We don't have a lot of evidence and concrete data about dark matter but we know that it makes up much of our universe, so how can we even study something that cannot be perceived let alone manipulated? Well, it appears that scientists have found a way to observe dark matter with the help of the stars.

Scientists have found evidence that dark matter can be heated up and moved around, as a result of star formation in galaxies. The findings provide the first observational evidence for the effect known as 'dark matter heating', and give new clues as to what makes up dark matter. The research is published today in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

In the new work, scientists from the University of Surrey, Carnegie Mellon University and ETH Zürich set out to hunt for evidence for dark matter at the centres of nearby dwarf galaxies. Dwarf galaxies are small, faint galaxies that are typically found orbiting larger galaxies like our own Milky Way. They may hold clues that could help us to better understand the nature of dark matter.

(Image credit: J. Read et al./Phys.org)

A recent discovery was made in Mexico where archaeologists dug up a pre-Aztec temple of the "flayed god" called Xipe Totec.

Items relating to the deity were discovered at a site in Puebla state, and believed to date from 900-1150 AD. Mexican archaeologists say the find may be the earliest dedication to Xipe Tótec discovered in Mexico.

Worship of the God, who represents fertility and regeneration, is known to have later spread throughout Mesoamerica during Aztec times.

Read more on The BBC.

(Image credit: Meliton Tapia INAH via BBC)

As much as pollution has contaminated our oceans, it would be surprising to find that there are still parts of the deep blue that sit untouched.

Some 700 years ago, before mankind began pumping carbon into the atmosphere and warming the climate, the Earth chilled in a centuries-long cooling event called the Little Ice Age.

Today, new research finds, the depths of the Pacific still hold memories of this colder time. Just over a mile (2 kilometers) down, the Pacific Ocean is getting a tad cooler as waters that were last at the surface during the Little Ice Age are only just now mixing with deeper, warmer waters.

More on Live Science.

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We know that hummingbirds use their long, slender, tube-like beaks to sip the nectar from flowers and that's why they are structured in that way. They can feed as much as six times in an hour so as to sustain their active lifestyle. However, a new research suggests that their beaks may be capable of a more offensive feature than we would expect.

Hummingbird beaks are also used to snatch insects and for self-defense, but their primary purpose is for nectar feeding—or so we thought. New research published today in Integrative Organismal Biology shows that males of some tropical hummingbird species from South America have beaks more suited to fencing, poking, and pinching behaviors.

Ornithologist Alejandro Rico-Guevara, the lead author of the study and a professor at UC Berkeley, said these appendages are used by male hummingbirds to fight off other males, which they do to gain access to food resources and females.

(Image credit: Cristian Irlan/Finca El Colibri Gorriazul via Gizmodo)

Though it looks like any old natural geological structure standing high above the ground, much like the rock formations in the Grand Canyon or other places, it is actually a 3,400-year-old ziggurat built during the time of King Kurigalzu of the Kassite Dynasty.

The structure was originally a ziggurat standing some 60 meters tall with a foundation about 70 meters square. What remains today is the core; the rest was destroyed along with the city of Dur-Kurigalzu that was invaded by the Elamites in the 12th century BC.

(Image credit: Wikimedia Commons)

When you are at work, at school, or maybe while you are outside, it gets annoying when you feel the need to pee but can't find a toilet anywhere. Or maybe you are suffering from an overactive bladder which induces you to constantly go to the bathroom and you just don't want to deal with the interruptions in your schedule. It seems researchers may have found a possible solution to rein in your bladder.

A new soft, wireless implant may someday help people who suffer from overactive bladder get through the day with fewer bathroom breaks.

The implant harnesses a technique for controlling cells with light, known as optogenetics, to regulate nerve cells in the bladder. In experiments in rats with medication-induced overactive bladders, the device alleviated animals’ frequent need to pee, researchers report online January 2 in Nature.

Although optogenetics has traditionally been used for manipulating brain cells to study how the mind works, the new implant is part of a recent push to use the technique to tame nerve cells throughout the body. Similar optogenetic implants could help treat disease and dysfunction in other organs, too.

Read more on Science News.

(Image credit: Sang Min Won/Science News)

How was it possible for the Nazis to have claimed the lives of six million Jews during the Holocaust? A study be Lewi Stone of Tel Aviv University in Israel and RMIT University in Australia, shows that a quarter of those deaths happened in a period of three months. And it was all made possible by Nazi infrastructure with the sole purpose of killing Jews.

The Holocaust was made possible in large part through the astonishing Nazi infrastructure dedicated to Jewish murder. The German national railway, known as the Reichsbahn, "employed almost half a million civil servants and 900,000 workers, who were made available for the job," Stone says. These train systems were enhanced through new technology supplied by Dehomag, a German subsidiary of IBM. Using punch card technology originally designed for census-taking, the Nazi infrastructure of death was able to take on an infamous efficiency.

Read more on Popular Mechanics.

(Image credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Despite its name, brown dwarfs aren't exactly brown neither are they that small either. They are celestial objects with features similar to stars and planets but not really belonging to either class. Rather they are an entity of their own.

It sounds like the start of a really bad riddle: "I'm bigger than a planet, but I'm not a star. And I'm smaller than a star, but I'm not a planet. Who am I?"

But instead of a cheesy brain-teaser, this is actually an entry point into exploring just how astronomers classify the exotic objects of our universe. It's also an opportunity to understand some of the weirdest citizens of the Milky Way.

The answer to the riddle, by the way, is "I'm a brown dwarf."

(Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech via Space)

With the advent of space and satellite technology, we were able to see, not just outer space in a whole new light, but even the world we live in, looking at it from a wider perspective. Using this technology, we are now able to see and piece together various information, one being archaeological data regarding sites and places that existed long ago but have since been destroyed.

