‘After you!’ A female bird’s flutter conveys a polite message to her mate
A wave goodbye. A bow. A thumbs-up. Human culture is full of gestures that can convey more than words ever could. Now, scientists have observed a pair of chivalrous birds joining the conversation.
Video taken in Nagano, Japan, shows two Japanese tits (
Parus minor
) as they return to their nest inside a birdhouse with food for their young. The female lands on a nearby branch and flutters her wings toward her mate, who enters the house first; she follows shortly afterward.
Observations of eight pairs of birds returning to the nest more than 300 times revealed that the females were the dominant fluttere...
Source: ScienceNOW - March 25, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news
Ancient brains, cannibal birds, and more stories you might have missed this week
How does 3D-printed wood compare to the real thing? Do long genes age faster than short ones? And why did scientists teach a robot how to do parkour? Check out the answers below in some of our favorite selections from
Science
’s daily newsletter,
Science
Adviser
.
How much wood would a 3D printer print if a 3D printer could print wood?
According to
The Three Little Pigs
, building your home out of sticks is a recipe for disaster. But wood is actually quite a sturdy construction material—one that humans have been using to make houses, furniture, and other st...
Source: ScienceNOW - March 22, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news
Failure to share scientific data is undermining efforts to protect major Asian rivers, reports find
Asian nations need to expand scientific collaborations and data sharing if they are to address the “enormous and growing” risks that climate change poses to three major rivers that support key ecosystems and nearly 1 billion people,
a series of new reports
from a regional research organization say.
All three rivers—the Indus, the Ganges, and the Brahmaputra—originate in the rugged, icy mountain ranges of the
Hindu Kush Himalaya region
,
where rapid warming is accelerating the melting of some glaciers and altering precipitation patterns. Those changes, together with gr...
Source: ScienceNOW - March 22, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news
Pregnancy may increase biological age by 2 years —though some people end up ‘younger’
Pregnancy is the ultimate stress test.
Nurturing a growing fetus requires a series of profound physical, hormonal, and chemical changes that may
rewire every major organ in the body
and can cause serious health complications such as hypertension and preeclampsia. But does being pregnant actually take years off your life?
According to the results of a new study, it just might. Today in
Cell Metabolism
, scientists report that the stress of pregnancy can cause a person’s biological age to increase by up to 2 years—a trend that
may reverse itself in the months that follow
. In som...
Source: ScienceNOW - March 22, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news
Final NIH budget for 2024 is essentially flat
Congress has given the National Institutes of Health (NIH) a 0.6% increase, to $47.1 billion, in a final 2024 spending bill that lawmakers are expected to approve in time to avert a partial government shutdown this weekend. And several policy directives opposed by researchers have been stripped from the legislation.
The tiny, $300 million bump is only one-third of the $920 million increase requested by President Joe Biden, who has promised to sign the $1.2 trillion package covering six federal agencies, and it comes after years of generous increases for NIH. But it was no surprise: Once the president and Congress agr...
Source: ScienceNOW - March 21, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news
RNA deserves its own massive counterpart to the human genome project, researchers argue
This report is very much modeled on the
NASEM report
that initiated the Human Genome Project,
”
completed in 2003,
says Cheung, who wasn’t involved in the new report’s drafting. But as the report notes,
“The RNome is much more complex
”
than a genome.
For one thing, frequent modifications to RNA mean there will be no fixed, reference sequence like the one researchers produced for the human genome. For a given RNA molecule, researchers will have to document
“not only the sequence, but also the type and location of the modifica...
Source: ScienceNOW - March 21, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news
Number of known moonquakes tripled with discovery in Apollo archive
THE WOODLANDS, TEXAS—
The Moon suddenly seems more alive. From 1969 to 1977, seismometers left on the lunar surface by the Apollo astronauts detected thousands of distinctive “moonquakes.” Now, half a century later, a new analysis has cut through the noise in the old data and nearly tripled the number of moonquakes, adding more than 22,000 new quakes to 13,000 previously identified ones.
The finding,
presented
last week here at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, shows “that the Moon may be more seismically and tectonically active today than we had thought,” says Jeffrey Andrews-Hanna...
Source: ScienceNOW - March 20, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news
Pressure grows to ditch controversial forced swim test in rodent studies of depression
For the past few decades, scientists studying candidate antidepressant drugs have had a convenient animal test: how long a rodent dropped in water keeps swimming.
