Thickness of Mercury’s mysterious water ice deposits measured Water ice on Mercury is about 50 meters thick on average, but there is some flexibility in that number and exactly where that water came from remains a mystery. Researchers used data from the MESSENGER spacecraft’s Mercury Laser Altimeter instrument to reach their estimate. Seeker Parasite adds […]
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Busy cells on the move in babies’ brains observed Neurons move through babies’ brains to where they are needed most in the first few months after birth, and these movements have now been seen by researchers. Researchers say the cells are most active in newborns, with activity slowing when the babies are about 5 months […]
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Bumblebees’ emotional buzz charted Happy bumblebees are productive bumblebees, according to a study published in Science that charted how the insects’ changing moods affected their decision-making behavior. The findings are the first clues that primitive emotional states exist in bees. ScienceNews Astronomers see spiral arms surrounding new star for first time Spiral arms like those […]
They say that we were born to run, not metaphorically as in that famous song by Bruce Springsteen, but more literally. The cursorial human being is neither the fastest nor the agilest or the most powerful (a simple backpack complicates things quite a lot). However humans, despite their quaint upright figure, present some breakneck numbers […]
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Hubble image offers detailed view of Mars A detailed image of Mars has been taken by the Hubble Space Telescope as the Red Planet moves into opposition with Earth. The image depicts many of Mars’ geological features, such as mountains, plains and ice caps. Mars is in opposition today! Space.com Urban bees mostly dine on […]
In multicellular organisms, embryonic stem cells develop into any of the different cell types that will form the adult, and along the development, they silence or activate different parts of the genome, giving rise to distinct cell identities, which are maintained throughout adult life by epigenetic mechanisms. A similar procedure may be at work at […]
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Unusual nasal dome allowed ancient beast to trumpet like a dinosaur An ancient wildebeest-like creature that lived during the Ice Age had an unusual skull shape that enabled it to bellow like a dinosaur, according to researchers who found the skull fossils on what is now Kenya’s Rusinga Island. Rusingoryx atopocranion, which lived between 75,000 […]
Looking for a sexual partner outside your species is not very common, but that is what the males of a type of spider mite do. Even more, a recent work suggests that this kinky behaviour could have been key to colonization of new environments. Tetranychus evansi is a species of red spider mite originally from […]
Swarm robotics studies the coordination of many simple physical robots that act as a single multirobot system. The interactions between the individual robots and the interaction of the robots with the environment generate a collective behavior that is named swarm behavior. This new discipline moves from the artificial intelligence to the biological world and vice […]
Metacognition is «cognition about cognition», or «knowing about knowing». It comes from the root word «meta», meaning beyond, and the word «cognition» that includes all mental abilities and processes related to knowledge: attention, memory, judgment and evaluation, reasoning, biological computation, problem-solving, decision making, comprehension and production of language, etc. Metacognition can take many forms; it […]