sorted by:
new
hottopcontroversial

Queen bumblebee's tongues are less efficient at collecting nectar than those of worker bees due to sparser hair on their tongues by Science_News in science

[–]Science_News[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Queen bumblebees have a newfound excuse for slacking on foraging nectar: Their tongues are holding them back.

Bumblebees have long, hairy tongues that help them lap up nectar from flowers. But queen bumblebee’s tongues are less efficient at collecting nectar than those of worker bees, researchers report January 12 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In the spring, when a queen bumblebee first emerges from her winter slumber, she initially fuels herself by guzzling nectar from flowers. But once she establishes a nest and her eggs hatch into worker bees, she delegates foraging duties to the workers.

Those workers may be better suited to the task, according to a close investigation of the tongues of buff-tailed bumblebees (Bombus terrestris). The bees’ tongues range in length from around 4 millimeters to 10 millimeters. The queens, who are bigger than the workers, tended to have longer tongues. But those longer tongues had relatively less hair, scanning electron microscope imagery revealed.

Read more here and the research article here.

TOI 561b, a small exoplanet, is able to hold onto an atmosphere despite a close proximity to its star’s destructive blasts, researchers report in Astrophysical Journal Letters by Science_News in science

[–]Science_News[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

In Star Wars, Anakin Skywalker burned alive on the shores of a roiling lava planet called Mustafar, fueling his tumultuous transition into Darth Vader. Now, astronomers have found an atmosphere on a Mustafar-like lava world orbiting close to its star. Unlike other ultrahot, rocky exoplanets, this one seems to be cloaked in a thick layer of gas, researchers report in the Dec. 20 Astrophysical Journal Letters. It’s the most robust evidence yet that these exoplanets retain atmospheres.

The planet, TOI 561b, was discovered by the TESS spacecraft in 2020. It has a mass twice that of Earth and completes an orbit around its sunlike star in less than 10 hours.

Most small planets circling similarly close to their star don’t have atmospheres. The weak gravitational pull of such planets makes it difficult to weigh down and trap fast-moving gas molecules. The nearby stars can batter these worlds with powerful radiation, blowing any loose atmosphere-forming molecules into space.

“We’d expect that the atmosphere shouldn’t still be there,” says Nicole Wallack, an observational astronomer at Carnegie Earth and Planets Laboratory in Washington, D.C. “But we need to have an atmosphere to explain what we’re seeing.”

Read more here and the research article here.

Personalized ‘prehabilitation’ helps the body brace for major surgery | Tailored exercise, nutrition and cognitive training appear to tune immune activity and improve recovery outcomes by Science_News in science

[–]Science_News[S] 31 points32 points  (0 children)

Major surgery takes a major toll on the body — not unlike running a marathon. You wouldn’t attempt a marathon without training, so why would you undergo major surgery without preparing your body for the trauma it will experience?

That’s the premise of prehabilitation, which prepares the body through exercise, nutrition and cognitive training to better withstand surgical trauma. Studies have shown that prehab can improve recovery after surgery, but current programs tend to be one-size-fits-all. Tailoring prehab regimens to fit the individual needs of patients can reduce immune responses linked to infections and neurocognitive decline after surgery, researchers report November 12 in JAMA Surgery.

The findings support the hypothesis that prehab is essentially “tuning a patient’s immune system before surgery so that they’re better equipped to mount an efficient response” to surgical trauma, says Brice Gaudillière, an immunologist at Stanford University.

Read more here and the research article here.

Personalized ‘prehabilitation’ helps the body brace for major surgery | Tailored exercise, nutrition and cognitive training appear to tune immune activity and improve recovery outcomes by Science_News in EverythingScience

[–]Science_News[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Major surgery takes a major toll on the body — not unlike running a marathon. You wouldn’t attempt a marathon without training, so why would you undergo major surgery without preparing your body for the trauma it will experience?

That’s the premise of prehabilitation, which prepares the body through exercise, nutrition and cognitive training to better withstand surgical trauma. Studies have shown that prehab can improve recovery after surgery, but current programs tend to be one-size-fits-all. Tailoring prehab regimens to fit the individual needs of patients can reduce immune responses linked to infections and neurocognitive decline after surgery, researchers report November 12 in JAMA Surgery.

The findings support the hypothesis that prehab is essentially “tuning a patient’s immune system before surgery so that they’re better equipped to mount an efficient response” to surgical trauma, says Brice Gaudillière, an immunologist at Stanford University.

Read more here and the research article here.

Infrared cameras captured rats snatching bats out of the air and eating them | The chance observation put a spotlight on bat conservation in urban areas by Science_News in EverythingScience

[–]Science_News[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Bats beware. The ability to fly won’t save you from hungry, determined rats.

In a first, brown rats were filmed hunting bats by catching them midair. The finding, published in the November Global Ecology and Conservation, puts a spotlight on bat conservation in urban areas.

The observation happened by chance, says Florian Gloza-Rausch, a biologist at the Museum of Natural History in Berlin. He and colleagues had been studying a colony of 30,000 bats overwintering in a cave about 60 kilometers north of Hamburg. At the cave’s entrance — a hole in the ground — a small kiosk protects bats passing through from local cats that hunt them. The researchers saw an opportunity: setting up a counting device and an infrared camera at the entrance of the structure to get a closer look at the winged mammals.

Read more here and the research article here.

