Other Sciences News

Archaic Humans May Have Boiled Their Food in Hot Springs

The proximity of hot springs to early settlements have led Sistiaga et al to wonder if early humans used hot springs as a cooking resource long before fire. Image credit: Tom Björklund.
Sep 17, 2020 by News Staff

An international team of researchers has found evidence that hot springs existed in Olduvai Gorge — a paleoanthropological site in the Great Rift Valley in Tanzania that has yielded some of the most significant fossils of hominins, such as Paranthropus boisei, Homo habilis and Homo erectus — around 1.7 million years ago. These hydrothermal features may have provided a convenient way to cook food, for instance to boil fresh kills or certain...

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Piotrowska et al developed tripeptide crystals which feature aqueous pores that expand and contract in response to humidity changes and use evaporation to create an effective mechanical actuator. Image credit: Tony Wang.

Scientists Create Shape-Changing Peptide Crystals

Sep 15, 2020 by News Staff

A team of researchers from the United States and the United Kingdom has created nanoporous tripeptide crystals that directly convert evaporation energy...

Crystal structure and magnetism in rare-earth langasite: (a) the distorted Kagome lattice of the rare-earth ions in R3Ga5SiO14; about 1.5% of the rare-earth sites (orange) are occupied by the holmium ions; the unit cell is shown by thin solid lines; (b) experimental and theoretical magnetization curves of HoxLa3−xGa5SiO14 (x = 0.043) in external magnetic fields parallel to three crystallographic axes and at T = 5 K. Symbols - experiment, solid lines - model accounting for a ground Ho3+ quasidoublet and a Van-Vleck contribution of excited crystal-field states. The inset shows the local magnetic moments of Ho-ions in the saturation regime. Image credit: Weymann et al, doi: 10.1038/s41535-020-00263-9.

New Type of Magnetoelectric Effect Discovered

Sep 15, 2020 by News Staff

Even small changes in the direction of the magnetic field can switch the electrical properties of a paramagnetic rare-earth material — the holmium-doped...

Left: Linear A fraction signs and their standard transcription. Right: Linear A clay tablet HT 104. Image credit: Heraklion Archaeological Museum and the Greek Ministry of Culture and Sport, Archaeological Resources Fund / Corazza et al, doi: 10.1016/j.jas.2020.105214.

New Research Sheds Light on Fraction Signs of Still Undeciphered Minoan Linear A Script

Sep 10, 2020 by News Staff

Minoan Linear A is still an undeciphered script mainly used on the island of Crete from 1700 to 1400 BCE. A new study published in the published in the...

Reconstruction of a Neanderthal. Image credit: Neanderthal Museum.

Researchers Sequence Mitochondrial Genome of 80,000-Year-Old European Neanderthal

Sep 9, 2020 by Enrico de Lazaro

An international team of scientists has successfully extracted and sequenced the mitochondrial DNA from an 80,000-year-old adult Neanderthal tooth found...

Stone forest in Yunnan province, China. Image credit: Zhang Yuan.

Study Sheds New Light on Growth of Mysterious Stone Forests

Sep 8, 2020 by News Staff

A new study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reveals a mechanism that may contribute to the formation of sharply pointed...

The skin-like sensing prototype device, made with stretchable electronics. Image credit: RMIT University.

Newly-Developed Electronic Artificial Skin Can Sense Touch, Pain and Heat

Sep 8, 2020 by News Staff

A team of researchers at RMIT University has developed electronic artificial skin that mimics the human body’s near-instant feedback response and can...

Heavy smoking has a damaging effect on facial aging. Image credit: Jui Magicman.

Moderate Cannabis Use Has Adverse Effects on Cognitive Functioning, Study Suggests

Sep 7, 2020 by News Staff

Moderate adolescent cannabis use may have adverse effects on cognitive functioning, specifically verbal memory, that cannot be explained by familial factors,...

The ENGAGE device. Image credit: Northwestern University.

Researchers Create Battery-Free, Energy-Harvesting Gaming Device

Sep 4, 2020 by News Staff

A team of scientists from Northwestern University and the Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) has developed the first-ever battery-free, personal...

An artistic rendering of the Horse Butchery Site and the Boxgrove people; it shows how the site was situated in front of towering chalk cliffs on the edge of an intertidal lagoon; the cliffs to the north provided all the flint used in tool making at the site and, within a few hours, the tide would have begun to cover the site in fine silt, preserving evidence of the day’s activity. Image credit: Lauren Gibson / Institute of Archaeology, University College London.

Homo heidelbergensis was Extremely Resourceful, New Research Shows

Sep 3, 2020 by News Staff

New research pieces together the activities and movements of a group of Homo heidelbergensis, a poorly understood species of archaic humans that lived...

