Ten thousand years ago, mastodons vanished from South America. With them, an ecologically vital function also disappeared: the dispersal of seeds from large-fruited plants. A new study led by the University of O’Higgins, Chile, with key contributions from IPHES-CERCA, demonstrates for the first time — based on direct fossil evidence — that these extinct elephant…
An international team of astronomers has trained a neural network with millions of synthetic simulations and artificial intelligence (AI) to tease out new cosmic curiosities about black holes, revealing the one at the center of our Milky Way is spinning at nearly top speed. These large ensembles of simulations were generated by throughput computing capabilities…
A University of Queensland-led project has developed a tool to standardize genetic testing of koala populations, providing a significant boost to conservation and recovery efforts. Dr Lyndal Hulse from UQ’s School of the Environment said the standardized koala genetic marker panel provides a consistent method for researchers nationwide to capture and share koala genetic variation,…
A cosmic particle detector in Antarctica has emitted a series of bizarre signals that defy the current understanding of particle physics, according to an international research group that includes scientists from Penn State. The unusual radio pulses were detected by the Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA) experiment, a range of instruments flown on balloons high…
Scientists have shed new light on the evolution of an important species of wasp – and believe that the findings could help improve the effectiveness of natural pest control. Dr Rebecca Boulton, from the University of Stirling, has shown, for the first time, that Lysiphlebus fabarum – a tiny species of wasp – can reproduce…
New results from a clinical trial reveal that a single dose of psilocybin — a naturally occurring psychedelic compound found in mushrooms — can provide sustained reductions in depression and anxiety in individuals with cancer suffering from major depressive disorder. The findings are published by Wiley online in CANCER, a peer-reviewed journal of the American…
Earth is some 4.5 billion years old. When it formed from colliding rocks around a dim, young sun, it was presumably lifeless, and geologists long thought that life didn’t emerge for a billion years or more. This idea came from analysis of moon rocks brought back from the Apollo landings, which indicated Earth was pummelled…
Fly Agaric Marshmallow Laser Feast Soils around the world are polluted, worn out, over-fertilised and exhausted. How did we get to a place where we think of soil as dirt? Soils are buzzing with life, criss-crossed with a hard-to-fathom complexity of connections, a multitude of symbiotic partnerships between plant roots, mycorrhizal fungi and nitrogen-fixing bacteria….
In the coming decades, we might figure out how to make an entirely new kind of life: a mirror cell, in which every molecule is the mirror image of those found in normal cells. Such reversed cells have probably never existed on our planet in its 4.5-billion-year history. Yet we could one day make them…
Tim Faulkner at Aussie Ark gets ready to release a Tasmanian devil in a fenced sanctuary at Barrington Tops, Australia James Woodford I’m sharing a ride with two very cranky and confused Tasmanian devils, loaded in the back of our all-terrain vehicle inside large plastic traps. These devils are a long way from their species’…