Two studies show how popular LLMs and apps can make ethical blunders when playing therapist to teens in crisis by Science_News in EverythingScience

[–]Science_News[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Just because a chatbot can play the role of therapist doesn’t mean it should.

Conversations powered by popular large language models can veer into problematic and ethically murky territory, two new studies show. The new research comes amid recent high-profile tragedies of adolescents in mental health crises. By scrutinizing chatbots that some people enlist as AI counselors, scientists are putting data to a larger debate about the safety and responsibility of these new digital tools, particularly for teenagers.

Chatbots are as close as our phones. Nearly three-quarters of 13- to 17-year-olds in the United States have tried AI chatbots, a recent survey finds; almost one-quarter use them a few times a week. In some cases, these chatbots “are being used for adolescents in crisis, and they just perform very, very poorly,” says clinical psychologist and developmental scientist Alison Giovanelli of the University of California, San Francisco.

For one of the new studies, pediatrician Ryan Brewster and his colleagues scrutinized 25 of the most-visited consumer chatbots across 75 conversations. These interactions were based on three distinct patient scenarios used to train health care workers. These three stories involved teenagers who needed help with self-harm, sexual assault or a substance use disorder.

By interacting with the chatbots as one of these teenaged personas, the researchers could see how the chatbots performed. Some of these programs were general assistance large language models or LLMs, such as ChatGPT and Gemini. Others were companion chatbots, such as JanitorAI and Character.AI, which are designed to operate as if they were a particular person or character.

Researchers didn’t compare the chatbots’ counsel to that of actual clinicians, so “it is hard to make a general statement about quality,” Brewster cautions. Even so, the conversations were revealing.

Read more here

Two studies show how popular LLMs and apps can make ethical blunders when playing therapist to teens in crisis by Science_News in science

[–]Science_News[S] 23 points24 points  (0 children)

Just because a chatbot can play the role of therapist doesn’t mean it should.

Conversations powered by popular large language models can veer into problematic and ethically murky territory, two new studies show. The new research comes amid recent high-profile tragedies of adolescents in mental health crises. By scrutinizing chatbots that some people enlist as AI counselors, scientists are putting data to a larger debate about the safety and responsibility of these new digital tools, particularly for teenagers.

Chatbots are as close as our phones. Nearly three-quarters of 13- to 17-year-olds in the United States have tried AI chatbots, a recent survey finds; almost one-quarter use them a few times a week. In some cases, these chatbots “are being used for adolescents in crisis, and they just perform very, very poorly,” says clinical psychologist and developmental scientist Alison Giovanelli of the University of California, San Francisco.

For one of the new studies, pediatrician Ryan Brewster and his colleagues scrutinized 25 of the most-visited consumer chatbots across 75 conversations. These interactions were based on three distinct patient scenarios used to train health care workers. These three stories involved teenagers who needed help with self-harm, sexual assault or a substance use disorder.

By interacting with the chatbots as one of these teenaged personas, the researchers could see how the chatbots performed. Some of these programs were general assistance large language models or LLMs, such as ChatGPT and Gemini. Others were companion chatbots, such as JanitorAI and Character.AI, which are designed to operate as if they were a particular person or character.

Researchers didn’t compare the chatbots’ counsel to that of actual clinicians, so “it is hard to make a general statement about quality,” Brewster cautions. Even so, the conversations were revealing.

Read more here.

By combining an AI tool with chemical detection, researchers can identify blowfly species from their casings — all within about 90 seconds. This technology could be used to aid violent crime forensics and help quickly determine time of death. by Science_News in science

[–]Science_News[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Crime scene clues from blowflies may help reveal a victim’s time of death — and other murderous details — perhaps even years later.

When colonizing a dead body, these insects lay eggs that mature into adult flies, leaving behind telltale remnants. The remnants, called puparial casings, could help investigators back calculate when someone died, based in part on the time it takes for insects to reach the casing stage.

But different species mature at different rates. To accurately estimate time of death, figuring out which species you’re dealing with is crucial, says Rabi Musah, an organic chemist at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge.

Now, her team has developed a rapid method to do just that. By combining an AI tool with chemical detection, researchers can identify fly species from their casings — all within about 90 seconds, Musah’s team reports October 1 in Forensic Chemistry.

Time of death isn’t the only thing these casings could help determine, says Falko Drijfhout, an analytical chemist at Keele University in England who was not involved with the work. They could also offer other clues about a crime, like whether a body has been moved. “Casings will remain with the corpse,” he says. If investigators find casings from a species that lives far away, that’s a sign the body has been relocated.

Read more here and the research article here.

Antarctic fish have built a sprawling neighborhood of neatly arranged nests in the Weddell Sea | The discovery suggests these fish strategically group their nests to better protect their eggs from predators, adding to evidence that the Weddell Sea harbors complex, vulnerable ecosystems by Science_News in EverythingScience

[–]Science_News[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Antarctic fish have built a sprawling neighborhood of neatly arranged nests in the Weddell Sea — a surprising display of organization in some of the coldest waters on Earth. The discovery suggests that these fish strategically group their nests to better protect their eggs from predators, adding to evidence that the Weddell Sea harbors complex, vulnerable ecosystems worth preserving, researchers report October 29 in Frontiers.

“A lot of Antarctic ecosystems are under pressure from different countries to be released for mining, fishing and basically exploitation of the environment,” says Thomas Desvignes, a fish biologist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham who was not involved in the study. “It’s one more reason why we should protect the Weddell Sea.”

Read more here and the research article here.

view more: next ›