The EU will relaunch its deadlocked effort to more closely regulate internet phone and message services such as WhatsApp, Skype and Messenger, a top bloc official said on Tuesday.

Published: 03 December 2019

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An 18-year-old man died in Belgium of respiratory failure that authorities on Thursday (Nov 14) attributed to vaping and a mixture of harmful products in an e-cigarette.

Published: 18 November 2019

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Apple went on the offensive against Brussels in an EU court on Tuesday, fighting the European Commission's landmark order that the iPhone-maker reimburse Ireland 13 billion euros

Published: 17 September 2019

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The European Medicines Agency, which is moving from Britain to Amsterdam because of Brexit, on Wednesday lost a court battle to cancel the lease on its London

Published: 21 February 2019

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Charles Darwin, Mr. Evolution himself, didn't know what to make of the fossils he saw in Patagonia so he sent them to his friend, the renowned paleontologist Richard Owen.

Owen was stumped too. Little wonder.

"The bones looked different from anything he knew," said Michael Hofreiter, senior author of a study published Tuesday in Nature Communications that finally situates in the tree of life what Darwin called the "strangest animal ever discovered".

"Imagine a camel without a hump, with feet like a slender rhino, and a head shaped like a saiga antelope," Hofreiter, a professor at the University of Potsdam, told AFP.

Macrauchenia patachonica -- literally, "long-necked llama" -- also had a long rubbery snout and with its nostrils high on the skull just above its eyes.

Published: 28 June 2017

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Analysis of a bear bone found in an Irish cave has provided evidence of human existence in Ireland 2,500 years earlier than previously thought, academics announced Sunday.

For decades, the earliest evidence of human life in Ireland dated from 8,000 BC.

But radiocarbon dating of a bear's knee bone indicated it had been butchered by a human in about 10,500 BC -- some 12,500 years ago and far earlier than the previous date.

"This find adds a new chapter to the human history of Ireland," said Marion Dowd, an archaeologist at the Institute of Technology Sligo who made the discovery along with Ruth Carden, a research associate with the National Museum of Ireland.

The knee bone, which is marked by cuts from a sharp tool, was one of thousands of bones first found in 1903 in a cave in County Clare on the west coast of Ireland.

It was stored in the National Museum of Ireland since the 1920s, until Carden and Dowd re-examined it and applied for funding to have it radiocarbon dated -- a technique developed in the 1940s -- by Queen's University Belfast.

The team sent a second sample to the University of Oxford to double-check the result. Both tests indicated the bear had been cut up by a human about 12,500 years ago.

The new date means there was human activity in Ireland in the Stone Age or Palaeolithic period, whereas previously, scientists only had evidence of humans in Ireland in the later Mesolithic period.

"Archaeologists have been searching for the Irish Palaeolithic since the 19th century, and now, finally, the first piece of the jigsaw has been revealed," Dowd said.

Three experts further confirmed that the cut marks on the bone had been made when the bone was fresh, confirming they dated from the same time as the bone.

The results were revealed in a paper published in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews.

As well as pushing back the date of human history in Ireland, the find may have important implications for zoology, as scientists have not previously considered that humans could have influenced extinctions of species in Ireland so long ago.

"From a zoological point of view, this is very exciting," Carden said. "This paper should generate a lot of discussion within the zoological research world and it's time to start thinking outside the box? or even dismantling it entirely!"

The National Museum of Ireland noted that approximately two million more specimens are held in its collections and could reveal more secrets.

Published: 21 March 2016

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