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Magazine
In the May 11 & 25 SN: High-tech cricket farming, AI learns from Minecraft, looking for lithium, a new hominid species is named, signs of life in dead pig brains, Cherokee cave texts decoded, water molecules on the moon and more.
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Science Visualized
How deep water surfaces around Antarctica
09/01/2017 - 13:00 Oceans, ClimateView the video
There’s no signpost to mark it, but about 3,000 meters underwater off the southeast coast of South America, a stream of deep water from the Atlantic Ocean spills into the Southern Ocean. Now new maps reveal in 3-D how the path of that water, called the North Atlantic Deep Water, spirals southeastward and up toward the surface around Antarctica.
The incoming water,...
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Introducing
This sea snake looks like a banana and hunts like a Slinky
09/01/2017 - 12:00 AnimalsWith its bright hue, this snake was bound to stand out sooner or later.
A newly discovered subspecies of sea snake, Hydrophis platurus xanthos, has a narrow geographic range and an unusual hunting trick. The canary-yellow reptile hunts at night in Golfo Dulce off Costa Rica’s Pacific coast. With its body coiled up at the sea surface, the snake points its head under the water, mouth open...
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News
Bones reveal what it was like to grow up dodo
08/29/2017 - 07:00 Animals, Physiology, EvolutionDumb extinction jokes aside, dodos’ life history is largely unknown.
Now the first closeup look inside the long-gone birds’ bones is giving a glimpse into their lives, an international research team reports August 24 in Scientific Reports. Until now, almost nothing has been known about the basic biology of dodos, such as when they mated or how quickly they grew.
Based on 22 bones...
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News
Molecules face the big chill
08/28/2017 - 12:41 PhysicsMolecules are seriously chilling out. Scientists report the first cooling of molecules below a previously impassable milestone. The result, in which scientists cooled molecules down to tens of millionths of a degree, is a step toward reaching the ultracold temperatures already achievable with atoms, researchers report August 28 in Nature Physics.
Scientists regularly chill atoms to less...
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News
Nitty-gritty of Homo naledi’s diet revealed in its teeth
08/24/2017 - 14:00 Anthropology, Human EvolutionGive Homo naledi credit for originality. The fossils of this humanlike species previously revealed an unexpectedly peculiar body plan. Now its pockmarked teeth speak to an unusually hard-edged diet.
H. naledi displays a much higher rate of chipped teeth than other members of the human evolutionary family that once occupied the same region of South Africa, say biological anthropologist...
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The –est
Meet the Bobcat Nanowagon, the world’s smallest monster truck
08/23/2017 - 17:21 TechnologyWASHINGTON, D.C. — The world’s smallest monster truck has a chemical curiosity under its hood.
Made out of a mere five molecules, the Ohio Bobcat Nanowagon checks in at 3.5 nanometers long and 2.5 wide — about the width of a DNA strand. Even so, it was the heftiest contender in the first-ever nanocar race earlier this year. This pip-squeak vehicle took home the bronze, but perhaps more...
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News
New antennas are up to a hundredth the size of today’s devices
08/22/2017 - 14:00 Technology, MaterialsAntennas just got a whole lot smaller.
Tiny chips that communicate via radio waves are a tenth to a hundredth the length of current state-of-the-art compact antennas. At only a couple hundred micrometers across — comparable to the thickness of a piece of paper — these next-gen antennas can relay the same types of signals as those used by TVs, cell phones and radios, researchers report...
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News
Some secrets of China’s terra-cotta army are baked in the clay
08/22/2017 - 09:30 Anthropology, ArchaeologyChina’s first emperor broke the mold when he had himself buried with a terra-cotta army. Now insight into the careful crafting of those soldiers is coming from the clays used to build them. Custom clay pastes were mixed at a clay-making center and then distributed to specialized workshops that cranked out thousands of the life-size figures, new research suggests.
Roughly 700,000...
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News
Cosmic lens lets astronomers zoom in on a black hole’s burps
08/18/2017 - 17:01 AstronomyAstronomers have caught their best look ever at blobs of hot gas fleeing a supermassive black hole, thanks to a new kind of cosmic magnifying glass.
Anthony Readhead of the Owens Valley Radio Observatory at Caltech and colleagues caught two small, hot bursts traveling away from a bright galaxy called J1415+1320 at near the speed of light. Although the galaxy is billions of light-years...
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News
We share the Milky Way with 100 million black holes
08/18/2017 - 09:00 Astronomy, PhysicsThe Milky Way teems with black holes — about 100 million of them.
But there’s no reason to fear. “It may sound like a big number, but by astronomical standards, it’s a pretty small number,” says physicist Daniel Holz of the University of Chicago. The number of stars in the Milky Way, for example, is about a thousand times larger.
Scientists from the University of California, Irvine...