The world`s oldest fossilised vomit, believed to have come from a large marine reptile that lived 160 million years ago, has been discovered in a clay quarry in Peterborough by the University of Greenwich`s Professor Peter Doyle and Dr Jason Wood of the Open University.
The vomit contains the remains of dozens of belemnites – squid-like shellfish that lived in abundance in the seas around what is now Britain. The belemnites were eaten in great numbers by ichthyosaurs, large marine reptiles (
New research by economists at the Universities of Warwick and Oxford has provided surprising information on just how much people hate a winner. It also shows what lengths human beings are prepared to go to damage a winner out of a sense of envy or fairness.
The researchers, Professor Andrew Oswald of the University of Warwick and Dr Daniel Zizzo of Oxford, designed a new kind of experiment, played with real cash, where subjects could anonymously “burn” away other people’s money – but only a
A supernova may have caused mass extinction two million years ago.
The explosion of a dying star could have ended much of marine life on Earth two million years ago. The supernova could have strafed the Earth’s atmosphere with cosmic rays, severely damaging the ozone layer and exposing living organisms to high levels of the Sun’s hazardous ultraviolet rays, US researchers propose 1 .
This idea dates back to the 1950s, but now Narciso Benítez of Johns Hopkins
Underwater video reveals lobsters behaving badly.
A lobster-pot is more like a Wild West saloon than a cunningly laid snare. Lobsters show up for food and a fight, and only the unlucky few get reeled in, underwater video footage is revealing.
Camera recordings show that lobster traps catch a mere 6% of the animals that enter them. The result suggests that lobsters rowdy behaviour could be confusing attempts to count and size them, and so to manage the fishery 1
Ethical considerations aside, a major issue in cloning is whether or not clones are as healthy as normally conceived animals. The evidence so far has been mixed. Some cloned cows have received clean bills of health, but Dolly suffers from premature arthritis, and many cloned animals are obese. According to a report published online today by the journal Nature Genetics, mice cloned from somatic cells fare particularly poorly. Indeed, the study found that cloned mice had significantly shorter life span
New skin receptor is the tip of the iceberg.
A snowball in the face or a chilly breeze around the ankles opens a molecular trap door in our skin’s nerve cells, two studies now show 1 , 2 . A third suggests that this, the first cold sensor to be identified, is just the tip of the iceberg 3 .
How sensory neurons detect a drop in temperature is very hard to study because it affects so many cell processes.
David Julius of
Not all magnets are the same. When we think of magnetism, we often think of magnets that stick to a refrigerator’s door. For these types of magnets, the electronic interactions…
An international research team from the University of Jena and the Helmholtz Institute Jena are demystifying the mechanisms by which high-intensity laser pulses produce plasma on the surface of solids….
Using the Hubbard model, Flatiron Institute senior research scientist Shiwei Zhang and his colleagues have computationally re-created key features of the superconductivity in materials called cuprates that have puzzled scientists…
A study from the Hackett group at EMBL Rome led to the development of a powerful epigenetic editing technology, which unlocks the ability to precisely program chromatin modifications. Understanding how…
Our human brain is not only bigger and contains more neurons than the brains of other species, but it is also connected in a special pattern: Thick bundles of neurons…
Macquarie University researchers have debunked a 75-year-old theory about how humans determine where sounds are coming from, and it could unlock the secret to creating a next generation of more…
Good vibrations… What if your earbuds could do everything your smartphone can do already, except better? What sounds a bit like science fiction may actually not be so far off….
The new technique can modify the nanostructure of bulk and 2D crystals without a cleanroom or expensive etching equipment. In a new paper published on May 1 in the journal…
Research led by scientists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory has demonstrated that small changes in the isotopic content of thin semiconductor materials can influence their optical…
In five years’ time, a large asteroid will fly very close to Earth – a unique opportunity to study it. Concepts for a national German small satellite mission are being…
The rapid advancement in photonic integrated circuits (PICs), whichcombine multiple optical devices and functionalities on a single chip, has revolutionized optical communications and computing systems. For decades, silicon-based PICs have…
Researchers from the University of Basel and the NCCR SPIN have achieved the first controllable interaction between two hole spin qubits in a conventional silicon transistor. The breakthrough opens up…