To the brave bird willing to wear goggles and fly through a laser sheet: we salute you. Thanks to you, we know a little more about how you and your kind fly.

When birds lift off, their wings generate tiny, circular currents of air called wingtip vortices. Think of them like tiny tornadoes under the … Read More → "Brave bird wears goggles and flies through a laser for science"

When most of us think of a musical wind instrument, we generally picture what is essentially a tube with a mouthpiece at one end – something like a flute, recorder or saxophone. And while that’s a tried and trusted design, the fact is that wind instruments can take almost any form. Weirdly-shaped instruments are more difficult to design, however, which is where a new computer program called Printone comes … Read More → "3D-printing software reshapes musical instrument design"

Digital models of humans can be uncannily accurate these days, but there’s at least one area where they fall short: teeth. Unless you’re willing to scan the inside of someone’s mouth, you aren’t going to get a very faithful representation of someone’s pearly whites. Disney Research and ETH Zurich, however, have a far easier solution. They’ve just developed a technique to digitally recreate teeth beyond the … Read More → "Disney can digitally recreate your teeth"

Psychologists working with young toddlers say the kids are capable of recognizing when someone else is pretending, cheating, or straight-up lying. The research is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Psychologists use a test called the false-belief task to gauge whether a person knows that other people’s thoughts are … Read More → "Young toddlers know when you’re lying, say scientists"

In case you thought we’d figured out life in the oceans even a little bit, a new study published in Nature Communications sets the record straight. For the first time, scientists have found experimental evidence of underwater pollination. There are bees in the sea—or at least creatures that perform the same kind of work. </ … Read More → "We just found out there are ‘bees’ in the sea"

For more than a decade, neuroscientists have known that stress impairs memory performance—an effect likely due to the influence of stress-related hormones. A recent article in Science shows that a specific technique—taking practice recall tests—can help people overcome the memory problems associated with stress. And it even works if you aren’t told how well you did … Read More → "Practice tests help you remember—even if you don’t check if you’re correct"

Last week, a construction project for the Los Angeles subway turned into a scientific excavation after workers uncovered fossilized skull, tooth and tusk fragments from ancient elephant relatives that have been extinct for 10,000 years.

According to L.A. transit officials, remains belonging to an adult mastodon were discovered shortly before Thanksgiving, … Read More → "Subway expansion uncovers mastodon remains at least 10,000 years old"

Kids have to memorize four new elements, now that the powers that be in the world of chemistry have expanded the periodic table. The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry has accepted the official names for elements 113, 115, 117 and 118, which it recognized in late December 2015. Previously known by their unappealing placeholder names ununtrium, ununpentium, ununseptium and ununoctium, the elements have been christened Nihonium (Nh), Moscovium (Mc), Tennessine (Ts) and Oganesson ( … Read More → "Chemists officially add new elements to the periodic table"

Coders at the Google Creative Lab are working with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology to teach an experimental artificially intelligent (AI) database to learn, organize and visualize the incredibly varying sounds of different birds “by ear”, without any other information. Using data from the Cornell Guide to Bird Sounds: … Read More → "An artificially intelligent database that learns, organizes and visualizes bird sounds ‘by ear’"

Solar planes have already traversed the Alps and flown around the world, but one team has its sights set a little higher: the edge of space. SolarStratos is planning to fly a solar-powered plane to an altitude of over 80,000 ft (24,000 m), from where the curvature of the Earth as well as daytime stars will be visible.

The aim of the project is to … Read More → "Solar-powered two-seater plane will soar to the edge of space"