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Bonobos, the ‘hippie chimps,’ might not be so mellow after all
It was 5 a.m., and Maud Mouginot was waiting for the Sun to rise over the Kokolopori Bonobo Reserve. Suddenly, two male bonobos—close relatives of chimpanzees—came hurtling out of the darkness, one rushing through the trees, the other giving chase. The terrified cries of the fleeing male suggested this was no friendly game of tag. Mouginot, a biological anthropologist at Boston University, hadn’t expected such behavior from bonobos, which, unlike chimps, have a reputation for making love, not war . But research by Mouginot and colleagues, published today in Current Biology , shows male ...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - April 12, 2024 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research

News at a glance: Jailed conservationists freed, physics titan dies, and diversity in anatomical illustrations
ASTRONOMY Scientists flock to the eclipse Tens of millions in North America turned their specially protected eyes to the skies on 8 April for several minutes of darkness when the Moon blocked the disk of the Sun, casting a shadow across Mexico, 15 U.S. states, and Canada. Researchers and citizen scientists seized the opportunity to study the corona—the wispy, outer layer of the Sun’s atmosphere—from the ground and in eclipse-chasing aircraft. They expected to see loops of plasma and other solar flares because the eclipse coincided with solar maximum, a period of high magnetic activity. Research...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - April 11, 2024 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research

‘It’s really a horror.’ Bones from across Europe suggest Stone Age ritual killings
In 1984, in France’s Rhône Valley, forensic anthropologist Eric Crubézy found the skeletons of three women in a Stone Age structure built to resemble a grain silo. At the 5600-year-old site, called Saint-Paul-Trois-Châteaux, one woman was lying on her side, her knees slightly bent. The other two were contorted into unnatural positions and hidden beneath a rocky overhang, broken grindstones piled on their bodies. The 25-year-old researcher, just out of medical school, didn’t know what to make of the odd arrangement of bones. “I thought it was unique,” Crubézy recalls. It wasn’t until 40 years later...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - April 10, 2024 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research

A university cut tenured faculty ’s pay. They’re suing
Along with a secure post and academic freedom, tenured professors enjoy financial security—or so many outsiders imagine. In fact, many tenured faculty are expected to cover much of their salary with grants, and may be penalized with salary reductions if they do not. That’s what happened at Tufts University School of Medicine—and some researchers are fighting back. Last month, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court sent a case brought by eight of the school’s faculty members to trial, writing that their claims have merit : “Tenure would seem to be a hollow promise if it came without any salary co...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - April 10, 2024 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research

Giant viruses played a key role in early life, study in Yellowstone hot spring suggests
The seething, microbe-rich hot springs of Yellowstone National Park are a model of the conditions in which life emerged on early Earth, many researchers think. Now, a study of one Yellowstone hot spring suggests so-called “giant viruses” played a key role in those primordial ecosystems and may have helped drive early steps in evolution. The study, published today in Communications Biology , drives home that “understanding ancient virus evolution may be key to our understanding of [life’s] early developments,” says Simon Roux, a microbiologist at the Department of Energy’s Joint Genome Institute ...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - April 9, 2024 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research

Insect poetry, conquering rats, and more stories you might have missed this week
Have we gotten bird evolution all wrong? Why did scientists make mouse brains glow? And how did thousands upon thousands of skeletons vanish from Napoleonic-era battlefields? Check out the answers below in some of our favorite selections from Science ’s daily newsletter, Science Adviser . A new way to light up oxygen in the brain We need to breathe because our cells do, too. Brain cells, for example, use about one-fifth of all the oxygen your body consumes. But scientists know relatively little about what oxygen flow in the brain looks like because it...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - April 5, 2024 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research

Clearer skies may be accelerating global warming
When 2023 turned out to be the hottest year in history , it underscored the warnings of some prominent climate scientists, including James Hansen, that the pace of global warming was accelerating and had entered a dangerous new phase. A new study, published Wednesday in Communications Earth & Environment , suggests one reason for such an acceleration: Earth’s skies are getting clearer and letting in more sunshine. The study was prompted by a set of NASA instruments in space that since 2001 have tracked the delicate balance of energy entering and leaving the planet. Over the past de...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - April 5, 2024 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research

