The tendency to perceive others as “us versus them” isn’t exclusively human but appears to be shared by our primate cousins, a new study led by Yale researchers has found.
In a series of ingenious experiments, Yale researchers led by psychologist Laurie Santosshowed that monkeys treat individuals from outside their groups with the same suspicion and dislike as their human cousins tend to treat outsiders, suggesting that the roots of human intergroup conflict may be evolutionarily quite ancient.(more…)
ANN ARBOR, Mich.— Americans are less willing to open their wallets to pay for increased production of renewable energy resources than Canadians, a new University of Michigan report indicates.(more…)
An international team of astronomers has identified for the first time a thick stellar disc in the Andromeda galaxy, the nearest large spiral galaxy to our own Milky Way.
The discovery of the thick disc, a major result from a five-year investigation, will help astronomers better understand the processes involved in the formation and evolution of large spiral galaxies like ours, according to the team, which includes UCLA research astronomer Michael Rich and colleagues from Europe and Australia.(more…)
Astronomers detected the faint signature of small, dim red dwarf stars in nearby galaxies (right), and found they are much more numerous than in our own Milky Way (left). Image credit: Patrick Lynch/Yale University
Astronomers have discovered that small, dim stars known as red dwarfs are much more prolific than previously thought — so much so that the total number of stars in the universe is likely three times bigger than previously believed.
Because red dwarfs are relatively small and dim compared to stars like our Sun, astronomers hadn’t been able to detect them in galaxies other than our own Milky Way and its nearest neighbors before now. Therefore, they did not know how much of the total stellar population of the universe is made up of red dwarfs.
Now astronomers have used powerful instruments on the Keck Observatory in Hawaii to detect the faint signature of red dwarfs in eight massive, relatively nearby galaxies called elliptical galaxies, which are located between about 50 million and 300 million light years away. They discovered that the red dwarfs, which are only between 10% and 20% as massive as the Sun, were much more bountiful than expected. (more…)
NSF enabled the assembly of an international, interdisciplinary team that was the first to quantitatively document body size patterns over the past 100 million years
Researchers have demonstrated that the extinction of dinosaurs some 65 million years ago paved the way for mammals to get bigger, about a thousand times larger than they had been when dinosaurs roamed the earth. The study, released in the journal Science, is the first to quantitatively document the patterns of body size of mammals after the existence of dinosaurs.(more…)
