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Categories: Offbeat: General, Paleontology: Dinosaurs

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Evolutionary biologists have for the first time decoded the genetic lineage of a famous killer whale and a pod that once worked alongside whale hunters off the coast of Australia. In the Australian tradition of claiming New Zealand's celebrities as its own, Old Tom, the leader of a pod of killer whales that famously helped whalers hunt baleen whales in the 20th century, has ancestral links to modern-day killer whales in New Zealand, according to new DNA research. Old Tom also shared a common ancestor with killer whales from Australasia, the North Pacific, and North Atlantic Oceans, but is most similar to modern New Zealand killer whales. However, most of Tom's DNA code is not found in other killer whales globally suggesting that the killer whales of Eden may have become extinct locally.

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Fast radio bursts, or FRBs, are an astronomical mystery, with their exact cause and origins still unconfirmed. These intense bursts of radio energy are invisible to the human eye, but show up brightly on radio telescopes. Previous studies have noted broad similarities between the energy distribution of repeat FRBs, and that of earthquakes and solar flares. However, new research has looked at the time and energy of FRBs and found distinct differences between FRBs and solar flares, but several notable similarities between FRBs and earthquakes. This supports the theory that FRBs are caused by 'starquakes' on the surface of neutron stars. This discovery could help us better understand earthquakes, the behavior of high-density matter and aspects of nuclear physics.

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Researchers created and used complex neural networks to recreate speech from brain recordings, and then used that recreation to analyze the processes that drive human speech.

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People who carry three gene variants that have been inherited from Neanderthals are more sensitive to some types of pain, according to a new study.

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Researchers describe an acoustic meta-surface that uses pingpong balls, with small holes punctured in each, as Helmholtz resonators to create inexpensive but effective low-frequency sound insulation. The coupling between two resonators led to two resonance frequencies, and more resonant frequencies meant the device was able to absorb more sound. At the success of two coupled resonators, the researchers added more, until their device resembled a square sheet of punctured pingpong balls, multiplying the number of resonant frequencies that could be absorbed.

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Twelve people crossed the Atlantic Ocean in a rowing boat. One of them was Ciara Burns, a scientist, who monitored her own heartbeat. Now the data was analyzed and the results were published: It turns out that the variability of the heart rate provides a lot of information about physical and mental wellbeing.

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Palaeontologists discover molecular evidence of phaeomelanin, the pigment that produces ginger coloration. Phaeomelanin is now toxic to animals – this discovery may be first step in understand its evolution. 

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New research reaffirms that human footprints found in White Sands National Park, NM, date to the Last Glacial Maximum, placing humans in North America thousands of years earlier than once thought.  In September 2021, scientists announced that ancient human footprints discovered in White Sands National Park were between 21,000 and 23,000 years old. This discovery pushed the known date of human presence in North America back by thousands of years and implied that early inhabitants and megafauna co-existed for several millennia before the terminal Pleistocene extinction event. In a follow-up study, researchers used two new independent approaches to date the footprints, both of which resulted in the same age range as the original estimate. 

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Imagine a life form that doesn't resemble any of the organisms found on the tree of life. One that has its own unique control system, and that a doctor would want to send into your body. It sounds like a science fiction movie, but according to nanoscientists, it can—and should—happen in the future.

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Scientists have detected the highest energy gamma rays ever from a dead star called a pulsar. The energy of these gamma rays clocked in at 20 tera-electronvolts, or about ten trillion times the energy of visible light. This observation is hard to reconcile with the theory of the production of such pulsed gamma rays, as the international team reports.

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A pair of theoretical physicists are reporting that the same observations inspiring the hunt for a ninth planet might instead be evidence within the solar system of a modified law of gravity originally developed to understand the rotation of galaxies.

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Bumblebees have a remarkably successful method for fighting off Asian hornets, new research shows.

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Scholars have discovered evidence of a sixth basic taste. The tongue responds to ammonium chloride, a popular ingredient in some Scandinavian candies. The OTOP1 protein receptor, previously linked to sour taste, is activated by ammonium chloride.  The ability to taste ammonium chloride may have evolved to help organisms avoid harmful substances.

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For decades, scientists have assumed that mammals and their relatives that survived challenging times (like those during mass extinctions) made it because they were generalists that were able to eat just about anything and adapt to whatever life threw at them. A new study into the mammal family tree through multiple mass extinctions revealed that the species that survived aren't as generic as scientists had thought: instead, having new and different traits can be the key to succeeding in the aftermath of a catastrophe.

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Fossil researchers have discovered a novel genus and species of tiny wasp with a mysterious, bulbous structure at the end of each antenna.

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Can artificial intelligence (AI) get hungry? Develop a taste for certain foods? Not yet, but a team of researchers is developing a novel electronic tongue that mimics how taste influences what we eat based on both needs and wants, providing a possible blueprint for AI that processes information more like a human being.

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Researchers have produced an engineered tissue representing a simplified cerebral cortex by 3D printing human stem cells. When implanted into mouse brain slices, the structures became integrated with the host tissue. The technique may ultimately be developed into tailored repairs to treat brain injuries.

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Individual voice could help birds be recognized in a flock, no matter what they say.

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Researchers developed the first AI to date that can intelligently design robots from scratch by compressing billions of years of evolution into mere seconds. It's not only fast but also runs on a lightweight computer and designs wholly novel structures from scratch — without human-labeled, bias-filled datasets.

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A new study posits that the large, approximately 5-kilometer-long mounds that dominate the appearance of the larger lobe of the pristine Kuiper Belt object Arrokoth are similar enough to suggest a common origin. The study suggests that these “building blocks” could guide further work on planetesimal formational models.