News
- Earth
A belly full of wriggling worms makes wood beetles better recyclers
Common beetles that eat rotten logs chew up more wood when filled with a roundworm larvae, releasing nutrients more quickly back to the forest floor.
- Physics
LIGO is on the lookout for these 8 sources of gravitational waves
Gravitational wave hunters are on a cosmic scavenger hunt. Here’s what they’re hoping to find.
- Science & Society
Medical student evaluations appear riddled with racial and gender biases
Women and minorities are more frequently described by personality in medical student evaluations, but men are described by their skills, a study says.
- Ecosystems
War wrecked an African ecosystem. Ecologists are trying to restore it
Bringing back big predators to Gorongosa, once a wildlife paradise in Mozambique, is just one piece of the puzzle in undoing the damage there.
- Science & Society
Facebook data show how many people left Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria
Conventional surveys can’t track migration after natural disasters in real time. But Facebook data may provide a crude estimate of those who flee.
- Animals
Pandas’ share of protein calories from bamboo rivals wolves’ from meat
The panda gut digests protein in bamboo so well that the animal’s nutritional profile for calories resembles a wolf’s.
- Paleontology
A dinosaur’s running gait may reveal insights into the history of bird flight
In what may have been a precursor to avian flight, a flightless winged dinosaur may have flapped its wings as it jogged.
- Artificial Intelligence
An AI used art to control monkeys’ brain cells
Art created by an artificial intelligence exacts unprecedented control over nerve cells tied to vision in monkey brains, and could lead to new neuroscience experiments.
- Planetary Science
Water has been found in the dust of an asteroid thought to be bone-dry
Scientists detected water in bits of an asteroid thought to be devoid of the liquid. Such space rocks might have helped create Earth’s oceans.
- Anthropology
A jawbone shows Denisovans lived on the Tibetan Plateau long before humans
A Denisovan jaw is the earliest evidence of hominids on the Tibetan Plateau, and the first fossil outside of Siberia from the mysterious human lineage.
- Earth
Dry sand can bubble and swirl like a fluid
Put two types of sand grains together in a chamber, and they can flow like fluids under the right conditions.
- Astronomy
Skepticism grows over whether the first known exomoon exists
New analyses of the data used to find the first discovered exomoon are reaching conflicting results.
