Luke Skywalker’s bionic hand is a step closer to reality for amputees in this galaxy. Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have created an ultrasonic sensor that allows amputees to control each of their prosthetic fingers individually. It provides fine motor hand gestures that aren’t possible with current commercially available devices.
Weizmann Institute and colleagues at the University of Copenhagen identify new dates for a 15,000-year-old site in Jordan, challenging some prevailing assumptions about the beginnings of permanent settlements
Logging of the largest trees in the Sierra Nevada’s national forests ended in the early 1990s after agreements were struck to protect species’ habitat. But new research reported Dec. 6 in the journal Diversity and Distributions by University of Wisconsin–Madison ecologists shows that spotted owls, one of the iconic species logging restrictions were meant to protect, have continued to experience population declines in the forests.
Using modern research tools on a 155-million-year-old reptile fossil, scientists at Johns Hopkins and the American Museum of Natural History report they have filled in some important clues to the evolution of animals that once roamed land and transitioned to life in the water.
University of Washington engineers have developed the first 3-D printed plastic objects that can connect to other devices via WiFi without using any electronics, including a laundry bottle that can detect when soap is running low and automatically order more.
Article describes Princeton and PPPL papers on the detrimental impact of stellar wind on the atmosphere of exoplanets.
With the whirl of a thumb, Georgia Tech researchers have created technology that allows people to trace letters and numbers on their fingers and see the figures appear on a nearby computer screen. The system is triggered by a thumb ring outfitted with a gyroscope and tiny microphone. As wearers strum their thumb across the fingers, the hardware detects the movement.
A decline in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) levels led to a fundamental shift in the behaviour of the Earth’s climate system around one million years ago, according to new research led by the University of Southampton.
A research collaboration including scientists from Berkeley Lab has demonstrated that the Earth stops high-energy neutrinos – particles that only very rarely interact with matter.
The dangerous wobbling of pedestrian bridges could be reduced by using biomechanically inspired models of pedestrian response to bridge motion and a mathematical formula to estimate the critical crowd size at which bridge wobbling begins, according to a study led by Georgia State University.
One of the saltiest bodies on Earth, an analog to how water might exist on Mars, shows signs of being one piece of a larger aquifer.
Using a sophisticated computer model, scientists have demonstrated for the first time that a new research approach to geoengineering could potentially be used to limit Earth’s warming to a specific target while reducing some of the risks and concerns identified in past studies, including uneven cooling of the globe.
Scientists from the University of Chicago analyzed genetic data from a group of swallowtail species to find out when and how mimicry first evolved, and what has been driving those changes since then.
Chemists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have found a compound that may have been a crucial factor in the origins of life on Earth.
Photobombing asteroids from our solar system have snuck their way into this deep image of the universe taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. These asteroids reside roughly 160 million miles from Earth, yet they’ve horned their way into this picture of thousands of galaxies scattered across space and time at inconceivably farther distances.
The anatomy and mechanisms underlying vocal production are often poorly described, especially in small animals, but thanks to new imaging technology, NAU researchers were able to examine the laryngeal structures of small rodents for the first time.
University of Washington computer scientists have created fabrics and fashion accessories that can store data — from security codes to identification tags — without needing any on-board electronics or sensors.
Mark Golitko, assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Notre Dame, worked with colleagues from the Field Museum in Chicago and institutes in Australia, New Zealand and Papua New Guinea to study the Aitape skull and the area it was found in.
Scientists around Tetyana Milojevic from the Faculty of Chemistry at the University of Vienna are in search of unique biosignatures, which are left on synthetic extraterrestrial minerals by microbial activity. The biochemist and astrobiologist investigates these signatures at her own miniaturized "Mars farm" where she can observe interactions between the archaeon Metallosphaera sedula and Mars-like rocks. These microbes are capable of oxidizing and integrating metals into their metabolism. The original research was currently published in the journal "Frontiers in Microbiology".
Filling the universe with knots shortly after it popped into existence 13.8 billion years ago provides a neat explanation for why we inhabit a three-dimensional world. That is the basic idea advanced by an out-of-the-box theory developed by an international team of physicists.
Soil organisms are diverse, with characteristics that can astound. The Soil Science Society of America (SSSA) October 15 Soils Matter blog post explains which soil critters glow—and why.
A new method that precisely measures the mysterious behavior and magnetic properties of electrons flowing across the surface of quantum materials could open a path to next-generation electronics. A team of scientists has developed an innovative microscopy technique to detect the spin of electrons in topological insulators, a new kind of quantum material that could be used in applications such as spintronics and quantum computing.
Iowa State's Massimo Marengo is part of a team of astronomers working to understand the mysterious dimming of Tabby's Star. The astronomers report that space dust orbiting the star -- not alien megastructures -- is the likely cause of the star's long-term dimming.
A study of 300,000 children in 35 nations says kids whose watersheds have greater tree cover are less likely to experience diarrheal disease, the second leading cause of death for children under the age of five.
Explosive volcanic eruptions in the tropics can lead to El Niño events, those notorious warming periods in the Pacific Ocean with dramatic global impacts on the climate, according to a new study.
