"A spectacular trove of fossils discovered in a cave on New Zealand's North Island has given scientists their first glimpse of ancient forest species that lived there more than a million years ago," reports Popular Mechanics: The fossils represent 12 ancient bird species and four frog species, including several previously unknown bird species. Taken together, the fossils paint a picture of an ancient world that looks drastically different than it does today. The discovery also fills in an important gap in scientific understanding of the patterns of extinction that preceded human arrival in New Zealand 750 years ago. The team published a study on the find in Alcheringa: An Australasian Journal of Palaeontology. Trevor Worthy, lead study author and associate professor at Flinders University, said in a statement that "This remarkable find suggests our ancient forests were once home to a diverse group of birds that did not survive the next million years... "For decades, the extinction of New Zealand's birds was viewed primarily through the lens of human arrival 750 years ago. This study proves that natural forces like super-volcanoes and dramatic climate shifts were already sculpting the unique identity of our wildlife over a million years ago." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot for sharing the article.

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2001: "Brookhaven Labs has produced for the first time collisions of gold nuclei at a center of mass energy of 200GeV/nucleon." 2002: "There may be a new type of matter according to researchers at Brookhaven National Laboratory." 2010: The hottest man-made temperatures ever achived were a record 4 trillion degree plasma experiment at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York... anointed the Guinness record holder." 2023: "Scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory have uncovered an entirely new kind of quantum entanglement." 2026: On Friday, February 6, "a control room full of scientists, administrators and members of the press gathered" at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Lab in Upton, New York to witness its final collisions, reports Scientific American: The vibe had been wistful, but the crowd broke into applause as Darío Gil, the Under Secretary for Science at the U.S. Department of Energy, pressed a red button to end the collider's quarter-century saga... "I'm really sad" [said Angelika Drees, a BNL accelerator physicist]. "It was such a beautiful experiment and my research home for 27 years. But we're going to put something even better there." That "something" will be a far more powerful electron-ion collider to further push the frontiers of physics, extend RHIC's legacy and maintain the lab's position as a center of discovery. This successor will be built in part from RHIC's bones, especially from one of its two giant, subterranean storage rings that once held the retiring collider's supply of circulating, near-light speed nuclei...slated for construction over the next decade. [That Electron-Ion Collider, or EIC] will utilize much of RHIC's infrastructure, replacing one of its ion rings with a new ring for cycling electrons. The EIC will use those tiny, fast-flying electrons as tiny knives for slicing open the much larger gold ions. Physicists will get an unrivaled look into the workings of quarks and gluons and yet another chance to grapple with nature's strongest force. "We knew for the EIC to happen, RHIC needed to end," says Wolfram Fischer, who chairs BNL's collider-accelerator department. "It's bittersweet." EIC will be the first new collider built in the US since RHIC. To some, it signifies the country's reentry into a particle physics landscape it has largely ceded to Europe and Asia over the past two decades. "For at least 10 or 15 years," says Abhay Deshpande, BNL's associate laboratory director for nuclear and particle physics, "this will be the number one place in the world for [young physicists] to come." The RHIC was able "to separately send two protons colliding with precisely aligned spins — something that, even today, no other experiment has yet matched," the article points out: During its record-breaking 25-year run, RHIC illuminated nature's thorniest force and its most fundamental constituents. It created the heaviest, most elaborate assemblages of antimatter ever seen. It nearly put to rest a decades-long crisis over the proton's spin. And, of course, it brought physicists closer to the big bang than ever before... When RHIC at last began full operations in 2000, its initial heavy-ion collisions almost immediately pumped out quark-gluon plasma. But demonstrating this beyond a shadow of a doubt proved in some respects more challenging than actually creating the elusive plasma itself, with the case for success strengthening as RHIC's numbers of collisions soared. By 2010 RHIC's scientists were confident enough to declare that the hot soup they'd been studying for a decade was hot and soupy enough to convincingly constitute a quark-gluon plasma. And it was even weirder than they thought. Instead of the gas of quarks and gluons theorists expected, the plasma acted like a swirling liquid unprecedented in nature. It was nearly "perfect," with zero friction, and set a new record for twistiness, or "vorticity." For Paul Mantica, a division director for the Facilities and Project Management Division in the DOE's Office of Nuclear Physics, this was the highlight of RHIC's storied existence. "It was paradigm-changing," he says... Data from the final run (which began nearly a year ago) has already produced yet another discovery: the first-ever direct evidence of "virtual particles" in RHIC's subatomic puffs of quark-gluon plasma, constituting an unprecedented probe of the quantum vacuum. RHIC's last run generated hundreds of petabytes of data, the article points out, meaning its final smash "isn't really the end; even when its collisions stop, its science will live on." But Science News notes RHIC's closure "marks the end for the only particle collider operating in the United States, and the only collider of its kind in the world. Most particle accelerators are unable to steer two particle beams to crash head-on into one another."

