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Categories: Mathematics: Modeling, Paleontology: Fossils

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A research team has confirmed evidence of a previously unknown planet outside of our solar system, and they used machine learning tools to detect it. A recent study by the team showed that machine learning can correctly determine if an exoplanet is present by looking in protoplanetary disks, the gas around newly formed stars. The newly published findings represent a first step toward using machine learning to identify previously overlooked exoplanets.

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Recently identified chili pepper fossils from Boulder and Denver museums challenge millions of years of global tomato evolutionary history. Now, that's some spicy science!

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Scientists have discovered the oldest evidence of plant self-defense in wood in a 360-million-year-old fossil from south-eastern Ireland. Plants can protect their wood from infection and water loss by forming special structures called 'tyloses'. These prevent bacterial and fungal pathogens from getting into the heartwood of living trees and damaging it. However, it was not previously known how early in the evolution of plants woody species became capable of forming such defenses. Published today in Nature Plants is the oldest evidence of tylosis formation from Late Devonian (360-million-year-old) fossil wood from the Hook Head Peninsula area, Co. Wexford, Ireland.

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A new machine-learning system can generate protein designs with certain structural features, and which do not exist in nature. These proteins could be utilized to make materials that have similar mechanical properties to existing materials, like polymers, but which would have a much smaller carbon footprint.

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We now know more about the diet of a prehistoric creature that grew up to two and a half meters long and lived in Australian waters during the time of the dinosaurs, thanks to the power of x-rays. Researchers used micro-CT scans to peer inside the fossilized stomach remains of a small marine reptile -- a plesiosaur nicknamed 'Eric' after a song from the comedy group Monty Python -- to determine what the creature ate in the lead up to its death.

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Solids can be melted by heating, but in the quantum world it can also be the other way around: An experimental team has shown how a quantum liquid forms supersolid structures by heating. The scientists obtained a first phase diagram for a supersolid at finite temperature.

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Researchers have discovered how long ago the Australian Nullarbor plain dried out, with a new approach shedding light on how ancient climate change altered some of the driest regions of our planet.

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New fossils in amber have revealed that beetles fed on the feathers of dinosaurs about 105 million years ago, showing a symbiotic relationship of one-sided or mutual benefit.

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For more than half a century, the Tully monster (Tullimonstrum gregarium), an enigmatic animal that lived about 300 million years ago, has confounded paleontologists, with its strange anatomy making it difficult to classify. Recently, a group of researchers proposed a hypothesis that Tullimonstrum was a vertebrate similar to cyclostomes (jawless fish like lamprey and hagfish). If it was, then the Tully monster would potentially fill a gap in the evolutionary history of early vertebrates. Studies so far have both supported and rejected this hypothesis. Now, using 3D imaging technology, a team in Japan believes it has found the answer after uncovering detailed characteristics of the Tully monster which strongly suggest that it was not a vertebrate. However, its exact classification and what type of invertebrate it was is still to be decided.

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Insect pollination is a decisive process for the survival and evolution of angiosperm (flowering) plants and, to a lesser extent, gymnosperms (without visible flower or fruit). There is a growing interest in studies on the origins of the relationship between insects and plants, especially in the current context of the progressive decline of pollinating insects on a global scale and its impact on food production. Pollinating insects can be recognized in the fossil record, although to date, there has been no protocol for their differentiation. Fossil pollinators have been found in both rock and amber deposits, and it is in rock deposits that the first evidence of plant pollination by insects is being studied across the globe. But how can we determine which was a true insect pollinator in the past?

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Studying mass extinction events from the past can build our understanding of how ecosystems and the communities of organisms within them respond. Researchers are looking to the Late Devonian mass extinction which happened around 370 million years ago to better understand how communities of organisms respond in times of great upheaval.

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New research led by a paleobotanist provides clues about what plants existed in the Burnaby Mountain area (British Columbia, Canada) 40 million years ago during the late Eocene, when the climate was much warmer than it is today.

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Anthropologists have long thought that our ape ancestors evolved an upright torso in order to pick fruit in forests, but new research from the University of Michigan suggests a life in open woodlands and a diet that included leaves drove apes' upright stature.

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Scientists have described a new species of bat based on the oldest bat skeletons ever recovered. The study on the extinct bat, which lived in Wyoming about 52 million years ago, supports the idea that bats diversified rapidly on multiple continents during this time.

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The ancestors of modern mammals managed to evolve into one of the most successful animal lineages -- the key was to start out small and simple, a new study reveals.

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A team of researchers compared the genomes of woolly mammoths with modern day elephants to find out what made woolly mammoths unique, both as individuals and as a species. The investigators report that many of the woolly mammoth's trademark features -- including their woolly coats and large fat deposits -- were already genetically encoded in the earliest woolly mammoths, but these and other traits became more defined over the species' 700,000+ year existence. They also identified a gene with several mutations that may have been responsible for the woolly mammoth's miniscule ears.

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In an advance they consider a breakthrough in computational chemistry research, chemical engineers have developed a model of how catalytic reactions work at the atomic scale. This understanding could allow engineers and chemists to develop more efficient catalysts and tune industrial processes -- potentially with enormous energy savings, given that 90% of the products we encounter in our lives are produced, at least partially, via catalysis.

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Scientists analyzed each element of the neutrino mass matrix belonging to leptons and showed theoretically that the intergenerational mixing of lepton flavors is large. Furthermore, by using the mathematics of random matrix theory, the research team was able to demonstrate, as much as is possible at this stage, why the calculation of the squared difference of the neutrino masses are in close agreement with the experimental results in the case of the seesaw model with the random Dirac and Majorana matrices. The results of this research are expected to contribute to the further development of particle theory research, which largely remains a mystery.

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Today, ants are pretty much everywhere. To learn more about how these insects conquered the world, scientists used a combination of fossils, DNA, and data on the habitat preferences of modern species to piece together how ants and plants have been evolving together over the past 60 million years. They found that when flowering plants spread out from forests, the ants followed, kicking off the evolution of the thousands of ant species alive today.

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Researchers used computational modeling to reveal finer details surrounding the outer shell of the COVID-19 virus. The work expands the scientific community's understanding of SARS-COV-2, and could lead to more refined antiviral therapies and better vaccines.