In ancient oceans that resembled our own, oxygen loss triggered mass extinction
Roughly 430 million years ago, during the Earth's Silurian Period, global oceans were experiencing changes that would seem eerily familiar today. Melting polar ice...
What’s in this plant? The best automated system for finding potential drugs
Researchers at the RIKEN Center for Sustainable Resource Science (CSRS) in Japan have developed a new computational mass-spectrometry system for identifying metabolomes—entire sets of...
People ‘hear’ flashes due to disinhibited flow of signals around the brain, suggests study
A synaesthesia-like effect in which people 'hear' silent flashes or movement, such as in popular 'noisy GIFs' and memes, could be due to a...
Solving the e-waste challenge requires global action
An international team of experts have highlighted the urgent need for global cooperation to reform the e-waste recycling industry and counteract the harm it...
Artificial intelligence can predict premature death, study finds
Computers which are capable of teaching themselves to predict premature death could greatly improve preventative healthcare in the future, suggests a new study by...
Researchers generate ultra-short spin waves in an astoundingly simple material
Due to its potential to make computers faster and smartphones more efficient, spintronics is considered a promising concept for the future of electronics. In...
Unusual galaxies defy dark matter theory
After drawing both praise and skepticism, the team of astronomers who discovered NGC 1052-DF2 – the very first known galaxy to contain little to...
Rivers raged on Mars late into its history
Long ago on Mars, water carved deep riverbeds into the planet's surface—but we still don't know what kind of weather fed them. Scientists aren't...
Researchers decipher and codify the universal language of honey bees
For Virginia Tech researchers Margaret Couvillon and Roger Schürch, the Tower of Babel origin myth—intended to explain the genesis of the world's many languages—holds...
Bacteria could be a future source of electricity
In recent years, researchers have tried to capture the electrical current that bacteria generate through metabolism. So far, however, the transfer of current from...
GRAVITY instrument breaks new ground in exoplanet imaging
The GRAVITY instrument on ESO's Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) has made the first direct observation of an exoplanet using optical interferometry. This method...
