In further proof that monkeys are much like people and that we can learn a lot about the development of the human brain through them, a study recently carried out by Harvard Medical School has shown that not only can monkeys do maths, they also make the same little mistakes as we do. The findings have been published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Neurobiologist Professor Marg ...

When thinking of a birds’ nest, the image that usually springs to mind is a wonderful concoction of twigs and leaves, magically woven together and resting between the branches of a leafy tree. However, there are actually many different kinds of nest, made from a huge variety of materials.They can range from a shallow ditch scratched into the ground (known as a scrape) to a pendant nest, which resembles a ha ...

Tian Tian resides at Edinburgh Zoo and is the only female panda in the UK, but it seems she is feeling the pressure because for the third year in a row she has failed to mate with her male companion, Yang Guang. But it’s nothing to worry about because she has been given a helping hand - with artificial insemination. According to the RZSS (Royal Zoological Society of Scotland), the timing of Tian Tian’s horm ...

Most of us have been there: loving a pet like family, because that is what they become to us, and then suffering through the devastation of them passing away. But what if, when that animal leaves this world, we could have it back? What if we could start over with an identical cat or dog or canary, a clone of the original? Cloning our pets is not as far off as you might think! A company from Seoul in South K ...

It has only been four years since the first ever synthetic chromosome for bacteria was created in a lab by Dr Craig Venter, who has managed to built it out of chemicals, assembled inside yeast. Today, yeast has played another important role in the play known as genetic engineering, as scientists unveil the first ever synthetic yeast chromosome, marking another huge moment in history. Although bacterial chro ...

In our solar system, beyond Pluto, is a theoretical area of space known as the Oort Cloud. A recent discovery a shown that in this ‘hypothetical’ region of space dwells a small, pink frozen planet 3.5% the size of Earth. ‘2012 VP113’, better known as VP or Biden after the US vice-president, hasn’t been properly named yet, but is the second planet to be officially discovered in the Oort Cloud, after Sedna wa ...

“Imagine having a chair where you can sit on it for a long time and it remodels to support areas of stress.” This is the dream of Professor Timothy Lu, a synthetic biologist from MIT in the US, who has created some living biofilms that could lead to living materials - like a chair that moulds itself to your needs. The living biofilms have been created in a lab at MIT, which is the Massachusetts Institute of ...

Scientists used to think that the human nose was only able to smell around 10,000 different odours. But now, according to scientists from Rockefeller University in New York, the human nose is actually capable of smelling a trillion different scents, and they have posted their findings in the journal Science. The ear is able to hear almost 500,000 different tones, while the average human eye can see around 1 ...

US paleontologists have announced the discovery of a completely new dinosaur, nicknamed the “Chicken from Hell” because of how it would have looked in life, and have published their findings in the journal PLOS ONE. The Anzu wyliei was so named after a bird-like demon Anzu from Mesopotamian folklore who was thought to be capable of breathing fire and water, and Wylie who was the grandson of a museum trustee ...

The Big Bang Theory has always been just that: a theory, though a highly educated one that was just supremely difficult to substantiate. But that might now have changed… The simple science behind the theory is that the universe was once very small, miniscule even, and very hot. Suddenly, about 14 million years ago, it started rapidly expanding (imagine a billowing smoke cloud when something explodes, hence ...