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An 'akiapōlāʻau, a small yellow Hawaiian bird with a long curved upper bill, on a branchScience
2 min

Hawaii's 'akiapōlāʻau drills wood from its ankles up, not with its neck like woodpeckers

A Field Museum-affiliated study of museum specimens found a large ankle tendon that lets the endangered bird hammer with its whole body.

Pink Himalayan balsam flowers, one of the invasive plants the dogs were trained to findScience
2 min

Only 12 of 31 volunteer dog teams reached UFZ's invasive plant field test

Owners trained pet dogs to sniff out three invasive plants. The 12 teams that made it to the field found 74.7% of targets on average.

Illustration of a calm bedroom at dusk with an empty armchair beside a bedSociety
2 min

UN's dying places classification: 11.5% of deaths in 35 countries had no clear place

A Coimbra-built standard now gives countries one way to record where people die, including vehicles and outdoors, and where they wanted to.

Illustration of an abstract fractal with interwoven blue and orange regionsAI
2 min

One-bit change sent an image network's training elsewhere in 48% of cases, Sydney finds

Two University of Sydney physicists say training outcomes sit on fractal 'riddled basins', so extra precision barely helps reproducibility.

Illustration of an antenna mast on a rooftop at night with radio rings spreading over a cityTech
3 min

KAIST's Devilray rebuilt 2,592 fake cell tower setups, and 7 detectors each missed 192+

A KAIST team modeled fake base stations on a commercial surveillance unit, then tested seven public detectors. Every one had blind spots.

Illustration of a small silent satellite drifting above the Earth's horizonTech
2 min

NASA and Starfish Space write off Otter after a fault protection issue left its radio off

The SSPICY debris inspection spacecraft lost contact during commissioning; NASA says a fault protection issue keeps its radio turned off.

Illustration of glowing marbles swapping places along a long tableAI
3 min

Ai2's StateBench: frontier models fall to 13% or less when long texts swap variables

Ai2's state-tracking benchmark found top models fail on swaps in long inputs, while small recurrent models trained on it stayed near perfect.

Tapeats Sandstone layers resting on darker Vishnu Schist in the Grand Canyon, seen from Hopi PointScience
3 min

Great Unconformity model: mantle currents lifted continents, then glaciers did the erasing

A Nature study from Wollongong says mantle-driven uplift and later sinking explain the gap of up to a billion years in Earth's rock record.

Illustration of small fruit flies clustered on a piece of ripe fruitScience
2 min

Drosophila erecta males won't court without the smell of food, a Nature study finds

Rockefeller researchers found a fruit fly species whose males stay idle around females until a food scent appears, then court as a crowd.

An instrumented hammer resting on an aluminum test structure with a faint wave pattern above itTech
2 min

NASA's NESC says a messy hammer-tap pulse is no reason to throw out a vibration test

A new NASA engineering bulletin argues the clean half-sine pulse engineers look for has its own blind spots, and the measured force is what counts.

An older adult practising a sideways roll onto a soft mat with an instructor kneeling nearbySociety
2 min

Adelaide's judo falling course for aged care staff lifted their own safe-falling skills 89%

The two-day course trained aged care staff and judo coaches to teach older people how to fall. The trainers improved fast; seniors' results are not reported yet.

Two glowing virtual hands near a rough stone and a smooth sphere, one hand outline jaggedTech
2 min

KAIST's VR hand outline shows roughness to users without haptics; pairs sorted 23% faster

When one VR partner feels textures through fingertip vibration and the other does not, a changing hand outline closed the gap in a 48-person study.