Female birds sing. That is one of the revelations of our 2020 study on one of the most abundant, widespread, well-studied bird species in the world: the barn swallow. Despite the well over 1,000 scientific publications about this species, female barn swallow song had never previously been the focus of a research article. Why does it matter that female song has been ignored in this bird that breeds across most of the Northern Hemisphere?...
POZZUOLLI, Italy—Tragedy struck at the Solfatara volcano crater north of Naples a few weeks ago. An 11-year-old boy climbed over a low, wooden fence, ventured onto the chalky moonscape, and fell into an open fissure. His parents frantically tried to pull him out, just as the hollow floor of the crater crumbled, sending them all to their deaths in a gaseous pit of boiling gray mud, as the family’s seven-year-old boy watched in horror....
If you are convinced your dog is a genius, you may be disappointed in the conclusions of a study just published in the journal Learning and Behavior.The study finds that dogs are cognitively quite ordinary when compared to other carnivores, domestic animals, and social hunters. “There is no current case for canine exceptionalism,” the authors conclude. That we think otherwise is not surprising. Claims of canine exceptionalism abound, from people’s anecdotes about their dogs’ ability to read their minds (“Sparky looked into my eyes and then at the refrigerator—he knew I wanted a beer!...
The launch of the clinicaltrials.gov registry in 2000 seems to have had a striking impact on reported trial results, according to a PLoS ONE study that many researchers have been talking about online in the past week. A 1997 US law mandated the registry’s creation, requiring researchers from 2000 to record their trial methods and outcome measures before collecting data. The study found that in a sample of 55 large trials testing heart-disease treatments, 57% of those published before 2000 reported positive effects from the treatments....
Exoplanets come in pretty much all colors, including pitch black. The huge, blistering-hot alien world WASP-12b has a reflectance, or albedo, of just 0.064 at most, a new study reports. “This is an extremely low value, making the planet darker than fresh asphalt!” lead author Taylor Bell, a master’s student in astronomy at McGill University in Montreal, said in a statement. [Gallery: The Strangest Alien Planets] For perspective, the moon’s albedo on the same scale is 0....
BEIJING—As the United States reverses its climate policies, the world’s top greenhouse gas emitter is in the midst of setting up a national carbon-trading system. Chinese officials are preparing to launch an emissions market later this year that will cover roughly a quarter of the country’s industrial CO2. Officials and nonprofit groups from the European Union, Australia and California have been advising the Chinese on their program design. Expectations are tempered: Details of China’s national system are still murky, but enough information has emerged that observers are skeptical it will be immediately comparable to existing programs, due to design features as well as the haste with which China is rolling it out....
In 1989, when elephant ethologist Joyce Poole began carrying out surveys of three East African elephant populations to understand the impact that heavy poaching was having on them, she quickly noted several stark trends. There was a huge skew in the sex ratio, with very few adult males. Many families lacked older females—and many of those females had no tusks. Poole’s observations—which were used a few months later to support a ban on international ivory trade—were alarming, but they mostly made sense....
You probably know the GIF as the perfect vehicle for sharing memes and reactions. We believe the format can go further, that it has real power to capture science and explain research in short, digestible loops. So kick off your week right with this GIF-able science. Enjoy and loop on. Drone Out of Water Credit: “Consecutive Aquatic Jump-Gliding with Water-Reactive Fuel,” by R. Zufferey et al., in Science Robotics, Vol. 4, No....
We tend to believe that our brains work as well as they can. Thus, we assume that if you are good at math, it means that your brain is superior to the brains of those who find math more challenging. Of course, we have come to realize that people are better at some things than at others. Being better in math does not mean being smarter at everything. But we assume that, at least within a given domain, better behavioral performance implies superior brains, because we take it for granted that the brain is working as well as it can to optimize behavior....
We are more often frightened than hurt; and we suffer more from imagination than from reality. —Lucius Annaeus Seneca Dennis Rogers is an unassuming guy. He’s on the short side. And though muscular, he doesn’t come across as the kind of towering Venice Beach, muscle-bound Arnold that you might expect from someone billed as the World’s Strongest Man. Rather he has the kind of avuncular intensity you find in a great automobile mechanic—a mechanic who happens to be able to lift an engine with one hand while using the fingertips of the other hand to wrench the spark plugs out....
