Donovan Gibson 
Male chicks of the domestic chicken play more than females. Credit: Rebecca Oscarsson Play is widespread, but far from ubiquitous, across the animal kingdom. Especially common in mammals, play is also known to occur in taxa as diverse as birds, fish, octopuses, and even insects. But what is its function, given that natural selection never …
A research team using the ChemCam instrument onboard NASA’s Curiosity rover discovered higher-than-usual amounts of manganese in lakebed rocks within Gale Crater on Mars, which indicates that the sediments were formed in a river, delta, or near the shoreline of an ancient lake. The results were published today in Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets. “It …
ROC curves of the retrained and original models on datasets from 20 plant species. A ROC curves of the retrained CPAT-plant model and its comparison with the original models for human and mouse. B ROC curves of the retrained LncFinder-plant model and comparison with the original models for human, mouse, and wheat. C ROC curves …
The health benefits of exercise are well known but new research shows that the body’s response to exercise is more complex and far-reaching than previously thought. In a study on rats, a team of scientists from across the United States has found that physical activity causes many cellular and molecular changes in all 19 of …
Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain The Colorado River’s future may be a little brighter than expected, according to a new modeling study from CIRES researchers. Warming temperatures, which deplete water in the river, have raised doubts the Colorado River could recover from a multi-decade drought. The new study fully accounts for both rising temperatures and precipitation …
During sleep, the brain weakens the new connections between neurons that had been forged while awake — but only during the first half of a night’s sleep, according to a new study in fish by UCL scientists. The researchers say their findings, published in Nature, provide insight into the role of sleep, but still leave …
The skull of Shanidar Z, which has been reconstructed in the lab at the University of Cambridge. Credit: BBC Studios/Jamie Simonds A new Netflix documentary has recreated the face of a 75,000-year-old female Neanderthal whose flattened skull was discovered and rebuilt from hundreds of bone fragments by a team of archaeologists and conservators led by …
A group of researchers at the University of Waterloo and the University of British Columbia have discovered a potential “cosmic glitch” in the universe’s gravity, explaining its strange behaviour on a cosmic scale. For the last 100 years, physicists have relied upon Albert Einstein’s theory of “general relativity” to explain how gravity works throughout the …
A new type of self-eating plastic could revolutionize the industry and cut down on plastic waste drastically. The new plastic was created by researchers who detailed their results in a new study featured in Nature Communications. According to their study, the new technique is potentially scalable and would open up new ways to dispose of …
Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain Amazonia is the home of the largest variety of birds in the world. In such a unique environment, craft cultures have flourished by translating the beauty and creativity of environmental materials like feathers into stunning pieces of art. An article titled “The Material Creativity of Affective Artifacts in the Dutch Colonial …