Science

Harry Howitt/Shutterstock We may receive a commission on purchases made from links. Apple CarPlay can be a rather nifty way to connect your iPhone to your vehicle's infotainment system, providing you with hands-free access to some of your favorite smartphone apps and features. From being able to personalize your CarPlay dashboar...

In the Physical Review Letters work, the NYU researchers created “metamaterials,” which are engineered materials with properties stemming from their structure rather than their chemical nature. However, a challenge in creating metamaterials is first understanding how their structure gives rise to physical properties of interest.To address these challenges, the scientists developed an algorithm to design disordered structures that were functional. In doing so, they discovered a novel form of “correlated disorder”—materials that are neither fully disordered nor fully ordered.“Think of trees in a forest—they grow at random positions, but not completely random because they’re usually a certain distance from one another,” explains Martiniani. “This new pattern, gyromorphs, combines properties t...

If you’ve ever combed boxes of old tech detritus in search of a nugget of pure gold, we know you’ll appreciate the excitement of discovering, in a dusty University of Utah storeroom, a tape labelled “UNIX Original from Bell Labs V4 (See manual for format)”. If the tape contains what’s promised on the label, this is a missing piece of computer history, because no complete copies of this version are known to exist. The tape will be delivered by hand to the Computer History Museum, where we hope its contents will be safely retrieved for archive and analysis. The reporter of the find, research professor [Rob Ricci], identifies the handwriting as that of Jay Lepreau, someone whose word on which UNIX version it contained could, we hope, be trusted. So if you happen to have a handy PDP-11 in you...

The Mwanza flat-headed rock agama (Agama mwanzae) has become an unlikely pop culture icon, earning the nickname “Spider-Man lizard” because of the striking red and blue hues of its male form. Native to East Africa, this reptile thrives on the sunlit rocks of Tanzania, Kenya, and Rwanda, displaying an extraordinary blend of biological adaptation and visual spectacle. Its vivid colours have inspired fascination among scientists and wildlife enthusiasts alike, prompting studies into how such visual traits evolve and function in semi-arid habitats.Beyond its resemblance to a superhero’s costume, the Mwanza agama offers an intriguing case study of how climate, competition, and reproduction shape animal appearance. The study Insect abundance and food intake by Agama mwanzae in Serengeti National...

Update: This story is being actively updated with results for ongoing regions. This story has been updated with final results for 5 out of 24 regions. We're approaching the end of the year which also means that the World Warrior circuits are rapidly approaching their conclusion. In this story, we'll be chronicling the results for each of the World Warrior finals as they happen, so you can keep up to date with the regional finals as well as wh...

For ancient duck-billed dinosaurs, mating might have been a bone-jarring, even bone-breaking, affair.  A new study describes a peculiar pattern of tailbone fractures in hadrosaurids (duck-billed dinosaurs) across North America, Europe, and Russia.  This research supports a long-standing but previously unproven hypothesis that these injuries were sustained during mating. “The weight of the male could have crushed the female’s back. These injuries may help us identify female dinosaurs,” said Filippo Bertozzo, first author from the Institute of Natural Sciences in Belgium.  It sheds new light on the intimate lives of these massive herbivores that roamed the Earth during the Late Cretaceous Period.  Examples of hadrosaur vertebrae with healing fractures suggest an external force...

Unexpected biosignatures found in a startlingly blue volcanic goo beneath the Pacific Ocean may offer clues to life's origins.Exhumed from mud volcanoes near the Mariana Trench, at depths of almost 3,000 meters (9,833 feet), the bizarrely colored sediment samples contain fats from mysterious living organisms.With an extremely high pH of 12 – among the highest recorded in a natural ecosystem – this nutrient-poor ooze would cause severe burns to your skin on contact. Yet researchers have now confirmed that some extremophile microbes live there."It is simply exciting to obtain insights into such a microbial habitat because we suspect that primordial life could have originated at precisely such sites," says University of Bremen organic geochemist Florence Schubotz."What is fascinating about th...