Curated News: Featured: SciWire

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Scientists have long puzzled over the seemingly ceaseless drizzle of snow drifting down from arctic clouds. Now they may have an explanation.

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Yields of rice, wheat and corn appear to have maxed out on 30 percent of the world's agricultural croplands, according to a University of Nebraska-Lincoln study published in Nature Communications.

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A new study by Wellesley College neuroscientists is the first to directly compare brain responses to faces and objects with responses to colors. The paper reveals new information about how the brain’s inferior temporal (IT) cortex processes information.

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Woodpeckers find emerald ash borers a handy food source and may slow the spread of this noxious pest, even ultimately controlling it, suggest researchers from the University of Illinois at Chicago.

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Researchers discover there are seven distinct African crocodile species, not just three.

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In some mountain ranges, Earth’s warming climate is driving rabbit relatives known as pikas to higher elevations or wiping them out. But University of Utah biologists discovered that roly-poly pikas living in rockslides near sea level in Oregon can survive hot weather by eating more moss than any other mammal.

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This festive NASA Hubble Space Telescope image resembles a holiday wreath made of sparkling lights. The bright southern hemisphere star RS Puppis, at the center of the image, is swaddled in a gossamer cocoon of reflective dust illuminated by the glittering star. Hubble took a series of photos of light flashes rippling across the nebula in a phenomenon known as a "light echo."

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The ancestor of snakes and lizards likely gave birth to live young, rather than laid eggs, and over time species have switched back and forth in their preferred reproductive mode, according to research published in print in Ecology Letters Dec. 17.

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A recently discovered bone from the hand of an East African hominim provides the earliest record of a structural feature related to tool use.

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Neanderthals, forerunners to modern humans, buried their dead, an international team of archaeologists has concluded after a 13-year study of remains discovered in southwestern France.

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Using a new technique to evaluate working muscles in mice, researchers have uncovered physiological mechanisms that could lead to new strategies for combating metabolism-related disorders like muscle wasting and obesity.

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In a study published in the journal Chemical Communications, scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, Stony Brook University, and Syracuse University show that shrinking the core of a quantum dot can enhance the ability of a surrounding polymer to extract electric charges generated in the dot by the absorption of light.

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South Pole Telescope scientists have detected for the first time a subtle distortion in the oldest light in the universe, which may help reveal secrets about the earliest moments in the universe’s formation.

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NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has found something that Jovian probes may have missed, plumes of water vapor leaking off into space near the Europa's south pole.

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Published studies from an NYIT Anatomy Professor and international colleagues shed new light on ancient creatures' dental structure and wear -- and how these unique characteristics helped them live and adapt to their environments.

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Indigenous use of fire for hunting is an unlikely contributor to long-term carbon emissions, but it is an effective environmental management and recovery tool against agribusiness deforestation, a new study from Indiana University and Brazil’s Oswaldo Cruz Foundation has found.

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To protect themselves, some animals rapidly change color when their environments change, but chameleons change colors in unusual ways when they interact with other chameleons. Arizona State University researchers have discovered that these color changes don’t happen “out-of-the-blue” — instead, they convey different types of information during important social interactions.

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Air flows mostly in a one-way loop through the lungs of monitor lizards – a breathing method shared by birds, alligators and presumably dinosaurs, according to a new University of Utah study that may push the evolution of this trait back to 270 million years ago.

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Mothers get all the attention. But a study led by McGill researcher Sarah Kimmins suggests that the father’s diet before conception may play an equally important role in the health of their offspring. It also raises concerns about the long-term effects of current Western diets and of food insecurity.

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Using the new, high-frequency capabilities of the National Science Foundation’s Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT), astronomers have captured never-before-seen details of the nearby starburst galaxy M82. These new data highlight streamers of material fleeing the disk of the galaxy as well as concentrations of dense molecular gas surrounding pockets of intense star formation.

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For that special Christmas gift, how about saving an endangered species? That's the goal of the Real Seal, a 6-inch plush Hawaiian monk seal toy designed by monk seal researchers at UC Santa Cruz.

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A species of cockroach never found in the United States before has been positively identified in Manhattan. Unlike the roaches that New York residents have known and hated for years, this variety can survive not just indoors where it’s warm, but also outdoors in freezing temperatures. The species Periplaneta japonica is well documented in Asia but was never confirmed in the United States until Rutgers insect biologists Jessica Ware and Dominic Evangelista documented its presence in a study just published by the Journal of Economic Entomology.

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Each year the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University challenges scientists to answer a thought-provoking question asked by 11-year-olds around the country. This year’s challenge to scientists will be announced on Wednesday, Dec. 11.

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New analyses of deuteron-gold collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider indicate that collisions between gold ions and much smaller deuterons, designed as control experiments, may be serving up miniscule drops of hot quark-gluon plasma.

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An international team of astronomers led by Prof. Jin Koda at Stony Brook University used Suprime-Cam, Subaru Telescope's wide-field, prime-focus camera, to capture an image of the intricate flow of Comet Lovejoy's ion tail.

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The tsunami that struck Japan’s Tohoku region in 2011 was touched off by a submarine earthquake far more massive than anything geologists had expected in that zone. Now, a team of scientists has published a set of studies in the journal Science that shed light on what caused the dramatic displacement of the seafloor.

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Research conducted in Bimini in The Bahamas spanning almost two decades shows that female lemon sharks that were born there returned 15 years later to give birth to their own young, confirming this behavior for the first time in sharks. The study began in 1995, and has resulted in the capture, tagging, and release of more than 2,000 baby sharks.

