This image, taken with ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT), seems to have captured a cosmic hawk as it spans its wings. While the dark clouds in the middle of the image make up the head and body of the bird of prey, the filaments extending away from the body to the left and right compose its wings. Below it is a mesmerizing blue nebula with massive newly born stars, whose intense radiation make the gas around them glow brightly.
Nocturnal insects may use both Earth's magnetic field and visual cues to guide their migratory flight behaviors, according to recent findings. The research, published in eLife, presents compelling evidence on how geomagnetic and visual cues are integrated in a nocturnally migrating insect—the fall armyworm—with findings that will be of interest to researchers studying animal migration and navigation.
The earliest mass graves in Europe date back just over 7,000 years. They reveal brutal evidence for violence beyond the simple act of killing. The motives for these events are probably diverse but consistently highlight an intention to kill large numbers of enemies across sex and age ranges.
Scientists have long focused on rising temperatures to understand how climate change is reshaping the natural world. But there's a critical blind spot in that picture: rain. A new global study reveals precipitation has been largely overlooked in studies of how climate change impacts birds, even though it can be just as influential as temperature.
Unretouched triangular microlithic projectile points have been identified from their impact traces in the oldest occupation layers of the Obi-Rakhmat site in Uzbekistan, dating to 80,000 years ago. Their size corresponds to small arrowheads, which are directly comparable to those produced by Homo sapiens during an incursion into Neanderthal territory in the Rhône Valley, 25,000 years later. This new study, published in PLOS One journal, provides a strong argument that could rewrite history on Homo sapiens' first settlement in Europe.
There are many open questions about how our planet formed 4.55 billion years ago: When did plate tectonics start? When did the Earth's mantle begin to vigorously circulate in a process called convection? What was Earth like early in its lifetime? Because no rock records from the earliest years of the Earth remain, researchers turn to minerals called zircons, which are resilient against physical and chemical alteration over time and therefore preserve a precise chemical record about the moments in which they were formed.
Astronomers with the Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX) have used data from the project to make the largest, most accurate 3D map yet of the light emitted by excited hydrogen in the early universe, 9 billion to 11 billion years ago. This specific form of light, called Lyman alpha, is emitted in large quantities when hydrogen atoms are exposed to a star's energy. That makes it a great tool for finding bright galaxies in this far-off time, which experienced a rash of star creation. Читать дальше...
Managers looking to improve worker performance are increasingly turning to AI tools to boost productivity and decision quality. But research published in the journal Management Science suggests that technology alone won't determine results. The biggest gains come when workers understand their own strengths and limitations, which helps them know when to rely on AI.
The best candidate for next-generation magnetic devices—technology that can power, store, sense or transport information—may be, counterintuitively, antiferromagnets. Today, the most widely used magnetic materials are ferromagnets, which exhibit permanent magnetization and therefore strongly attract each other. Their opposite, called antiferromagnetic materials, exhibit no net magnetization at all. Despite a net zero magnetic field, they offer appealing properties that would solve the challenges of current magnetic technologies... Читать дальше...
Using AI to identify wildlife reveals a potential "transferability crisis," researchers say. Marketing for AI imaging systems often suggests that models can easily tackle novel scenarios across ecosystems and settings, much in the same way as human observers. But in a new article, two University of Exeter researchers argue that this is based on a "flawed assumption." They use examples from species identification and diagnostic imaging to illustrate this.
