Curated News: Featured: SciWire

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A study of marine mammals finds that several once endangered species, including the humpback whale, the northern elephant seal and green sea turtles, have recovered and are repopulating their former ranges. But returning species create a new challenge: some people interpret the return of these animals as a hostile invasion. The study presents strategies for “lifting baselines” to help manage and celebrate recovering species.

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PNAS Article reports new evidence that microbial algae in Caribbean came from the Pacific likely via the Panama Canal. Algae offers short term benefits to coral communities but could do long-term damage.

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New research shows that the close linkage between the physical properties of amino acids, the genetic code, and protein folding was likely the key factor in the evolution from building blocks to organisms when Earth’s first life was emerging from the primordial soup.

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A team of scientists from Berkeley Lab, JGI and UC Berkeley, simplified and sped up genome assembly, reducing a months-long process to mere minutes. This was primarily achieved by “parallelizing” the code to harness the processing power of supercomputers.

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In Science Advances, University at Buffalo researchers will report that they have managed to turn E. coli into tiny factories for producing new forms of the popular antibiotic erythromycin — including three that were shown in the lab to kill drug-resistant bacteria.

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Dinosaurs grew as fast as your average living mammal, according to a research paper published by Stony Brook University paleontologist Michael D’Emic, PhD. The paper, to published in Science on May 29, is a re-analysis of a widely publicized 2014 Science paper on dinosaur metabolism and growth that concluded dinosaurs were neither ectothermic nor endothermic—terms popularly simplified as ‘cold-blooded’ and ‘warm-blooded’—but instead occupied an intermediate category.

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A new study by anthropologists from The University of Texas at Austin shows for the first time that epigenetic marks on DNA can be detected in a large number of ancient human remains, which may lead to further understanding about the effects of famine and disease in the ancient world.

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Research into lethal wounds found on a human skull may indicate one of the first cases of murder in human history—some 430,000 years ago—and offers evidence of the earliest funerary practices in the archaeological record.

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Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have discovered for the first time a rear-end collision between two high-speed knots of ejected matter from a supermassive black hole. This discovery was made while piecing together a time-lapse movie of a plasma jet blasted from a supermassive black hole inside galaxy 3C 264, located 260 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Leo.

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A new study, by scientists from the University of Southampton and National Oceanography Centre (NOC), implies that the global climate is on the verge of broad-scale change that could last for a number of decades.

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The Millennium Drought in southeastern Australia forced Greater Melbourne, a city of 4.3 million people, to successfully implement innovations that hold critical lessons for water-stressed regions around the world, according to findings by UC Irvine and Australian researchers.

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In a new twist on the use of DNA in nanoscale construction, scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory and collaborators put synthetic strands of the biological material to work in two ways: They used ropelike configurations of the DNA double helix to form a rigid geometrical framework, and added dangling pieces of single-stranded DNA to glue nanoparticles in place.

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Madagascar is home to extraordinary biodiversity, but in the past few decades, the island’s forests and associated biodiversity have been under greater attack than ever. Rapid deforestation is affecting the biotopes of hundreds of species, including the panther chameleon, a species with spectacular intra-specific colour variation. A new study by Michel Milinkovitch, professor of genetics, evolution, and biophysics at the University of Geneva (UNIGE), led in close collaboration with colleagues in Madagascar, reveals that this charismatic reptilian species, which is only found in Madagascar, is actually composed of eleven different species. The results of their research appear in the latest issue of the Molecular Ecology journal. They also discuss the urgent need to protect Madagascar’s habitats.

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This new result has allowed researchers to determine the reason behind a large discrepancy in the data between two different methods used to measure the proton’s electric form factor.

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It looks like a Slinky suspended in motion. Yet this photonics advancement – called a metamaterial hyperlens – doesn’t climb down stairs. Instead, it improves our ability to see tiny objects.