Genes which determine animal complexity – or what makes humans so much more complex than a fruit fly or a sea urchin – have been identified for the first time.
Fifty years ago, scientists discovered that the Earth is occasionally hit by cosmic rays of enormous energies. Since then, they have argued about the source of those ultra-high energy cosmic rays—whether they came from our galaxy or outside the Milky Way. The answer is a galaxy or galaxies far, far away, according to a report published Sept. 22 in Science by the Pierre Auger Collaboration.
Where do cosmic rays come from? Solving a 50-year old mystery, a collaboration of researchers has discovered it's much farther than the Milky Way.
Playdough and Legos are among the most popular childhood building blocks. But what could you use if you wanted to create something really small—a structure less than the width of a human hair? It turns out, a team of chemists has found, this can be achieved by creating particles that have both playdough and Lego traits.
Vanderbilt University researcher Ken Catania stuck his arm into a tank with small electric eel 10 times -- the only way to get accurate measurements of the circuit created by animal, arm and water.
Hidden in plain sight – that’s how researchers describe their discovery of a new genus of large forest tree commonly found, yet previously scientifically unknown, in the tropical Andes. Researchers from the Smithsonian and Wake Forest University detailed their findings in a study just released the journal PhytoKeys.
The discovery of boron on Mars gives scientists more clues about whether life could have ever existed on the planet, according to a paper published today in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
The surprising results of a Northern Arizona University astronomer's new study find that there are 3.5 million house-sized meteoroids whose orbits bring them close enough to Earth to pose potential impact hazards—ten times fewer than previously thought.
In a new approach to enable scientific breakthroughs, researchers linked together supercomputers at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) and at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
After nearly two years of planning, a team of scientists from the U.S. and Cuba has explored never-before-studied mesophotic coral reefs along the entire coast of Cuba, spanning about 1,500 miles. Except for a few places along the coast, prior to this expedition, there were virtually no data or charts indicating what was beyond the shallow reef zone.
Researchers using Los Alamos’ unique neutron-imaging and high-energy X-ray capabilities have exposed the inner structures of the fossil skull of a 74-million-year-old tyrannosauroid dinosaur nicknamed the Bisti Beast in the highest-resolution scan of tyrannosaur skull ever done.
A U-led team developed a method for analyzing DNA sequence data to reconstruct early history of archaic human populations, revealing an evolutionary story that contradicts conventional wisdom about modern humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans. The Neanderthal-Denisovan lineage nearly went extinct after separating from modern humans. Just 300 generations later, Neanderthals and Denisovans diverged around 744,000 years ago. The global Neanderthal population grew to tens of thousands of individuals living in fragmented, isolated populations.
A decrease in Great Plains streams, fed by decreasing ground water, is changing fish assembles according to research published Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
A new light-trapping sensor, developed by a University at Buffalo-led team of engineers and described in an Advanced Optical Materials study, makes infrared absorption more sensitive, inexpensive and versatile. It may improve scientists’ ability use to sleuth out performance-enhancing drugs in blood samples, tiny particles of explosives in the air and more.
Some of the world’s tiniest crystals are known as “artificial atoms” because they can organize themselves into structures that look like molecules, including “superlattices” that are potential building blocks for novel materials. Now scientists from the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University have made the first observation of these nanocrystals rapidly forming superlattices while they are themselves still growing.
An international team of researchers has shown in unprecedented detail that prehistoric farmers took their animals away from permanent settlements to graze in more fertile areas – probably because of high demand for land locally.
A team of researchers, including a faculty member and seven students from the University of Washington, has found and dated artifacts in northern Australia that indicate humans arrived there about 65,000 years ago — more than 10,000 years earlier than previously thought.
By analyzing the DNA of two prehistoric dogs from Germany, an international research team led by Krishna R. Veeramah, PhD, Assistant Professor of Ecology & Evolution in the College of Arts & Sciences at Stony Brook University, has determined that their genomes were the probable ancestors of modern European dogs. The finding, to be published in Nature Communications, suggests a single domestication event of modern dogs from a population of gray wolves that occurred between 20,000 and 40,000 years ago.
By applying a new computational analysis to a galaxy magnified by a gravitational lens, astronomers have obtained images 10 times sharper than what Hubble could achieve on its own.
Little is known about the origin and early evolution of the Notosuchia, hitherto unknown in the Jurassic period. New research on fossils from Madagascar, published in the peer-reviewed journal PeerJ by Italian and French paleontologists, begin to fill the gap in a million-year-long ghost lineage.
Researchers have discovered the earliest evidence of wild potato use in North America. This is the first archaeological study to identify a spud-bearing species native to the southwestern United States, the Four Corners potato (S. jamesii), as an important part of ancient human diets.
A new look inside 2,000-year-old Roman concrete has provided new clues to the evolving chemistry and mineral cements that allow ancient harbor structures to withstand the test of time.
How baleen whales became filter feeders is widely debated among scientists—but now anatomy researchers at NYIT College of Osteopathic Medicine may finally solve this mystery.
Climate change from rising levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) is having two major effects in our seas - global warming and ocean acidification - and the combination of these threats is affecting marine life from single organisms to species communities.
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