Seeing a black hole’s magnetic personality
Scientists using the Event Horizon Telescope have produced a new image of the supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy. And this image is a little different: it captures the powerful magnetic fields that are acting as the cosmic cutlery feeding mass into the singularity. Avery Broderick is part of the Event Horizon Telescope team, he’s also a professor at the University of Waterloo’s Department of Physics and Astronomy, and associate faculty at the Perimeter Institute for theoretical physics.
Decoding how chickadees maintain a mental map of their food caches
Chickadees have an uncanny ability to recall thousands of secret stashes of food with a centimetre-scale precision. Salmaan Chettih, a postdoctoral researcher in neuroscience at Columbia University, investigated how chickadees encode their internal treasure maps. In his study in the journal Cell, he found the chickadee brains produce a unique pattern of activity — akin to a neural “barcode” — that marks the X on its mental treasure map.
Italians don’t just speak more with their hands, they speak differently
Researchers comparing Swedish speakers with Italian speakers have found that the gestures they commonly use to accompany spoken language are quite different in kind. Lund University scientists Maria Graziano and Marianne Gullberg recorded the hand gestures study participants used when describing a children’s cartoon to their friends. According to the results published in a Frontiers in Communication journal, Swedish speakers used gestures that concretely represented the subjects of their speech, while Italian speakers used abstract gestures more related to emphasis.
What came first, the drumstick or the omelette?
New archaeological work along the famous Silk Road trade route between Asia and Europe has added to the picture of how the chicken was brought from its southeast Asian homeland to the rest of Eurasia. An international team of researchers, including archaeobotanist Robert Spengler, analyzed tiny eggshell fragments from the soil of multiple sites in Central Asia. Their findings, published in Nature Communications, suggest that the motivation for domesticating the fowl was not the chicken, but their eggs.
LED lighting is bright, efficient, and perhaps a problem
The global transition to LED lighting seems to be having some concerning impacts on the natural world and human health. These energy efficient artificial lights produce different spectra than older incandescent technology, or the natural light of the Sun that life on Earth evolved with over billions of years. LED lighting is brighter, bluer, and more widely used than incandescent lighting.
Glen Jeffery, a professor of neuroscience from University College London, said that as a result, we may be paying the price with our health due to being oversaturated with blue light and starved of red and infrared light. In a new study in the Journal of Biophotonics, he found that exposing people to red and infrared light lowered their blood glucose levels by “charging up” our cells’ energy production.
Artificial light at night is also having “a profound impact” on our environment in how it affects plants and wildlife and the ecosystems they’re in, according to Kevin Gaston, a professor of biodiversity and conservation at the University of Exeter. He said for nocturnal animals, the challenge they face from light pollution is the equivalent to humans losing daylight during the daytime. His review was published in the Annual Review of Environment and Resources.
Quirks & Quarks goes to the dogs -- a dog science special
Tiny black holes that could smash through our planet, and more…
Bonus: What On Earth's Earth Day special
Why this Indigenous researcher thinks we can do science differently, and more…
COVID-19’s “long tail” includes a range of impacts on the brain and more…
An Australian Atlantis and other lost landscapes, and more...
The future of freshwater — will we have a drop to drink, and more.
How animals eating, excreting and expiring is like the world's bloodstream, and more
How disabled primates thrive in the wild and more…
The boreal forest is on the move, and we need to understand how, and more...
Icelanders reap the costs and benefits of living on a volcanic island and more…
A post valentine’s look at humpback mating songs and a marsupial that’s sleepless for sex
Scientists explore which came first, the chicken or the egg, and more…
An ancient tree’s crowning glory and more…
The aftermath of a record-smashing volcano: Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai two years later, and more...
Can diet and exercise be replaced by pills and more…
Could buried hydrogen help save the world, and more…
A Cave of bones could rewrite the history of human evolution, and more…
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