EAST LANSING, Mich. — Two teams of Michigan State University researchers – one working at a medieval burial site in Albania, the other at a DNA lab in East Lansing – have shown how modern science can unlock the mysteries of the past.(more…)
Scientific discoveries come through many different means. Breakthroughs can result from purposefully-executed research projects that are perhaps punctuated with unexpected flashes of insight. In rare cases, discoveries occur through a chain of highly improbable, very lucky, occurrences.(more…)
*Climate changes profoundly influenced the rise and fall of six distinct, successive waves of mammal species diversity in North America over the last 65 million years, shows a novel statistical analysis led by Brown University evolutionary biologists. Warming and cooling periods, in two cases confounded by species migrations, marked the transition from one dominant grouping to the next.*
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — History often seems to happen in waves — fashion and musical tastes turn over every decade and empires give way to new ones over centuries. A similar pattern characterizes the last 65 million years of natural history in North America, where a novel quantitative analysis has identified six distinct, consecutive waves of mammal species diversity or “evolutionary faunas.” What force of history determined the destiny of these groupings? The numbers say it was typically climate change.
“Although we’ve always known in a general way that mammals respond to climatic change over time, there has been controversy as to whether this can be demonstrated in a quantitative fashion,” said Christine Janis, professor of evolutionary biology at Brown University. “We show that the rise and fall of these faunas is indeed correlated with climatic change — the rise or fall of global paleotemperatures — and also influenced by other more local perturbations such as immigration events.” (more…)
COLUMBUS, Ohio – New research challenges the conventional thinking that young children use language just as adults do to help classify and understand objects in the world around them.
In a new study involving 4- to 5-year-old children, researchers found that the labels adults use to classify items – words like “dog” or “pencil” – don’t have the same ability to influence the thinking of children. (more…)
COLUMBUS, Ohio – Both children and the elderly have slower response times when they have to make quick decisions in some settings.
But recent research suggests that much of that slower response is a conscious choice to emphasize accuracy over speed.
In fact, healthy older people can be trained to respond faster in some decision-making tasks without hurting their accuracy – meaning their cognitive skills in this area aren’t so different from younger adults. (more…)
PASADENA, Calif. — NASA’s twin spacecraft to study the moon from crust to core are nearing their New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day main-engine burns to place the duo in lunar orbit. (more…)
