Science

[:es]North America’s birds are disappearing from the skies at a rate that’s shocking even to ornithologists. Since the 1970s, the continent has lost 3 billion birds, nearly 30% of the total, and even common birds such as sparrows and blackbirds are in decline, U.S. and Canadian researchers report this week online in Science. “It’s staggering,”…

[:es]Physicists have set a new limit on the mass of nature’s lightest particle of matter. The neutrino can weigh no more than 1.1 electron volts (eV)—less than one-500,000th the mass of an electron—say experimenters with the Karlsruhe Tritium Neutrino (KATRIN) experiment at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany. Reported on 13 September at a…

[:es]Solar panels are great for powering devices during the day. But they don’t work after the sun goes down. Now, a new technology that takes advantage of the cold darkness of space may do the trick.[:]

[:es]Forget the legendary lost continent of Atlantis. Geologists have reconstructed, time slice by time slice, a nearly quarter-of-a-billion-year-long history of a vanished landmass that now lies submerged, not beneath an ocean somewhere, but largely below southern Europe.[:]

[:es]In the thousands of years we’ve lived with dogs, we’ve transformed them from fearsome wolves to fluffy, tail-wagging Frisbee catchers that range in size from tiny pomeranians to towering great Danes. Now, a new study of dogs’ brain scans suggests our impact on our canine pals has been even more profound: We’ve changed the very…

[:es]When we think of how humans have altered the planet, greenhouse gas warming, industrial pollution, and nuclear fallout usually spring to mind. But now, a new study invites us to think much further back in time. Humans have been altering landscapes planetwide for thousands of years: since at least 1000 B.C.E., by which time people…

[:es]If Gao Caixia were a farmer, she might be spread a little thin. Down the hall from her office at a branch of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) here in Beijing, seeds from a strain of unusually soft rice and a variety of wheat with especially fat grains and resistance to a common fungus…

[:es]In the past 2000 years, Earth has drifted in and out of extended periods of warmer- and cooler-than-normal climate, including the so-called Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age. Scientists long thought that during these hot and cold spells, temperatures rose and fell in sync across the globe. In fact, Earth warmed and cooled…

[:es]Dark matter, the mysterious substance that makes up most of the mass of the universe, has proved notoriously hard to detect. But scientists have now proposed a surprising new sensor: human flesh.[:]