Showing 20 articles starting at article 521

< Previous 20 articles        Next 20 articles >

Categories: Offbeat: General, Paleontology: Early Mammals and Birds

Return to the site home page

     (via sciencedaily.com)     Original source 

Chattering squirrels, charming coypus, and tail-slapping beavers -- along with some other rodents -- have orange-brown front teeth. Researchers have produced high-resolution images of rodent incisors, providing an atomic-level view of the teeth's ingenious enamel and its coating. They discovered tiny pockets of iron-rich materials in the enamel that form a protective shield for the teeth but, importantly, don't contribute to the orange-brown hue -- new insights that could improve human dentistry.

     (via sciencedaily.com)     Original source 

Engineers have developed a record-setting nanomaterial which when stretched in one direction, expands perpendicular to the applied force.

     (via sciencedaily.com)     Original source 

To make weeding easier, scientists suggest bioengineering crops to be colorful or to have differently shaped leaves so that they can be more easily distinguished from their wild and weedy counterparts. This could involve altering the crops' genomes so that they express pigments that are already produced by many plants, for example, anthocyanins, which make blueberries blue, or carotenoids, which make carrots orange. Then, they say, weeding robots could be trained to remove only the weeds using machine learning.

     (via sciencedaily.com)     Original source 

Young male blue tits are less successful in fathering offspring outside their breeding pair, not because of a lack of experience, but because they are outcompeted by older males, researchers report.

     (via sciencedaily.com)     Original source 

Astronomers have identified the most massive stellar black hole yet discovered in the Milky Way galaxy. This black hole was spotted in data from the European Space Agency's Gaia mission because it imposes an odd 'wobbling' motion on the companion star orbiting it. Astronomers have verified the mass of the black hole, putting it at an impressive 33 times that of the Sun.

     (via sciencedaily.com)     Original source 

For the first time, scientists have managed to create sheets of gold only a single atom layer thick. The material has been termed goldene. According to researchers, this has given the gold new properties that can make it suitable for use in applications such as carbon dioxide conversion, hydrogen production, and production of value-added chemicals.

     (via sciencedaily.com)     Original source 

Researchers have made a groundbreaking discovery regarding number sense in animals by confirming the existence of discrete number sense in rats, offering a crucial animal model for investigating the neural basis of numerical ability and disability in humans.

     (via sciencedaily.com)     Original source 

The mystery of how Pluto got a giant heart-shaped feature on its surface has finally been solved by an international team of astrophysicists. The team is the first to successfully reproduce the unusual shape with numerical simulations, attributing it to a giant and slow oblique-angle impact.

     (via sciencedaily.com)     Original source 

An international team of scientists has published a single-cell atlas for Pristina leidyi (Pristina), the water nymph worm, a segmented annelid with extraordinary regenerative abilities that has fascinated biologists for more than a century.

     (via sciencedaily.com)     Original source 

A series of whole genome and gene duplication events that go back hundreds of millions of years have laid the foundations for tissue-specific gene expression, according to a new study. The 'copy-paste' errors allowed animals to keep one copy of their genome or genes for fundamental functions, while the second copy could be used as raw material for evolutionary innovation. Events like these, at varying degrees of scale, occurred constantly throughout the bilaterian evolutionary tree and enabled traits and behaviours as diverse as insect flight, octopus camouflage and human cognition.

     (via sciencedaily.com)     Original source 

Sport junkie or couch potato? Always on time or often late? The animal kingdom, too, is home to a range of personalities, each with its own lifestyle. Biologists report on a surprising discovery: even simple marine polychaete worms shape their day-to-day lives on the basis of highly individual rhythms. This diversity is of interest not just for the future of species and populations in a changing environment, but also for medicine.

     (via sciencedaily.com)     Original source 

In the sun-scorched Pilbara region of north-western Australia, scientists have unearthed a mysterious creature from the shadows -- a new ant species called Leptanilla voldemort.

     (via sciencedaily.com)     Original source 

In 2022, astronomers discovered the brightest gamma-ray burst (GRB) of all time. Now, astronomers confirm that a 'normal' supernova, the telltale sign of a stellar collapse, accompanied the GRB. The team also looked for signatures of heavy elements like gold and platinum in the supernova. They found no evidence of such elements, deepening the mystery of their origins.

     (via sciencedaily.com)     Original source 

An international research team has for the first time directly detected stellar winds from three Sun-like stars by recording the X-ray emission from their astrospheres, and placed constraints on the mass loss rate of the stars via their stellar winds.

     (via sciencedaily.com)     Original source 

When astronomers looked at a stellar pair at the heart of a stunning cloud of gas and dust, they were in for a surprise. Star pairs are typically very similar, like twins, but in HD 148937, one star appears younger and, unlike the other, is magnetic. New data suggest there were originally three stars in the system, until two of them clashed and merged. This violent event created the surrounding cloud and forever altered the system's fate.

     (via sciencedaily.com)     Original source 

Adding one simple rule to an idealized game of billiards leads to a wealth of intriguing mathematical questions, as well as applications in the physics of living organisms. Researchers are discovering the fascinating dynamics of billiards with memory.

     (via sciencedaily.com)     Original source 

Star Trek's Holodeck is no longer just science fiction. Using AI, engineers have created a tool that can generate 3D environments, prompted by everyday language.

     (via sciencedaily.com)     Original source 

The full power of next-generation quantum computing could soon be harnessed by millions of individuals and companies, thanks to a breakthrough guaranteeing security and privacy. This advance promises to unlock the transformative potential of cloud-based quantum computing.

     (via sciencedaily.com)     Original source 

Researchers have found that baby stars discharge plumes of gas, dust, and magnetic flux from their protostellar disk. The protostellar disk that surrounds developing stars are constantly penetrated by magnetic flux, and if too much magnetic flux remained, the resulting object would generate a magnetic field stronger than any observed protostar. These newly discovered discharges of magnetic flux, or 'sneezes' as the researchers describes them, may be a vital step in proper star formation.

     (via sciencedaily.com)     Original source 

Researchers show that ozone levels, such as those found in many places on hot summer days today, destroy the sex pheromones of fruit fly species. As a result, some natural mating boundaries maintained by species-specific pheromones no longer exist. The research team has shown in experiments that flies of different species mate when exposed to ozone and produce hybrid offspring. Since most of these offspring are unable to reproduce, the results could provide another explanation for the global decline of insects.