SCIENCE

After their recent pioneering experiments to couple light and matter to an extreme degree, Rice University scientists decided to look for a similar effect in matter alone. They didn’t expect to find it so soon. Rice physicist Junichiro Kono, graduate student Xinwei Li and their international colleagues have discovered the …

An international team of researchers discovered a new species of dinosaur, Xiyunykus pengi, during an expedition to Xinjiang, China. The discovery is the latest stemming from a partnership between the George Washington University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The findings were published today in Current Biology along with the …

Researchers from Virginia Tech and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have developed a novel way to 3D print complex objects of one of the highest-performing materials used in the battery and aerospace industries. Previously, researchers could only print this material, known as graphene, in 2D sheets or basic structures. But Virginia …

In a new study, researchers at Uppsala University now demonstrate that one night of sleep loss has a tissue-specific impact on the regulation of gene expression and metabolism in humans. This may explain how shift work and chronic sleep loss impairs our metabolism and adversely affects our body composition. The …

By sequencing the genome of the yellow-banded bumblebee, York University researchers have found that inbreeding and disease are likely culprits in their rapid decline in North America. This is believed to be the first time the genome of an at-risk bumblebee has been sequenced and it allows researchers to take …

One of the rarest birds in the western hemisphere, the Bahama Nuthatch, has been rediscovered by research teams searching the island of Grand Bahama. The finding is particularly significant because the species had been feared extinct following the catastrophic damage caused by Hurricane Matthew in 2016, and had not been …

The word Sargassum conjures up images of a vast floating island off the coast of Bermuda, the mystical Sargasso Sea that has fascinated and inspired sailors’ tales for hundreds of years. Sargassum is actually a floating seaweed that drifts on ocean currents in the Atlantic Ocean, Caribbean, and Gulf of …

An international team of researchers has uncovered a destructive mechanism at the molecular level that causes a well-known phenomenon associated with obesity, called leptin resistance. They found that mice fed a high-fat diet produce an enzyme named MMP-2 that clips receptors for the hormone leptin from the surface of neuronal …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …