As fall begins across the Northern Hemisphere, hundreds of millions of birds are preparing for a journey that can take them thousands of miles to warmer climates near the equator. These fall migrations are both a simple fact of life for many avian species, and an epic adventure that takes them halfway across the globe.Seasonal migrations allow birds to take advantage of prime habitats for feeding and reproducing in the warmer summer months before escaping the deadly cold of winter. But many bird ...read more

A supercomputer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee called Summit takes up the same floor space as a couple of tennis courts, and weighs more than a large commercial aircraft. In certain cases, the machine can perform about a billion calculations per second, allowing it to simulate complex systems in physics, biology and other fields.Recently, a team of astronomers used Summit to simulate a supermassive black hole and the swirl of matter (the “accretion disk”) that surrounds it ...read more

Unique conditions appear to have preserved part of an ancient wooden structure dating back at least 476,000 years. This time was well before the presumed evolution of modern humans, upsetting old notions of hominid development.No one knows what the structure was, only that it appears to have been fashioned with stone tools to fit together in an interlinking fashion similar to Lincoln Logs. The scientific team led by archaeologist Larry Barham found a single such connection composed of a longer, ...read more

Smartwatches may be able to buy potential Parkinson’s patients valuable time when it comes to diagnosis.New research reveals that these devices can detect the degenerative condition years before the symptoms become serious, based solely on the movement and sleep patterns of those who wear them.“Parkinson’s disease is primarily a movement disorder and we know that before a clinical diagnosis is made where all these motor symptoms have to be present, there’s a long phase where neuronal dam ...read more

For a long time, philosophers have pondered the nature of what we hear and by association, the nature of the perception of silence. Do we only hear sounds? Some might argue that we hear sounds and their sources — a singer and her voice. However, experience leads us to believe that we also hear silence, the absence of sound, for example, when a dramatic piece of music comes to an end.The view that we only hear sounds centers on the idea that perception is only ever of positive things and that w ...read more

Scientists have identified five major episodes of mass extinction in the past 550 million years. These episodes were rare but extremely deadly, and at least 76 percent of species were lost forever. The last mass extinction happened about 65 million years ago when an asteroid destroyed dinosaur life.Many scientists now say the planet is experiencing its sixth great mass extinction, and the greatest acceleration in the loss of animal life has happened in the past century. A 2022 study in Nat ...read more

A new study of a cave used by prehistoric people in southern Spain has uncovered a mystifying set of practices involving possible cannibalism and the manipulation of dead bodies.Scientists have studied the Cueva de los Marmoles (Marble Cave) since 1934, but the most recent effort by researchers from the University of Bern and the Universidad de Córdoba is the first comprehensive study of the human remains there. The analysis relies on 411 bone fragments collected from the site, along with 47 at ...read more

When 17 people were in orbit around the Earth all at the same time on May 30, 2023, it set a record. With NASA and other federal space agencies planning more manned missions and commercial companies bringing people to space, opportunities for human space travel are rapidly expanding.However, traveling to space poses risks to the human body. Since NASA wants to send a manned mission to Mars in the 2030s, scientists need to find solutions for these hazards sooner rather than later.As a kinesio ...read more

Until the middle of the 19th century, surgery was performed with no anesthesia. You don’t need a fertile imagination to realize how excruciating the experience was for patients. Nor did the surgeons who administered this particular type of torment take it lightly. In The Worst of Evils: The Fight Against Pain, Thomas Dormandy tells how the 19th-century surgeon and medical pioneer Sir James Paget recalled those gruesome days before anesthesia in his memoirs: “They had been the worst night ...read more

Most living things on Earth have an internal clock that ticks at the schedule of a circadian rhythm. Environmental factors can throw off this rhythm, and for animals that live in zoos, these factors are different compared to animals living in the wild.  One of these factors is moving an animal to a different time zone for conservation purposes. To understand if animals could get jet lag, a recent study tuned into the clocks of wild and captive pandas in zoos worldwide. Researchers found that p ...read more