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Japanese scientists have awakened the cells of an extinct woolly mammoth in an experiment that could one day bring the prehistoric beasts back to life. Researchers from Kindai University in Osaka extracted bone marrow and muscle tissue from a long-frozen beast and injected it into the ovaries of a mouse, according to a study published Tuesday in the journal Scientific Reports. The experiment revived the 28,000-year-old creature’s cells, triggering “signs of biological activity,” according to the researchers. “[It’s] a significant step towards bringing mammoths back from the dead,” Kei Miyamoto, one of the study’s authors, told the Nikkei Asian Review.

Cells from a woolly mammoth that died 28,000 years ago have begun to show "signs of biological [activity]" after they were implanted in mouse cells. However, researchers caution that it's unlikely the extinct creatures will walk the Earth again anytime soon. The research, published in Scientific Reports, details how a well-preserved woolly mammoth, found in 2011 in the Siberian permafrost, has begun to show some activity. "Until now many studies have focused on analyzing fossil DNA and not whether they still function," Miyamoto added. The study's abstract reveals "[i]n the reconstructed oocytes, the mammoth nuclei showed the spindle assembly, histone...

A global team of scientists have mapped the developmental pathway of a newborn's life for the first time. The research, published in Nature Communications, could transform our understanding of health and disease in babies. Co-led by the MRC Unit The Gambia at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, the new study included lifting the lid on what genes are turned on, what proteins are being made and what metabolites are changing in the first seven days of human life.Newborn babies are the most vulnerable population when it comes to infectious disease. Establishing key pathways in early development could...

On July 1, 1942, the U.S.S. Wasp, an aircraft carrier holding 71 planes, 2,247 sailors and a journalist, sailed from San Diego to the western Pacific to join the battle against the Japanese. On board was a naval officer named Lt. Cmdr. John Joseph Shea. Two days before he left San Diego, Shea wrote his 5-year-old son a letter.

An intense blast of high-energy protons from the Sun pummelled the Earth in about 660 BC and left a distinct record of cosmogenic nuclei in the Greenland ice sheet. The discovery was made by an international team of scientists who say the event was one most powerful solar storms known to have struck Earth. The team calculates that the storm was about ten times more intense than any event that has occurred in the past 70 years. “If that solar storm had occurred today, it could have had severe effects on our hi-tech society”, says Raimund Muscheler of Sweden’s University...

Scientists have debated whether the dinosaurs were already in decline before a massive asteroid impact finished them off 66 million years ago. New research shows they were thriving in their final days. Help EarthSky keep going! Please donate what you can to our annual crowd-funding campaign.Dinosaurs once reigned on Earth, until a cataclysmic event – now thought to have been a massive asteroid impact, or possibly intense volcanic activity – wiped them out about 66 million years ago during the Maastrichtian age at the end the Late Cretaceous epoch. This mass extinction event was sudden and brutal, powerful enough to...

Bomarzo is an obscure little town in the Viterbo province of Lazio, Italy. The area of Bomarzo was once a part of the larger region of Etruria, which the mysterious Etruscans dominated... they built a curious structure out of the volcanic rock in a thickly wooded area of Bomarzo in a nearby valley. Today, people call it the Etruscan Pyramid of Bomarzo. Steep steps, a number of platforms, rectangular cubicles, and channels running at odd angles decorate the front wall... The Etruscan Pyramid at Bomarzo is a relatively new discovery. Two local archaeologists named Giovanni Lamoratta and Giuseppe Maiorano stumbled across it...

LEAVENWORTH, Kan. -- Some Leavenworth residents have been unknowingly walking around above an underground city, and no one seems to know who created it or why. Windows, doors and narrow paths beneath a title company at South Fourth and Delaware streets lead to storefronts stretching several city blocks and perhaps beyond.

By day, Lazar Kunstmann is a typically avant-garde Parisian, an urbane, well-spoken video film editor who hangs out in the fashionable Latin Quarter. By night he inhabits a strange and secret world with its base in the tunnels beneath the French capital – the world of the urban explorers. Mr Kunstmann belongs to les UX, a clandestine network that is on a mission to discover and exploit the city’s neglected underworld. The urban explorers put on film shows in underground galleries, restore medieval crypts and break into monuments after dark to organise plays and readings. In the eyes of their...

A whole underground city exists under Sofia streets. Hundreds of kilometers of tunnels spread under the capital. Some of them are so big that buses can pass through them. Nowadays the catacombs host thousands of clochards. Witnesses say, ten to twenty thousand people live there. "These figures are unrealistic," said Sofia Mayor Boyko Borissov but he could give the exact number of the homeless living in the tunnels Jordan Todorov says: "I was surprised to learn recently about the underground tunnel in Mexico. Exactly at the same time some Bulgarian newspapers published simmilar kind of stories. "According to Standart daily...

