Eighty-one years after Adolf Hitler died by his own hand in a Berlin bunker, a viral video on TikTok shows an AI-generated vision of the Nazi dictator standing in Antarctica, shoulders broad and face smiling, sipping a White Monster Energy drink while Men at Work's iconic song Down Under plays.
The H5N1 strain of highly pathogenic avian influenza H5N1 has been detected in over 700 herds of dairy cows in California, the largest dairy-producing state in the U.S. A study published in PLOS Biology led by Seema S. Lakdawala at Emory University School of Medicine, U.S. and Jason Lombard at Colorado State University, U.S. suggests that H5N1 is transmitted through multiple, previously unknown sources and that some H5N1 positive cows do not show clinical signs of infection.
Like people, nonhuman primates live in groups that vary in size and shape depending on the species. Some primate groups are small and simple; others are large and more layered. Over the decades, primatologists have observed that baboons and other closely related monkeys, the African papionins, typically live in two types of social groups: single-level and multi-level societies.
Modern biology is awash in data. Scientists can sequence DNA, track gene activity cell-by-cell, map proteins in space, and image tissues at microscopic resolution. However, it is a struggle to put all that information together to form a cohesive view.
While some of us enjoy curling up with a good book, others prefer watching a series or playing video games. But from the perspective of neuroscience, reading is much more than just entertainment. This is especially true for children and teenagers. In the young brain, reading stimulates specific cognitive processes that can make a major difference in adult life.
Electronic nematicity is a phase of some crystalline solids in which electrons' collective properties, such as charge or spin densities, organize themselves into ordered patterns, lowering the crystal's rotational symmetry. This phase is found across a wide range of diverse materials, making nematicity crucial to understanding emergent solid-state phenomena, such as unconventional superconductivity and magnetism.
Plants use sunlight to convert water and carbon dioxide into energy-rich sugars and oxygen in various ways (photosynthesis). Drought is a major challenge in this process. A research team led by Wolfram Weckwerth at the University of Vienna has now demonstrated how a particularly water-efficient variant of this process (CAM) has evolved in diverse ways within a single tropical tree genus.
Hostage-taking by nation-states is emerging as an overlooked consequence of the more unstable and dangerous world that's been created by the fracturing rules-based order. In an increasingly might-is-right system of international relations, malign actors have become even more emboldened to take the citizens of Western democracies hostage.
Indigenous people of the Andes were the first to domesticate the potato, making the starch-rich crop a dietary staple for this high-altitude population long before it spread to the rest of the world. Today, their descendants in Peru carry the highest known numbers of a gene involved in starch digestion of any population in the world.
Many properties of molecules cannot be predicted from the properties of the atoms they consist of. These properties only emerge when they are combined—a phenomenon known in science as "emergence." A publication by Goethe University Frankfurt examines, from chemical, biological, and philosophical perspectives, how emergence and complexity are connected.
