When most Americans imagine an archaeologist, they picture someone who looks like Indiana Jones. Or, perhaps, Lara Croft, from the Tomb Raider game. White, usually male but occasionally female, digging up the spoils of a vanished culture in colonized lands.

The network of nerves connecting our eyes to our brains is sophisticated and researchers have now shown that it evolved much earlier than previously thought, thanks to an unexpected source: the gar fish.

Nobel laureate in physics Richard Feynman once described turbulence as "the most important unsolved problem of classical physics."

Six years ago, Michael Niederweis, Ph.D., described the first toxin ever found for the deadly pathogen Mycobacterium tuberculosis. This toxin, tuberculosis necrotizing toxin, or TNT, became the founding member of a novel class of previously unrecognized toxins present in more than 600 bacterial and fungal species, as determined by protein sequence similarity. The toxin is released as M....

Taiwan is an island of extremes: severe earthquakes and typhoons repeatedly strike the region and change the landscape, sometimes catastrophically. This makes Taiwan a fantastic laboratory for geosciences. Erosion processes, for example, occur up to a thousand times faster in the center of the island than in its far south. This difference in erosion rates influences the chemical weathering of...

Ion channels play an indispensable role in cellular physiology, and understanding the physical features that affect ion channel functions is a matter of considerable interest to biologists. Given that mechanosensitivity is an intrinsic feature of cells, the complex set of mechanical stresses acting on a cell at any time represents an important consideration in the field of cellular physiology. In...

When it comes to choosing a partner, humans tend to be attracted by characteristics like personality and common interests. In contrast, insects tend to be a bit shallow, as they choose a mate based on appearance, and in some cases, smells. One example is the leaf beetle, which produces chemical pheromones that are on their cuticles, or the exterior surface of the beetle. They use these 'scents' to...

Charles Darwin, the British naturalist who championed the theory of evolution, noted that corals form far-reaching structures, largely made of limestone, that surround tropical islands. He didn't know how they performed this feat.

A new study shows that several disagreements between Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt around Africa's largest hydropower plant, the new Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), could be alleviated by massively expanding solar and wind power across the region. Adapting GERD operation to support grid integration of solar and wind power would provide tangible energy and water benefits to all involved...

Past surveys have shown that more than 80% of dog owners report observing jealous behaviors from their dogs—vocalizations, agitated behavior, pulling on a leash—when they give attention to other dogs. New research published in the journal Psychological Science supports these observations and finds that dogs also exhibit jealous behaviors when they merely imagine that their owner is interacting...

A current study by scientists of the University of Bonn and Southwest University in China sheds light on an unusual interdependence: Maize can attract special soil bacteria that, in turn, help the plants to grow better. In the long term, the results could be used to breed new varieties that use less fertilizer and therefore have less impact on the environment. The study is published in the...

Researchers have developed a new algorithm capable of identifying features of male zebra finch songs that may underlie the distinction between a short phrase sung during courtship, and the same phrase sung in a non-courtship context. Sarah Woolley of McGill University in Montreal, Canada, and colleagues present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS Computational Biology.

Piping plovers, charismatic shorebirds that nest and feed on many Atlantic Coast beaches, rely on different kinds of coastal habitats in different regions along the Atlantic Coast, according to a new study by the U.S. Geological Survey and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Research shows people turn to religion in times of fear and uncertainty—and March 2020 was one of those times.

Five-star ratings are no guarantee to lead you to the perfect barber who truly understands your hair or to the espresso machine that brews a perfect cup of coffee.

Avian brood parasites lay their eggs in the nests of other bird species, forcing the hosts to do the hard work of raising the unrelated young. A team of scientists wanted to simulate the task of piercing an egg—a tactic that only a minority of host birds use to help grasp and eject the foreign eggs. Their study offers insight into some of the physical challenges the discriminating host birds...

Waste materials from the pulp and paper industry have long been seen as possible fillers for building products like cement, but for years these materials have ended up in the landfill. Now, researchers at UBC Okanagan are developing guidelines to use this waste for road construction in an environmentally friendly manner.

The Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre (CCDC) has made around 10,000 metal—organic framework structures free to academics in the new CSD MOF Collection. This has been announced in a letter in Matter.

Using DNA structures as scaffolds, Tim Liedl, a scientist of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich, has shown that precisely positioned gold nanoparticles can serve as efficient energy transmitters. 

It's like something out of science fiction. Research led by Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences has revealed that a group of microbes, which feed off chemical reactions triggered by radioactivity, have been at an evolutionary standstill for millions of years. The discovery could have significant implications for biotechnology applications and scientific understanding of microbial evolution.

Orchids of the Boreal zone are rare species. Most of the 28,000 species of the Orchid family actually live in the tropics. In the Boreal zone, ground orchids can hardly tolerate competition from other plants—mainly forbs or grasses. So they are often pushed into ecotones—border areas between meadows and forests, or between forests and swamps.

Short pieces of DNA—jumping genes—can bounce from one place to another in our genomes. When too many DNA fragments move around, cancer, infertility, and other problems can arise. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) Professor & HHMI Investigator Leemor Joshua-Tor and a research investigator in her lab, Jonathan Ipsaro, study how cells safeguard the genome's integrity and immobilize these...

A team of archaeologists in north-west the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has uncovered the earliest evidence of dog domestication by the region's ancient inhabitants.

Indoles, and structures derived from them, are a component of many natural substances, such as the amino acid tryptophan. A new catalytic reaction produces cyclopenta[ b ] indoles—frameworks made of three rings that are joined at the edges—very selectively and with the desired spatial structure. As a research team reports in the journal Angewandte Chemie, the rates of the different steps of...