A stone plaquette engraved with abstract designs from the Magdalenian site of Les Varines, Jersey, Channel Islands. Image credit: Bello et al, doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0236875.

15,000-Year-Old Abstract Art Found in Channel Islands

Sep 2, 2020 by News Staff

A team of archaeologists from the United Kingdom has uncovered 15,000-year-old stone plaquettes extensively engraved with abstract designs at the Magdalenian...

Miskin et al built microsopic robots that consist of a simple circuit made from silicon photovoltaics and four electrochemical actuators; when laser light is shined on the photovoltaics, the robots walk. Image credit: Miskin et al, doi: 10.1038/s41586-020-2626-9.

Researchers Create Laser-Activated Walking Microrobots

Aug 27, 2020 by News Staff

A team of scientists from Cornell University and the University of Pennsylvania has developed a new class of microscopic robots that incorporate semiconductor...

Earth’s internal structure: dense solid metallic core, viscous metallic outer core, mantle and silicate based crust. Image credit: NASA.

Earth’s Inner Core is Around 1.15 Billion Years Old, Study Shows

Aug 26, 2020 by News Staff

The inner core of our planet is between 1 and 1.3 billion years old, according to new research led by the University of Texas at Austin and Carnegie Institution...

NASA’s Viking 1 orbiter photographed the Cydonia region in the northern latitudes of Mars on July 25, 1976 while searching for a landing site for the Viking 2 lander. The speckled appearance of the image is due to missing data, called bit errors, caused by problems in transmission of the photographic data from Mars to Earth. Bit errors comprise part of one of the ‘eyes’ and ‘nostrils’ on the eroded rock that resembles a human face near the center of the image. Shadows in the rock formation give the illusion of a nose and mouth. Planetary geologists attribute the origin of the formation to purely natural processes. The feature is 1.5 km across, with the Sun angle at approximately 20 degrees. The picture was taken from a range of 1,873 km. Image credit: NASA / JPL.

Study: Face Pareidolia Reflects Activation of Same Visual Mechanisms that Process Real Human Faces

Aug 17, 2020 by News Staff

Face pareidolia is the phenomenon of seeing face-like structures in everyday objects. It is a very human condition that relates to how our brains are wired....

An American grasshopper with an improved brain sensor implant. Image credit: Raman Lab / Washington University in St. Louis.

Grasshoppers Can Discriminate Between Different Explosives’ Smells, Study Finds

Aug 14, 2020 by News Staff

In a new study published this month in the journal Biosensors and Bioelectronics: X, a team of scientists at Washington University in St. Louis showed...

Stable blue whirl observed in an experiment. Image credit: H. Xiao, University of Science and Technology of China.

Structure of Mysterious Blue Whirl Revealed

Aug 14, 2020 by News Staff

The blue whirl consists of three different flame structures that swirl together into one otherworldly blue ring, according to new research. Stable blue...

The 2016 7.1 earthquake on the Romanche Fracture Zone in the equatorial Atlantic. The map location is given by the red rectangle on the inset globe. Image credit: Hicks et al, doi: 10.1038/s41561-020-0619-9.

Geoscientists Record ‘Boomerang’ Earthquake in Atlantic Ocean

Aug 12, 2020 by News Staff

Earthquakes occur when rocks suddenly break on a fault — a boundary between two blocks or plates. During large earthquakes, the breaking of rock...

Various types of fluted points and preforms from Manayzah, Yemen: (1) double-fluted preform on a plano-convex elongated bifacial piece; (2) broken fluted preform on a bifacial elongated piece with symmetrical section; (3) base-fluted projectile point; (4 and 5) tip-fluted projectile points. Image credit: Crassard et al, doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0236314.

Neolithic People in Arabia Used Same Fluting Technology as Ancient Native Americans

Aug 11, 2020 by News Staff

An international team of archaeologists has excavated and examined 8,000-year-old projectile points (spear- and arrowheads) at two sites in Yemen and Oman....

Coronal section of the human brain; amygdala is colored in purple; from Anatomy of the Human Body by Henry Gray.

Depression in Association with Anxiety Makes Amygdala Bigger

Aug 10, 2020 by News Staff

According to a new review of previous studies, published July 29 in the Journal of Psychiatry and Neuroscience, depression is linked to areas of the brain...

Denisovans Interbred with Mysterious Archaic Hominin: Study

Aug 7, 2020 by News Staff

In a new study published in the journal PLoS Genetics, researchers analyzed the genomes of two Neanderthals, a Denisovan, and two African humans; and found...

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