Science

Published in Science Advances, the study draws on comparisons of biological brains and experiments on artificial neural networks to suggest a new framework for understanding the evolution of intelligence. For decades, the human brain was like some evolutionary skyscraper: ancient instincts on the bottom, emotions in the middle, and sophisticated reasoning on the top. That’s…

A team of Dutch engineering students has won first place at a major international hackathon with an idea that tackles two problems at once: plastic waste and a lack of safe, affordable housing. The project, ManufacturingBox, was developed by students from the University of Twente and took top honours at the World Federation of Engineering…

The study was conducted in Little Rock Lake, an 18-hectare undeveloped, unfished lake in Vilas County, Wisconsin. A large curtain divides the lake into 2 similar basins. From the surface a lake might look like it is not changing at all but underneath it is a very different story. Scientists demonstrated how important fallen trees…

Researchers have located the planet’s largest known octopus nursery deep off the Californian coast, documenting 5,718 animals in 2.5 hectares and estimating about 20,000 around Davidson Seamount. Known as the Octopus Garden, the nursery is located about 10,500 feet below the surface off Central California. According to a statement released by the Monterey Bay Aquarium…

Southern California anglers are seeing an unusual number of warm-water fish as rising ocean temperatures linked to El Niño and marine heatwaves bring species typically found farther south into local waters.Fishermen working in Marina del Rey and Santa Monica are catching fish species, in larger sizes, that are rarely seen in the area. Tony Villanueva,…

Almost 10 years after the tanks went under, researchers from Ramkhamhaeng University in Bangkok did some diving to see what had grown up around the man-made reef sites. Battle tank is made for war. It is built to cross tough terrain, take a beating and dominate a battlefield. But what if the battlefield disappears and…

Seven-year-old Alyssa was looking for bugs and collecting rocks at a Calgary playground when she noticed something unusual in one of the boulders surrounding the park. A dark shape embedded in the stone caught her attention, prompting the young palaeontology enthusiast to take a closer look. What began as an ordinary search during a trip…

Waste coffee grounds and discarded oyster shells could be turned into a useful construction material. The mixture used spent coffee grounds (SCG) as its main filler, with oyster shells added to strengthen the granular structure and GGBS-based alkali-activated materials used as the binder. Because SCG particles are highly compressible, the researchers added oyster shells in…

Wyoming tetons Representative image from Canva Deep in the rock record of Wyoming, a layer of fossil leaves tells a quiet but powerful story about what happens to forests when the planet warms rapidly. About 56 million years ago, during a spike in global temperatures known as the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), a lush…

Soldiers on both sides stand behind fences and in between are thousands of landmines. For more than 70 years, humans have not ventured into a 155-mile-long corridor that divides two nations, North and South Korea. While boundaries and borders can ward people off, nature is above all such regulations. This is probably why a space…