Invented in 1977
, the forced swim test (FST) hinged on the idea that a depressed animal would give up quickly. It seemed to work: Antidepressants and electroconvulsive therapy often made the animal try harder. The test remains popular,
appearing in about 600 papers per year
.
But researchers have recently begun to question the assumption that the test really gauges depression and is a good predictor of human responses to drugs. Oppositi...
Source: ScienceNOW - March 20, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news
Can quantum tech give telescopes sharper vision?
When the Extremely Large Telescope is completed in Chile in a few years’ time, its 39-meter mirror will be larger than those of all earlier research telescopes added together. Yet even this titan will see planets around nearby stars as single points of light, with no discernible detail.
What’s an astronomer to do? At a meeting last week organized by NOIRLab, the U.S. national center for optical and infrared astronomy, researchers discussed a possible answer: not one big telescope, but many, their light combined by quantum technologies. If the strategy works, telescopes hundreds of kilometers apart could collectiv...
Source: ScienceNOW - March 19, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news
A data duel over U.S. maternal mortality
Experts agree that the U.S. maternal mortality rate is unacceptably high. And year after year of data show that disadvantaged groups, particularly Black and Native American women, die at even higher rates than women in the United States overall during pregnancy and childbirth.
But controversy broke out last week over just how bad the situation is, when a paper by academic epidemiologists published in the
American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology
(
AJOG
) provoked unusual pushback from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The paper suggested a widely reported tripling in t...
Source: ScienceNOW - March 19, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news
Possible TikTok ban has U.S. science communicators on edge
For biologist Brooke Fitzwater, a doctoral student at the University of Alabama, the social media platform TikTok has become a key tool for
sharing her knowledge of marine biology
with some 250,000 followers. Her short, humorous videos on everything from whale sharks to zombie worms have attracted up to 2.1 million views. “TikTok has been an unparalleled way for me to communicate science to the public,” Fitzwater says.
Last week, however, Fitzwater and many other science communicators who rely on TikTok got some worrying news: The U.S. House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly to approve legislation...
Source: ScienceNOW - March 19, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news
West Virginia opens the door to teaching intelligent design
In 2005, then–U.S. District Court Judge John Jones ruled that intelligent design (ID)—the idea that life is too complex to have evolved without nudging from supernatural forces—cannot be taught in public school biology courses because it is not a scientific theory. This month, the West Virginia legislature found a workaround, and passed a bill that doesn’t name ID but will nevertheless allow public school teachers there to discuss it in the classroom.
The bill, which the state’s governor is expected to sign before the end of the month, is the latest example of what evolution educator at the University of Au...
Source: ScienceNOW - March 18, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news
‘Lab-leak’ proponents at Rutgers accused of defaming and intimidating COVID-19 origin researchers
Fraudsters. Liars. Perjurers. Felons. Grifters. Stooges. Imbeciles. Murderers. When it comes to describing scientists whose peer-reviewed studies suggest the COVID-19 virus made a natural jump from animals to humans, molecular biologist Richard Ebright and microbiologist Bryce Nickels have used some very harsh language. On X (formerly Twitter), where the two scientists from Rutgers University are a constant presence, they have even compared fellow researchers to Nazi war criminals and the genocidal Cambodian dictator Pol Pot.
But now, their targets have had enough. A dozen scientists filed a
formal complaint
...
Source: ScienceNOW - March 15, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news
Department of Energy ’s science chief announces her unexpected departure
After 22 months on the job, Asmeret Asefaw Berhe, director of the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Office of Science, is stepping down. Yesterday Berhe sent a letter to the office’s 815 employees saying her last day would be 28 March. With a budget of $8.2 billion, the office is the United States’s single largest funder of the physical sciences.
Berhe, who was born in Eritrea and is the first person of color to direct the office, says in her letter that the job has been “the honor of my lifetime” and that she’s leaving with “pride in what we have accomplished, and a heavy heart filled with profound sadn...
Source: ScienceNOW - March 15, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news
A treaty to prepare the world for the next pandemic hangs in the balance
“Me first”—that’s how Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, head of the World Health Organization (WHO), described the wealthy world’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic when he kicked off negotiations for a global “pandemic treaty” in December 2021. Even before vaccines had proved safe and effective, rich countries had purchased enough doses to cover their entire population several times, whereas lower and middle-income countries had little or no vaccine. The pandemic treaty would address that searing inequity, Tedros vowed, along with many other problems identified during the COVID-19 pandemic, leaving the world bette...
Source: ScienceNOW - March 15, 2024 Category: Science Source Type: news
