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Categories: Offbeat: Earth and Climate, Physics: Acoustics and Ultrasound

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Two-million-year-old DNA has been identified -- opening a 'game-changing' new chapter in the history of evolution. Microscopic fragments of environmental DNA were found in Ice Age sediment in northern Greenland. Using cutting-edge technology, researchers discovered the fragments are one million years older than the previous record for DNA sampled from a Siberian mammoth bone. The ancient DNA has been used to map a two-million-year-old ecosystem which weathered extreme climate change.

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Dinosaurs dominated the world right up until a deadly asteroid hit the earth, leading to their mass extinction, some 66 million years ago, a landmark study reveals. Fresh insights into dinosaurs' ecosystems -- the habitats and food types that supported their lives -- suggests that their environments were robust and thriving, right up until that fateful day, at the end of the Cretaceous period.

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New research, based on two decades' worth of data, shows that in the ten years after its onset in 2000, the Southwestern North American (SWNA) megadrought caused a 30% change in gravity wave activity in Earth's upper atmosphere.

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Experimental physicists growing icicles are closer to understanding why some form with ripples up and down their outsides, while others form with smooth, slick, even surfaces. By growing icicles from water samples with different contaminants like sodium chloride (salt), dextrose (sugar) and fluorescent dye, they discovered that water impurities become entrapped within icicles as they form and subsequently create chevron patterns that contribute to a ripple effect around their circumferences.

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As a result of climate change, over one-fifth of the UK may have suitable weather by mid-Century to grow Chardonnay grapes for still wines, according to new research.

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Up to 78% of walkers would take a more challenging route featuring obstacles such as balancing beams, stepping stones and high steps, research has found. The findings suggest that providing 'Active Landscape' routes in urban areas could help tackle an 'inactivity pandemic' and improve health outcomes.

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A specimen retrieved from a cupboard of the Natural History Museum in London has shown that modern lizards originated in the Late Triassic and not the Middle Jurassic as previously thought.

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Water that simply will not freeze, no matter how cold it gets -- a research group has discovered a quantum state that could be described in this way. Experts have managed to cool a special material to near absolute zero temperature. They found that a central property of atoms -- their alignment -- did not 'freeze', as usual, but remained in a 'liquid' state. The new quantum material could serve as a model system to develop novel, highly sensitive quantum sensors.

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A plant common to Japan, Causonis japonica, is the first to show a newly discovered trait. Its flowers can change color depending on the stage of its maturation cycle, and then change back to its original color. Although many flowers have been shown to change color depending on their maturation phase, Causonis japonica is the only known example of bidirectional color change. The pigments involved in the colors are related to nutrient-rich colorful vegetables, so understanding the flowers' color-changing tricks could have downstream applications in improving nutrient yields in certain food crops.

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Fossilized fragments of a skeleton, hidden within a rock the size of a grapefruit, have helped upend one of the longest-standing assumptions about the origins of modern birds.

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Researchers have devised a method to transform post-consumer mixed plastics that wash up on beaches into a variety of valuable products.

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Researchers have discovered and characterized a DNA sequence found in jawed vertebrates, such as sharks and humans, but absent in jawless vertebrates, such as lampreys. This DNA is important for the shaping of the joint surfaces during embryo development.

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Whatcheeria, a six-foot-long salamander-like creature that lived 340 million years ago, was the T. rex of its time: the biggest, baddest predator in its habitat. A new study reveals how they grew to their 'giant' size: instead of growing slow and steady throughout their lives like many modern reptiles and amphibians, they did most of their growing when they were young.

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For millennia, caves have served as shelters for prehistoric humans. Caves have also intrigued scholars from early Chinese naturalists to Charles Darwin. A cave ecologist has been in and out of these subterranean ecosystems, examining the unique life forms -- and unique living conditions -- that exist in Earth's many caves. But what does that suggest about caves on other planetary bodies? In two connected studies, engineers, astrophysicists, astrobiologists and astronauts lay out the research that needs to be done to get us closer to answering the old-age question about life beyond Earth.

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Some commercial earbuds can perform as well as hearing aids. The result could help a large proportion of people with hearing loss access more affordable sound amplification devices.

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To find out how different aspects of music influence the body, researchers turned a live electronic music concert into a lab study. By introducing levels of bass over speakers that were too low to hear and monitoring the crowd's movements, scientists found that people danced 11.8 percent more when the very low frequency bass was present.

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The forensic-voice-comparison system, based on state-of-the-art automatic-speaker-recognition technology, outperformed all the listeners.

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Researchers have developed a machine-learning technique that captures and models the underlying acoustics of a scene from a limited number of sound recordings. The system can accurately simulate what any sound, like a song, would sound like if a person were to walk around to different locations in a scene.

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When two musical notes are played simultaneously, the human ear can perceive weak additional tones called combination tones. While less perceivable, objective combination tones are also generated by some musical instruments. Researchers have now used violins to explore these rarely studied objective combination tones. They found that the combination tones produced by higher-quality violins were much stronger and clearly audible and powerful air resonance and violin sound quality are linked. The higher-quality violins produced a stronger air resonance due to several factors, including structural material and crafting techniques.

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Researchers have created a newborn hearing screening system that uses cheap earbuds and a smartphone instead of an expensive commercial device.