Curated News: Featured: SciWire

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Are humans unique and alone in the vast universe? This question-- summed up in the famous Drake equation--has for a half-century been one of the most intractable and uncertain in science. But a new paper shows that the recent discoveries of exoplanets combined with a broader approach to the question makes it possible to assign a new empirically valid probability to whether any other advanced technological civilizations have ever existed.

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Millions of native orchids are flourishing on the site of a former iron mine in New York's Adirondacks, suggesting that former industrial sites – typically regarded as blighted landscapes — have untapped value in ecological restoration efforts.

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Honey bee colonies in the United States are in decline, due in part to the ill effects of voracious mites, fungal gut parasites and a wide variety of debilitating viruses. Researchers from the University of Maryland and the U.S. Department of Agriculture recently completed the first comprehensive, multi-year study of honey bee parasites and disease as part of the National Honey Bee Disease Survey. The findings reveal some alarming patterns, but provide at least a few pieces of good news as well.

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Astronomers using the Hubble telescope have discovered a tiny moon orbiting the dwarf planet Makemake. The moon is estimated to be 100 miles wide and is 13,000 miles away from Makemake.

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In 1442, 50 years before Columbus “sailed the ocean blue,” Shinto priests in Japan began keeping records of the annual freeze dates of a nearby lake. Along a Finnish river, starting in 1693, local merchants recorded the date the ice broke up each spring. These observations are among the oldest inland water ice records in human history, and now they are contributing to modern understanding of climate change.

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Teeth can reveal a lot, such as how the earliest mammals lived with their neighbors. Researchers have uncovered dozens of fossilized teeth in Kuwajima, Japan and identified this as a new species of tritylodontid, an animal family that links the evolution of mammals from reptiles. This finding suggests that tritylodontids co-existed with some of the earliest mammal species for millions of years, overturning beliefs that mammals wiped out mammal-like reptiles soon after they emerged.

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A team of researchers led by faculty at the University of Georgia has discovered the fate of much of the freshwater that pours into the surrounding oceans as the Greenland ice sheet melts every summer. They published their findings today in the journal Nature Geoscience.

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Atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration was the major driver behind the global climatic shifts that occurred between 53 and 34 million years ago, according to new research led by the University of Southampton.

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How easily did life arise on Earth, how likely is it on other planets? A new experiment strongly supports the idea that very early life coding molecules, ancestors of RNA and DNA, arose in primordial puddles with relative ease and speed, and not necessarily just in rarer fiery cataclysms.

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In the face of scientific dogma that faults the population decline of monarch butterflies on a lack of milkweed, herbicides and genetically modified crops, a new Cornell University study casts wider blame: sparse autumnal nectar sources, weather and habitat fragmentation.

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Most of the cosmic rays arriving at Earth  from our galaxy come from nearby clusters of massive stars, according to new observations from the Cosmic Ray Isotope Spectrometer (CRIS), an instrument aboard NASA’s Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE) spacecraft.The distance between the galactic cosmic rays’ point of origin and Earth is limited by the survival of a very rare type of cosmic ray that acts like a tiny clock.

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Astronomers are releasing today this new Hubble image of the Bubble Nebula to celebrate the 26th anniversary of the Hubble telescope's launch into Earth orbit on April 24, 1990. The Bubble Nebula is a giant cloud of gas and dust illuminated by the brilliant star inside it.

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click to visit the Cancer Channel

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Latest analysis shows that human limbs share a genetic programme with the gills of cartilaginous fishes such as sharks and skates, providing evidence to support a century-old theory on the origin of limbs that had been widely discounted.

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A new study from WCS (Wildlife Conservation Society) and TRAFFIC underlines Singapore's role as a leading transit hub for birds from Africa and Europe to East Asia and the Middle East, and highlights serious discrepancies in the way this trade has been recorded over a decade.

