A macaque using a stone tool to break open shellfish. (Credit: Luncz et. al/eLife)
The advent of tools was a big deal for humanity. It made it far easier to manipulate our environment and mold the planet to serve our own interests—from the folsom point to the iPhone X.
Some animals use tools too, like the macaques of Thailand, who have figured out that their favorite shellfish snacks are much easier to eat if they bash them open with rocks first. They’ve become proficient shellfish ...read more
One-third of Asia’s high mountain glaciers will melt — even if the Paris Agreement succeeds.
Afternoon clouds roll into a Himalayan valley below Yala Glacier Basecamp in Nepal. (Credit: Joseph Shea)
There’s so much ice packed into the high mountains of Asia that scientists call it Earth’s “Third Pole.” The Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau hold the largest reserves of freshwater outside the Arctic and Antarctic.
Here, thousands of glaciers form the headwater ...read more
This is NOT a scientifically accurate illustration of oral bacteria. (Credit: Shutterstock)
Were you born to have bad teeth, or did you break them?
When it comes to allocating blame for tooth decay, one of the most common chronic childhood diseases worldwide, experts point fingers at both genes and dental hygiene as causes. Excessive sugar consumption and acid buildup in the mouth have long been linked with cavities, but there are clearly other factors in play.
That the causality waters are st ...read more
(Credit: structuresxx/Shutterstock)
In Australia, a question lingers: Do we shoot the kangaroos?
The proposition sounds a bit inhumane at first blush, after all, the kangaroo stands proudly on the Australian coat of arms. The bouncing beasts are a fixture of the outback. But in recent years, the roos have been doing quite well—in fact, too well. Their numbers have been bolstered by the extinction of natural predators and generous rainfall; there are now so many kangaroos, that one ecolog ...read more
(Credit: RSGS)
After more than a century, a mysterious shorthand message exhumed from the archives is confounding scientists and historical societies alike.
In the winter of 1903, upon returning from his very first Antarctic expedition, Sir Ernest Shackleton found himself in need of a job. He applied for a secretary position within the Royal Scottish Geographical Society (RSGS), an organization responsible for introducing the latest and most innovative technologies. Among them at the time: the ...read more
(Credit: Marco Dorigo and Nithin Mathews)
In the future, we may have drones that can autonomously change size, shape and function. Basically, Transformers is starting to get real.
Currently, most autonomous robots are stuck with the function and form they were designed for, but scientists are working hard to change that. In a study published Tuesday in Nature Communications, a team led by Nithin Mathews of the Universite Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium showcased its fleet of “mergeable ner ...read more
Image: Flickr/Per-Olof Forsberg
There’s a lot more in Trump’s Twitter feed than just a load of covfefe. In fact, the POTUS tweets often enough to be a source of information about his daily habits. This paper describes what Professor Till Roenneberg gleaned from a careful analysis of Trump’s Twitter activities over several years. Because Trump shares his Twitter accounts with others on his team, Professor Roenneberg first had to separate Tweets originating from diffe ...read more
Instead of making scientists compete for grants based on project proposals, research funding could simply be divided equally among all ‘qualified’ researchers, according to a new paper.
Authors Krist Vaesen and Joel Katzav argue that such an ‘egalitarian’ distribution of funds would still leave each grant holder with enough money to support their work and pay for students and junior researchers. But I’m not sure I agree with their logic.
Vaesen and Katzav start by ...read more
