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Categories: Mathematics: Modeling, Paleontology: Fossils

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The origin of bees is tens of millions of years older than most previous estimates, a new study shows. A team led by Washington State University researchers traced the bee genealogy back more than 120 million years to an ancient supercontinent, Gondwana, which included today's continents of Africa and South America.

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Scientists have trained a machine learning model in outer space, on board a satellite. This achievement could revolutionize the capabilities of remote-sensing satellites by enabling real-time monitoring and decision making for a range of applications.

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An international team of linguists and geneticists has achieved a significant breakthrough in our understanding of the origins of Indo-European, a family of languages spoken by nearly half of the world's population.

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A new machine-learning technique can efficiently learn to control a robot, leading to better performance with fewer data.

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Miyako Islands are home to various native species of snake and lizards. How these species came to call these islands home has long puzzled scientists. A group of researchers have compiled the latest geological and biological data, proposing that an island once facilitated migration between Okinawa and Miyako Islands.

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Newly identified plant fossils found in Argentina suggest that a group of spurges long thought to have Asian origins may have first appeared in Gondwanan South America.

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Enzymes play a key role in cellular metabolic processes. To enable the quantitative assessment of these processes, researchers need to know the so-called 'turnover number' (for short: kcat) of the enzymes. A team of bioinformaticians now describes a tool for predicting this parameter for various enzymes using AI methods.

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An exquisitely preserved fossil forest from Japan provides missing links and helps reconstruct a whole Eurasia plant from the late Miocene epoch.

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Sabertooth cats make up a diverse group of long-toothed predators that roamed Africa around 6-7 million years ago, around the time that hominins -- the group that includes modern humans -- began to evolve. By examining one of the largest global Pliocene collections of fossils in Langebaanweg, north of Cape Town in South Africa, researchers present two new sabertooth species and the first family tree of the region's ancient sabertooths. Their results suggest that the distribution of sabertooths throughout ancient Africa might have been different than previously assumed, and the study provides important information about Africa's paleoenvironment.

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Scientists have described an unusual fossil from around 125 million years ago in China that shows a dramatic moment in time when a carnivorous mammal attacked a larger plant-eating dinosaur. The two animals are locked in mortal combat, and it's among the first evidence to show actual predatory behavior by a mammal on a dinosaur. The fossil's presence challenges the view that dinosaurs had few threats from their mammal contemporaries during the Cretaceous, when dinosaurs were the dominant animals.

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No, oxygen didn't catalyze the swift blossoming of Earth's first multicellular organisms. The result defies a 70-year-old assumption about what caused an explosion of oceanic fauna hundreds of millions of years ago.

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In an exciting scientific development, an international team of researchers have officially named a newly discovered 145-million-year-old pterosaur. The animal had enormous 2-meter wingspan and was nicknamed 'Elvis' when the fossil was first unearthed in Bavaria, Germany because of the giant pompadour-like bony crest on its skull. Now the animal has been given a formal scientific name of Petrodactyle wellnhoferi. The name translates as 'Wellnhofer's stone-finger' honouring legendary German palaeontologist Peter Wellnhofer who spent his career working on German pterosaurs. Petrodactyle is a very complete skeleton with nearly every bone preserved and in remarkable detail.

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A team has combined economic theory with biology to understand how natural systems respond to change. The researchers noticed a similarity between consumers' shopping behavior and the behavior of metabolic systems, which convert food into energy in our bodies. The team focused on predicting how different metabolic systems might respond to environmental change by using an economic tool called the Slutsky equation. Their calculations indicated that very different metabolic systems actually share previously unknown universal properties, and can be understood using tools from other academic fields. Metabolic processes are used in drug development, bioengineering, food production and other industries, so being able to predict how such systems will respond to change can offer many benefits.

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Portable chemical imaging technology can reveal hidden details in ancient Egyptian paintings, according to new research.

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Ice Age saber-tooth cats and dire wolves experienced a high incidence of bone disease in their joints, according to new research.

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Using Japan's most powerful supercomputer, researchers reproduced cases of clear air turbulence around Tokyo. They simulated the fine vortices responsible for this dangerous phenomenon. The usefulness of the simulation in predicting turbulence was confirmed by comparing simulation data with data from aircraft recordings. This research should improve the forecasting of turbulence.

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Structural engineers are familiar with seventeenth-century scientist Robert Hooke's theory that a hanging chain will mirror the shape of an upstanding rigid arch. However, new research now shows that this common-held belief is incorrect because, regardless of the similarities, the hanging chain and the arch are two incompatible mechanical systems.

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Humans began altering environments long before records were kept of the things that lived in them, making it difficult for scientists to determine what healthy ecosystems should look like. Researchers show the recent fossil record preserves a reliable snapshot of marine environments as they existed before humans.

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Movement in the Earth's tectonic plates indirectly triggers bursts of biodiversity in 36 million-year cycles by forcing sea levels to rise and fall, new research has shown.

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Board games based on numbers, like Monopoly, Othello and Chutes and Ladders, make young children better at math, according to a comprehensive review of research published on the topic over the last 23 years.