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Contents
- Sweet Confusion: Does high fructose corn syrup deserve such a bad rap?
- Closed Thinking: Without scientific competition and open debate, much psychology research goes nowhere
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Contents
- Teens take home science gold: A low-cost, self-driving vehicle; battery alternatives and analyses of galaxy clusters claim top prizes at a global high school science competition
- Flagging loose bolts: “Smart alert washer” automatically flags when a nut is coming loose, warning of potential danger
- Pee is for power: The water in urine can be a source of hydrogen for electrical generators
Paleontology
- The Ediacaran fauna were as varied as all animals in existence today and, more impressively, as in the Cambrian, report paleontologists.
- Chemical analyses of amber excavated near Paris suggest that France was covered with a dense tropical forest about 55 million years ago.
- The ancestors of whales, some of which are the largest creatures ever to evolve, probably were mammals no larger than a fox.
- Evidence of an extraterrestrial object striking Earth at the height of the last ice age comes from micrometeorites embedded in the tusks of creatures that were grazing the Alaskan tundra when the object burst in the air above.
- Nigersaurus boasted more than 500 teeth, arranged in rows across its mouth.
- The Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh will unveil the world's largest dinosaur mural on Nov. 21, when its dinosaur halls reopen after a 30-month, $36 million renovation.
- The long-term disappearance of creatures from the fossil record and their later reemergence can provide insights into ancient environmental conditions and the trustworthiness of the fossil record itself.
- The dire wolf, an extinct species preserved in abundance at the La Brea tar pits, seems to have had a social structure similar to that of its modern-day relatives.
- Distinctive bone tissue in fossils of several dinosaur species suggests that the ancient reptiles became sexually mature long before they gained adult size.
- The meat-eating dinosaur Deinonychus probably used the large, sicklelike claw on its foot to grip and climb large prey, not disembowel it.
- A newly found fossil preserves one creature inside another that lies nestled inside yet another, a Paleozoic version of the Russian nesting dolls known as matrushkas.
- Dinosaurs remains fossilized within an ancient burrow are the first indisputable evidence that some dinosaurs maintained an underground lifestyle.
- Experiments in a Florida swamp show how aquatic creatures can get trapped and preserved in amber, a form of hardened tree sap.
- Saber-toothed cats living in North America around 10,000 years ago had a much weaker bite than modern big cats.
- Hair from ancient mammoths contains enough genetic material to permit reconstruction of parts of the animal's genome.
- A series of knobs on the forearm bone of a 1.5-meter-long velociraptor provides the first direct evidence of substantial feathers on a dinosaur of that size.
- Early dinosaurs didn't quickly eclipse the creatures they evolved from, but lived alongside them for perhaps 20 million years.
- Fossils found in the head-thrown-back position, the so-called "dead bird" pose, probably died from central nervous system damage.
- A quarry on the Virginia–North Carolina border has yielded fossils of an unusual gliding reptile that lived in the region about 220 million years ago.
- Paleontologists have unearthed the remains of a gigantic birdlike dinosaur, 3.5 meters tall, that lived 70 million years ago in what is now China.
- Recently unearthed fossils provide new insights about the appearance of the world's oldest known trees, plants that previously were known only from preserved stumps.
- New analyses of a Tyrannosaurus rex leg bone reveal substantial remnants of proteins that strengthen the link between modern birds and dinosaurs.
- Among mammals, reptiles, and related animals, today's birds have the smallest genomes, and the dinosaurs that gave rise to birds had small genomes as well.
- Paleontologists have unearthed fossils that provide direct evidence of something scientists had long suspected: The tiny bones in the middle ears of modern-day mammals evolved from bones located at the rear of their reptilian ancestors' jaws.
- A 1-centimeter-long, 505-million-year-old fossil from British Columbia represents a creature that joins two lineages of marine invertebrates from that era that scientists previously hadn't linked.
- About 125 million years before the Wright Brothers took to the air with their biplane, a 1-meter-long dinosaur may have been swooping from tree to tree using the same arrangement of wings.
- A lengthy, newly compiled fossil record of Australian mammals bolsters the notion that humanity's arrival on the island continent led to the extinction of many large creatures there.
- Variations in the range of Adélie penguins along one section of Antarctica's coast during the past 45,000 years are a keen indicator of climate change there.
- Species in one group of insects have escaped the hungry eye of predators by looking like foliage and moving like swaying leaves for at least 47 million years, a new fossil find suggests.
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Not to miss
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Coverage of the 2013 American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting
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The Year in Science 2012
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Three-part series on the scientific struggle to explain the conscious self
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