Curated News: Featured: SciWire

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Probing deeper into the South African cave system known as Rising Star, which last year yielded the largest cache of hominin fossils known to science, an international team of researchers has discovered another chamber with more remains of a newfound human relative, Homo naledi. The discovery of the new fossils representing the remains of at least three juvenile and adult specimens includes a “wonderfully complete skull,” says University of Wisconsin-Madison anthropologist John Hawks.

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Scientists have completed the first outdoor field trial sanctioned by the EPA for genetically engineered algae. A genetically engineered strain of algae tested in outdoor ponds demonstrated that genetically engineered algae can be successfully cultivated outdoors without adversely impacting native algae populations.

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Explorers planning to settle on Mars might be able to turn the planet’s red soil into bricks without needing to use an oven or additional ingredients. Instead, they would just need to apply pressure to compact the soil—the equivalent of a blow from a hammer. These are the findings of a study published in Nature Scientific Reports on April 27, 2017. The study was authored by a team of engineers at the University of California San Diego and funded by NASA.

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A new scientific discovery game called Mozak is allowing video gamers to significantly speed up reconstructing the intricate architecture of brain cells, a fundamental task in 21st century brain science. These citizen scientists have outperformed computers in tracing the intricate shapes of neurons, a first step in understanding how our brain circuitry works.

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Violent winds and shockwaves would account for more than 60 per cent of lives lost if an asteroid were to hit the Earth, according to a new University of Southampton-led study.

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With Earth Day approaching, new research from Binghamton University-State of New York could help U.S. residents save more energy, regardless of location, if they adjust the angles of solar panels four to five times a year.

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Despite the internet-dependent nature of our world, a thorough understanding of the internet’s physical makeup has only recently emerged, thanks to painstaking work by University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers and their collaborators.

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Research conducted at the University of Adelaide has discovered that bees have much better vision than was previously known, offering new insights into the lives of honey bees, and new opportunities for translating this knowledge into fields such as robot vision.

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Male jumping spiders will try to mate with any female, but that lack of discretion could cost them their lives, says a University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences researcher.

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Ten images and two videos by University of Wisconsin–Madison students, faculty and staff have been named winners of the university's 2017 Cool Science Image Contest.

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A new, open-source software platform has been designed to support applications required to create a smart power grid and protect it from dangers ranging from terrorists to falling tree limbs.

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Brain size in primates is predicted by diet, an analysis by a team of New York University anthropologists indicates. These results call into question “the social brain hypothesis,” which has posited that humans and other primates are big-brained due to factors pertaining to sociality.

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When geologists went in search for evidence of ancient tsunamis along Southern California’s coastal wetlands, they found something else. Their discoveries have implications for seismic hazard and risk assessment in coastal Southern California.

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More than 50 million years ago, when the Earth experienced a series of extreme global warming events, early mammals responded by shrinking in size. While this mammalian dwarfism has previously been linked to the largest of these events, research led by the University of New Hampshire has found that this evolutionary process can happen in smaller, so-called hyperthermals, indicating an important pattern that could help shape an understanding of underlying effects of current human-caused climate change.

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Researchers in Italy hope to measure Earth’s rotation using a laser-based gyroscope housed deep underground, with enough experimental precision to reveal measurable effects of Einstein’s general theory of relativity. The ring laser gyroscope technology enabling these Earth-based measurements provide, unlike those made by referencing celestial objects, inertial rotation information, revealing fluctuations in the rotation rate from the grounded reference frame. The group discusses their work in this week’s Review of Scientific Instruments.

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NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has found that the black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy ate its last big meal about 6 million years ago, when it consumed a large clump of infalling gas. After the meal, the engorged black hole burped out a colossal bubble of gas weighing the equivalent of millions of suns, which now billows above and below our galaxy's center.

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Researchers at the University of Iowa have proposed a new approach to sampling materials with weak or no magnetic fields. The method could help advance research in a host of fields, from computing to MRI machines. The results were published in the journal “Physical Review Letters.”

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Feedbacks of clouds on climate change strongly influence the magnitude of global warming.

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Iron particles generated by cities and industry are being dissolved by man-made air pollution and washed into the sea – potentially increasing the amount of greenhouse gases that the world’s oceans can absorb, a new study suggests.

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Irvine, Calif., March 1, 2017 – The combination of prolonged hot spells with poor air quality greatly compounds the negative effects of each and can pose a major risk to human health, according to new research from the University of California, Irvine.“The weather factors that drive heat waves also contribute to intensified surface ozone and air pollution episodes,” said UCI professor of Earth system science Michael J.