An international team of scientists has discovered a new lineage of extinct plankton-feeding sharks, Pseudomegachasma, that lived in warm oceans during the age of the dinosaurs nearly 100 million years ago. The fossil sharks had tiny teeth very similar to a modern-day, plankton-eating megamouth shark.
Light, sound, and now, heat -- just as optical invisibility cloaks can bend and diffract light to shield an object from sight, and specially fabricated acoustic metamaterials can hide an object from sound waves, a recently developed thermal cloak can render an object thermally invisible by actively redirecting incident heat. The system, designed by scientists in Singapore and described in this week’s Applied Physics Letters, has the potential to fine-tune temperature distribution and heat flow in electronic and semiconductor systems.
This monkey puzzle tree (Araucaria araucaria) is one of the stranger trees growing in the Smithsonian’s Enid A. Haupt Garden in Washington, D.C. Its triangular leaves, which cover the entire tree, both branches and trunk, are thick, tough, and scale-like, with sharp edges and tips. Each leaf can last 10 to 15 years.
A University of Georgia study using a new method for calculating urban heat island intensities clarifies the conflict on whether urban density or sprawl amplify these effects more. It also provides a ranking of the top urban heat island cities among the 50 largest metropolitan statistical areas.
According to a study published1 on 14 September in Nature Climate Change, snowpack in the Sierra Nevada Mountains is its lowest level in 500 years. Snowpack is crucial for the water supply of California.
A pair of supermassive black holes appeared to be spiraling together toward a cataclysmic collision that could have big repercussions.
Scientists have identified the precise nerve cells that allow the brain to make a split-second change of course, like jamming on the brakes.
The authors monitored the social and foraging behaviors of wild flocks of house finches, a common backyard songbird, and the spread of a naturally-occurring bird disease called Mycoplasmal conjunctivitis, which is similar to "pink eye" in humans but cannot be contracted by humans.
Juries in criminal cases typically decide if someone is guilty, then a judge determines a suitable level of punishment. New research confirms that these two separate assessments of guilt and punishment – though related -- are calculated in different parts of the brain. In fact, researchers found that they can disrupt and change one decision without affecting the other. New work by researchers at Vanderbilt University and Harvard University confirms that a specific area of the brain, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, is crucial to punishment decisions. Researchers predicted and found that by altering brain activity in this brain area, they could change how subjects punished hypothetical defendants without changing the amount of blame placed on the defendants.
New technique to selectively and noninvasively turn on groups of neurons in worms could be boon to science and medicine
New research at the University of Warwick with colleagues from the London School of Economics has identified changes in the shape of rainfall across Europe; changes in the amount of drizzle compared with downpours and everything in-between.
Early humans were skilful at using the landscape features of the Kenyan Rift to ambush and kill their prey. They became adept at predicting the pathways used by potential prey, enabling them to ambush large and dangerous animals.
Scientists used high-power laser beams at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory to simulate the shock effects of a meteorite impact in silica, one of the most abundant materials in the Earth’s crust. They observed, for the first time, its shockingly fast transformation into the mineral stishovite – a rare, extremely hard and dense form of silica.
A team of researchers from the Stowers Institute for Medical Research and the University of Colorado Boulder has devised a novel optical technique — a combination of structured illumination microscopy (SIM) and single-particle averaging (SPA) — to resolve individual components of SPB duplication in living yeast cells.
Working in a cave complex deep beneath South Africa’s Malmani dolomites, an international team of scientists has brought to light an unprecedented trove of hominin fossils — more than 1,500 well-preserved bones and teeth — representing the largest, most complete set of such remains found to date in Africa. The discovery of the fossils, cached in a barely accessible chamber in a subterranean labyrinth not far from Johannesburg, adds a new branch to the human family tree, a creature dubbed Homo naledi.
An international research team, which includes NYU anthropologists Scott Williams and Myra Laird, has discovered a new species of a human relative. Homo naledi, uncovered in a cave outside of Johannesburg, South Africa, sheds light on the diversity of our genus and possibly its origin.
