Category Archives: news briefs

Astronomers reported last week that black holes can sing bass — in a manner of speaking. Using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, they have detected the deepest note in the universe, a B-flat being emitted by a massive black hole in … Continue reading →

Canadian researchers report in the September issue of the Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society that senior citizens can still enjoy a good joke — as long as it’s not too complicated. Prathiba Shammi and Donald Stuss, psychologists at the … Continue reading →

Using bees to explain the sexual behavior of humans has been found to be even more off the mark than you’d think. An international team of researchers report in the Aug. 22 issue of Cell that they have discovered the … Continue reading →

In yet another example of how Mother Nature got there first, a small deep-sea “glass” sponge has been shown to have “remarkable fiber-optical properties, which are surprisingly similar to those of commercial telecommunication fibers,” report researchers from Bell Laboratories/Lucent Technologies … Continue reading →

Not unlike Pavlov teaching dogs to associate food with the sound of a bell, Jay Gottfried and colleagues from London’s Wellcome Department of Imaging Neuroscience have taught humans to associate pictures with peanut butter or vanilla. As reported in the … Continue reading →

It’s hard to know when clothing originated because cloth fibers don’t last as long as, say, bones or stone tools. But researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany have found an ingenious way to date the … Continue reading →

Researchers presented yet more evidence in last week’s Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society that the universe is eventually going to end up a dark, cold place, the stars winking out one by one. Research student Ben Panter and … Continue reading →

Divorce can be a good thing, but you need to be the dumper and not the dumpee, at least if you’re the shorebird known as the oystercatcher. Dik Heg of the University of Bern in Switzerland and his colleagues studied … Continue reading →

Contrary to popular opinion, the big, dominant male isn’t the one the ladies like. For certain salmon and quail, the wimpy guys make the girls swoon, reports New Scientist. At an Animal Behavior Society meeting in Idaho last month, Jason … Continue reading →

Do you think the ancient cobwebs hanging in your attic are old? Well, Samuel Zschokke of the University of Basel in Switzerland has you beat. Zschokke reports in the Aug. 7 Nature that he has found a strand of spider … Continue reading →