Science Trends

Ilulissat, Greenland (stock image). New research shows an iceless Greenland may be in the future. If worldwide greenhouse gas emissions remain on their current trajectory, Greenland may be ice-free by the year 3000. Even by the end of the century, the island could lose 4.5% of its ice, contributing up to 13 inches of sea level rise. "How Greenland will look in the future -- in a couple of hundred years or in 1,000 years -- whether there will be Greenland, or at least a Greenland similar to today, it's up to us," said Andy Aschwanden, a research associate professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute. Aschwanden is lead author on a new study published in the June issue of  Science Advances . UAF Geophysical Institute researchers Mark Fahnestock, Martin Truffer, Regine Hock and Constantine Khrulev are co-authors, as is Doug Brinkerhoff, a former UAF graduate student. This research uses new data on the landscape under the ice today to...

Cursor on computer screen (stock image). A team of researchers from Carnegie Mellon University, in collaboration with the University of Minnesota, has made a breakthrough in the field of noninvasive robotic device control. Using a noninvasive brain-computer interface (BCI), researchers have developed the first-ever successful mind-controlled robotic arm exhibiting the ability to continuously track and follow a computer cursor. Being able to noninvasively control robotic devices using only thoughts will have broad applications, in particular benefiting the lives of paralyzed patients and those with movement disorders. BCIs have been shown to achieve good performance for controlling robotic devices using only the signals sensed from brain implants. When robotic devices can be controlled with high precision, they can be used to complete a variety of daily tasks. Until now, however, BCIs successful in controlling robotic arms have used invasive brain implants. These implants...

Younger generations seem to be developing horns in the back of their skulls due to the extended use of technology like smartphones and tablets. Two Australian researchers made the bizarre discovery while examining hundreds of X-rays of people aged between 18 and 30, finding almost half had developed bone growths. They’re the kind of spurs normally seen in hunched-over elderly people who’ve subjected their bodies to long-term poor posture and significant stress loads on their bones. But the presence of the “horn-like” skull growths raise serious concerns about what extended use of phones is doing to young people’s bodies. The findings by Dr David Shahar and Associate Professor Mark Sayers at The University of the Sunshine Coast flew under the radar when they were published at the end of last year, two years after their initial warning about the trend. But a BBC article last week about how tech is changing the human body cited their research and saw an explosio...

Exoplanets illustration (stock image). An international research team led by the University of Göttingen has discovered two new Earth-like planets near one of our closest neighboring stars. "Teegarden's star" is only about 12.5 light years away from Earth and is one of the smallest known stars. It is only about 2,700 °C warm and about ten times lighter than the Sun. Although it is so close to us, the star wasn't discovered until 2003. The scientists observed the star for about three years. The results were published in the journal  Astronomy and Astrophysics . Their data clearly show the existence of two planets. "The two planets resemble the inner planets of our solar system," explains lead author Mathias Zechmeister of the Institute for Astrophysics at the University of Göttingen. "They are only slightly heavier than Earth and are located in the so-called habitable zone, where water can be present in liquid form." The astronomers s...

RAM memory chips (stock image). A new type of computer memory which could solve the digital technology energy crisis has been invented and patented by scientists from Lancaster University in the UK. The electronic memory device -- described in research published in  Scientific Reports  -- promises to transform daily life with its ultra-low energy consumption. In the home, energy savings from efficient lighting and appliances have been completely wiped out by increased use of computers and gadgets, and by 2025 a 'tsunami of data' is expected to consume a fifth of global electricity. But this new device would immediately reduce peak power consumption in data centres by a fifth. It would also allow, for example, computers which do not need to boot up and could instantaneously and imperceptibly go into an energy-saving sleep mode -- even between key stokes. The device is the realisation of the search for a "Universal Memory" which has preoccupied scie...

Narwhals illustration (stock image). A team of University of Copenhagen researchers has compiled the first and only evidence that narwhals and beluga whales can breed successfully. DNA and stable isotope analysis of an anomalous skull from the Natural History Museum of Denmark has allowed researchers to confirm the existence of a narwhal-beluga hybrid. For nearly thirty years, a strange-looking whale skull has gathered dust in the collections of the Natural History Museum of Denmark. Now, a team of researchers has determined the reason for the skull's unique characteristics: it belongs to a narwhal-beluga hybrid. A Greenlandic hunter shot the whale in the 1980's and was puzzled by its odd appearance. He therefore kept the skull and placed it on the roof of his toolshed. Several years later, Professor Mads Peter Heide-Jørgensen of the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources visited the settlement and also immediately recognized the skull's strange characteris...