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image:generatedatwhiskデータセンターって、「電気が安くて冷やしやすい場所」に作られることが多いんです。たとえば、Googleがフィンランドにデータセンターを持っているのは、冷涼な気候で冷却コストが抑えられる上に、豊富な再生可能エネルギーが使えるから（あと税制優遇措置も効いている）とのこと。でも、これからは「水素が安い場所」が新しい選択肢になるかもしれません。地下で「勝手に」水

ImagebyDCStudioonFreepikゲームそのものが悪いわけではない…のだけれど。「そんなにゲームばかりしてないで勉強しなさい！」きっと多くのゲーマーが子ども時代にそう言われて育ったはず。問題はその「ゲームばかりして」がどのくらいの時間を指すのかですけど、どうやら思ったより少ない時間でも健康に影響が出てくるみたいなんですよ。週10時間のゲームで不健康に？電子ジャーナルの「Nutriti

Photo:SonsedskaYuliia/Shutterstock.comおよそ50年ぶりに月へ有人飛行を行う我々、地球人。月探査ミッションのアルテミスIIは3月に延期されてしまいましたが、宇宙探索は確実に前進しています。いつか、火星に移住する日がくるかもしれません。そしていつかは、火星生まれの人類が誕生するかもしれません。…まぁ、そのいつかは当分やってこないそうですが。今は不可能でも今から準備

Image:EuropeanSouthernObservatory超新星の初期形状のイメージイラスト2025年11月14日の記事を編集して再掲載しています。その残骸は意外にもオリーブみたいなカタチ。天文学者らは、巨大な恒星が死を迎える瞬間を初めて画像として捉えることに成功。2024年4月、超新星「SN2024ggi」が観測されてからわずか26時間後、ヨーロッパ南天天文台（ESO）は、チリにある超大

Image:三浦一紀-GeneratedwithGPT-4o2024年11月18日の記事を編集して再掲載しています。無限の猿定理って知っていますか？これは「十分長い時間をかけてランダムに文字列を作り続ければ、どんな文字列もほとんど確実にできあがる（出典：Wikipedia）」という定理。この例として、お猿がはちゃめちゃにキーボードを叩きまくっていても意味のある単語がでることもあるので、はちゃめちゃ

Image:NASA,ESA,DavidO'Ryan(ESA),PabloGómez(ESA),MahdiZamani(ESA/Hubble)AIがあれば、過去のデータから未知の発見を得られるかも？宇宙に存在する無数の天体を画像としてアーカイブし続けているハッブル宇宙望遠鏡。そのアーカイブの中から、AIを駆使して、科学的には未発見の天体を見つけ出そうとする研究が実を結びました。AIアシストツールが

Image:NASA/JPL-Caltech2020年打ち上げ、2021年に火星の地に降り立ったNASAの探査機パーサヴィアランス。火星をあっちにこっちにと走り、人類のためにいろいろなデータを収集しています。5周年を迎えたパーサヴィアランスが新たなミッションに挑戦。AIとタッグを組んでみました。2度のテストに成功パーサヴィアランスの火星走行のバディを務めたのは、Anthropicが開発する生成AI

Image:NASA/SamLott人類が再び月へ…。50年以上ぶりとなる有人月飛行「アルテミス計画」。アルテミスIIミッションとして宇宙船オリオンの打ち上げが今月予定されていました。が、リハーサルで水素漏れが発生。打ち上げは延期が決定し、早ければ3月に実行される見通しです。リハーサルで問題発生2月8日の打ち上げを予定していたアルテミスII。これに向けて、NASAは、2日間に及ぶ「ウェット・ドレス

Image:Shutterstock8種類いるクマ科の動物の中で、パンダだけは成長してもベビーフェイスで危険度が低いように見えませんか？餌は笹だし、でんぐり返しとかするし、木から落ちて転がっていく様子を捉えた動画とかも拡散されているし…（かなりハマってリピート再生した）。でも、パンダってイメージどおりおっとりしていて、かわいいだけのクマなんでしょうか？いえいえ、そんなことありません。実はかなり強い

