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Categories: Geoscience: Volcanoes, Offbeat: General

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Driving at night might be a scary challenge for a new driver, but with hours of practice it soon becomes second nature. For self-driving cars, however, practice may not be enough because the lidar sensors that often act as these vehicles' 'eyes' have difficulty detecting dark-colored objects. New research describes a highly reflective black paint that could help these cars see dark objects and make autonomous driving safer.

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A wild orangutan was observed applying a plant with known medicinal properties to a wound, a first for a wild animal.

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Recent reports of NASA's James Webb Space Telescope finding signs of life on a distant planet understandably sparked excitement. A new study challenges this finding, but also outlines how the telescope might verify the presence of the life-produced gas.

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A new documentary has recreated the face of a 75,000-year-old female Neanderthal whose flattened skull was discovered and rebuilt from hundreds of bone fragments by a team of archaeologists and conservators.

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Researchers have discovered a potential 'cosmic glitch' in the universe's gravity, explaining its strange behavior on a cosmic scale.

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Scientists are harnessing cells to make new types of materials that can grow, repair themselves and even respond to their environment. These solid 'engineered living materials' are made by embedding cells in an inanimate matrix that's formed in a desired shape. Now, researchers have 3D printed a bioink containing plant cells that were then genetically modified, producing programmable materials. Applications could someday include biomanufacturing and sustainable construction.

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A research team using the ChemCam instrument onboard NASA's Curiosity rover discovered higher-than-usual amounts of manganese in lakebed rocks within Gale Crater on Mars, which indicates that the sediments were formed in a river, delta, or near the shoreline of an ancient lake.

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The body clock has a significant impact on the performance of NBA players. Data shows vastly better win ratio for home teams from the Western Time Zone Area (PDT) when playing an EDT team, compared to vice versa.

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NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has captured the sharpest infrared images to date of a zoomed-in portion of one of the most distinctive objects in our skies, the Horsehead Nebula. These observations show the top of the 'horse's mane' or edge of this iconic nebula in a whole new light, capturing the region's complexity with unprecedented spatial resolution.

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A study of body size in leaf-nosed bats of the Solomon Islands has revealed surprising genetic diversity among nearly indistinguishable species on different islands.

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Researchers have successfully used NASA's James Webb Space Telescope to map the weather on the hot gas-giant exoplanet WASP-43 b.

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A four-legged robot trained with machine learning has learned to avoid falls by spontaneously switching between walking, trotting, and pronking -- a milestone for roboticists as well as biologists interested in animal locomotion.

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How did North America's saber-toothed cats hunt without breaking their unwieldy saber-like canines, which are vulnerable to sideways bending stresses? A paleontologist provides mechanical evidence that during adolescence, when young cats were learning to hunt, their baby teeth remained in place for up to 30 months to laterally buttress the emerging permanent sabers. By the time the baby teeth fell out, presumably the adult cat knew how to protect its sabers during attacks.

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Scientists have applied a data-driven approach to understanding firefly population dynamics on a continental scale. Key findings from this new study indicate that fireflies, part of the beetle order, are sensitive to various environmental factors, from short-term weather conditions to longer climatic trends, including the number of growing-degree days related to temperature accumulations.

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When hunting for mice in winter, red and arctic fox are known to plunge headfirst at speeds of 2-4 meters per second, but their sharp noses reduce the impact force in snow and protect them from injury, according to a new study.

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For most people, biting into a lemon would leave them puckered up and desperate to lose that sour flavor, but a new study revealed that roughly one in eight adults like intensely sour sensations. The cross-cultural study demonstrated there is a subset of 'sour likers' who enjoy exceptionally sour foods.

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Astronomers have confirmed that differences in binary stars' composition can originate from chemical variations in the cloud of stellar material from which they formed. The results help explain why stars born from the same molecular cloud can possess different chemical composition and host different planetary systems, as well as pose challenges to current stellar and planet formation models.

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Scientists have developed a smart, reusable adhesive more than ten times stronger than a gecko's feet adhesion, pointing the way for development of reusable superglue and grippers capable of holding heavy weights across rough and smooth surfaces. The research team found a way to maximize the adhesion of the smart adhesives by using shape-memory polymers, which can stick and detach easily when needed simply by heating them. This smart adhesive can support extremely heavy weights, opening new possibilities for robotic grippers that allow humans to scale walls effortlessly, or climbing robots that can cling onto ceilings for survey or repair applications.

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Greening the way we eat needn't mean going vegetarian. A healthy, more realistic solution is to adopt a flexitarian diet where seafoods add umami to 'boring' vegetables. A gastrophysicist puts mathematical equations to work in calculating the umami potential of everything from seaweed and shrimp paste to mussels and mackerel.

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Dinosaurs were likely as smart as reptiles but not as intelligent as monkeys.