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A team of researchers at Binghamton University, led by Assistant Professor of Psychology Sarah Laszlo and Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Zhanpeng Jin, recorded the brain activity of 50 people wearing an electroencephalogram headset while they looked at a series of 500 images designed specifically to elicit unique responses from person to person — e.g., a slice of pizza, a boat, Anne Hathaway, the word “conundrum.” They found that participants’ brains reacted differently to each image, enough that a computer system was able to identify each volunteer’s “brainprint” with 100 percent accuracy.

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Study suggests same neural mechanism that interrupts body movement also interrupts cognition. Findings may give insights into Parkinson's: The system “over-stopping” motor activity might also be keeping patients over-focused. More speculatively, the findings may give insights into conditions characterized by distractibility, such as ADHD.

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Although the second-largest and rather concrete metropolis in the United States might not be anywhere near one's immediate association for a biodiversity hotspot, the fly fauna of Los Angeles is quite impressive. As part of BioSCAN, a project devoted to exploring the insect diversity in and around the city, a team of three entomologists report on their latest discovery - twelve new scuttle fly species. Their study is published in the open access Biodiversity Data Journal.

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Clear-cutting loosens up carbon stored in forest soils, increasing the chances it will return to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide and contribute to climate change, a Dartmouth College study shows.

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Columbia Engineering Professor Harish Krishnaswamy has integrated a non-reciprocal circulator and a full-duplex radio on a nanoscale silicon chip for the first time. This breakthrough technology needs only one antenna, thus enabling an even smaller overall system than one he developed last year: “This technology could revolutionize the field of telecommunications,” he says. (Nature Communications 4/15/16)

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Jupiter's moon Europa is under a constant gravitational assault. As it orbits, Europa's icy surface heaves and falls with the pull of Jupiter's gravity, creating enough heat, scientists think, to support a global ocean beneath the moon's solid shell.

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What does the Red Queen in “Alice in Wonderland” have to do with biology? “It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.” Sexual reproduction protects species by continuously shuffling their genes. A UI-led team bolstered the theory by studying snails’ resilience to parasitic worms.

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Evidence of wildlife passage, such as tracks, scat, fur, and disturbed surroundings, is a more accurate tool for assessing wildlife conservation status than actual encounters with animals, according to an international team of scientists from six universities, including Virginia Tech.

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Rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide have reduced protein in goldenrod pollen, a key late-season food source for North American bees, a Purdue University study shows.

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Researchers pinpoint chemical compound that gives rare animal its popcorn-like scent.

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Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory, Cornell University, and collaborators have produced the first direct evidence of a state of electronic matter first predicted by theorists in 1964 -- a "Cooper pair density wave." The discovery, described in a paper published online April 13, 2016, in Nature, may provide key insights into the workings of high-temperature superconductors.

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The University of Arkansas has established a commercial venture that will allow two scientists to commercialize research materials developed in their laboratories.

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Columbia Engineering researchers have developed a novel sheet camera that can be wrapped around everyday objects to capture images that cannot be taken with one or more conventional cameras. They designed and fabricated a flexible lens array that adapts its optical properties when the sheet camera is bent. This optical adaptation enables the sheet camera to produce high quality images over a wide range of sheet deformations. (To be presented at ICCP 5/13-15)

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You can never predict what treasure might be hiding in your own basement. We didn't know it a year ago, but it turns out that a 1917 image on an astronomical glass plate from our Carnegie Observatories' collection shows the first-ever evidence of a planetary system beyond our own Sun.

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If you go out after a rain, you may notice spider webs glistening with water droplets. The soggy webs resemble human-made meshes for fog collection: They both have thin fibers that collect water from droplets in the air. Now researchers have developed a model to predict whether a falling droplet will stick to a thin fiber, and how much water residue will remain on the fiber, discussing their findings in this week’s Physics of Fluids.

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Scientists at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) are set to use computer models to investigate NASA tests to develop an engineering tool to design missions using a new type of long-distance space propulsion.

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Researchers at the University of Georgia’s Savannah River Ecology Laboratory warn that the extinction to two amphibian species—the southern toad and the southern leopard frog—may be hastened by the combined effects of climate change and copper-contaminated wetlands.