Astronomers using ALMA have discovered an unexpected population of compact interstellar clouds hidden within the nearby dwarf irregular galaxy WLM.
A team of Stony Brook University and international researchers have found that biogenic materials in sea spray may affect ice cloud formation and thus climate on a global scale.
An artificial intelligence programme to improve Tinder suggestions has been developed by Harm de Vries, a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Montreal who was sick of swiping left.
Global Temperature Report: August 2015
Astronomers from the University of California, Irvine and Baltimore’s Space Telescope Science Institute have generated the most accurate statistical description yet of faint, early galaxies as they existed in the universe 500 million years after the Big Bang.
A McGill-led team has discovered a pattern that is consistent across a range of ecosystems. They found that, in a very systematic way, in crowded settings, prey reproduced less than they do in settings where their numbers are smaller. Some scientists are already suggesting that it may well be the discovery of a new law of nature.
In an intensive citizen-science-aided survey of Hubble telescope images of 2,753 young, blue star clusters in the neighboring Andromeda galaxy (M31), astronomers have found that M31 and our own galaxy have a similar percentage of newborn stars based on mass. By nailing down what percentage of stars have a particular mass within a cluster (the Initial Mass Function), scientists can better interpret the light from distant galaxies and understand the formation history of stars in our universe.
One of the longstanding debates in science, that has, perhaps unsurprisingly, permeated into the field of stem cell research, is the question of nature versus nurture influencing development. Science on stem cells thus far, has suggested that, as one side of the existential debate holds: their fate is not predestined. But new research from the Neural Stem Cell Institute and Drexel University suggests that the cells’ tabula might not be as rasa as we have been led to believe.
A team led by NYIT Assistant Professor Gaberiel Bever has determined that Eunotosaurus africanus is the earliest known branch of the turtle tree of life
The new approach shows how cells in the spinal cord synchronize many neurons at once to allow complex movements, which could have implications for treating spinal cord injuries and diseases
In the popular mind, mass extinctions are associated with catastrophic events, like giant meteorite impacts and volcanic super-eruptions. But the world’s first known mass extinction, which took place about 540 million years ago, now appears to have had a more subtle cause: evolution itself. “People have been slow to recognize that biological organisms can also drive mass extinction,” said Simon Darroch, assistant professor of earth and environmental sciences at Vanderbilt University.
Unlike current methods that coat nanoparticles with light-sensitive molecules, a new technique from the Weizmann Institute instead suspends the particles in a light-sensitive medium, then self-assemble. Possible applications include rewritable paper, water decontamination, and a way to precisely deliver medicines.
How did the ankylosaur get its tail club? According to research that traces the evolution of the ankylosaur’s distinctive tail, the handle arrived first on the scene, and the knot at the end of the tail followed.
Turning carbon dioxide from certain power plants into a more valuable chemical would reduce emissions while creating a revenue return. Scientists at the University of Pittsburgh derived a metal-free catalyst that does the trick without the need for expensive, extreme conditions.
A study led by researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and the University of California, Los Angeles has demonstrated a new, efficient way to accelerate positrons, the antimatter opposites of electrons. The method may help boost the energy and shrink the size of future linear particle colliders – powerful accelerators that could be used to unravel the properties of nature’s fundamental building blocks.
Grenada, Spain's climate and layout is like that of many cities in the Mediterranean area, which has the highest occurrence of pollen allergies in the world. The researchers hope their efforts will lead to fantastic urban green spaces that don’t cause allergic reactions for 30% of the city’s population.
Renowned physicist Stephen Hawking unveils his new theory adding to his work on the quantum mechanics of black holes. Click to watch video
In early August, biologist Peter Ward returned from the South Pacific with news that he encountered an old friend, one he hadn’t seen in over three decades. The University of Washington professor had seen what he considers one of the world’s rarest animals, a remote encounter that may become even more infrequent if illegal fishing practices continue.
