Science

Using a combination of MRI, micro-CT and minimally invasive gene analysis, a team of biologists from the Institut für Evolutionsbiologie und Ökologie at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität has discovered a new species of dumbo octopus — named Grimpoteuthis imperator — living in the northern part of the Emperor Seamounts, an undersea …

Scientists have described a new species of the frog genus Brachycephalus from the forests of the Brazilian state of São Paulo. Brachycephalus rotenbergae. Image credit: Nunes et al., doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0244812. Brachycephalus is a genus of miniaturized frogs that live in the forest leaf litter and are most active during daylight. …

A team of marine biologists from the United States, Spain and Taiwan has discovered a new species of the snapper genus Etelis living in Indo-West Pacific waters. Etelis boweni, caught in American Samoa. Image credit: NOAA Fisheries. Etelis is a small genus of massive bottom-dwelling fishes in the family Lutjanidae. …

Feral equids (horses and donkeys) reintroduced to desert regions in the North American southwest regularly dig wells to expose groundwater, increasing water availability — and sometimes providing the only water available locally — for a wide variety of plant and animal species and ecosystem processes, according to new research led …

Otus brookii brookii, a subspecies of the Rajah scops-owl (Otus brookii) that had been lost to science since 1892, has been discovered alive and photographed in the montane forests of Mount Kinabalu in Borneo, Malaysia. The first photograph of the Bornean Rajah scops-owl (Otus brookii brookii) in the wild. Image …

Dark matter with masses below 1 GeV can scatter, become captured, deposit annihilation energy, and increase the heat flow within extrasolar gas giants, rogue planets and brown dwarfs peppered throughout the Milky Way Galaxy, according to a paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters. Leane Smirnov suggest light dark …

Molecular quantum gases (that is, ultracold and dense molecular gases) have many potential applications, including quantum control of chemical reactions, precision measurements, quantum simulation and quantum information processing. For molecules, to reach the quantum regime usually requires efficient cooling at high densities. In new research, physicists from the James Franck …

A team of researchers from the Penn State College of Medicine and the Pennsylvania State University found that people who incorporated any variety of mushrooms into their daily diets had a lower risk of cancer. Ba et al. show that mushroom may help guard against cancer. Image credit: Barbro Forsberg. …

An international team of scientists has recovered and analyzed partial mitochondrial genomes from 1,300-1,400-year-old specimens of Voay robustus, a recently extinct species of ‘horned’ crocodile that lived in Madagascar. Their results indicate that this endemic represented the sister lineage to true crocodiles (Crocodylus) and that the ancestor of modern crocodiles …

Historical and ethnographic literature from across Africa suggests bee products, honey and larvae, had considerable importance both as a food source and in the making of honey-based drinks. To investigate this, a team of researchers from the University of Bristol and Goethe University analyzed lipid residues from 458 prehistoric pottery …