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Categories: Engineering: Robotics Research, Offbeat: Paleontology and Archeology

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Mammoths, the massive pre-historic ice age cousins of the modern-day elephant, have always been understood to have inhabited parts of British Columbia, but the question of when has always been a bit woolly. Now, a new study has given scientists the clearest picture yet when the giant mammals roamed Vancouver Island.

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The first-ever archeological survey in space has provided new insights into how astronauts use and adapt their living space on the International Space Station, which could influence the design of new space stations after the ISS is decommissioned.

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Researchers have demonstrated a technique for creating sensors that can function both in air and underwater. The approach paves the way for 'amphibious' sensors with applications ranging from wildlife monitoring to biomedical applications.

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Markings on a stone pillar at a 12,000 year-old archaeological site in Turkey likely represent the world's oldest solar calendar, created as a memorial to a devastating comet strike, experts suggest.

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A new study reports the discovery of extremely rare early human fossils from the Indonesian island of Flores, including an astonishingly small adult limb bone. Dated to about 700,000 years old, the new findings shed light on the evolution of Homo floresiensis, the so-called 'Hobbits' of Flores whose remains were uncovered in 2003 at Liang Bua cave in the island's west.

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The Pyramid of Djoser, the oldest of Egypt's iconic pyramids, may have been built with the help of a unique hydraulic lift system, according to researchers. A new study suggests that water may have been able to flow into two shafts located inside the pyramid itself, where that water could have been used to help raise and lower a float used to carry the building stones.

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Exceptional fossils with preserved soft parts reveal that the earliest mollusks were flat, armored slugs without shells. The new species, Shishania aculeata, was covered with hollow, organic, cone-shaped spines. The fossils preserve exceptionally rare detailed features which reveal that these spines were produced using a sophisticated secretion system that is shared with annelids (earthworms and relatives).

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What if the 'Market Economy' always existed? Archaeologists tried to answer this question by researching how much Bronze Age people used to spend to sustain their daily lives. Their results show that, starting at least 3,500 years ago, the spending habits of prehistoric Europeans were not substantially different from what they are today.

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Soil liquefaction that results in infrastructure damage has long been a point of contention for urban planners and engineers. Accurately predicting the soil liquefaction risk of a region could help overcome this challenge. Accordingly, researchers applied artificial intelligence to generate soil liquefaction risk maps, superseding already published risk maps.

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Inspired by the paper-folding art of origami, engineers have discovered a way to make a single plastic cubed structure transform into more than 1,000 configurations using only three active motors.

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Researchers have developed a self-powered 'bug' that can skim across the water, and they hope it will revolutionize aquatic robotics.

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Scientists have identified an automatic behavior in flies that helps them assess wind conditions -- its presence and direction -- before deploying a strategy to follow a scent to its source. The fact that they can do this is surprising -- can you tell if there's a gentle breeze if you stick your head out of a moving car? Flies aren't just reacting to an odor with a preprogrammed response: they are responding in context-appropriate manner. This knowledge potentially could be applied to train more sophisticated algorithms for scent-detecting drones to find the source of chemical leaks.

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Birds tend to be more colorful in the tropics, and scientists wanted to find out how they got there: if colorful feathers evolved in the tropics, or if tropical birds have brightly-colored ancestors that came to the region from somwhere else. Scientists built a database of 9,409 birds to explore the spread of color across the globe. They found that iridescent, colorful feathers originated 415 times across the bird tree of life, and in most cases, arose outside of the tropics -- and that the ancestor of all modern birds likely had iridescent feathers, too.

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Lampreys are one of only two living jawless vertebrates Jaws are formed by a key stem cell population called the neural crest New research reveals the gene regulatory changes that may explain morphological differences between jawed and jawless vertebrates.

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Danish Tycho Brahe was most famous for his contributions to astronomy. However, he also had a well-equipped alchemical laboratory where he produced secret medicines for Europe's elite.

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Brachiopods were evolving in new directions but this did not turn into evolutionary success in terms of the numbers of species, researchers have found.

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Rock art explored by archaeologists in the Colombian Amazon has provided an insight into the complex relationship between the earliest settlers on the continent and the animals they encountered.

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Artificial intelligence (AI) is hot right now. Also hot: the data centers that power the technology. And keeping those centers cool requires a tremendous amount of energy. The problem is only going to grow as high-powered AI-based computers and devices become commonplace. That's why researchers are devising a new type of cooling system that promises to dramatically reduce energy demands.

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The praying mantis is one of the few insects with compound eyes and the ability to perceive 3D space. Engineers are replicating their visual systems to make machines see better.

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Engineers have shown that something as simple as the flow of air through open-cell foam can be used to perform digital computation, analog sensing and combined digital-analog control in soft textile-based wearable systems.