Panoramic snapshots help ants find home

Ants can find their way back to a nest many metres away, even from areas they have never been before, just by using visual landmarks, new research has found.

Early talkers benefit from non-verbal clues

Giving toddlers non-verbal cues about words can have a big impact on their vocabulary three years later, according to new research.

Flare fallout creates bright spots on Sun

The rare appearance of bright spots on the Sun's surface is caused by material raining down from solar flares.

Bacterial Trail Formation

Bacteria in slimy biofilms are able to spread rapidly over surfaces such as catheters by building a transport network with DNA for tracks.

North America being drawn to Iberian coast

Scientists have discovered the beginning of an active fault system off the coast of Portugal.  The fault system may herald the start of a cycle that will eventually see the Atlantic Ocean close up as North America is pulled towards the Iberian Peninsula.

Speedy winds on Venus getting faster

Already travelling at super-hurricane speeds, winds on Venus have accelerated by an astonishing one-third over the past six years.

Oldest nearly complete primate fossil reported

Scientists have found the oldest known nearly complete skeleton of a primate.  The fossil of the tiny tree-dweller Arch­i­ce­bus dates back an estimated 55 million years, to the so-called Eocene Epoch, and was found in Hubei Province in central China. This adds to growing evidence that primates originated in Asia.

Lyrebird has different dance for different songs

When male superb lyrebirds sing, they often move their bodies to the music in a choreographed way. Like humans, male superb lyrebirds have different dance movements to go with different songs. The lyrebirds’ dance movements are a voluntary embellishment to their singing; in other words, they can and do sing without dancing.

Bacterial Populations Grow In Fractal Branching Patterns

Scientists have discovered strange, branching patterns in bacterial populations.  They found that as each bacterium grows in a single direction, lines or files of cells are formed, but these buckle and fold easily. This happens repeatedly as the cells grow and divide, leading to the formation of rafts of aligned cells arranged in self-similar branching patterns called fractals.

Archaeopteryx Feathers

The feathers of Archaeopteryx, a famous fossil linking dinosaurs and birds, were not all black, but rather patterned—light-coloured with a dark edge and tip, a new chemical analysis indicates.

Study dates arrival of humans in Asia

The first anatomically modern humans almost certainly arrived in southern Asia within the last 70,000 years, having dispersed as small groups of pioneer settlers along coastal regions from Africa.

Barbaturex morrisoni

A giant lizard that lived 40 million years ago at a time when Earth was a hothouse has been named in honour of rock singer Jim Morrison.  Around 1.80 metres from snout to tail and tipping the scales at up to 27 kilograms, the plant-eating reptile is one of the biggest-known lizards ever to have lived on land.  It competed with mammals for food in the humid tropical forests of Southeast Asia.  A fossil of the beast, found in sediment in Sagaing district in Myanmar, has been dated to the late-middle Eocene period, when Earth was so hot there was no ice at its poles.

The lowest mass of any directly observed exoplanet

Breaking new ground in the detection of planets beyond our solar system, European astronomers have recorded the most lightweight world to be discovered so far through direct observation. The new discovery is a gas giant about four to five times the mass of Jupiter, the largest planet of our solar system, say astronomers at the European Southern Observatory (ESO).

Koala Evolution

More than 20 million years ago an Australian koala was leaping possum-like through the trees at night - a far cry from its couch potato cousins that slump in eucalypts today.  The more-agile marsupial was half the size of the modern-day koala and ate younger, softer plants, including possibly fruit.