World's oldest cave art, including famous hand stencils, being erased by climate change

 Posted on December 24, 2022  |  4 minutes  |  715 words  |  Mittie Cheatwood

Some of the world's earliest cave art, including the oldest-known hand stencil drawing, is degenerating at an "alarming rate" due to climate change, according to a new study. The island of Sulawesi in Indonesia is home to cave art dating back more than 45,000 years. The ancient cave paintings include depictions of animals, mixed human and animal figures, hand stencils drawn in red and mulberry pigments, and what is possibly the earliest known narrative scene in prehistoric art. [Read More]

A Bird Murder Witness: Why Parrots Are Such Great Mimics

 Posted on December 23, 2022  |  4 minutes  |  756 words  |  Mittie Cheatwood

A Michigan woman was convicted of first-degree murder on Wednesday (July 19) in a bizarre case that included psychics, mysterious death threats and a parrot as an alleged eyewitness. As reported by The Detroit News, Glenna Duram was convicted in the May 2015 shooting of her husband, Martin Duram, in what police said was a botched murder-suicide. Several things made the case a national story, including that a relative of the victim said she predicted where the murder weapon would be found and that interfamily squabbling over the crime led to death threats among branches of the family. [Read More]

A Mosasaur Tail: How Ancient Reptiles Came to Rule the Oceans

 Posted on December 23, 2022  |  4 minutes  |  763 words  |  Arica Deslauriers

At a time when dinosaurs ruled the land, mosasaurs, a type of swimming reptile related to modern Komodo dragons, came to dominate the seas. Within the span of roughly 27 million years, these predators transformed from an animal with limited swimming ability and limbs still meant for walking into a sleek, fishlike form. Now, a new study reveals the evolutionary details behind this transformation, which turned the mosasaurs into swimming machines and fearsome predators, the marine equivalent of Tyrannosaurus rex, that may even have decimated the large ginsu sharks of the time. [Read More]

Are Octopuses Smart?

 Posted on December 23, 2022  |  7 minutes  |  1334 words  |  Arica Deslauriers

In 2014, one of Roy Caldwell's octopuses went missing. Caldwell, a professor of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley, had kept the reef octopuses (Abdopus aculeatus) he and his team collected on Lizard Island in Australia in separate, sealed tanks. Puzzled, he peered into the female octopus's tank and found spermatophores, the capsules that contain octopus sperm, floating in the water. He looked closer and found the male there, too, buried in the gravel. [Read More]

Ban Human Fetuses in Food, Lawmaker Says

 Posted on December 23, 2022  |  3 minutes  |  521 words  |  Mittie Cheatwood

An Oklahoma state senator introduced a bill on Tuesday (Jan. 24) that would ban the manufacture or sale of food containing aborted human fetuses. Ralph Shortey, the freshman Republican who introduced the legislation, acknowledges he is not aware of any company in Oklahoma or elsewhere that is attempting to sell food that contains fetuses, but he said, "There is a potential that there are companies that are using aborted human babies in their research and development of basically enhancing flavor for artificial flavors. [Read More]

Coronavirus variants to be named using Greek letters, WHO says

 Posted on December 23, 2022  |  4 minutes  |  748 words  |  Mittie Cheatwood

Coronavirus variants of concern and variants of interest will now be named using a system similar to hurricane naming, wherein each variant gets assigned a letter of the Greek alphabet, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced Monday (May 31). For example, the coronavirus variant first found in the U.K. will be known as Alpha, according to a statement from the WHO. This new label does not replace the variant's scientific name, B. [Read More]

Deep-Sea Worms Can't Take the Heat

 Posted on December 23, 2022  |  3 minutes  |  638 words  |  Mittie Cheatwood

Hot pink tube worms living on scalding deep-sea hydrothermal vents actually like to keep things relatively cool, according to a study published today (May 29) in the journal PLOS ONE. Superheated water — at temperatures of more than 750 degrees Fahrenheit (400 degrees Celsius) — spews from the vents. An entire ecosystem clings to the chimneylike columns, with worms and many other species consuming each other and the mineral-laden hydrothermal fluids. [Read More]

Exotic 'Early Dark Energy' Could Be the Missing Link That Explains the Universe's Expansion

 Posted on December 23, 2022  |  3 minutes  |  630 words  |  Fernande Dalal

There may be an exotic form of dark energy lurking in the universe, and it could explain a stubborn discrepancy in measurements of the universe's expansion rate. This so-called early dark energy might have existed in the universe’s infancy, then flickered out of existence soon after. That, in turn, would explain why expansion rates disagree. Dark energy is the unknown, mysterious form of energy that permeates space, flinging the universe outward at faster and faster speeds. [Read More]

Fire Ants Build Sinking 'Eiffel Towers' from Their Own Bodies

 Posted on December 23, 2022  |  5 minutes  |  1021 words  |  Trudie Dory

Fire ants can build miniature look-alikes of the Eiffel Tower from their own bodies, and the insects perpetually rebuild the structures to save them from collapsing, a new study finds. The insects crawl up and down these structures in a phenomenon that resembles a slow-motion water fountain in reverse, the researchers said. The new study's finding could help lead to swarms of robots that can use their own bodies to form complex 3D structures, the scientists added. [Read More]

How'd He Do That? Physicist Demos Quantum Levitation

 Posted on December 23, 2022  |  4 minutes  |  741 words  |  Patria Henriques

A tiny cube floating and flipping in midair sounds like something straight out of "Harry Potter," but Harvard physicist Subir Sachdev doesn't need magic to levitate objects. Sachdev performed a levitation demonstration using a magnet and a superconductor during a presentation at the Perimeter Institute on Oct. 1. Superconductors are incredible materials that can conduct electricity with zero resistance. But to generate the superconductivity, the material has to be extremely cold, and so Sachdev poured liquid nitrogen that's about minus 320 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 195 degrees Celsius) on the superconductor to trigger its superconductive state. [Read More]