Ultra-processed foods (UPFs) have more in common with cigarettes than with fruit or vegetables, and require far tighter regulation, according to a new report. The Guardian: UPFs and cigarettes are engineered to encourage addiction and consumption, researchers from three US universities said, pointing to the parallels in widespread health harms that link both. UPFs, which are widely available worldwide, are food products that have been industrially manufactured, often using emulsifiers or artificial colouring and flavours. The category includes soft drinks and packaged snacks such as crisps and biscuits. There are similarities in the production processes of UPFs and cigarettes, and in manufacturers' efforts to optimise the "doses" of products and how quickly they act on reward pathways in the body, according to the paper from researchers at Harvard, the University of Michigan and Duke University. They draw on data from the fields of addiction science, nutrition and public health history to make their comparisons, published on 3 February in the healthcare journal the Milbank Quarterly. The authors suggest that marketing claims on the products, such as being "low fat" or "sugar free," are "health washing" that can stall regulation, akin to the advertising of cigarette filters in the 1950s as protective innovations that "in practice offered little meaningful benefit."

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Scientists at the University of Utah have analyzed nearly a century's worth of human hair samples and found that lead concentrations dropped 100-fold after the EPA began cracking down on leaded gasoline and other lead-based products in the 1970s. The findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, drew on hair collected from Utah residents -- some preserved in family scrapbooks going back generations. Lead levels peaked between 1916 and 1969 at around 100 parts per million, fell to 10 ppm by 1990, and dropped below 1 ppm by 2024. The decline largely tracks the phase-out of leaded gasoline after President Nixon established the EPA in 1970; before the agency acted, most gasolines contained about 2 grams of lead per gallon, releasing nearly 2 pounds of lead per person into the environment each year. The study arrives amid the Trump administration's broader push to scale back the EPA. Lead regulations have not yet been targeted, but the authors note concerns about loosened enforcement of the 2024 Lead and Copper rule on replacing old lead pipes.

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Image:ChristiaanStopforth,DroneFanaticsSA,Ttatty/Shutterstock.com,NASA,Shutterstock2024年5月4日の記事を編集して再掲載しています。「えっ、なにそれ？」そんな風に思ってしまう、あまり聞いたこともないような話が科学の世界には転がっています。1.古代エジプトのミイラは寄生虫だらけImage:Ttatty/Shutte

The preprint repository arXiv will require all submissions to be written in English or accompanied by a full English translation starting February 11, a policy change that explicitly permits the use of AI translators even as research suggests large language models remain inconsistent at the task. Until now, authors only needed to submit an abstract in English. ArXiv hosts nearly 3 million preprints and receives more than 20,000 submissions monthly, though just 1% are in languages other than English. Ralph Wijers, chair of arXiv's editorial advisory council, advises authors to verify any AI-generated translations. "Our own experience is that AI translation is good but not good enough," he says. A 2025 study from ByteDance Seed and Peking University ranked 20 LLMs on translation quality between Chinese and English; GPT-5-high scored nearly 77, just below the human expert benchmark of 80, but most models including GPT-4o, Claude 4, and Deepseek-V3 scored under 60.

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Image:NASAシャトル時代のエンジンで再び月へ！NASAは、アポロ計画以来となる月への有人飛行に向けて、完全使い切り型のロケットの打ち上げ準備を現在進めています。今回のロケットには、過去のNASAのミッションで使用された3基のロケットエンジンが使われているということです。NASAは1月17日に組み上げが完了したロケット、スペース・ローンチ・システム「SLS」をケネディ宇宙センターの発射台へ移

