News
- Neuroscience
Here’s how magnetic fields shape desert ants’ brains
Exposure to a tweaked magnetic field scrambled desert ants’ efforts to learn where home is — and affected neuron connections in a key part of the brain.
- Earth
Earth’s oldest known earthquake was probably triggered by plate tectonics
Billion-year-old rocks in South Africa hold evidence for the onset of plate tectonics early in Earth’s history.
- Earth
Climate change is changing how we keep time
Polar ice sheets are melting faster, slowing Earth’s spin. That is changing how we synchronize our clocks to tell time.
- Space
A new image reveals magnetic fields around our galaxy’s central black hole
Astronomers have captured polarized light coming from the Milky Way’s central supermassive black hole, giving insight into its magnetic fields.
- Physics
A teeny device can measure subtle shifts in Earth’s gravitational field
No bigger than a grain of rice, the heart of the instrument is the latest entrant in the quest to build ever tinier gravity-measuring devices.
- Paleontology
An extinct sofa-sized turtle may have lived alongside humans
Peltocephalus maturin was one of the biggest turtles ever, but unlike similarly sized prehistoric freshwater turtles, it lived thousands of years ago.
- Animals
By fluttering its wings, this bird uses body language to tell its mate ‘after you’
New observations suggest that Japanese tits gesture to communicate complex messages — a rare ability in the animal kingdom and a first seen in birds.
- Artificial Intelligence
AI learned how to sway humans by watching a cooperative cooking game
New research used the game Overcooked to show how offline reinforcement learning algorithms could teach bots to collaborate with — or manipulate — us.
- Neuroscience
Dogs know words for their favorite toys
The brain activity of dogs that were expecting one toy but were shown another suggests canines create mental concepts of everyday objects.
- Humans
These are the chemicals that give teens pungent body odor
Steroids and high levels of carboxylic acids in teenagers’ body odor give off a mix of pleasant and acrid scents.
- Psychology
Timbre can affect what harmony is music to our ears
The acoustic qualities of instruments may have influenced variations in musical scales and preferred harmonies.
- Animals
American bullfrogs may be threatening a rare frog species in Brazil
A search for environmental DNA from critically endangered Pithecopus rusticus frogs turned up DNA from invasive American bullfrogs instead.