Tectonic plates illustration (stock image, elements furnished by NASA). The quest to discover what drove one of the most important evolutionary events in the history of life on Earth has taken a new, fascinating twist. A team of scientists have given a fresh insight into what may have driven the "Cambrian Explosion" -- a period of rapid expansion of different forms of animal life that occurred over 500 million years ago. While a number of theories have been put forward to explain this landmark period, the most credible is that it was fuelled by a significant rise in oxygen levels which allowed a wide variety of animals to thrive. The new study suggests that such a rise in oxygen levels was the result of extraordinary changes in global plate tectonics. During the formation of the supercontinent 'Gondwana', there was a major increase in continental arc volcanism -- chains of volcanoes often thousands of miles long formed where continental and oceanic ...

Microscopic life (stock image). Scientists at The University of Queensland have upended biologists' century-old understanding of the evolutionary history of animals. Using new technology to investigate how multi-celled animals developed, their findings revealed a surprising truth. Professor Bernie Degnan said the results contradicted years of tradition. "We've found that the first multicellular animals probably weren't like the modern-day sponge cells, but were more like a collection of convertible cells," Professor Degnan said. "The great-great-great-grandmother of all cells in the animal kingdom, so to speak, was probably quite similar to a stem cell. "This is somewhat intuitive as, compared to plants and fungi, animals have many more cell types, used in very different ways -- from neurons to muscles -- and cell-flexibility has been critical to animal evolution from the start." The findings disprove a long-standing idea: tha...

Dog with raised eyebrows (stock image). Dogs have evolved new muscles around the eyes to better communicate with humans. New research comparing the anatomy and behavior of dogs and wolves suggests dogs' facial anatomy has changed over thousands of years specifically to allow them to better communicate with humans. In the first detailed analysis comparing the anatomy and behavior of dogs and wolves, researchers found that the facial musculature of both species was similar, except above the eyes. Dogs have a small muscle, which allows them to intensely raise their inner eyebrow, which wolves do not. The authors suggest that the inner eyebrow raising movement triggers a nurturing response in humans because it makes the dogs' eyes appear larger, more infant like and also resembles a movement humans produce when they are sad. The research team, led by comparative psychologist Dr Juliane Kaminski, at the University of Portsmouth, included a team of behavioural and ...

Couple holding hands If you've ever come out of a bad relationship and decided you need to date someone different from your usual "type," you're not alone. However, new research by social psychologists at the University of Toronto (U of T) suggests that might be easier said than done. A study published today in  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences  shows people often look for love with the same type of person over and over again. "It's common that when a relationship ends, people attribute the breakup to their ex-partner's personality and decide they need to date a different type of person," says lead author Yoobin Park, a PhD student in the Department of Psychology in the Faculty of Arts & Science at U of T. "Our research suggests there's a strong tendency to nevertheless continue to date a similar personality." Using data from an ongoing multi-year study on couples and families across several age groups, P...

Illustration of sperm cells fertilizing egg cell (stock image). One of the greatest enigmas of evolutionary biology is that while sex is the dominant mode of reproduction among multicellular organisms, asexual reproduction appears much more efficient and less costly. However, in a study publishing on June 6 in the open-access journal  PLOS Biology , researchers suggest that sexual reproduction is favored by selection because, unlike asexual reproduction, it not only provides important evolutionary advantages in constantly changing environments, but also prevents the invasion of transmissible cancer, or "cheater" cells. Multicellular organisms are societies of cooperating clonal cells that emerged and evolved one billion years ago. A key point in the evolution of multicellular organisms was therefore the ability to prevent cheater cells from overexploiting the cooperative system; this evolutionary constraint favoured the emergence of the many known mechanisms th...

Illustration of amyloid plaques on a nerve cell in Alzheimer's disease (stock image). A new protein involved in Alzheimer's disease (AD) has been identified by researchers at the RIKEN Center for Brain Science (CBS). CAPON may facilitate the connection between the two most well-known AD culprits, amyloid plaques and tau pathology, whose interactions cause brain cell death and symptoms of dementia. This latest finding from the Takaomi Saido group at RIKEN CBS uses a novel mouse model of AD. The study was published in  Nature Communications  on June 3. Alzheimer's disease is a complex and devastating condition characterized by plaques of amyloid-β and neurofibrillary tangles, also known as tau pathology, in the brain. Investigating the connection between these features, the research team identified CAPON, a protein that binds to tau. The CAPON gene is a known risk for other psychiatric disorders, and because AD can be accompanied by psychiatric symptoms, the team...

                                                          C. elegans   (stock image). Princeton University researchers have discovered that learned behaviors can be inherited for multiple generations in  C. elegans , transmitted from parent to progeny via eggs and sperm cells. The paper detailing this finding, by Rebecca Moore, Rachel Kaletsky and Coleen Murphy, appears in the June 13 issue of the journal  Cell . It's well known that an organism's characteristics are encoded in genes that are passed down from parent to progeny through the eggs and sperm of the germline. The inheritance of some traits is determined exclusively by whether the individual receives the dominant or recessive form of an associated gene from each parent. Other heritable traits are influenced both by genetic makeup and by factors such as nutr...