SCIENCE

Parrots — highly intelligent and highly verbal — may also ruffle their head feathers and blush to communicate visually, according to a new study published August 22 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Aline Bertin of the INRA Centre Val de Loire, France and colleagues. The study extends the ... Read More »

Max-Planck-Gesellschaft. “If the birds can expect a larger profit in the future, they foregoe their desire for immediate reward.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 22 August 2018. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/08/180822141018.htm>. Max-Planck-Gesellschaft. (2018, August 22). If the birds can expect a larger profit in the future, they foregoe their desire for immediate reward. ScienceDaily. Retrieved August ... Read More »

Despite plants and vegetation being key to the Earth’s ecosystem, little is known about the origin of their roots. However in new research, published in Nature, Oxford University scientists describe a transitional root fossils from the earliest land ecosystem that sheds light on how roots have evolved. The findings suggest ... Read More »

You don’t focus as well as you think you do. That’s the fundamental finding of a team of researchers from Princeton University and the University of California-Berkeley who studied monkeys and humans and discovered that attention pulses in and out four times per second. “Our subjective experience of the visual ... Read More »

Air pollution shortens human lives by more than a year, according to a new study from a team of leading environmental engineers and public health researchers. Better air quality could lead to a significant extension of lifespans around the world. This is the first time that data on air pollution ... Read More »

For the first time in decades, researchers have identified a new ‘micro-organ’ within the immune system — and they say it’s an important step towards understanding how to make better vaccines. In a study published this week in Nature Communications, scientists at Australia’s Garvan Institute of Medical Research have identified ... Read More »

One of the oldest, most versatile and inexpensive of materials — paper — seemingly springs to life, bending, folding or flattening itself, by means of a low-cost actuation technology developed at Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute. A thin layer of conducting thermoplastic, applied to common paper with an inexpensive ... Read More »

A universal flu vaccine that protects people against most influenza strains is one step closer to reality, with a study from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. The candidate vaccine, described in Nature Communications this week, elicited a strong antibody response to a structure on the ... Read More »

Salk Institute and Purdue University scientists have discovered the switch in plants that turns off production of terpenoids — carbon-rich compounds that play roles in plant physiology and are used by humans in everything from fragrances and flavorings to biofuels and pharmaceuticals. Plant terpenoids are found in nutritional supplements, natural ... Read More »

Young female orphan elephants have a tougher social life than non-orphans, a new study suggests, adding to a growing body of evidence of how the impacts of poaching cascade through elephant societies. The research, part of a wider study by Save The Elephants and Colorado State University into the social ... Read More »

MIT researchers have taken a step toward solving a longstanding challenge with wireless communication: direct data transmission between underwater and airborne devices. Today, underwater sensors cannot share data with those on land, as both use different wireless signals that only work in their respective mediums. Radio signals that travel through ... Read More »

Discovered more than half a century ago in Kenya and sitting in museum storage ever since, the roughly 20-million-year-old fossil Propotto leakeyi was long classified as a fruit bat. Now, it’s helping researchers rethink the early evolution of lemurs, distant primate cousins of humans that today are only found on ... Read More »

The United States Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) has released new recommendations on screening for cervical cancer. These latest recommendations continue the trend of decreasing participant burden by lengthening screening intervals, making the “annual Pap” a historical artifact. Since its introduction 75 years ago, exfoliative cytology commonly known as the ... Read More »

More than an eon ago, the sun shone dimmer than it does today, but the Earth stayed warm due to a strong greenhouse gas effect, geoscience theory holds. Astronomer Carl Sagan coined this “the Faint Young Sun Paradox,” and for decades, researchers have searched for the right balance of atmospheric ... Read More »

Researchers have found that seawater can replace freshwater to produce the sustainable fuel Bioethanol, reducing the need to drain precious resources. The study — ‘The establishment of a marine focused biorefinery for bioethanol production using seawater and a novel marine yeast strain’ — has been published in Scientific Reports and ... Read More »

We’ve all tried talking with devices, and in some cases they talk back. But, it’s a far cry from having a conversation with a real person. Now a research team from Kyoto University, Osaka University, and the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute, or ATR, have significantly upgraded the interaction system for ... Read More »

Scientists at the MDI Biological Laboratory and the University of Maine have discovered that genetic material in the cell that was previously thought to be “junk” because of its apparent lack of function likely plays a part in regulating genetic circuits responsible for regeneration in highly regenerative animals. Viravuth P. ... Read More »

In the largest known brain imaging study, scientists from Amen Clinics (Costa Mesa, CA), Google, John’s Hopkins University, University of California, Los Angeles and the University of California, San Francisco evaluated 62,454 brain SPECT (single photon emission computed tomography) scans of more than 30,000 individuals from 9 months old to ... Read More »

A new, comprehensive survey led by USC scientists shows the Southern California coast harbors some of the world’s highest concentrations of an algal toxin dangerous to wildlife and people who eat local seafood. Episodic outbreaks of algae-produced toxins make headlines every few years when stricken marine animals wash ashore between ... Read More »

Spider silk is among the strongest and toughest materials in the natural world, as strong as some steel alloys with a toughness even greater than bulletproof Kevlar. Spider silk’s unmatched combination of strength and toughness have made this protein-based material desirable for many applications ranging from super thin surgical sutures ... Read More »