Scientific American's Elizabeth Anne Brown recently "polled the great art houses of Europe" about whether they'd had any recent experiences with mold in their collections. Despite the stigma that keeps many institutions silent, she found that extremophile "xerophilic" molds are quietly spreading through museums and archives, thriving in low-humidity, tightly sealed storage and damaging everything from textiles and wood to manuscripts and stone. An anonymous Slashdot reader shares an excerpt from the article: Mold is a perennial scourge in museums that can disfigure and destroy art and artifacts. [...] Consequently, mold is spoken of in whispers in the museum world. Curators fear that even rumors of an infestation can hurt their institution's funding and blacklist them from traveling exhibitions. When an infestation does occur, it's generally kept secret. The contract conservation teams that museums hire to remediate invasive mold often must vow confidentiality before they're even allowed to see the damage. But a handful of researchers, from in-house conservators to university mycologists, are beginning to compare notes about the fungal infestations they've tackled in museum storage depots, monastery archives, crypts and cathedrals. A disquieting revelation has emerged from these discussions: there's a class of molds that flourish in low humidity, long believed to be a sanctuary from decay. By trying so hard to protect artifacts, we've accidentally created the "perfect conditions for [these molds] to grow," says Flavia Pinzari, a mycologist at the Council of National Research of Italy. "All the rules for conservation never considered these species." These molds -- called xerophiles -- can survive in dry, hostile environments such as volcano calderas and scorching deserts, and to the chagrin of curators across the world, they seem to have developed a taste for cultural heritage. They devour the organic material that abounds in museums -- from fabric canvases and wood furniture to tapestries. They can also eke out a living on marble statues and stained-glass windows by eating micronutrients in the dust that accumulates on their surfaces. And global warming seems to be helping them spread. Most frustrating for curators, these xerophilic molds are undetectable by conventional means. But now, armed with new methods, several research teams are solving art history cold cases and explaining mysterious new infestations... The xerophiles' body count is rising: bruiselike stains on Leonardo da Vinci's most famous self-portrait, housed in Turin. Brown blotches on the walls of King Tut's burial chamber in Luxor. Pockmarks on the face of a saint in an 11th-century fresco in Kyiv. It's not enough to find and identify the mold. Investigators are racing to determine the limits of xerophilic life and figure out which pieces of our cultural heritage are at the highest risk of infestation before the ravenous microbes set in.

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Early hominins in Europe were creating tools from raw materials hundreds of thousands of years before Homo sapiens arrived there, two new studies indicate, pushing back the established time for such activity. From a report: The evidence includes a 500,000-year-old hammer made of elephant or mammoth bone, excavated in southern England, and 430,000-year-old wooden tools found in southern Greece -- the earliest wooden tools on record. The findings suggest that early humans possessed sophisticated technological skills, the researchers said. Katerina Harvati, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Tubingen in Germany and a lead author of the wooden-tool paper, which was published on Monday in the journal PNAS, said the discoveries provided insight into the prehistoric origins of human intelligence. Silvia Bello, a paleoanthropologist at London's Natural History Museum and an author on the elephant-bone study, which was published last week in Science Advances, concurred. The artifacts in both studies, recovered from coal-mine sites, were probably produced by early Neanderthals or a preceding species, Homo heidelbergensis. Homo sapiens emerged in Africa more than 300,000 years ago, and the oldest evidence of them in Europe is a 210,000-year-old fossil unearthed in Greece. By the time Homo sapiens established themselves in Britain 40,000 years ago, other hominins had already lived there for nearly a million years.

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Image:NASAおよそ50年ぶりとなるNASAの月への有人飛行ミッション、アルテミス計画。早ければ、来月頭にもアルテミスIIミッションとして、宇宙船オリオンの打ち上げが行われます。人類が地球低軌道の向こう側へ行くのはアポロ計画以来だし、オリオンにはアメリカの航空史において大きな意味をもついろんなアイテムを乗っけていくし、なかなかエモいアルテミス。そんなエモさを乗せたオリオン宇宙船が地球から月へ

OpenAI has launched Prism, a free scientific research app that aims to do for scientific writing what coding agents did for programming. Engadget reports: Prism builds on Crixet, a cloud-based LaTeX platform the company is announcing it acquired today. For the uninitiated, LaTeX is a typesetting system for formatting scientific documents and journals. Nearly the entire scientific community relies on LaTeX, but it can make some tasks, such as drawing diagrams through TikZ commands, time-consuming to do. Beyond that, LaTeX is just one of the software tools a scientist might turn to when preparing to publish their research. That's where Prism comes into the picture. Like Crixet before it, the app offers robust LaTeX editing and a built-in AI assistant. Where previously it was Crixet's own Chirp agent, now it's GPT-5.2 Thinking. OpenAI's model can help with more than just formatting journals -- in a press demo, an OpenAI employee used it to find and incorporate scientific literature that was relevant to the paper they were working on, with GPT-5.2 automating the process of writing the bibliography. [...] Later in the same demo, the OpenAI employee used Prism to generate a lesson plan for a graduate course on general relativity, as well as a set of problems for students to solve. OpenAI envisions these features helping scientists and professors spend less time on the more tedious tasks in their professions.

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