Iranian Three-Story Underground City Served as Haven Archeologists believe that a three-story underground city, recently unearthed in central Iran, used to function as a collective shelter for its residents in wake of relentless invasions, Iranian Cultural Heritage News Agency reported on Monday. The city, lying beneath the small town of Noush Abad near Kashan, features labyrinth-like architectural structures, starting 2.5 meters under the surface and running 18 meters deep. Noush Abad residents had been reporting about underground corridors and chambers when they were digging wells in their yards for sewage, since most Iranian cities lack a sewage network. Working on...

BIBLE scholars claim to have uncovered the final resting place of the legendary Ark of the Covenant – saying the holy relic was most likely smuggled out of Israel to Africa. _________________________________________________________________ Bible Archaeology, Search & Exploration Institute (BASE) claim there is strong evidence that the Old Testament’s ark’s resting place is in Ethiopia. The Ark of the Covenant is one of the most sought after relics from the Bible, being the trunk said to contain the Ten Commandments handed down to Moses on Mount Sinai. It is said the chest is made of wood and covered in gold, containing...

In desperate circumstances people are often driven to perform feats of mythical proportions. In the late 1100s the medieval kingdom of Georgia was resisting the onslaught of the Mongol hordes, the most devastating force Europe had ever seen. Queen Tamar ordered the construction of this underground sanctuary in 1185, and the digging began, carving into the side of the Erusheli mountain, located in the south of the country near the town of Aspindza. When completed this underground fortress extended 13 levels and contained 6000 apartments, a throne room and a large church with an external bell tower. It is assumed...

Researchers say a set of ancient tools found in a box at a Canberra university is the world's oldest known complete tattoo kit, thought to be made from human bones. Key points: •The tools were fashioned out of bones, some of which researchers say were most likely human bones •Researchers say the bones may come from the graves of the tattooist's relatives •Radiocarbon dating proved the kit was about 2,700 years old, dating back to the beginning of Polynesian cultures Four tattooing implements were found along with what was believed to be an ink pot on Tonga's Tongatapu Island in...

Until now the study of Egypt’s population history has been largely based on literary and archaeological sources and inferences drawn from genetic diversity in present-day Egyptians. Both approaches have made crucial contributions to the debate but are not without limitations. On the one hand, the interpretation of literary and archaeological sources is often complicated by selective representation and preservation and the fact that markers of foreign identity, such as, for example, Greek or Latin names and ethnics, quickly became ‘status symbols’ and were adopted by natives and foreigners alike. On the other hand, results obtained by modern genetic studies are...

For several million years, the Earth cycled through ice ages at a regular pace, but then, 1.25 million to 700,000 years ago, something changed: ice ages went from lasting 40,000 years to 100,000. … By looking at the microscopic shells of microorganisms called foraminifera, Adam Hasenfratz of the Geological Institute in Zürich, Switzerland, and colleagues, find evidence of a reduction in deep water circulation, causing less carbon dioxide to be released into the air. Oceanic changes in the Antarctic Zone could have ensured “that glacial conditions persisted despite orbital changes to the contrary”, the study says. The new research, presented...

American whalers recorded voyages in Australian rock art, study reveals Text chiseled into boulders more than 150 years ago is the earliest archaeological evidence of a thriving 19th-century American whaling industry found in northwestern Australia. Homesick sailors on 19th-century American whaling ships commemorated their remarkable circumnavigations of the globe by recording their voyages into rocks on remote islands in northwestern Australia, report archaeologists. Engravings created by whalemen on two vessels—Connecticut, in 1842, and Delta, in 1849—have been found amid Aboriginal rock art on the Pilbara coast of Western Australia, nearly 1,000 miles north of Perth. The discovery is reported in...

At the bottom of the world, in some of the roughest seas, live mysterious killer whales that look very different from other orcas. Now, for the first time, scientists have located and studied these animals in the wild. The orcas are “highly likely” to be a new species, says Robert Pitman, a researcher with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The scientific team made the finding in January about 60 miles off the coast of Cape Horn, Chile..

Shimmying through a maze of dark tunnels below the Mayan ruins of Chichén Itzá on Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula, archaeologists have rediscovered a long-sealed cave brimming with lost treasure. According to an statement from Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), the cave is stockpiled with more than 150 artifacts, including incense burners, vases, and decorative plates adorned with the faces of ancient gods and other religious icons. The trove is believed to be just one of seven sacred chambers in a network of tunnels known as Balamku — "Jaguar God" — that sits below Chichén Itzá, a city that...

We offer here an answer to one of the most intriguing questions in ancient Mediterranean history: the timing/contexts and incentives of early Phoenician expansion to Mediterranean and Atlantic regions in Africa and Europe ~3,000 years ago. This was enabled by a rare opportunity to analyze a very large sample set of ancient silver items from Phoenicia. An interdisciplinary collaboration combining scientific methods with precise archaeological data revealed the Phoenicians' silver sources. We propose that Phoenicians brought silver to the Levant from southwest Sardinia ~200 years before they de facto settled there, and later, gradually, also from Iberia. We show that...