Researchers discover 12,000-year-old flutes made from bird bones

A team of researchers, including a Virginia Commonwealth University professor, has discovered rare prehistoric instruments made from the bones of birds dating back more than 12,000 years, according to findings published Friday ...

Scientists make advances in breeding high-resistant-starch rice

Scientists have shown that the loss of function of two paralogous starch biosynthetic genes contributes to an increase in resistant starch (RS) content in cooked rice, providing insights into the generation of high-RS varieties ...

Finding microbes rarer than a ticket to the moon

You are more likely to take a trip to the Moon than to see a microbe called Legendrea loyezae under a microscope. Nasa's Apollo program has sent a total of 24 people to the Moon between 1968 and 1972. Only four people (including ...

The genetic origins of the world's first farmers clarified

The genetic origins of the first agriculturalists in the Neolithic period long seemed to lie in the Near East. A new study published in the journal Cell shows that the first farmers actually represented a mixture of Ice Age ...

X-ray imaging of beetles in ancient Japanese earthenware

Using X-rays, Professor Hiroki Obata of Kumamoto University, Japan has imaged 28 impressions of maize weevils on pottery shards from the late Jomon period (around 3,600 years ago) excavated from the Yakushoden site in Miyazaki ...

Oldest relative of ragworms and earthworms discovered

Scientists have discovered the oldest fossil that can be assigned to the living annelid worms, the group of animals that contains earthworms, leeches and many different forms in the ocean including polychaetes (such as ragworms ...

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