Zayan Khan was not like most fourteen-year-olds in Class IX. While other kids played football after school or scrolled endlessly through their phones, Zayan preferred sitting in his garage-turned-lab, surrounded by beeping circuits, old computer parts, and a strange notebook titled “Experiments with the Unknown.” His classmates called him “The...
Writing out the same word again and again in cursive may bring back bad memories for some, but handwriting can boost connectivity across brain regions, some of which are implicated in learning and memory, a new study shows. When asked to handwrite words, college students showed increased connectivity across the...
Nesting chinstrap penguins take nodding off to the extreme. These birds dip into slumber many thousands of times per day, sleeping only seconds at a time. The penguins’ breeding colonies are noisy and stressful. Threats from predatory birds and aggressive neighboring penguins never seem to let up. But their extremely disrupted...
People tend to harvest trees for lumber and papermaking. But maybe electronics engineers are missing out on something here. “Turns out,” says Magnus Berggren. Two major building blocks of wood have “a lot of electrical properties.” And he’s shown that these blocks could serve as green replacements for some of...
Hummingbirds are natural acrobats, twisting their wings in ways that let them fly backward and upside down, unlike any other bird (SN: 1/13/16). A new high-speed video now shows how, using a bit of aerial gymnastics, hummingbirds can also slip through gaps narrower than their wingspan. Most birds can bend...
The animals haven’t been shown to change their behavior based on past experiences until now. For Caribbean box jellyfish, learning is literally a no-brainer. In a new experiment, these animals learned to spot and avoid obstacles despite having no central brain, researchers report on September 22 in Current Biology. This...
If they exist, “dark stars” could tell us about dark matter and the early universe The James Webb Space Telescope may have spotted a new type of star. Some of the telescope’s recent pictures have turned up three potential “dark stars” – ones powered by dark matter. That’s the invisible stuff that makes...
Whether they’re in mortal peril or just suffering from indigestion, infants across the animal kingdom cry out to tell their parents they need help. Unfortunately for them, the parents aren’t the only ones attuned to the cries of their vulnerable young. Nile crocodiles are uniquely sensitive to the wails of...
The method captured the key ideas of stories people heard — but only if they let it Like Dumbledore’s wand, a scan can pull long strings of stories straight out of a person’s brain. But it only works if that person cooperates. This ‘mind-reading’ feat has a long way to...
The fruit-inspired material could quench thirst where drinking water is scarce A new gel can sponge up dirty water. When the water later comes out, it emerges clean and fresh. The new material is a hydrogel, spongy tangles of threadlike molecules that stick to — and absorb — water. Like a...
Like a high-tech hammer of Thor, a powerful laser can grab hold of a lightning bolt and reroute its path through the sky. Scientists have used lasers to wrangle electricity in the lab before. But researchers now offer the first proof that this can also work in real-world storms. Their tests...
Scientists have finally managed to bottle the sun. Nuclear fusion powers stars, including our sun. To do it, lightweight atoms fuse together to form heavier elements. They release energy in the process. To make them fuse, high temperatures and pressures must squeeze atoms together. Intense gravity does much of this work inside stars. But fusion is...
Following the most severe known mass extinction in Earth’s history, vibrant marine ecosystems may have recovered within just a million years, researchers report in the Feb. 10 Science. That’s millions of years faster than previously thought. The evidence, which lies in a diverse trove of pristine fossils discovered near the city of...
Researchers at the University of Tokyo have built a robotic finger that, much like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s titular cyborg assassin, is covered in living human skin. The goal is to someday build robots that look like real people – albeit for more altruistic applications. Super realistic-looking robots could more seamlessly interact with...
With the zap of a laser, trash can literally become treasure. In a new experiment, physicists shined a laser at bits of PET. That’s the kind of plastic used in soda bottles. The laser blast squeezed the plastic to about a million times Earth’s atmospheric pressure. It also superheated the material....
Not long ago, researchers in Brazil’s Atlantic Forest saw something strange. They had been following a group of black lion tamarins every day for weeks. Small and agile, these endangered New World monkeys sport a long black mane and golden rump. And one day, recalls researcher Olivier Kaisin, “We witnessed...
You might want to bring plenty of exercise gear for your legs on that next trip to space. During space missions, astronauts can experience a loss of some of the inner structural support in their bones. This leaves those bones less dense than before liftoff. For trips in space lasting...
A new supercomputer just passed a major milestone. It is the first to officially reach the “exascale.” That means it can perform at least 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 calculations per second. You can simply refer to that as a quintillion calculations per second! The new computer is called Frontier. Its exascale status was announced on May 30...
New data show that a comet discovered in 2014 is one for the record books. This frigid object, dubbed Bernardinelli-Bernstein, is the largest comet ever spotted. Comets are chunks of rock and ice that orbit the sun. Such “dirty snowballs” in space are often surrounded by clouds of gas and...
Plants can’t get COVID-19, but they can get infected by a range of other viruses. Some of those viruses can cause huge problems for crops. A ringspot virus, for instance, threatens papaya fruit trees in Taiwan. Options exist to fight plant viruses, such as proteins to treat leaves. But two...
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