Science

A team of paleontologists has digitally reconstructed the facial skeleton and brain endocast of Ichthyornis dispar, a toothed stem bird that lived in North America during the Late Cretaceous epoch and has traditionally been considered the nearest known well-understood relative of living birds. The ancestors of living birds had a …

Buff-tailed bumblebees (Bombus terrestris) are able to use differences in floral humidity to distinguish between rewarding and non-rewarding flowers, according to new research led by biologists from the University of Bristol and the University of Exeter. By experimentally varying the levels of floral humidity in artificial flowers within a range …

An international team of scientists has retrieved and analyzed nuclear and mitochondrial environmental DNA of humans, wolfs (Canis lupus), and bisons (Bison bonasus) from a 25,000-year-old sediment sample from the Upper Paleolithic site of Satsurblia Cave, western Georgia, Caucasus. Gelabert et al. retrieved human and mammalian nuclear and mitochondrial environmental …

Physicists from the ATLAS Collaboration at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have observed a process called WWW production: the simultaneous creation of three massive W bosons in high-energy proton-proton collisions. Display of a candidate WWW→ 3 leptons + neutrinos event; the event is identified by its decay to a muon …

In a study of 7,675 Australians, higher total fruit consumption was associated with better measures of glucose tolerance and insulin sensitivity; furthermore, a moderate to high total fruit consumption was associated with lower odds of diabetes after 5 years of follow-up. A healthy diet that includes the consumption of popular …

Archaeologists have uncovered a 51,000-year-old engraved giant deer phalanx in a cave in the Harz Mountains, Germany. The find, which came from an apparent Middle Paleolithic context that was linked to Neanderthals, demonstrates that conceptual imagination, as a prerequisite to compose individual lines into a coherent design, was present in …

African coelacanths (Latimeria chalumnae) reach maturity around the age of 55 and gestate their offspring for 5 years, according to a study published in the journal Current Biology. Latimeria chalumnae off Pumula on the KwaZulu-Natal South Coast, South Africa, on November 22, 2019. Image credit: Bruce Henderson, doi: 10.17159/sajs.2020/7806. Coelacanths …

The genomes of multiple East Asian populations bear the signature of a viral epidemic that occurred approximately 900 generations, or 25,000 years (28 years per generation) ago, according to a new study published in the journal Current Biology. Souilmi et al. apply evolutionary analyses to human genomic datasets to recover …

An acoustic amplifier developed by Sandia National Laboratories researchers measures 0.5 mm2 (0.0008 square inches), and is more than 10 times more effective than the earlier versions. The acousto-electric chip includes a radio-frequency amplifier, circulator and filter; SEM image shows details of the amplifier. Image credit: Bret Latter / Matt …

In a new meta-analysis of previous studies, a team of researchers from the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand found that people who regularly drank high amounts of milk had lower levels of both good and bad cholesterol, although their body mass index (BMI) levels were higher than non-milk drinkers; …