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A new research study combining marine physiology, neuroscience, pharmacology, and behavioral psychology has revealed a surprising outcome from increases of carbon dioxide uptake in the oceans: anxious fish.

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An analysis of the femur of one of the oldest human ancestors reveals the six-million-year-old “Millenium Man” was bipedal but lived in the trees.The research could provide additional insight to the origins of human bipedalism.

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Carbon dioxide pumped into the air since the Industrial Revolution appears to have changed the way the coastal ocean functions, according to a new analysis published this week in Nature. A comprehensive review of research on carbon cycling in rivers, estuaries and continental shelves suggests that collectively this coastal zone now takes in more carbon dioxide than it releases. The shift could impact global models of carbon’s flow through the environment and future predictions related to climate change.

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University of Utah and German biologists discovered how nerve cells recycle tiny bubbles or “vesicles” that send chemical nerve signals from one cell to the next. The process is much faster and different than two previously proposed mechanisms for recycling the bubbles.

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New research indicates a phenomenon known as "quantum entanglement" might be intrinsically linked with wormholes, hypothetical features of space-time that could link one part of the universe with another.

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St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital scientists have evidence that descendants of the H2N2 avian influenza A virus that killed millions worldwide in the 1950s still pose a threat to human health, particularly to those under 50. The research has been published in an advance online edition of the Journal of Virology.

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Richard Martel and his research team at the Department of Chemistry of the Université de Montréal have discovered a method to improve detection of the infinitely small. Their discovery is presented in the November 24 online edition of the journal Nature Photonics.

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A new algorithm designed at the University of Toronto has the power to profoundly change the way we find photos among the billions on social media sites such as Facebook and Flickr. This month, the United States Patent and Trademark Office will issue a patent on this technology. Developed by Parham Aarabi, a professor in The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, and his former Master’s student Ron Appel, the search tool uses tag locations to quantify relationships between individuals, even those not tagged in any given photo.

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The most detailed range-wide assessment of the bonobo (formerly known as the pygmy chimpanzee) ever conducted has revealed that this poorly known and endangered great ape is quickly losing space in a world with growing human populations. The loss of usable habitat is attributed to both forest fragmentation and poaching, according to a new study by University of Georgia, University of Maryland, the Wildlife Conservation Society, ICCN (Congolese Wildlife Authority), African Wildlife Foundation, Zoological Society of Milwaukee, World Wildlife Fund, Max Planck Institute, Lukuru Foundation, University of Stirling, Kyoto University, and other groups.

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Biologists have long thought that the spores produced by a mushroom’s cap simply drop into the wind and blow away. The problem with that notion, scientists say, is that spores can be dispersed even when the air is still. So how do the mushrooms do it? A team of researchers believe they have found the answer: mushrooms make their own wind.

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By working with a model spacesuit, a group of Kansas State University engineering professors and students are exploring how wearable medical sensors can be used in future space missions to keep astronauts healthy.

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Think Greenland’s ice sheet is small today? It was smaller — as small as it's been in recent history — from 3-5,000 years ago, according to scientists who studied the ice sheet’s history using a new technique they developed for interpreting the Arctic fossil record.

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A team of American and Israeli researchers has unearthed what could be the largest and oldest wine cellar in the Near East.

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A new species of carnivorous dinosaur – one of the three largest ever discovered in North America – lived alongside and competed with small-bodied tyrannosaurs 98 million years ago. Siats meekerorum, (pronounced see-atch) was the apex predator of its time.

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Obesity may alter the way we taste at the most fundamental level: by changing how our tongues react to different foods. In a Nov. 13 study, University at Buffalo biologists report that being severely overweight impaired the ability of mice to detect sweets.

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Neutrinos can zip right through your body, the walls of your house, entire planets, even emerging from near the surface of fascinating and frightening black holes. And now, an international scientific collaboration that includes researchers from the University of Delaware has taken an 'astronomical' step forward in unmasking the origins of some of these high-energy particles, the so-called “messengers of the universe.”

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Astronomers using the combined power of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope and NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have discovered a far-flung trio of primitive galaxies nestled inside an enormous blob of primordial gas nearly 13 billion light-years from Earth.

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A new study by scientists from Nova Southeastern University’s (NSU) Save Our Seas Shark Research Centre and Cornell University published in final form today in the journal BMC Genomics now undertakes the first large-scale exploration of the great white shark’s genetic repertoire, and comes up with unexpected findings.

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Results from a DNA study of a young boy’s skeletal remains believed to be 24,000 years old could turn the archaeological world upside down – it’s been proven that nearly 30 percent of modern Native American’s ancestry came from this youngster’s gene pool, suggesting First Americans came directly from Siberia.

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Grammar and syntax have been thought for decades to be automatic and untouchable by other brain processes and that everything else — the sex of the speaker, their dialect, etc. — is stripped away as our brains process the sound signal of a word and store it as an abstract form. A University of Kansas study suggests that even higher-level processes – in this case – grammar - are affected by information about the speaker.

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Unexpected behavior in ferroelectric materials explored by researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory supports a new approach to information storage and processing.

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University of Utah biologists found that when mother mice compete socially for mates in a promiscuous environment, their sons play hard and die young: They attract more females by making more urinary pheromones, but smelling sexier shortens their lives.

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Why are men's noses bigger than women's? The answer, according to a new study from the University of Iowa, lies in our physiology. Men's noses are about 10 percent larger than female noses, on average, because males have more lean muscle mass, which requires more oxygen for muscle tissue growth and maintenance. It also explains why we have smaller noses than our ancestors. Results appear in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.