Superbly preserved braincase of this new species is an important find — it suggests there was a greater diversity and abundance of abelisaurids late in dinosaurs’ era than previously thought. Around 80 million years ago as tyrannosaurs ruled the Northern Hemisphere, this lookalike was one of 10 currently known species of abelisaurids flourishing in the…

Researchers have created a soft, stretchable device that converts movement into electricity and works in both dry and wet environments. «Mechanical energy — such as the kinetic energy of wind, waves, body movement and vibrations from motors — is abundant,» says Michael Dickey, corresponding author of a paper on the work and Camille & Henry…

Researchers have uncovered a basic but surprising fact: your kitchen sponge is a better incubator for diverse bacterial communities than a laboratory Petri dish. But it’s not just the trapped leftovers that make the cornucopia of microbes swarming around so happy and productive, it’s the structure of the sponge itself. In a series of experiments,…

Researchers have injected human stem cells into primate embryos and were able to grow chimeric embryos for a significant period of time — up to 20 days. The research, despite its ethical concerns, has the potential to provide new insights into developmental biology and evolution. It also has implications for developing new models of human…

Vampire bats that form bonds in captivity and continue those ‘friendships’ in the wild also hunt together, meeting up over a meal after independent departures from the roost, according to a new study. Researchers attached tiny «backpack» computers to 50 vampire bats — some that had previously been in captivity together and others that had…

A team of geneticists and archaeologists has sequenced the DNA from a 1,600-year-old sheep mummy from an ancient Iranian salt mine, Chehrabad. This remarkable specimen has revealed sheep husbandry practices of the ancient Near East, as well as underlining how natural mummification can affect DNA degradation. The incredible findings have just been published in the…

A ball of 4,000-year-old hair frozen in time tangled around a whalebone comb led to the first ever reconstruction of an ancient human genome a decade ago. The hair, which was preserved in arctic permafrost in Greenland, was collected in the 1980s. It wasn’t until 2010 that evolutionary biologists were able to use pioneering shotgun…

Dinosaurs came to flourish during the Jurassic period after a volcanic eruption roughly 201 millions years ago wiped out many marine and land animals, leaving them able to evolve and grow. Now, further details about this eruption and the mass extinction have been revealed. A group of researchers demonstrated how low temperature magma slowly heated…

On the afternoon of April 13, 2018, a large wave of water surged across Lake Michigan and flooded the shores of the picturesque beach town of Ludington, Michigan, damaging homes and boat docks, and flooding intake pipes. Thanks to a local citizen’s photos and other data, scientists reconstructed the event in models and determined this…

Some of Australia’s most famous animals — wombat, platypus, kangaroos and the extinct marsupial tiger thylacine — have been traced back to their fossil ancestors in remarkable finds in central South Australia. Now a remote expedition to a large inland salt lake in 2017 has sifted through remains unearthed in Namba Formation deposits to describe…