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Psychoacoustics identifies five basic types of emotional speech: angry, fearful, happy, sad and neutral. In order to fully understand what’s happening with speech perception, a research team at the University of Texas at Austin studied how depressed individuals perceive these different kinds of emotional speech in multi-tonal environments. They will present their findings at the 169th ASA meeting, held this week in Pittsburgh.

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Astronomers have spent decades trying to determine the oddball behavior of an aging star nicknamed "Nasty 1" residing in our Milky Way galaxy. Looking at the star using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers had expected to see a bipolar outflow of twin lobes of gas from the star. The astronomers were surprised, however, to find a pancake-shaped disk of gas encircling the star. The vast disk is nearly 1,000 times the diameter of our solar system.

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A cartwheeling spider, a bird-like dinosaur and a fish that wriggles around on the sea floor to create a circular nesting site are among the species identified by the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry as the Top 10 New Species for 2015.

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Research by Bournemouth University's John Stewart has found that birds living during the Ice Age were larger, with a mixture of birds unlike any seen today, and many species now exotic to Britain living in Northern England.

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The success of corals that adapt to survive in the world’s hottest sea could contribute to their demise through global warming, according to new research.

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Our ancestors were making stone tools some 700,000 years earlier than we thought. That’s the finding co-led by Stony Brook University's Drs. Sonia Harmand and Jason Lewis—who have found the earliest stone artifacts, dating 3.3 million years ago.

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A new class of magnets that expand their volume when placed in a magnetic field and generate negligible amounts of wasteful heat during energy harvesting, has been discovered.

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Modern lifestyles have made our bones lighter weight than our hunter-gatherer ancestors. A study of the bones of hundreds of humans who lived during the past 33,000 years in Europe finds the rise of agriculture and a corresponding fall in mobility drove the change, rather than urbanization, nutrition or other factors.

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U.S. residents' exposure to extreme heat could increase four- to six-fold by mid-century, due to both a warming climate and a population that's growing especially fast in the hottest regions of the country, according to new research by NCAR scientists.

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A factor that determines the properties of clouds that help moderate the planet’s temperature may be decided in the oceans.

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In a study using functional magnetic resonance imaging, Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute scientists found that our inherent risk-taking preferences affect how we view and act on information from other people.

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Only recently has nanotechnology made it possible to reach the scale required to test the theoretical model known as the Tomonaga-Luttinger theory. Now, a team of researchers has succeeded in conducting experiments with the smallest channel yet.

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Salmon carry a strontium chemical signature in their “ear bones” that lets scientists identify specific streams where the fish hatched and lived before they were caught at sea. The new tool may help pinpoint critical habitats for fish threatened by climate change, industrial development and overfishing.

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Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have captured for the first time snapshots of fledgling white dwarf stars beginning their slow-paced, 40-million-year migration from the crowded center of an ancient star cluster to the less populated suburbs.

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Chewing, breathing, and other regular bodily functions that we undertake “without thinking” actually do require the involvement of our brain, but the question of how the brain programs such regular functions intrigues scientists. Arlette Kolta, a professor at the University of Montreal’s Faculty of Dentistry, has shown that astrocytes play a key role. Astrocytes are star-shaped glial cells in our brain. Glial cells are not neurons – they play a supporting role.

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An international team, including archaeologists from the University of Southampton, has found evidence suggesting leprosy may have spread to Britain from Scandinavia. The team, led by the University of Leiden examined a 1500 year old male skeleton, excavated at Great Chesterford in Essex, England during the 1950s.

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Two experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland, have combined their results and observed a previously unseen subatomic process.

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An international team of scientists has designed and tested a magnetic shield that is the first to achieve an extremely low magnetic field over a large volume. The device provides more than 10 times better magnetic shielding than previous state-of-the art shields. The record-setting performance makes it possible for scientists to measure certain properties of fundamental particles at higher levels of precision -- which in turn could reveal previously hidden physics and set parameters in the search for new particles.

