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Categories: Offbeat: Computers and Math, Paleontology: Fossils

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Researchers have developed next-generation smart textiles -- incorporating LEDs, sensors, energy harvesting, and storage -- that can be produced inexpensively, in any shape or size, using the same machines used to make the clothing we wear every day.

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Scientists have demonstrated nanowire networks can exhibit both short- and long-term memory like the human brain.

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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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ChatGPT faced off against students on accounting assessments. Students scored an overall average of 76.7%, compared to ChatGPT's score of 47.4%. On a 11.3% of questions, ChatGPT scored higher than the student average, doing particularly well on AIS and auditing. But the AI bot did worse on tax, financial, and managerial assessments, possibly because ChatGPT struggled with the mathematical processes required for the latter type.

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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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The 'spooky action at a distance' that once unnerved Einstein may be on its way to being as pedestrian as the gyroscopes that currently measure acceleration in smartphones.

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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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In the quantum world particles can instantaneously know about each other's state, even when separated by large distances. This is known as nonlocality. Now, A research group has produced some interesting findings on the Hardy nonlocality that have important ramifications for understanding quantum mechanics and its potential applications in communications.

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Researchers report having achieved quantum teleportation from a photon to a solid-state qubit over a distance of 1km, with a novel approach using multiplexed quantum memories.

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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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Researchers have designed a system that makes an off-the-shelf quadruped robot nimble enough to walk a narrow balance beam -- a feat that is likely the first of its kind.

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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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Scientists have developed an extremely small and fast nano-excitonic transistor.

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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.