Scientists are using the satellites' decades-old photos of the Middle East to reconstruct archaeological sites that disappeared many years ago, erased by urbanization, agricultural expansion and industrial growth, researchers reported in December at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU).

By comparing these "spy" images to more-recent satellite photos, scientists can track settlements and historically important sites that have since been obscured or destroyed, the researchers explained at AGU.

(Image credit: Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies/University of Arkansas via Live Science)

Though we have a long-held belief that genes hold the blueprint of our functions, traits, and other developmental variables that would predict how we look, think, or act, this concept has been contested long ago but had not been given serious attention until recently.

It appears that the genes don't have a mind of their own. Sure, they provide a template for what would become proteins and other information needed to construct our physiology, but they are more like databases than autonomous agents giving out instructions to cells. Actually, it's the other way around. Our cells are the ones manipulating these genes to construct us.

Ken Richardson of Nautilus shares in detail this revelation that has come to light and is being given more attention now than ever before.

(Image credit: Hal Gatewood/Unsplash)

A new discovery has given hope that melanoma cells can be monitored by memory T cells and effectively "put the cancer to sleep." The researchers say that the cancer cells would not be destroyed but they are simply patrolled by the T cells so as to restrict activity and reproduction.

In research published on Tuesday in the prestigious Nature journal, researchers from Melbourne’s Peter Doherty Institute and Telethon Kids Institute revealed they had discovered that the T cells had the ability to halt the growth of melanoma cells.

The cells were able to control the tumour in mice for the life of the animal, which was likely to equate to decades of protection in humans, said the paper’s lead author Simone Park.

The study was conducted through a new system whereby scientists monitored the melanoma cells and T cells under the microscope using flourescent markers. Through that, they were able to observe how T cells worked to keep the cancer cells in check.

The scientists were also able to remove the T cells from mice with dormant melanomas and found that once the cells were gone the tumours were then able to escape or grow, highlighting the importance of the immune cells in controlling the spread of cancer.

(Image credit: Chris Hopkins/The Sydney Morning Herald)

We already know about Tokyo's engineering marvel of a massive, sophisticated underground sewer system that channels floodwater that help protect Tokyo from flooding. Now, we turn to Chicago and how they managed to do something almost similar with the Deep Tunnel.

Though it would have seemed insane in 1980 (or 1880), people do fish in the Chicago River today, and the number of species to be found here has multiplied tenfold in the past four decades.

That’s because Chicago built a second river, an infernal reflection of the first, tracing its course hundreds of feet below ground. On rainy days, this subterranean passage, a conduit that can hold more than 1 billion gallons of wastewater, welcomes a roaring torrent of shit, piss, and oily runoff from the downtown streets.

This is the Deep Tunnel, formally the Tunnel and Reservoir Plan, and it may be the world’s most ambitious and expensive effort to manage urban flooding and water pollution. It is a project, in the visionary tradition of Chicago engineering, to bottle rainstorms.

Read more on Slate.

(Image credit: David Schalliol/Slate)

That is the question posed by Vybarr Cregan-Reid. In his article, he details how our lives are becoming more sedentary and exercise is simply one of the tasks in the long list of things that we need to do every day. And one of the reasons why we tend to set it aside is the fact that our obligations to other people take more precedence and so we don't mind putting it off.

We would also rather engage in more leisurely and less physically strenuous activities after a regular working day so exercise doesn't really have as much a priority today. Even ordinary physical chores and tasks which were more common a century ago have been easily replaced through various means that make our lives more convenient.

Read more on The Guardian.

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Though we have been conducting examinations upon the human body since the time of the ancient Romans, surgeries were only recorded during the Medieval period. One such example is the image of the Wound Man which depicts the various injuries with which a person may be inflicted whether in war, an accident, or disease.

That corporeal fragility and the lengths to which intrepid (and otherwise) surgeons throughout human history have gone to address it via novel, absurd, and often downright terrifying surgical interventions is the subject of Dutch surgeon Arnold van der Laar’s new book, Under the Knife: A History of Surgery in 28 Remarkable Operations.

The Wound Man appears therein, alongside a colorful cast of characters hovering on and around the operating table. We see superstar surgeon Robert Liston at work, and learn about the medical troubles of Queen Victoria, Harry Houdini, Vladimir Lenin, a smattering of popes, and the Sun King himself, Louis XIV, who became the proud (and very public) recipient of France’s first successful anal fistula removal.

Van der Laar outlines numerous bloody miracles and missteps while also taking care to explain the science and methodology behind the operations themselves; he is a surgeon, after all, and attention to detail is kind of their thing nowadays.

Read more on Gizmodo.

(Image credit: Digitale Sammlungen)

The Earth, as it stands today, is around 4.5 billion years old and much of the geological landscape would give us clues and evidence that could support this.

The Grand Canyon is a gigantic geological library, with rocky layers that tell much of the story of Earth’s history. Curiously though, a sizeable layer representing anywhere from 250 million years to 1.2 billion years is missing.

Known as the Great Unconformity, this massive temporal gap can be found not just in this famous crevasse, but in places all over the world. In one layer, you have the Cambrian period, which started roughly 540 million years ago and left behind sedimentary rocks packed with the fossils of complex, multicellular life. Directly below, you have fossil-free crystalline basement rock, which formed about a billion or more years ago.

So what happened in between those two time periods that seemingly has disappeared from history?

Using multiple lines of evidence, an international team of geoscientists reckons that the thief was Snowball Earth, a hypothesized time when much, if not all, of the planet was covered in ice.

Read more on National Geographic.

(Image credit: Matt Palmer/Unsplash)