How are we able to find things in the dark? And how can we imagine how something feels just by looking at it?
It is because our brain is able to store information in such a way that it can be retrieved by different senses. This multi-sensory integration allows us to form mental images of the world and underpins our
conscious awareness.
It turns out that the ability to recognise objects across different senses is present in the tiny brains of an insect.
Researchers at Queen Mary University of London and Macquarie University in Sydney have published new work in the journal Science showing that bumblebees can also find objects in the dark they've only seen before.
A pair of researchers at the University of Connecticut, has found that hatchling tadpoles create their own air bubbles in order to breathe. [...]
The technique involved swimming to the surface, opening the mouth wide, and sucking on the underside of the surface—similar to a person sucking on a window. The sucking action pulled the surface of the water lower and into the mouth of the tadpole, forming a partial bubble. The tadpole then snapped its mouth shut, trapping a full bubble of air in its mouth. It then used muscles in its mouth to push air in the bubble into its lungs.
The researchers also discovered that because the capacity of the mouth was bigger than the lungs, the tadpole would expel the remaining air as a small bubble, leaving it to float up and remain on the surface of the water for a period of time. Multiple tadpoles engaging in the same behavior led to the formation of a small island of bubbles of the type that can often be seen on frog ponds. The researchers found that the tadpoles refined their technique over time as they aged, eventually forming double bubbles in quick succession, making the process more efficient.
The frozen carcass of a horned lark discovered in northeast Siberia by fossil ivory hunters could help scientists better understand how the ecosystem evolved at the end of the last ice age, new research suggests.
Scientists said they extracted DNA from the “exceptionally well-preserved” ancient bird carcass that they determined was roughly 46,000 years old, according to an article published Friday in the journal Communications Biology. Researchers at the Centre for Palaeogenetics at Stockholm University and the Swedish Museum of Natural History studied the female bird after it was found in 2018 in a permafrost tunnel in Siberia’s Belaya Gora area.
The discovery offers new information about how the mammoth steppe, a cold and dry biome that covered northern Europe and Asia, divided into three types of biological environments when the ice age ended about 11,700 years ago. The steppe, which was home to now-extinct species including the woolly mammoth and the woolly rhinoceros, separated into tundra, taiga — coniferous forest — and steppe.
A powerful antibiotic that kills some of the most dangerous drug-resistant bacteria in the world has been discovered using artificial intelligence.
The drug works in a different way to existing antibacterials and is the first of its kind to be found by setting AI loose on vast digital libraries of pharmaceutical compounds.
Tests showed that the drug wiped out a range of antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria, including Acinetobacter baumannii and Enterobacteriaceae, two of the three high-priority pathogens that the World Health Organization ranks as “critical” for new antibiotics to target.
Scientists reported on Wednesday that they had discovered evidence of an extinct branch of humans whose ancestors split from our own a million years ago. The evidence of these humans was not a fossil. Instead, the researchers found pieces of their DNA in the genomes of living people from West Africa.
Arun Durvasula and Sriram Sankararaman, two geneticists at the University of California, Los Angeles, described this so-called ghost archaic population in the journal Science Advances. Their discovery may shed light on human genetic diversity in Africa, which has been hard to chart until now because the fossil record is sparse. [...]
A few percent of the DNA in the living West Africans seemed to have arisen in a distant branch of humans that were not Homo sapiens, or other species in our genus known from their genes. Mr. Durvasula and Dr. Sankararaman’s model suggests that this ghost archaic population split as long as a million years ago from the lineage that led to modern humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans.
"The warm spell caused widespread melting on nearby glaciers," the space agency says. "Such persistent warmth was not typical in Antarctica until the 21st century, but it has become more common in recent years."
On Eagle Island, the biggest loss of ice and snow came on Feb. 6, when an inch of snowpack melted, according to NASA's climate models. By Feb. 11, the island had lost 4 inches of snow.
"I haven't seen melt ponds develop this quickly in Antarctica," Mauri Pelto, a glaciologist at Nichols College in Massachusetts, said in NASA's news release about the phenomenon.
Two particularly tenacious species of bacteria have colonized the potable water dispenser aboard the International Space Station (ISS), but a new study suggests that they are no more dangerous than closely related strains on Earth. Aubrie O’Rourke of the J. Craig Venter Institute and colleagues report these findings in a new paper published February 19, 2020 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE.
Shortly after the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) installed the water dispenser aboard the ISS in 2009, periodic sampling showed that two bacteria, Burkholderia cepacia and later on, Burkholderia contaminans were contaminating the drinking water. These microbes belong to a group of related Burkholderia species that cause opportunistic lung infections in people with underlying health conditions and are very difficult to kill using common sterilization techniques. The bacteria have persisted in the water dispenser despite periodic flushing with an extra-strength iodine cleaning solution.
Jupiter appears to have more water than anyone expected.
Newly released data from NASA's Juno probe shows that water may make up about 0.25% of the molecules in the atmosphere over Jupiter's equator. While that doesn't sound like much, the calculation is based on a prevalence of water's components, hydrogen and oxygen, three times more than at the sun. The new measurements Juno obtained are much higher than a previous mission suggested.
Some people travel across oceans to seek warm, healing waters in spas or coastal resorts. It turns out that whales are likely making their annual migrations for much the same reason: to maintain healthy skin, according to a new study out today.
Scientists have long wondered why whales—baleens, such as humpbacks and blues, and toothed whales, such as sperm and killer whales—travel up to 18,840 kilometers every year between their feeding grounds in polar waters and warmer, tropical seas. Previously, researchers thought that after feeding in the Arctic or Antarctic, whales traveled to the tropics to give birth far from their usual predators.
Using DNA sequencing on ancient pack rat nests made of plants, insects, bones, fecal matter and urine could give us a look into Earth's past, according to research published Thursday in the journal Ecology and Evolution. The study could help scientists better understand how plant communities, as well as potentially animals, bacteria and fungi, will react to climate change.
"Rodent middens are powerful tools in paleoecology," Michael Tessler, a postdoctoral fellow at the American Museum of Natural History, said in a statement. "We wanted to see how we could take this invaluable resource and expand its use to give us a big-picture view of what life in the Americas was like 1,000, 10,000, or even 30,000 years ago, and measure how it has changed in the time since then."
Pack rats are nocturnal rodents that use plant materials to build nests in dry caves. Their urine helps to hold the nests together. This allows the nests to be preserved for tens of thousands of years, with some dating to before the last ice age.
All homes have chemicals in the air that are inhaled by the home's occupants. The chemicals come from materials such as couches and pillows, and also from products such as hair sprays, room deodorizers and scented candles. Other contributors include cleaning products and fumes from heating or cooking oils. No one really knows if the chemicals in the average home are making people sick, but scientists are looking into it. In this new effort, the researchers wondered if simply opening the windows and doors to a home would reduce the amount of chemicals in the air.
...the researchers found that concentrations of most of the chemicals dropped dramatically when the doors and windows were opened—but they were surprised to see that the chemicals returned to their original concentrations within just a few minutes.
The researchers suggest that the reason opening the doors and windows did not reduce chemical levels for more than a few minutes was because the chemicals were clinging to the walls and on surfaces in the home. As concentration levels in the air dropped, the chemicals were immediately replaced by chemicals detaching from these surfaces and floating into the air.