Showing 20 articles starting at article 1021
< Previous 20 articles Next 20 articles >
Categories: Ecology: Trees, Offbeat: General
Published Was 'witchcraft' in the Devil's Church in Koli based on acoustic resonance? The crevice cave has a unique soundscape



The national park of Koli in eastern Finland is home to a famous, 34-metre-long crevice cave known as Pirunkirkko, or Devil's Church in English. A new study investigates the acoustics of the Devil's Church and explores whether the acoustic properties of the cave could explain the beliefs associated with it, and why it was chosen as a place for activities and rituals involving sound.
Published Alien haze, cooked in a lab, clears view to distant water worlds



Scientists have simulated conditions that allow hazy skies to form in water-rich exoplanets, a crucial step in determining how haziness muddles important telescope observations for the search of habitable worlds beyond the solar system.
Published Wave devouring propulsion: A revolutionary green technology for maritime sustainability



A new form of wave devouring propulsion (WDP) could power ships and help to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the maritime industry.
Published The Fens of eastern England once held vast woodlands



The Fens of eastern England, a low-lying, extremely flat landscape dominated by agricultural fields, was once a vast woodland filled with huge yew trees, according to new research. Scientists have studied hundreds of tree trunks, dug up by Fenland farmers while ploughing their fields. The team found that most of the ancient wood came from yew trees that populated the area between four and five thousand years ago.
Published 'Strange metal' is strangely quiet in noise experiment



Experiments have provided the first direct evidence that electricity seems to flow through 'strange metals' in an unusual liquid-like form.
Published Telescope Array detects second highest-energy cosmic ray ever



In 1991, an experiment detected the highest-energy cosmic ray ever observed. Later dubbed the Oh-My-God particle, the cosmic ray’s energy shocked astrophysicists. Nothing in our galaxy had the power to produce it, and the particle had more energy than was theoretically possible for cosmic rays traveling to Earth from other galaxies. Simply put, the particle should not exist. On May 27, 2021, the Telescope Array experiment detected the second-highest extreme-energy cosmic ray. The newly dubbed Amaterasu particle deepens the mystery of the origin, propagation and particle physics of rare, ultra-high-energy cosmic rays.
Published Hybrid transistors set stage for integration of biology and microelectronics



Researchers create transistors combining silicon with biological silk, using common microprocessor manufacturing methods. The silk protein can be easily modified with other chemical and biological molecules to change its properties, leading to circuits that respond to biology and the environment.
Published This sea worm's posterior body part swims away, and now scientists know how



A research team shows how the expression of developmental genes in the Japanese green syllid worms, Megasyllis nipponica, helps form their swimming reproductive unit called stolon.
Published First experimental evidence of hopfions in crystals opens up new dimension for future technology



Hopfions, magnetic spin structures predicted decades ago, have become a hot and challenging research topic in recent years. New findings open up new fields in experimental physics: identifying other crystals in which hopfions are stable, studying how hopfions interact with electric and spin currents, hopfion dynamics, and more.
Published NASA's Webb reveals new features in heart of Milky Way



The latest image from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope shows a portion of the dense center of our galaxy in unprecedented detail, including never-before-seen features astronomers have yet to explain. The star-forming region, named Sagittarius C (Sgr C), is about 300 light-years from the Milky Way's central supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A*.
Published 'Triple star' discovery could revolutionize understanding of stellar evolution



A ground-breaking new discovery could transform the way astronomers understand some of the biggest and most common stars in the Universe. Research by PhD student Jonathan Dodd and Professor René Oudmaijer, from the University's School of Physics and Astronomy, points to intriguing new evidence that massive Be stars -- until now mainly thought to exist in double stars -- could in fact be 'triples'. The remarkable discovery could revolutionise our understanding of the objects -- a subset of B stars -- which are considered an important 'test bed' for developing theories on how stars evolve more generally.
Published Sophisticated swarming: Bacteria support each other across generations



When bacteria build communities, they cooperate and share nutrients across generations. Researchers have been able to demonstrate this for the first time using a newly developed method. This innovative technique enables the tracking of gene expression during the development of bacterial communities over space and time.
Published Trilobites rise from the ashes to reveal ancient map



Ten newly discovered species of trilobites, hidden for 490 million years in a little-studied part of Thailand, could be the missing pieces in an intricate puzzle of ancient world geography.
Published Looking for 'LUCA' and the timing of cellular evolution



LUCA, the 'last universal common ancestor' of all living organisms, lived 4.32 to at most 4.52 billion years ago. What LUCA looked like is unknown, but it must have been a cell with among others ribosomal proteins and an ATP synthase.
Published Unearthing how a carnivorous fungus traps and digests worms



A new analysis sheds light on the molecular processes involved when a carnivorous species of fungus known as Arthrobotrys oligospora senses, traps and consumes a worm.
Published Forest modeling shows which harvest rotations lead to maximum carbon sequestration



Forest modeling shows that a site's productivity -- an indicator of how fast trees grow and how much biomass they accumulate -- is the main factor that determines which time period between timber harvests allows for maximum above-ground carbon sequestration.
Published AI finds formula on how to predict monster waves



Using 700 years' worth of wave data from more than a billion waves, scientists have used artificial intelligence to find a formula for how to predict the occurrence of these maritime monsters. Long considered myth, freakishly large rogue waves are very real and can split apart ships and even damage oil rigs.
Published People watched other people shake boxes for science: Here's why



When researchers asked hundreds of people to watch other people shake boxes, it took just seconds for almost all of them to figure out what the shaking was for. The deceptively simple work by perception researchers is the first to demonstrate that people can tell what others are trying to learn just by watching their actions. The study reveals a key yet neglected aspect of human cognition, and one with implications for artificial intelligence. 'Just by looking at how someone's body is moving, you can tell what they are trying to learn about their environment,' said author Chaz Firestone, an assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences who investigates how vision and thought interact. 'We do this all the time, but there has been very little research on it.'
Published 'Teenage galaxies' are unusually hot, glowing with unexpected elements



Using the James Webb Space Telescope, CECILIA Survey receives first data from galaxies forming two-to-three billion years after the Big Bang. By examining light from these 33 galaxies, researchers discovered their elemental composition and temperature. The ultra-deep spectrum revealed eight distinct elements: Hydrogen, helium, nitrogen, oxygen, silicon, sulfur, argon and nickel. The teenage galaxies also were extremely hot, reaching temperatures higher than 13,350 degrees Celsius.
Published AI system self-organizes to develop features of brains of complex organisms



Scientists have shown that placing physical constraints on an artificially-intelligent system -- in much the same way that the human brain has to develop and operate within physical and biological constraints -- allows it to develop features of the brains of complex organisms in order to solve tasks.