Welcome to the “Science News” update from Hawaii Science Digest. Views expressed in this science and technology news summary are those of the reporters and correspondents. Content provided by “Science News.” Accessed on 13 May 2019, 1505 UTC.
Source: https://www.sciencenews.org
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NEWS
A new AI acquired humanlike ‘number sense’ on its own
A new artificial intelligence seems to share our intuitive ability to estimate numbers at a glance.
TRANSPARENCY PROJECT
2 WEEKS AGO
TRANSPARENCY PROJECT
2 WEEKS AGO
NEWS IN BRIEF
Only a third of Earth’s longest rivers still run free
Mapping millions of kilometers of waterways shows that just 37 percent of rivers longer than 1,000 kilometers remain unchained by human activities.
SPONSOR MESSAGE
NEWS IN BRIEF
Ancient South American populations dipped due to an erratic climate
Scientists link bouts of intense rainfall and drought around 8,600 to 6,000 years ago to declining numbers of South American hunter-gatherers.
FEATURE
The search for new geologic sources of lithium could power a clean future
Futuristic clean-energy visions of electric vehicles are driving the hunt for lithium.
50 YEARS AGO
50 years ago, scientists tried to transplant part of a human eye
In 1969, a doctor tried and failed to restore a 54-year-old man’s vision. Fifty years later, scientists are still struggling to make eye transplants work.
FEATURE
Can Silicon Valley entrepreneurs make crickets the next chicken?
Entrepreneurs are bringing automation and data analysis to insect agriculture to build a profitable business that helps feed the planet.
NEWS
A gut bacteria transplant may not help you lose weight
A small study finds that transplanting gut microbes from a lean person into obese people didn’t lead to weight loss, as hoped.
NEWS
Dying stars called collapsars may forge much of the universe’s gold
Spinning stars that collapse into black holes could help explain the origins of heavy elements such as gold and silver.
NEWS
What a nearby kilonova would look like
Physicists imagined what we’d see in the sky if two neutron stars collided just 1,000 light-years from Earth.
NEWS
1 million species are under threat. Here are 5 ways we speed up extinctions
One million of the world’s plant and animal species are now under threat of extinction, a new report finds.
MYSTERY SOLVED
A tiny mystery dinosaur from New Mexico is officially T. rex’s cousin
A newly identified dinosaur species called Suskityrannus hazelae fills a gap in tyrannosaur lineage.
NEWS
A belly full of wriggling worms makes wood beetles better recyclers
Common beetles that eat rotten logs chew up more wood when filled with a roundworm larvae, releasing nutrients more quickly back to the forest floor.
NEWS IN BRIEF
An ancient pouch reveals the hallucinogen stash of an Andes shaman
South American shamans in the Andes Mountains carried mind-altering ingredients 1,000 years ago, a study finds.
NEWS
LIGO is on the lookout for these 8 sources of gravitational waves
Gravitational wave hunters are on a cosmic scavenger hunt. Here’s what they’re hoping to find.
NEWS
Medical student evaluations appear riddled with racial and gender biases
Women and minorities are more frequently described by personality in medical student evaluations, but men are described by their skills, a study says.
NEWS
War wrecked an African ecosystem. Ecologists are trying to restore it
Bringing back big predators to Gorongosa, once a wildlife paradise in Mozambique, is just one piece of the puzzle in undoing the damage there.
NEWS IN BRIEF
Antimatter keeps with quantum theory. It’s both particle and wave
A new variation of the classic double-slit experiment confirms that antimatter, like normal matter, has wave-particle duality.
SCIENCE VISUALIZED
These award-winning photographs capture rarely seen wildlife and landscapes
Winners of the California Academy of Sciences’ annual photo contest dove deep underwater and hiked to great heights to create these striking images.
NEWS
Facebook data show how many people left Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria
Conventional surveys can’t track migration after natural disasters in real time. But Facebook data may provide a crude estimate of those who flee.
NEWS
Pandas’ share of protein calories from bamboo rivals wolves’ from meat
The panda gut digests protein in bamboo so well that the animal’s nutritional profile for calories resembles a wolf’s.
NEWS
A dinosaur’s running gait may reveal insights into the history of bird flight
In what may have been a precursor to avian flight, a flightless winged dinosaur may have flapped its wings as it jogged.
NEWS
An AI used art to control monkeys’ brain cells
Art created by an artificial intelligence exacts unprecedented control over nerve cells tied to vision in monkey brains, and could lead to new neuroscience experiments.
NEWS IN BRIEF
LIGO and Virgo made 5 likely gravitational wave detections in a month
It took decades to find the first gravitational wave event, and now they’re a weekly occurrence.
NEWS IN BRIEF
Hippo poop cycles silicon through the East African environment
By chowing down on grass and then excreting into rivers and lakes, hippos play a big role in transporting a nutrient crucial to the food web.