https://phys.org/science-news/ en-us Phys.org provides the latest news on science, fossils, archaeology, chemistry, mathematics, biology and science technology. The strength of connections, be it human connections within cities, or collaborative networks between cities, has been a key factor in determining how effectively the world's biggest cities have been able to navigate the COVID-19 pandemic, according to leading experts. https://phys.org/news/2020-09-people-power-key-covid-pandemic.html Social Sciences Political science Fri, 04 Sep 2020 07:46:05 EDT news518424360 The number of mammoth skeletons recovered at an airport construction site north of Mexico City has risen to at least 200, with a large number still to be excavated, experts said Thursday. https://phys.org/news/2020-09-mammoth-central-mexico-airport-site.html Archaeology & Fossils Fri, 04 Sep 2020 04:23:24 EDT news518412064 A Dartmouth-led study using multisensor drones has revealed a large circular earthwork at what may be Etzanoa, an archaeological site near Wichita, Kansas. Archaeologists speculate that the site was visited by a Spanish expedition, led by Juan de Oñate, a controversial conquistador, in 1601. The earthwork may be the remains of a so-called "council circle," as it is similar to several other circular earthworks in the region, according to the study's findings published in American Antiquity. https://phys.org/news/2020-09-drone-survey-reveals-large-earthwork.html Archaeology & Fossils Thu, 03 Sep 2020 16:46:55 EDT news518370413 A Rochester Institute of Technology researcher developed a mathematical method that shows climate change likely caused the rise and fall of an ancient civilization. In an article recently featured in the journal Chaos: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Nonlinear Science, Nishant Malik, assistant professor in RIT's School of Mathematical Sciences, outlined the new technique he developed and showed how shifting monsoon patterns led to the demise of the Indus Valley Civilization, a Bronze Age civilization contemporary to Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt. https://phys.org/news/2020-09-mathematical-method-climate-fall-ancient.html Mathematics Thu, 03 Sep 2020 12:13:30 EDT news518354007 The population on Rapa Nui didn't crash because the Europeans came. Nor did they live in idyllic equilibrium with nature for centuries. https://phys.org/news/2020-09-growth-decline-rapa-nui-population.html Archaeology & Fossils Thu, 03 Sep 2020 08:04:58 EDT news518339094 Every four years, U.S. presidential campaigns collectively spend billions of dollars flooding TV screens across the country with political ads. But a new study co-authored by Yale political scientist Alexander Coppock shows that, regardless of content, context, or audience, those pricey commercials do little to persuade voters. https://phys.org/news/2020-09-political-ads-persuasive-power.html Social Sciences Political science Wed, 02 Sep 2020 14:00:10 EDT news518248355 Grade 3 students who watch more than two hours of TV daily or spend more than one hour a day on a computer experience a decline in academic results two years later, a new study has found. https://phys.org/news/2020-09-heavy-tv-impacts-children-academic.html Education Wed, 02 Sep 2020 14:00:06 EDT news518247496 A trio of researchers, two with the University of Salford, the third with English Heritage, has built a small-scale model of Stonehenge to test the acoustical properties of the ancient monument. In their paper published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, Trevor Cox, Bruno Fazenda and Susan Greaney describe their efforts to recreate the acoustic properties of Stonehenge back when it was new, and what they learned. https://phys.org/news/2020-09-uncovering-acoustical-properties-stonehenge.html Archaeology & Fossils Wed, 02 Sep 2020 09:08:32 EDT news518256489 The standard history of anatomy traces its roots back to classical Greece, but a new reading of a recently discovered Chinese text argues that the Chinese were also among the earliest anatomists. https://phys.org/news/2020-09-ancient-chinese-text-revealed-anatomical.html Archaeology & Fossils Wed, 02 Sep 2020 07:47:24 EDT news518251642 Scientists have uncovered the earliest known evidence of an insect mimicking a lichen as a survival strategy, according to new findings published today in eLife. https://phys.org/news/2020-09-scientists-earliest-fossil-evidence-insect.html Archaeology & Fossils Tue, 01 Sep 2020 16:12:17 EDT news518195534 New research suggests that American mastodons were avid travelers, migrating vast distances across North America in response to dramatic climate change during the ice ages of the Pleistocene. The study, conducted by an international team of scientists and published today in the journal Nature Communications, also reveals that mastodon populations that headed northward to the Arctic during warm periods were less genetically diverse, making them vulnerable to extinction. The findings could be useful for modern conservation science. https://phys.org/news/2020-09-mastodons-frequent-north-climate.html