A bacterial infection turns non-farming social amoebae into farmers Washington University evolutionary biologists report in the August 24 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
A spectacular collision between galaxies has been spotted near the Milky Way. Two small star systems are slamming into each other, producing a colourful firework display.
WCS reports that the groundbreaking Bolivian scientific expedition, Identidad Madidi, has found a bizarre bat along with a new species of big-headed or robber frog (Oreobates sp. nov.) from the Craugastoridae family in Madidi National Park.
Michigan Tech researchers have streamlined a method to improve the splitting water into hydrogen molecules using visible light. Their work paves the way for more sustainable hydrogen fuels.
Researchers using the IceCube Neutrino Observatory have sorted through the billions of subatomic particles that zip through its frozen cubic-kilometer-sized detector each year to gather powerful new evidence in support of 2013 observations confirming the existence of cosmic neutrinos. The evidence is important because it heralds a new form of astronomy using neutrinos, the nearly massless high-energy particles generated in nature’s accelerators: black holes, massive exploding stars and the energetic cores of galaxies.
A rare longfin mako shark satellite-tagged near Cuba recently “phoned home” off the U.S. Atlantic coast, say Mote Marine Laboratory scientists and colleagues who tagged the mako during the first-ever expedition to satellite-tag sharks off Cuba.
The Natufian culture, which flourished 15,000 years ago, is well known for its complex burial customs. A new study by Dr. Danny Rosenberg and Prof. Dani Nadel of the University of Haifa has discovered that these ceremonies included the use of giant boulder mortars whose pounding sound informed the community that a ceremony was being held
You see a man at the grocery store. Is that the fellow you went to college with or just a guy who looks like him? It turns out that a tiny spot in the brain has the answer.
Researchers from the University of California, Irvine and NASA have uncovered a remarkably strong link between high wildfire risk in the Amazon basin and the devastating hurricanes that ravage North Atlantic shorelines. The climate scientists’ findings appear in the journal Geophysical Research Letters near the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s calamitous August 2005 landfall at New Orleans.
Indiana University paleobotanist David Dilcher and colleagues in Europe have identified a 125 million- to 130 million-year-old freshwater plant as one of earliest flowering plants on Earth.
By combining information about power plant operation with real-time air quality predictions, researchers have created a new capability to minimize the human health effects of air pollution resulting from electric power generating facilities.
Scientists have revealed never-before-seen details of how our brain sends rapid-fire messages between its cells. They mapped the 3-D atomic structure of a two-part protein complex that controls the release of signaling chemicals, called neurotransmitters, from brain cells. Understanding how cells release those signals in less than one-thousandth of a second could help launch a new wave of research on drugs for treating brain disorders.
Scientists on the Dark Energy Survey, using one of the world’s most powerful digital cameras, have discovered eight more faint celestial objects hovering near our Milky Way galaxy. If these new discoveries are representative of the entire sky, there could be many more galaxies hiding in our cosmic neighborhood.
With every breath you take, microbes have a chance of making it into your lungs. But what happens when they get there? And why do dangerous lung infections like pneumonia happen in some people, but not others? Researchers have started to answer these questions by studying the microbiome of the lungs.
The first planet detected by the Gemini Planet Imager (GPI) from an international team of astronomers, which includes two scientists from the Department of Physics & Astronomy at Stony Brook University, is one outside earth’s solar system at 100 light years away. The exoplanet is being called a “young Jupiter” by the researchers because it shares many characteristics of Jupiter. A paper outlining the full findings is published in Science.
When fruit flies are attacked by parasites or bacteria they respond by producing offspring with greater genetic variability. These findings demonstrate that parents may purposefully alter the genotypes of their offspring to increase their chance of survival.
RSS
Medicine keyboard_arrow_right
Sciencekeyboard_arrow_right
Life keyboard_arrow_right
Business keyboard_arrow_right
Journal News keyboard_arrow_right
By Location keyboard_arrow_right
Meetings, Grants, and Events keyboard_arrow_right