News Article

By Mada Masr The newly formed Cabinet is planning a campaign to combat atheism, according to an official statement released Wednesday. Neamat Saty, the Youth Ministry’s director of civic education, would work with Ahmed Turky, the head of the Endowment Ministry’s mosques management unit, and a team of psychiatrists to form a national strategy to …

By Bill Nye   Every one of us has wondered if we’re alone in the universe. Are there living things elsewhere? Is the Earth the only place we’ll ever know that has life? That’s the question posed by this month’s cover story in National Geographic. It’s one I think we can answer, and maybe sooner than you think. …

By Jane J. Lee   When monarch butterflies wing their way south to central Mexico each fall, they use the sun to ensure that they stay on course. But how they head in the right direction on cloudy days has been a mystery—until now. It turns out they use Earth’s magnetic field as a kind of backup …

By BBC   The White House has set up a taskforce to tackle the decline of honey bees. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the agriculture department will lead the effort, which includes $8m (£4.7m) for new honey bee habitats. Bee populations saw a 23% decline last winter, a trend blamed on the loss of …

By Mark Kinver   China’s scarce water supply is being wasted as crops grown in water-stressed provinces are exported to wet, rainfall-rich areas, a study reports. Farming accounts for about 65% of water use in China and the limited resource is coming under pressure from rapid urbanisation and industrialisation. Officials have called the nation’s water …

By Helen Briggs   Smartphones reflect the personal microbial world of their owners, say US scientists. More than 80% of the common bacteria that make up our personal bacterial “fingerprints” end up on their screens, a study suggests. Personal possessions, such as phones, might be useful for tracking the spread of bacteria, they report in PeerJ. …

By Science Alert Staff   New data reveals that Germany broke a record at the start of June by generating half its energy from solar power, demonstrating the country’s impressive renewable energy capabilities. Research from the Fraunhofer ISE research institute showed that German solar panels generated a record 24.24 GW of electricity between 1pm and …

By Science Alert Staff The object is scientifically known as a “transient feature” but astronomers have playfully dubbed it the “magic island”. This could be the first time dynamic geological processes have been observed in Titan’s northern hemisphere. The research is published in Nature Geoscience. “This discovery tells us that the liquids in Titan’s northern hemisphere are …

By Michael McCullough Few categories of human rights violations more deeply scandalize the liberal (with a little-L) moral sensibility than honor killings do. Reliable numbers are hard to come by, but by most credible accounts it seems likely that several thousand Muslim women each year (and more than a few men) are stoned, burned, hanged, strangled, …

By University of East Anglia   Scientists at the University of East Anglia have made a breakthrough in the race to solve antibiotic resistance. New research published Wednesday in the journal Nature reveals an Achilles’ heel in the defensive barrier which surrounds drug-resistant bacterial cells. The findings pave the way for a new wave of drugs that kill …

By George Dvorsky   In what’s being heralded as a secular triumph, the UK government has banned the teaching of creationism as science in all existing and future academies and free schools. The new clauses, which arrived with very little fanfare last week, state that the… …requirement for every academy and free school to provide a broad …

By David Brunnstrom   Draft laws in Myanmar aimed at protecting the country’s majority Buddhist identity by regulating religious conversions and marriages between people of different faiths have “no place in the 21st century” and should be withdrawn, a U.S. government agency said on Wednesday. The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom said the laws …