News
- Animals
Deep-sea fishes’ eye chemistry might let them see colors in near darkness
An unexpected abundance of proteins for catching dim light evolved independently in three groups of weird deep-sea fishes.
- Life
A gut bacteria transplant may not help you lose weight
A small study finds that transplanting gut microbes from a lean person into obese people didn’t lead to weight loss, as hoped.
- Astronomy
Dying stars called collapsars may forge much of the universe’s gold
Spinning stars that collapse into black holes could help explain the origins of heavy elements such as gold and silver.
- Physics
What a nearby kilonova would look like
Physicists imagined what we’d see in the sky if two neutron stars collided just 1,000 light-years from Earth.
- Earth
A belly full of wriggling worms makes wood beetles better recyclers
Common beetles that eat rotten logs chew up more wood when filled with a roundworm larvae, releasing nutrients more quickly back to the forest floor.
- Physics
LIGO is on the lookout for these 8 sources of gravitational waves
Gravitational wave hunters are on a cosmic scavenger hunt. Here’s what they’re hoping to find.
- Science & Society
Medical student evaluations appear riddled with racial and gender biases
Women and minorities are more frequently described by personality in medical student evaluations, but men are described by their skills, a study says.
- Ecosystems
War wrecked an African ecosystem. Ecologists are trying to restore it
Bringing back big predators to Gorongosa, once a wildlife paradise in Mozambique, is just one piece of the puzzle in undoing the damage there.
- Science & Society
Facebook data show how many people left Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria
Conventional surveys can’t track migration after natural disasters in real time. But Facebook data may provide a crude estimate of those who flee.
- Animals
Pandas’ share of protein calories from bamboo rivals wolves’ from meat
The panda gut digests protein in bamboo so well that the animal’s nutritional profile for calories resembles a wolf’s.
- Paleontology
A dinosaur’s running gait may reveal insights into the history of bird flight
In what may have been a precursor to avian flight, a flightless winged dinosaur may have flapped its wings as it jogged.
- Artificial Intelligence
An AI used art to control monkeys’ brain cells
Art created by an artificial intelligence exacts unprecedented control over nerve cells tied to vision in monkey brains, and could lead to new neuroscience experiments.