Archaeology & Fossils Tue, 01 Sep 2020 11:00:01 EDT news518162867 Using radiocarbon dating and CT scanning to study ancient bones, researchers have uncovered for the first time a Bronze Age tradition of retaining and curating human remains as relics over several generations. https://phys.org/news/2020-08-radiocarbon-dating-ct-scans-reveal.html Archaeology & Fossils Mon, 31 Aug 2020 19:00:01 EDT news518102875 How do you weigh a long-extinct dinosaur? There are a couple of ways, as it turns out, neither of which involve actual weighing—but according to a new study, different approaches still yield strikingly similar results. https://phys.org/news/2020-08-dinosaur.html Archaeology & Fossils Mon, 31 Aug 2020 18:00:01 EDT news518078308 Eager to learn the latest in instructional practices that research says will better engage and educate her students, an assistant professor of biochemistry attends a virtual workshop devoted to exactly that. https://phys.org/news/2020-08-choir-forward-thinking-faculty.html Social Sciences Education Mon, 31 Aug 2020 15:00:01 EDT news518086599 A pair of researchers, one with Instituto Argentino de Nivología, the other Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia, has found fossil evidence of an ancient giant ground sloth living in proto-Amazonian swamps. The fossil has shinbone bite marks from a Miocene caiman Purussaurus, a large crocodilian species from the period. In their paper published in the journal Biology Letters, François Pujos and Rodolfo Salas-Gismondi describe the fossil and what they learned about it. https://phys.org/news/2020-08-ancient-sloth-bitten-crocodile.html Archaeology & Fossils Mon, 31 Aug 2020 09:30:01 EDT news518084673 Climate change occurring shortly before their disappearance triggered a complex change in the behavior of late Neanderthals in Europe: they developed more complex tools. This is the conclusion reached by a group of researchers from Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) and Università degli Studi die Ferrara (UNIFE) on the basis of finds in the Sesselfelsgrotte cave in Lower Bavaria. https://phys.org/news/2020-08-neanderthals-adjusted-climate.html Archaeology & Fossils Fri, 28 Aug 2020 11:45:16 EDT news517833911 New research undertaken by scientists at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) and University of Montreal, has uncovered fossils of a new species of marine animal, Gyaltsenglossus senis, (pronounced Gen-zay-gloss-us senis) that provides new evidence in the historical debate among zoologists: how the anatomies of the two main types of an animal group called the hemichordates are related. The fossils are over half-a-billion years old and were discovered at a Burgess Shale site in the Canadian Rockies. This discovery was published August 27, 2020, in the science journal Current Biology. https://phys.org/news/2020-08-early-cambrian-fossil-discovery-hemichordates.html Archaeology & Fossils Thu, 27 Aug 2020 11:00:05 EDT news517735853 About 25 years ago, researchers discovered the first dinosaur embryos in an enormous nesting ground of titanosaurian dinosaurs that lived about 80 million years ago in a place known as Auca Mahuevo in Patagonia, Argentina. Now, researchers reporting in the journal Current Biology on August 27 describe the first near-intact embryonic skull. The finding adds to our understanding of the development of sauropod dinosaurs, a group characterized by the long neck and tails and small heads perhaps most familiar in the Brontosaurus, and suggests that they may have had specialized facial features as hatchlings that changed as they grew into adults. https://phys.org/news/2020-08-3d-embryonic-sauropod-dinosaur-reveals.html Archaeology & Fossils Thu, 27 Aug 2020 11:00:04 EDT news517735746 Analyzing three components of ceramic cooking pots—charred remains, inner surface residues and lipids absorbed within the ceramic walls—may help archaeologists uncover detailed timelines of culinary cooking practices used by ancient civilizations. The findings, from a year-long cooking experiment, are published this week in Scientific Reports. https://phys.org/news/2020-08-ceramic-cooking-pots-history-ancient.html Archaeology & Fossils Thu, 27 Aug 2020 11:00:01 EDT news517736527 Robin Ian MacDonald Dunbar, a psychologist at the University of Oxford, has conducted a review of the literature and concluded that the impact of the pandemic on friendships is likely to be fleeting. He has published a paper in Proceedings of the Royal Society A outlining his research and findings, and his theories regarding the impact of the pandemic on social networks. https://phys.org/news/2020-08-psychologist-negative-impact-pandemic-friendships.html Mathematics Social Sciences Thu, 27 Aug 2020 10:20:02 EDT news517741927 Hibernation is a familiar feature on Earth today. Many animals—especially those that live close to or within polar regions—hibernate to get through the tough winter months when food is scarce, temperatures drop and days are dark. https://phys.org/news/2020-08-fossil-evidence-hibernation-like-state-million-year-old.html Archaeology & Fossils