A new study documents a set of fossil footprints preserving a snapshot of “fossil behavior” from an ancient hominin group along a lakeshore in northern Kenya around 1.4 million years ago. An international team of researchers from the US and Kenya found tracks showing eight Paranthropus boisei individuals — an extinct “cousin” of modern humans — in one place at one time. All of the individuals are thought to be adults, and some appear to have been much larger in body size than previous estimates based on rare fossil bones.

Efficient heat management in solids is key to advancing the next generation of electronics. However, wavelike heat movement — known as phonon focusing — had only been observed at extremely low, or cryogenic, temperatures, limiting its study and practical use.

Now, researchers at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering have demonstrated that phonons, atomic heat-carrying vibrations with quantum properties, can travel in focused, ray-like paths at room temperature. Instead of spreading uniformly in all directions, heat can move along guided pathways defined by a material’s crystal structure, opening up new possibilities for managing heat flow in future electronics and quantum technologies.

A research team led by UCLA and the University of Rochester has demonstrated a promising evolution of an imaging system designed to capture details within “complex media,” which scatter light, from depicting structures inside body tissue to seeing obstacles through heavy fog. The system uses physics-based machine learning to improve upon an existing imaging technique. 

In tests with standard calibration images obscured by complex media, the new system more than doubled the signal-to-noise ratio compared to a previous generation of the technology. The system also created images in close to real time — thousandths of a second.

New research found that the century-old yardstick used across many industries to estimate air-conditioning and refrigeration energy demand — called cooling degree days — is missing something fundamental. The study reports a new, physics-based version of the metric — effective cooling degree days — that captures how temperature and humidity together impact the actual work a cooling system is required to do. Applying it across North America, they found that cooling efficiency has been quietly declining by 2–4% per decade since 1971, and that the old temperature-only metric misjudges how much cooling is required in different regions, overstating demand in some places and understating it in others.