In our annual World Changing Ideas roundup, we select 10 innovations—from software that uses eye movements to control wheelchairs to cameras that can see around corners—that could become game changers. Here, we’ve collected videos (and one audio interview) in which the scientists and engineers behind four of this year’s innovations give a deeper look at their work. Eye-controlled machines Aldo Faisal, an associate professor of neurotechnology at Imperial College London, developed an inexpensive system that translates a person’s eye movements into commands for external devices....
Many people wish their memory worked like a video recording. How handy would that be? Finding your car keys would simply be a matter of zipping back to the last time you had them and hitting “play.” You would never miss an appointment or forget to pay a bill. You would remember everyone’s birthday. You would ace every exam. Or so you might think. In fact, a memory like that would snare mostly useless data and mix them willy-nilly with the information you really needed....
Research on prosthetics takes its greatest strides during or just after wartime, and the past several years have sadly been no exception. Todd A. Kuiken of the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago and his team have pioneered “targeted reinnervation,” which jacks an artificial arm into the nervous system. They transplant nerves from the shoulder of a lost arm to a patch on the chest. In trying to move the arm, the person causes chest muscles to flex, which electrodes pick up and transmit to the prosthesis....
On Mars, the sky is dust. A massive dust storm on Mars that covered one-fourth of the planet just a week ago has grown into a global weather event, NASA officials said Wednesday (June 20). The dust storm has knocked NASA’s Opportunity rover offline for want of sunlight. The agency’s nuclear-powered Curiosity, meanwhile, is snapping photos of the ever-darkening Martian sky. The two rovers are on opposite sides of Mars. “The Martian dust storm has grown in size and is now officially a ‘planet-encircling’ (or ‘global’) dust event,” NASA officials said in a statement....
A preliminary estimate from NOAA finds that levels of atmospheric methane, a potent heat-trapping gas, have hit an all-time high. Methane is roughly 80 times more powerful than carbon dioxide, and while it stays in the atmosphere for only around a decade, as opposed to centuries, like CO2, its continued rise poses a major challenge to international climate goals. “Here we are. It’s 2020, and it’s not only not dropping. It’s not level....
Editor’s Note (6/14/22): The current hearings on the January 6, 2021, insurrection, held by a U.S. House of Representatives committee, have highlighted ties between mainstream supporters of former president Donald Trump and extremist groups in the mob that invaded the Capitol. A week after the January 2021 attack, extremism expert Amy Cooter explained why these connections are growing more dangerous and common. Growing concerns about violence from some people and groups supporting Donald Trump proved terrifyingly accurate last week as an armed mob bearing Trump banners stormed into the United States Capitol....
Bwindi Impenetrable National Park in Uganda is one of the last places where mountain gorillas still live in the wild, a dwindling redoubt in the last decades of the 20th century. But a new census shows that gorillas there have been making a comeback since the government began protecting the mountainous forest in 1991, dramatically limiting logging, hunting and other human activities that cut into their population. The most recent census of its small mountain gorilla population shows that they are continuing to thrive: up from just 300 in 1997 to 340 in 2006....
SAN DIEGO—Robert King spent 29 years living alone in a six by nine-foot prison cell. He was part of the “Angola Three”—a trio of men kept in solitary confinement for decades and named for the Louisiana state penitentiary where they were held. King was released in 2001 after a judge overturned his 1973 conviction for killing a fellow inmate. Since his exoneration he has dedicated his life to raising awareness about the psychological harms of solitary confinement....
Hindsight is very often 20-20, but sometimes foresight is, too. Mark Fischetti’s article “Drowning New Orleans” in the October 2001 Scientific American all too accurately depicted the devastation that an inevitable strong hurricane would bring to that city, as have articles in many other publications since that time. Those predictions sprang from years of published scientific analyses. Any official who claims to have been surprised by the tragic events that unfolded in New Orleans after Katrina simply wasn’t paying attention....
On March 14 and 15, 2011, explosions unleashed invisible radioactive plumes from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, crippled three days earlier when the strongest recorded earthquake in Japan’s history triggered a massive tsunami. As the plumes drifted over the neighboring countryside, their contents—including radioactive cesium, a by-product of the plant’s fission reactions—fell to the ground and over the ocean. What no one knew or expected was the fallout also contained bacteria-size glassy beads, with concentrations of radioactive cesium that were far higher than those in similar-size motes of tainted dust or dirt....
