion later the International Space Station has been reduced to recouping some of its extravagant costs with a commercial stunt.
Scientists have identified perhaps the most crucial genetic region that makes us human. Comparing human DNA with that of chimpanzees and other animals, they have found the region of the genome subject to the strongest natural selection since our common ancestry with chimps.
Robert Bigelow, the Las Vegas property magnate and space entrepreneur, moved a step closer to his dream of opening an orbiting space hotel on Thursday. At around lunchtime he confirmed that a test vehicle launched on Wednesday from Yasny in Russia had reached its target orbit 547km up with a 64° inclination to the equator.
To many he is the greatest scientist who ever lived, but a unique collection of Albert Einstein’s letters and papers has revealed a history of struggle and failure made worse by an apparently shaky grasp of maths. An archive, shows how after securing unprecedented celebrity status with his general theory of relativity in 1916, Einstein suffered years of frustration as he failed to top that with ”a grand theory of everything”.