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Categories: Offbeat: General, Physics: Optics
Published Fruit fly post-mating behavior controlled by male-derived peptide via command neurons, study finds



Scientists have succeeded in pinpointing the neurons within a female fruit fly's brain that respond to signals from the male during mating.
Published Hunter-gatherers kept an 'orderly home' in the earliest known British dwelling



Archaeological evidence from the world-famous Mesolithic site of Star Carr in North Yorkshire has shown that hunter-gatherers likely kept an orderly home by creating 'zones' for particular domestic activities.
Published A promising new method uses light to clean up forever chemicals



A room-temperature method to decompose perfluoroalkyl substances (PFASs) using visible LED light offers a promising solution for sustainable fluorine recycling and PFAS treatment.
Published Astrophysicists uncover supermassive blackhole/dark matter connection in solving the 'final parsec problem'



Researchers have found a link between some of the largest and smallest objects in the cosmos: supermassive black holes and dark matter particles. Their new calculations reveal that pairs of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) can merge into a single larger black hole because of previously overlooked behavior of dark matter particles, proposing a solution to the longstanding 'final parsec problem' in astronomy.
Published Development of 'living robots' needs regulation and public debate



Researchers are calling for regulation to guide the responsible and ethical development of bio-hybrid robotics -- a ground-breaking science which fuses artificial components with living tissue and cells.
Published Smell of human stress affects dogs' emotions leading them to make more pessimistic choices



Dogs experience emotional contagion from the smell of human stress, leading them to make more 'pessimistic' choices, new research finds. Researchers tested how human stress odors affect dogs' learning and emotional state.
Published Controlling mosquito populations through genetic breeding



Researchers have found a new way to identify genetic targets useful for control of mosquito populations, potentially offering an alternative to insecticides. Their study focused on the genetic basis of species incompatibility. They crossed Ae. aegypti, a major global arboviral disease vector, and its sibling species, Ae. mascarensis, from the Indian Ocean. When offspring is crossed back with one parent, about 10 percent of the progeny becomes intersex and is unable to reproduce.
Published Birds need entertainment during avian flu lockdowns



Birds need varied activities during avian flu lockdowns, new research shows.
Published 3D printing of light-activated hydrogel actuators



An international team of researchers has embedded gold nanorods in hydrogels that can be processed through 3D printing to create structures that contract when exposed to light -- and expand again when the light is removed. Because this expansion and contraction can be performed repeatedly, the 3D-printed structures can serve as remotely controlled actuators.
Published Chimpanzees gesture back and forth quickly like in human conversations



When people are having a conversation, they rapidly take turns speaking and sometimes even interrupt. Now, researchers who have collected the largest ever dataset of chimpanzee 'conversations' have found that they communicate back and forth using gestures following the same rapid-fire pattern.
Published Life signs could survive near surfaces of Enceladus and Europa



Europa and Enceladus, icy moons of Jupiter and Saturn respectively, have evidence of oceans beneath their crusts. A NASA experiment suggests -- if these oceans support life -- signatures of that life in the form of organic molecules (like amino acids and nucleic acids) could survive just under the surface ice despite the harsh, ionizing radiation on these worlds. If robotic landers were to go to these moons to look for life signs, they would not have to dig very deep to find amino acids that have survived being altered or destroyed by radiation.
Published Can consciousness exist in a computer simulation?



A new essay explores which conditions must be met for consciousness to exist. At least one of them can't be found in a computer.
Published Another intermediate-mass black hole discovered at the center of our galaxy



So far, only about ten intermediate-mass black holes have been discovered in the entire universe. The newly identified black hole causes surrounding stars in a cluster to move in an unexpectedly orderly way.
Published The courtship of leopard seals off the coast of South America



A pioneering study has unveiled the first paired observations of sexual behavior and vocalizations in wild leopard seals. The study on the mysterious leopard seal represents a major advance in understanding the behavior of one of the most difficult apex predators to study on Earth.
Published Singing the science: Using karaoke to examine blushing



A new collaboration explores the neural substrates of blushing in a MRI scanner.
Published Ant insights lead to robot navigation breakthrough



Have you ever wondered how insects are able to go so far beyond their home and still find their way? The answer to this question is not only relevant to biology but also to making the AI for tiny, autonomous robots. Drone-researchers felt inspired by biological findings on how ants visually recognize their environment and combine it with counting their steps in order to get safely back home. They have used these insights to create an insect-inspired autonomous navigation strategy for tiny, lightweight robots. It allows such robots to come back home after long trajectories, while requiring extremely little computation and memory (0.65 kiloByte per 100 m). In the future, tiny autonomous robots could find a wide range of uses, from monitoring stock in warehouses to finding gas leaks in industrial sites.
Published New technique pinpoints nanoscale 'hot spots' in electronics to improve their longevity



Researchers engineered a new technique to identify at the nanoscale level what components are overheating in electronics and causing their performance to fail.
Published Want to spot a deepfake? Look for the stars in their eyes



In an era when the creation of artificial intelligence (AI) images is at the fingertips of the masses, the ability to detect fake pictures -- particularly deepfakes of people -- is becoming increasingly important. So what if you could tell just by looking into someone's eyes? That's the compelling finding of new research which suggests that AI-generated fakes can be spotted by analyzing human eyes in the same way that astronomers study pictures of galaxies.
Published Completely stretchy lithium-ion battery for flexible electronics



When you think of a battery, you probably don't think stretchy. But batteries will need this shape-shifting quality to be incorporated into flexible electronics, which are gaining traction for wearable health monitors. Now, researchers report a lithium-ion battery with entirely stretchable components, including an electrolyte layer that can expand by 5000%, and it retains its charge storage capacity after nearly 70 charge/discharge cycles.
Published What fat cats on a diet may tell us about obesity in humans



Pet cats may be excellent animal models for the study of obesity origins and treatment in humans, a new study of feline gut microbes suggests -- and both species would likely get healthier in the research process, scientists say.