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To maximize such benefits as conserved biodiversity and sustained livelihoods, ecological restoration should increase ecological integrity, be sustainable in the long term, be informed by the past and future, and benefit and engage society.

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Expansion of cattle pastures has led to the destruction of huge swaths of rain forest in Brazil, home to the world’s largest herd of commercial beef cattle. But a new study led by the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Holly Gibbs shows that market-driven “zero deforestation agreements” have dramatically influenced the behavior of ranchers and the slaughterhouses to which they sell.

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Salk scientists find a single molecule that controls the fate of mature sensory neurons

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New research, led by the University of Southampton, has questioned the role played by ocean acidification, produced by the asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs, in the extinction of ammonites and other planktonic calcifiers 66 million years ago.

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Citizen scientists tracking backyard bird feeders helped scientists pinpoint the climate forces that likely set the stage for boreal bird irruptions in which vast numbers of northern birds migrate far south of their usual winter range. The discovery could make it possible to predict the events more than a year in advance.

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Archaeologists from the University of York have played a key role in Anglo-Danish research which has suggested the dawn of the Viking Age may have been much earlier – and less violent – than previously believed.

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Scientists using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have discovered that the immense halo of gas enveloping the Andromeda galaxy, our nearest massive galactic neighbor, is about six times larger and 1,000 times more massive than previously measured.

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Astronomers using ALMA have discovered what may be the first known example of a globular cluster about to be born: an incredibly massive, extremely dense, yet star-free cloud of molecular gas.

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To put the massive range of the electromagnetic spectrum into perspective, this image links wavelengths to the ocean, from blue whales to water molecules.

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Researchers from Berkeley Lab and the University of Hawaii at Manoa have shown for the first time that cosmic hot spots, such as those near stars, could be excellent environments for the creation of molecular precursors to DNA.

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In a synergy between the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes, and the giant W. M. Keck Observatory, astronomers have set a new distance record to the farthest redshift-confirmed galaxy. It is so far away the light we receive left the galaxy over 13 billion years ago, and it is just arriving now. The new observations underline the very exciting discoveries that NASA's James Webb Space Telescope will enable when it is launched in 2018.

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Conventional semiconductor detectors made from germanium and silicon are standard equipment in nuclear physics, but are less useful in many emerging applications because they require low temperatures to operate. In recent years, scientists have been seeking new semiconductor materials to develop high-performance radiation detectors that can operate at room temperature, and now researchers from Oak Ridge National Laboratory think they have a good candidate material: a compound called thallium sulfide iodide.

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The onion, a humble root vegetable, is proving its strength outside the culinary world -- in an artificial muscle created from onion cells. Unlike previous artificial muscles, this one, created by researchers from National Taiwan University, can either expand or contract to bend in different directions depending on the driving voltage applied. The finding is published this week in the journal Applied Physics Letters.

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Although the human ability to write evolved from our ability to speak, writing and talking are now such independent systems in the brain that someone who can’t write a grammatically correct sentence may be able say it aloud flawlessly.

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They may not be on Facebook or Twitter, but dolphins do, in fact, form highly complex and dynamic networks of friends, according to a recent study by scientists at Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute at Florida Atlantic University. Dolphins are known for being highly social animals, and a team of researchers at HBOI took a closer look at the interactions between bottlenose dolphins in the Indian River Lagoon (IRL) and discovered how they mingle and with whom they spend their time.

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Bioluminescence at least in one millipede may have evolved as a way to survive in a hot, dry environment, not as a means to ward off predators, according to scientists publishing in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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What happens to an astronaut’s brain during a mission to Mars? Nothing good. It’s besieged by destructive particles that can forever impair cognition, according to a UC Irvine radiation oncology study appearing in the May 1 edition of Science Advances. Charles Limoli and colleagues found that exposure to highly energetic charged particles – much like those found in the galactic cosmic rays that bombard astronauts during extended spaceflights – cause significant damage to the central nervous system, resulting in cognitive impairments.