NSF tests ways to improve research security without disrupting peer review
The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) is spending $571 million to build the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile so astronomers can survey the sky in unprecedented detail for evidence of dark matter and energy. It’s part of the agency’s mission to fund basic research. But when the telescope sees first light next year, its 3.2-gigapixel camera will also see things the U.S. government might not want disclosed, including spy satellites and other military hardware that could pose a threat to the United States. So do the data it collects need to be restricted in some way? In response to pressure from Congress...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - April 5, 2024 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research

Australian museum ’s plan to cut research draws fire from scientists
A plan by one of Australia’s major natural history museums to reduce and “reimagine” the roles of its research and curatorial staff is drawing fierce criticism from scientists in Australia and abroad. Leaders of the South Australian Museum (SAM) in Adelaide say the proposed changes, unveiled in late February, are needed to address financial shortfalls and help the 168-year-old museum become more “sustainable, relevant, and accessible … for the 21st century.” David Gaimster, SAM’s CEO, has told Australian media that the museum is “not a university” and suggested that, in the future, its researchers s...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - April 5, 2024 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research

Bird flu may be spreading in cows via milking and herd transport
The bird flu virus spreading through dairy cattle in the United States may be expanding its reach via milking equipment, the people doing the milking, or both U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) representatives reported today at an international, virtual meeting held to update the situation. The avian virus may not be spreading directly from cows breathing on cows, as some researchers have speculated, according to USDA scientists who took part in the meeting organized jointly by the World Organisation for Animal Health and the U.N.’s Food and Agricultural Organization. “We haven't seen any true indication that ...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - April 5, 2024 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research

News at a glance: Giant telescope camera complete, limits to Paxlovid benefits, and missing battlefield bones
ASTRONOMY Biggest ever digital camera heads to Chile Skip slideshow Researchers at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have finished building the biggest ever astronomical camera. It will create a movie of the universe, imaging the whole southern sky in unprecedented detail every 3 days. Jacqueline Ramseyer Orrell/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory Researchers install the first of 21 arrays of image sensors that together make up the camer...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - April 4, 2024 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research

‘Hot little things’: Island rattlesnakes are more likely to strike than their mainland kin
Call it a moral victory for graduate students everywhere. The young scientists in the lab of William Hayes kept grumbling that, compared with those found on the mainland, southern Pacific rattlesnakes on a California island were “hot”—a term herpetologists use to refer to how volatile and therefore dangerous a venomous creature is. But Hayes, a behavioral ecologist at Loma Linda University who has spent his career studying venomous animals, was skeptical. After all, isolated populations are generally more mild-mannered, thanks to a phenomenon known as island tameness. Yet in blinded trials, the students' insigh...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - April 4, 2024 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research

Model of ever-expanding universe confirmed by dark energy probe
The standard theory of cosmology—which says 95% of the universe is made up of an unknown energy we can’t see—has passed its strictest test yet. The first results released from an instrument designed to study the cosmic effects of this mysterious dark energy confirm that, to the nearest 1%, the universe has evolved over the past 11 billion years just as theorists have predicted. The findings, presented today in a series of talks at the American Physical Society meeting in Sacramento, California, and the Moriond meeting in Italy, as well as in a set of preprints posted to arXiv, come from the Dark Energ...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - April 4, 2024 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research

Was Lucy the mother of us all? Fifty years after discovery, famed skeleton has rivals
Related podcast When did rats come to the Americas, and was Lucy really our direct ancestor? BY Sarah Crespi , Meagan Cantwell , Ann Gibbons Podcast 04 Apr 2024 Zeresenay Alemseged doesn’t remember the 1974 discovery of the famous fossil Lucy at Hadar in Ethiopia, because he was 5 years old, living 600 kilometers away in Axum. Later he saw Lucy’s name on cafes and taxis, but he knew l...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - April 4, 2024 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research

With money running out, astronomers urge Mexico to save its giant telescope
Facing a looming funding cutoff, astronomers are urging the Mexican government to renew its support for the nation’s most prominent astronomical facility, the Large Millimeter Telescope Alfonso Serrano (LMT). The telescope will run out of money on 31 August unless the government agrees to continue to help cover its operating costs, researchers warned in two recent letters to senior officials. Urgent action is needed to “guarantee the operation of a flagship project of Mexican science,” LMT Director David Hughes and five other researchers wrote in a 19 March letter to Mexico’s finance secretary, Roge...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - April 4, 2024 Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research