Thu, 27 Aug 2020 06:53:30 EDT news517729995 The first complete dinosaur skeleton ever identified has finally been studied in detail and found its place in the dinosaur family tree, completing a project that began more than a century and a half ago. https://phys.org/news/2020-08-dinosaur-skeleton-ready-closeup.html Archaeology & Fossils Thu, 27 Aug 2020 04:00:25 EDT news517719621 Male lions typically have manes. Male peacocks have six-foot-long tail feathers. Female eagles and hawks can be about 30% bigger than males. But if you only had these animals' fossils to go off of, it would be hard to confidently say that those differences were because of the animals' sex. That's the problem that paleontologists face: it's hard to tell if dinosaurs with different features were separate species, different ages, males and females of the same species, or just varied in a way that had nothing to do with sex. A lot of the work trying to show differences between male and female dinosaurs has come back inconclusive. But in a new paper, scientists show how using a different kind of statistical analysis can often estimate the degree of sexual variation in a dataset of fossils. https://phys.org/news/2020-08-math-sex-differences-dinosaurs.html Archaeology & Fossils Thu, 27 Aug 2020 03:32:45 EDT news517717959 The transition from the Middle Stone Age (MSA) to the Later Stone Age (LSA) marks a major cultural change among human hunter-gatherer ancestors, but distinguishing between these two industrial complexes is not straightforward. New research published by a team from the University of Liverpool and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History this week demonstrates that machine learning can provide a valuable tool for archeologists, and can identify what differentiates the MSA and LSA. https://phys.org/news/2020-08-neural-network-differentiates-middle-late.html Archaeology & Fossils Wed, 26 Aug 2020 14:00:07 EDT news517652404 A pair of researchers with Universidade Federal de Santa Maria has pieced together fossilized bones of a species of dinosaur called Sacisaurus agudoensis, a creature that was not much bigger than a modern dog. In their paper published in the journal Biology Letters, Rodrigo Temp Müller and Maurício Silva Garcia discuss their work and why they believe what they learned can fill in a major part of the story of ornithischians. https://phys.org/news/2020-08-sacisaurus-hole-evolution-ornithischians.html Archaeology & Fossils Wed, 26 Aug 2020 09:22:50 EDT news517652536 A new study published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences documents dietary shifts in herbivores that lived between 1-3 million years ago in Ethiopia's Lower Omo Valley. The research team, led by Enquye Negash, a postdoctoral researcher in the George Washington University Center for the Advanced Study of Human Paleobiology, examined stable isotopes in the fossilized teeth of herbivores such as antelopes and pigs and found a shift away from C3-derived foods, characteristic of woody vegetation, to C4-derived foods, representative of grasses and sedges. The shift happened at two distinct time periods, approximately 2.7 million years ago and 2 million years ago, when the environment of the Lower Omo Valley was transitioning to open savanna. https://phys.org/news/2020-08-fossilized-teeth-reveal-dietary-shifts.html Archaeology & Fossils Tue, 25 Aug 2020 15:48:17 EDT news517589290 An international team of researchers has conducted one of the most intense studies of mustatils to date, and in so doing, have found them to be some of the oldest stone structures in the world. In their paper published in the journal The Holocene, the group describes their study of the unique structures and what they learned about them. https://phys.org/news/2020-08-survey-mustatils-oldest-stone-world.html Archaeology & Fossils Tue, 25 Aug 2020 09:40:02 EDT news517566917 Mineral dust ingested with food causes distinct signs of wear on the teeth of plant-eating vertebrates, which can differ considerably depending on the type of dust. This is what paleontologists at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) have discovered in a controlled feeding study of guinea pigs. As they report in the current issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), their findings could lead to a more accurate reconstruction of the eating habits of extinct animals as well as a reconstruction of their habitats. https://phys.org/news/2020-08-mineral-ingested-food-characteristic-herbivore.html Archaeology & Fossils Tue, 25 Aug 2020 09:38:50 EDT news517567126 An fMRI-based study of error-monitoring shows that students who are focused on monitoring their own learning process, rather than on getting right answers, learn better over time. https://phys.org/news/2020-08-students.html Education Tue, 25 Aug 2020 09:05:29 EDT news517565126 An amazing construction method for curved structures was developed at TU Wien (Vienna): With a flick of the wrist, flat grids become a 3-D shape. https://phys.org/news/2020-08-mathematical-magic-grids.html Mathematics Mon, 24 Aug 2020 14:31:50 EDT news517498304