8,095 results
- Animals
Extensive toolkits give chimps a taste of honey
Chimps living in central Africa’s dense forests make and use complex sets of tools to gather honey from beehives, further narrowing the gap between the way humans and chimps use tools.
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Think like a scientist
A class of curious sixth-graders arguing over moist, mucky jars may represent the future of science education.
- Animals
Dolphins wield tools of the sea
A long-term study of dolphins living off Australia’s coast finds that a small number of them, mostly females, frequently use sea sponges to forage for fish on the ocean floor.
- Earth
The Costs of Meat and Fish
The purchase price is often but a small part of the true cost of many animal products in the diet.
- Animals
Chimps ambidextrous when digging wells
A survey of water-collection holes dug on the banks of an African river by wild chimpanzees indicates that, unlike people, these apes don’t have a preference for using either the right or left hand on manual tasks.
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Science for science writers
Science News blogs from Austin, Texas, where the 47th annual New Horizons in Science meeting is taking place. Freelance Laura Beil describes how Skip Garner began his accidental journey into scientific misconduct investigation after he developed a computer program that could, as he put it, “help a physicist understand medicine,” he told writers in the audience at the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing symposium. Got milk tolerance? Your ability to digest lactose as an adult is relatively new in the human species. And, said John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, provides evidence of rapid evolution over the past 10,000 years, Elizabeth Quill reports in this blog from the meeting. Virgil Griffith’s life goal is “to create a machine who feels.” Griffith, a doctoral student at Caltech, isn’t the only one. During his talk, he revealed that turning people into cyborgs is the secret passion of many of his Caltech peers, Rachel Ehrenberg reports. (They contend that they are working on implant devices for the injured bodies of people like Vietnam vets, says Griffith, but if you get them drunk they’ll confess that the real aim is to make cyborgs of us all.) Also, blogging from: Eva Emerson on some new results on longevity without caloric restriction in yeast; freelance Susan Gaidos on a Boston University medical statistician who has devoted lots of time to studying errors in the voting process, and says things can, and do, routinely go wrong; and Lisa Grossman on how mapping fossil fuel emissions may help scientists find where carbon is hiding in the biosphere.
- Life
How Tiktaalik got its neck
The oldest fossil with a neck, Tiktaalik roseae, shows how animals developed a head for living on land.
- Ecosystems
Pacific Northwest salmon poisoning killer whales
A protected population of resident orcas around Vancouver Island and Puget Sound is the planet’s most PCB-contaminated mammals, says one researcher.
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Smart from the start
Animal embryos get some respect for their survival skills.
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Science News at AAAS 2009
The American Association for the Advancement of Science is holding its annual meeting February 12 through 16 in Chicago. Leading researchers from all fields will discuss recent work and insights. Check here for the latest news from the SN writers attending the meeting.
- Life
Bicoastal Atlantic bluefin tuna
Mediterranean and western Atlantic bluefin tuna spend more time in mixed groups than previously thought, suggesting management strategies need to be revisited.
