Animals shelter officials housing lost pets that had been implanted with a microchip were able to find the owners in almost three out of four cases in a recently published national study. According to the research, the return-to-owner rate for cats was 20 times higher and for dogs 2 ½ times higher for microchipped pets than were the rates of return for all stray cats and dogs that had enter...

Experts from Bournemouth University and the Fishbourne Roman Palace near Chichester in the UK are preparing to scan the damaged statue of a boy’s head to reveal if it is a rare depiction of Roman Emperor Nero as a youngster. Dr Rob Symmons, Curator of Archaeology at the Palace site in southern England, and Dr Miles Russell, senior lecturer from Bournemouth University, will run 3D scans on th...

Sniffing out any potential contaminants on the International Space Station where it was stationed for the last six months, the JPL-built electronic nose, or ENose, is homeward bound. While on the space station, the ENose sampled the air with 32 sensors that can detect various odors and pinpoint which ones are dangerous to humans. The sleek, shoebox-sized ENose, the third generation of its kind, mo...

The Cheddar Gorge in Somerset was one of the first sites to be inhabited by humans when they returned to Britain near the end of the last Ice Age. According to new radio carbon dating by Oxford University researchers, outlined in the latest issue of Quaternary Science Review, humans were living in Gough`s Cave 14,700 years ago. A number of stone artefacts as well as human and animal bones from exc...

NASA`s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) has taken and received its first images of the Moon, kicking off the year-long mapping mission of Earth`s nearest celestial neighbor. The LROC imaging system, under the watchful eyes of Arizona State University professor Mark Robison, the principal investigator, consists of two Narrow Angle Cameras (NACs) to provide high-resolution black-and-white ...

A once critically endangered bat species, the ‘Pemba flying fox’, has made a dramatic return from the brink of extinction, according to new research. As recently as 1989, only a scant few individual fruit bats could be observed on the tropical island of Pemba, off Tanzania. Its numbers have since soared to an astounding 22,000 bats in less than 20 years, the new research finds. The spe...