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Tracking 56 barred owls in northwestern California, researchers found each bird claiming large territories in the tallest, oldest forest, with nearly two-thirds of an average home range overlapping spotted owl habitat. Removing resident owls reopened habitat, but only where control is sustained.
A study of nearly 16,000 children finds that sensory over-responsivity tracks tightly with anxiety and autism, not ADHD, and traces to a weakened link between a memory network and the caudate nucleus.
Engineers built a coiled fabric gripper driven by just two puffs of air, letting it pinch a hair, unscrew a cap through 690 degrees, and reach into a 35 mm slit. Its spring broke past 7000 cycles.
A record breaking JWST observation has turned up a black hole cocooned in gas the size of the solar system, shining 100 billion times brighter than any star could burn. The object may explain the universe’s puzzling little red dots and reveal how the earliest supermassive black holes grew fast.
In mice lacking an autism-linked gene, inhibitory neurons in the hippocampus no longer remodeled themselves after social experience. Boosting a single plasticity gene in those cells, in adult animals, rebalanced the circuit, improved memory, sharpened brain rhythms, and cut seizures from ten of fourteen mice to three of twelve.
MEIS2 is a developmental transcription factor that helps cells choose their identities, shaping the brain, retina, heart, and craniofacial structures. Research is revealing how this conserved gene influences neurogenesis, human developmental disorders, and emerging areas of cancer biology.
Northwestern researchers scanned thousands of federal grant proposals for signs of chatbot writing. Moving from light to heavy AI involvement came with a four-point rise in the chance of NIH funding. It also came with ideas that were closer to what the agency had recently funded. At NSF, neither pattern appeared.
A study of 58,425 adolescents across 21 countries found that unstructured free time, especially unsupervised hours outside the home, was strongly associated with self-reported offending even after accounting for self-control, parenting and morality. Only having delinquent friends showed a stronger overall association.
Gaia observations of 110 Milky Way star clusters challenge the assumption that stars everywhere are born in the same proportions. A telltale bend in their stellar mass distributions varies with cluster age, evidence that the stellar initial mass function depends on the conditions in which stars form.
In living mice, astrocytes around small brain lesions divided and sent new nuclei through their own branches to refill the emptied tissue. The nuclei moved in stop-and-go bursts, stretching as they squeezed through narrow processes. In comparable stroke lesions, the same refilling response was almost absent.
An MIT plasma physicist and a financial economist have built a ten-parameter test, modeled on fusion’s famous Lawson criterion, that asks the question the industry tends to dodge: can a fusion power plant bring in more money than it consumes?
Two studies published days apart test how well artificial intelligence explains human reading. Language models match the forward glide of our eyes but fail on rereading. A second model, trained to budget its attention like a person, gets much closer.