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A 200-year-long drought 4,200 years ago may have killed off the ancient Sumerian language, one geologist says.

no written accounts explicitly mention drought as the reason for the Sumerian demise, the conclusions rely on indirect clues.

his was not a single summer or winter, this was 200 to 300 years of drought," said Matt Konfirst, a geologist at the Byrd Polar Research Center.

NEW ORLEANS — Ever reacted to the sight of a cute puppy or darling infant by squealing, "I want to eat you up!"? Or maybe you can't help but want to pinch your grandbaby's adorable cheeks. You're not alone. New research finds that seemingly strange aggressive responses to cuteness are actually the norm.

In the study, presented Friday (Jan. 18) here at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, researchers found that people watching a slideshow of adorable pictures popped more bubbles on a sheet of bubble wrap than did people viewing funny or neutral pictures.

The participants rated the pictures on cuteness and funniness, as well as on how much they felt the pictures made them lose control — for example, if they agreed with statements such as "I can't handle it!" The participants also rated the extent to which the pictures made them "want to say something like 'grr!'" and "want to squeeze something." Sure enough, the cuter the animal, the less control and more desire to "grrr" and squeeze something that people felt. Cute animals produced this feeling significantly more strongly than did funny animals. The funny critters in turn produced the feeling more strongly than did neutral animals, perhaps because the funny animals were perceived as cute, too, Dyer said.

idea that human hands evolved not only for manual dexterity, but also for fistfights.

fist fighting might have helped to drive the evolution of not only the human hand, but also the human face and the human propensity to walk upright.

specifically, why such beliefs even exist in the first place.

how early humans interacted with their natural environment

All of a sudden, you see the grasses in front of you rustling. What do you do? Do you stop and think about what might be causing the rustling (the wind or a lion, for example), or do you immediately take some kind of action?

In a radical experiment that has some experts questioning what it means to be "alive," scientists have restored brain circulation and some cell activity in pigs' brains hours after the animals died

that in some cases, the cell death processes can be postponed or even reversed, Sestan said.

Still, the researchers stressed that they did not observe any kind of activity in the pigs' brains that would be needed for normal brain function or things like awareness or consciousness.

The largest prime number yet has been discovered — and it's 17,425,170 digits long. The new prime number crushes the last one discovered in 2008, which was a paltry 12,978,189 digits long.

The number — 2 raised to the 57,885,161 power minus 1 — was discovered by University of Central Missouri mathematician Curtis Cooper as part of a giant network of volunteer computers

"It's analogous to climbing Mt. Everest," said George Woltman, the retired, Orlando, Fla.-based computer scientist who created GIMPS. "People enjoy it for the challenge of the discovery of finding something that's never been known before."

Sixty years after scientists described the chemical code of life — an interweaving double helix called DNA — researchers have found four-stranded DNA is also lurking in human cells.

they form in regions of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) that are full of guanine, one of the DNA molecule's four building blocks

Scientists had shown in the past that such quadruplex DNA could form in test tubes and had even been found in the cells of ciliated protozoa, or single-celled organisms with hairlike appendages. Also there were hints of its existence in human cells, though no direct proof, Lipps said.

Over the past few centuries, science can be said to have gradually chipped away at the traditional grounds for believing in God. Much of what once seemed mysterious — the existence of humanity, the life-bearing perfection of Earth, the workings of the universe — can now be explained by biology, astronomy, physics and other domains of science. 

good reason to think science will ultimately arrive at a complete understanding of the universe that leaves no grounds for God whatsoever.

Psychology research suggests that belief in the supernatural acts as societal glue and motivates people to follow the rules; further, belief in the afterlife helps people grieve and staves off fears of death.

Trees — and all plants, for that matter — feel nothing at all, because consciousness, emotions and cognition are hallmarks of animals alone, scientists recently reported in an opinion article.

Though plants lack brains, the firing of electrical signals in their stems and leaves nonetheless triggered responses that hinted at consciousness, researchers previously reported.

Beginning in 2006, some scientists have argued that plants possess neuron-like cells that interact with hormones and neurotransmitters, forming "a plant nervous system, analogous to that in animals

There will be no place to go but the unemployment line.

There will be no place to go but the unemployment line.

at this point our tale takes a darker turn. What do we do over the next few decades as robots become steadily more capable and steadily begin taking away all our jobs?

When you bring home the wrong color of paint from the hardware store, it may not be your foggy memory at fault

Flombaum and his colleagues conducted four experiments on four different groups of people.

while the human brain can distinguish between millions of colors, it has difficulty remembering specific shades.

Being around strangers can cause people stress and, in turn, make them less able to feel others' pain, new research suggests.

The study suggests that people's default response is to be empathetic toward others but that stress inhibits their ability to feel others' pain. The findings also underscore how deeply hardwired the fear of stranger danger is, in both mice and humans.

From an evolutionary standpoint, that makes sense, as every meeting with a stranger has a higher risk of resulting in violence

A century ago this year, a young Swiss physicist, who had already revolutionized physics with discoveries about the relationship between space and time, developed a radical new understanding of gravity.

He came up with a set of equations that relate the curvature of space-time to the energy and momentum of the matter and radiation that are present in a particular region.

Today, 100 years later, Einstein's theory of gravitation remains a pillar of modern understanding, and has withstood all the tests that scientists could throw at it

people who are passionately in love are less able to focus and to perform tasks that require attention.

because you spend a large part of your cognitive resources on thinking of your beloved,

When you fall in love, the same neural system in your brain linked to cocaine addiction becomes active, giving you that feeling of euphoria.

Anyone with normal color vision agrees that blood is roughly the same color as strawberries, cardinals and the planet Mars. That is, they're all red. But could it be that what you call "red" is someone else's "blue"?

Atoms Reach Record Temperature, Colder than Absolute Zero

Meteorites