Flight is a rare skill in the animal world. Among vertebrates, it evolved only three times: in bats, birds, and the long-extinct pterosaurs. Pterosaurs were the pioneers, taking to the skies more than 220 million years ago, long before early bird relatives such as Archaeopteryx appeared, around 150 million years ago. While scientists have a detailed fossil record that sheds light on how birds’ brains evolved for flight, the same story for pterosaurs has been far less clear. Until now. In a new study published in Current Biology, an international team now reveals how pterosaurs evolved the neurological structures required for powered flight. 

With the help of newly identified bones, an enigmatic 3.4-million-year-old hominin foot found in 2009, is assigned to a species different from that of the famous fossil Lucy providing further proof that two ancient species of hominins co-existed at the same time and in the same region.

Princeton researchers have developed a diamond-based quantum sensor that reveals rich new information about magnetic phenomena in spaces smaller than a wavelength of light. Their new technique uncovers magnetic fluctuations beyond the reach of existing instruments and provides key insight into quantum materials such as graphene and superconductors — opening a new way to study condensed matter physics.

A study by researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison has revealed a previously unknown pathway plants use to detect gravity and orient the direction they grow in. Publishing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study may one day open the door for improvements in crop cultivation.

Over the last few years, systems and applications that help visually impaired people navigate their environment have undergone rapid development, but still have room to grow, according to a team of researchers at Penn State. The team recently combined recommendations from the visually impaired community and artificial intelligence (AI) to develop a new tool that offers support specifically tailored to the needs of people who are visually impaired. 

A massive, multi-year scientific expedition determined that land use on tropical islands can shape water quality in lagoons and that rainfall can be an important mediator for connections between land and lagoon waters. The scale of this research is sigificant: the researchers assessed at algal tissue nutrients, water chemistry, and microbial communities at nearly 200 sites around the island of Mo‘orea, French Polynesia, and repeated this sampling over multiple years.

Florida State University oceanographers have discovered a significant connection between small-scale microbial processes and ecosystem-wide dynamics, offering new insights into the mechanisms driving marine carbon storage.

In an effort to reveal the inner workings of a protein that serves as a cell’s damage detection system, scientists at Johns Hopkins and the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich (LMU) have published what is believed to be the first 3D details of the ZAK protein’s structure.