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Just like humans, when plants are cut they clot at the site of the wound. Just how they do it is has been a botanical mystery until now. Two University of Delaware researchers have uncovered the enzymes that produce this response. The findings will be published on Monday in Nature Plants.

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Robots do many things formerly done only by humans - from bartending and farming to driving cars - but a Dartmouth researcher and his colleagues have invented a "smart" paint spray can that robotically reproduces photographs as large-scale murals.

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Crisp, clear images of a “hot Jupiter” system captured by a University of Notre Dame physicist were vital in determining that a newly found planet inhabits a three-star system, a phenomenon documented only a few times before.

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Sequencing the genomes of hundreds of strains of the wine yeast S. cerevisiae has revealed little genetic diversity and high levels of inbreeding. In many cases, yeast strains sold by different companies were almost genetically identical. The results, published in the April issue of G3: Genes|Genomes|Genetics, a publication of the Genetics Society of America, suggest that winemakers attempting to develop improved wine yeasts will need to look to creating hybrids with more exotic strains.

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Scientists have found evidence that rising river waters deliver a feast of carbon to hungry microbes where water meets land, triggering increased activity and altering the flow of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

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Astronomers have uncovered one of the biggest supermassive black holes, with the mass of 17 billion suns, in an unlikely place: the cente of a galaxy that lies in a quiet backwater of the universe. The observations, made with the Hubble Space Telescope and the Gemini telescope in Hawaii, indicate that these monster objects may be more common than once thought. The results of this study are released in the journal Nature. To learn even more, join astronomers and scientists during a live Hubble Hangout discussion at 3pm EDT on Thurs., April 7, at http://hbbl.us/z7j.

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University of Kentucky Astrophysicist Isaac Shlosman and collaborators have revealed details of how supermassive black holes formed 13 billion years ago, and it's not from normal (stellar size) black holes growing to supermassive proportions.

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A new study offers hope for cold-water species in the face of climate change. The study, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, addresses a longstanding paradox between predictions of widespread extinctions of cold-water species and a general lack of evidence for those extinctions despite decades of recent climate change.

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A new study addresses a controversial hypothesis regarding the potential ramming function of the sperm whale’s head. This hypothesis was instrumental in inspiring Herman Melville to write the novel Moby Dick but its mechanical feasibility had never been addressed.

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A team of international paleontologists demonstrate that ancient mammal relatives known as therapsids were suited to the drastic climate change by having shorter life expectancies and would have had a better chance of success by breeding at younger ages than their predecessors.

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New research on coral reefs suggests that existing biodiversity will be essential for the successful adaptation of ecosystems to climate change.

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Microbiologists based in the Institute for Global Food Security and School of Biological Sciences at Queen’s University Belfast have recently released results that may have answered one of ancient history’s greatest enigmas: Where did Hannibal cross the Alps?

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A shocking new report by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and Fauna & Flora International documents a catastrophic collapse of the world’s largest great ape– the Grauer’s gorilla – due to a combination of illegal hunting around mining sites and settlements, prior civil unrest, and habitat loss.

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The first largescale study of ancient DNA from early American people has confirmed the devastating impact of European colonisation on the Indigenous American populations of the time.

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Two invasive species of tumbleweed have hybridized to create a new species of tumbleweed that University of California, Riverside researchers found has dramatically expanded its geographic range in California in just a decade.

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A new study analyzes cloud cover around the world over 15 years. It finds that variations in cloud cover can help researchers predict where different species live — information that could aid conservation and management efforts.

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Peering deep into the heart of our Milky Way galaxy, this Hubble Space Telescope image reveals a rich tapestry of more than half a million stars. Except for a few blue, foreground stars, the stars are part of the Milky Way’s nuclear star cluster, the most massive and densest star cluster in our galaxy. To learn more, join astronomers and scientists during a live Hubble Hangout discussion at 3pm EDT today (Thurs., March 31) at http://hbbl.us/y6k.

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New images from ALMA reveal never-before-seen details in the planet-forming disk around a nearby Sun-like star, including a tantalizing gap at the same distance from the star as the Earth is from the Sun.