An international team of archaeologists and paleoanthropologists has discovered a large collection of 2-million-year-old stone tools, fossilized bones and plant materials at the site of Ewass Oldupa in the western portion of the ancient basin of Olduvai Gorge (now Oldupai) in northern Tanzania. The discovery reveals that the earliest Olduvai …
Read More »
An international team of scientists has discovered a new species of the bee genus Lasioglossum living in sand dunes in Israel. Head of a female of Lasioglossum dorchini. Image credit: Nahal Alexander / A. Pauly. Lasioglossum is a genus of wild bees in the family Halictidae (commonly referred to as …
Read More »
A team of researchers from Germany, Denmark and the United Kingdom has identified circadian rhythms in non-photosynthetic, Gram-positive bacterium Bacillus subtilis. Bacillus subtilis. Image credit: Ákos Kovács, Technical University of Denmark. Circadian rhythms are exquisite internal timing mechanisms that are widespread across nature enabling living organisms to cope with the …
Read More »
Paleontologists from the Royal Ontario Museum and the University of Toronto have found and examined the fossilized remains of two subadult and one adult saber-toothed tigers (Smilodon fatalis) — likely a mother and two adolescents — in the Pleistocene coastal deposits in Ecuador. Their results show that saber-toothed tigers had …
Read More »
A single letter change in DNA code can potentially decide whether a plant is a lark or a night owl, according to a study published in the journal Plant, Cell and Environment. Arabidopsis thaliana. Image credit: Carl Davies, CSIRO / CC BY 3.0. The circadian clock is a temporal program …
Read More »
Quantum teleportation is essential for many quantum information technologies, including long-distance quantum networks. Using fiber-coupled devices, including state-of-the-art low-noise superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors and off-the-shelf optics, scientists from Fermilab, Caltech, ATT, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the University of Calgary, and Harvard University have demonstrated sustained, long-distance (44 km of fiber) …
Read More »
Marine biologists from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History have described a new species of the hermit crab genus Cancellus from a deep bank in the northwestern Gulf of Mexico. Cancellus heatherae, female holotype, shield length – 4 mm: (A) habitus, dorsal; …
Read More »
Palm cockatoos (Probosciger aterrimus), renowned for their human-like musical drumming behavior, are in severe decline, according to a paper published in the journal Biological Conservation. A palm cockatoos (Probosciger aterrimus). Image credit: Doug Janson / CC BY-SA 3.0. Palm cockatoos are one of the largest cockatoos, reaching 1.2 kg and …
Read More »
In a new paper in the journal Physical Review Letters, an international team of theoretical physicists described a scenario for the formation of primordial black holes from vacuum bubbles in the early Universe and discussed its intriguing realization that can naturally account for all of the dark matter. ‘Baby universes’ …
Read More »
The parent body of the Almahata Sitta meteorites — space rocks that rained down on the Nubian Desert in Sudan in 2008 — is a 640 to 1,800 km-wide water-rich asteroid that is as yet unknown, according to new research. Hamilton et al. studied the composition of Almahata Sitta 202 …
Read More »
