December 12, 2023 4 min read Birds might sing in the morning because they need a vocal workout By Olivia Ferrari A male zebra finch (Taeniopygia castanotis). Most professional singers agree that practice makes perfect. And now research published in Nature Communications shows that songbirds also rely on a daily vocal workout—if they want to… Continue reading Male Songbirds Need Daily Vocal Practice to Woo Females
Category: Quantum Stuff
Hottest Survivable Temperatures Are Lower Than Expected
CLIMATEWIRE | Death can happen at lower temperatures than an established scientific measure of “heat survivability” indicates, according to new research from Arizona State University. A recent paper published in Nature Communications found that the primary methodology to measure deadly heat — called “wet-bulb global temperature” — is inadequate, resulting in artificially low mortality estimates from extreme heat events. The… Continue reading Hottest Survivable Temperatures Are Lower Than Expected
Extra-Long Blasts Challenge Our Theories of Cosmic Cataclysms
The new observations from Levan, Rastinejad and others clash with this quick and clean image of neutron star mergers. “It doesn’t make any sense to have a 10-second burst from a system that lives only a fraction of a second,” said Ore Gottlieb, a computational astrophysicist at the Flatiron Institute who was not involved with… Continue reading Extra-Long Blasts Challenge Our Theories of Cosmic Cataclysms
Meet Strange Metals: Where Electricity May Flow Without Electrons
After a year of trial and error, Liyang Chen had managed to whittle down a metallic wire into a microscopic strand half the width of an E.coli bacterium — just thin enough to allow a trickle of electric current to pass through. The drips of that current might, Chen hoped, help settle a persistent mystery… Continue reading Meet Strange Metals: Where Electricity May Flow Without Electrons
International Space Station Suffers Leak, But Crew Remains Safe
Space station astronauts were “never in any danger” following a coolant leak Monday (Oct. 9) on a Russian module, NASA officials have said. Toxic ammonia flakes were observed on the International Space Station‘s (ISS) Russian Nauka Multipurpose Laboratory Module (MLM) around 1 p.m. EDT (1700 GMT). Personnel in NASA‘s Mission Control in Houston first spotted the “possible”… Continue reading International Space Station Suffers Leak, But Crew Remains Safe
The Milky Way May Be Missing a Trillion Suns’ Worth of Mass
There’s something strange going on with the Milky Way. Recent measurements suggest that stars at the outskirts of our galaxy are misbehaving. They’re traveling far slower than similarly situated stars in other galaxies. One possible explanation for the Milky Way’s stellar slowpokes is that our galaxy is extraordinarily deficient in dark matter, the invisible substance… Continue reading The Milky Way May Be Missing a Trillion Suns’ Worth of Mass
Why Women Earn Less Than Men: Economic Historian Wins Nobel for Work on Gender Pay Gap
October 11, 2023 4 min read Claudia Goldin mined 200 years of data to show that greater economic growth did not lead to wage parity or more women in the workplace By Philip Ball & Nature magazine Claudia Goldin, the Henry Lee Professor of Economics at Harvard University, speaks at a press conference after being named this… Continue reading Why Women Earn Less Than Men: Economic Historian Wins Nobel for Work on Gender Pay Gap
A Soggy Mission to Sniff Out a Greenhouse Gas ‘Bomb’ in the High Arctic
Jocie Bentley (tape): PSA: don’t bring hiking boots when walking the tundra. Your feet will get soaked like a wet sponge. Gabriel Hould Gosselin (tape): Almost there. [laughs] About halfway. Well, it’s a lot faster with snowmobiles. Bentley: Hey, I’m Jocie Bentley, and this is the final episode of a three-part Science, Quickly Fascination series from… Continue reading A Soggy Mission to Sniff Out a Greenhouse Gas ‘Bomb’ in the High Arctic
Monkeys with Transplanted Pig Kidneys Live for Up to Two Years or More
People seeking a kidney transplant often have to wait years for a donor organ to become available—and many die before ever receiving one. Xenotransplantation, in which organs from one species are transplanted into another, could alleviate the organ shortage. But bridging millions of years of evolutionary divergence between two species is a tall order, so… Continue reading Monkeys with Transplanted Pig Kidneys Live for Up to Two Years or More
Evolving Bacteria Can Evade Barriers to ‘Peak’ Fitness
For many decades, exploring fitness landscapes was primarily the reserve of theoreticians working with simulated organisms, or pioneering experimentalists working on a relatively small scale. But with the rise of easy, inexpensive gene editing technology, the team behind the new paper wondered if they could build a very large adaptive landscape using living organisms, said… Continue reading Evolving Bacteria Can Evade Barriers to ‘Peak’ Fitness