ScienceDaily: Strange Science News

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• NASA Voyager: 'Tsunami wave' still flies through interstellar space
• Cost of cloud brightening for cooler planet revealed
• Dental plaque reveals key plant in prehistoric Easter Island diet
• NASA's Fermi Mission brings deeper focus to thunderstorm gamma rays
• Reshaping the horse through millennia: Sequencing reveals genes selected by humans in domestication
• New algorithm a Christmas gift to 3-D printing, and the environment
• Far from powerless: Ant larvae cannibalize eggs, are influenced by relatedness, sex
• Virtual bodyswapping diminishes people's negative biases about others
• Linguistic methods uncover sophisticated meanings, monkey dialects
• Squid supplies blueprint for printable thermoplastics
• Do you speak cow? Researchers listen in on 'conversations' between calves and their mothers
• Show us how you play and it may tell us who you are
• Stretched-out solid exoplanets

NASA Voyager: 'Tsunami wave' still flies through interstellar space Posted: 15 Dec 2014 05:42 PM PST The Voyager 1 spacecraft has experienced three shock waves. The most recent shock wave, first observed in February 2014, still appears to be going on. One wave, previously reported, helped researchers determine that Voyager 1 had entered interstellar space.

Cost of cloud brightening for cooler planet revealed Posted: 15 Dec 2014 05:30 PM PST Scientists have identified the most energy-efficient way to make clouds more reflective to the sun in a bid to combat climate change. Marine Cloud Brightening is a reversible geoengineering method proposed to mitigate rising global temperatures. It relies on propelling a fine mist of salt particles high into the atmosphere to increase the albedo of clouds -- the amount of sunlight they reflect back into space.

Dental plaque reveals key plant in prehistoric Easter Island diet Posted: 15 Dec 2014 03:53 PM PST A student analyzing dental calculus from ancient teeth is helping resolve the question of what plant foods Easter Islanders relied on before European contact.

NASA's Fermi Mission brings deeper focus to thunderstorm gamma rays Posted: 15 Dec 2014 12:47 PM PST Each day, thunderstorms around the world produce about a thousand quick bursts of gamma rays, some of the highest-energy light naturally found on Earth. By merging records of events seen by NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope with data from ground-based radar and lightning detectors, scientists have completed the most detailed analysis to date of the types of thunderstorms involved.

Reshaping the horse through millennia: Sequencing reveals genes selected by humans in domestication Posted: 15 Dec 2014 12:46 PM PST Whole genome sequencing of modern and ancient horses unveils the genes that have been selected by humans in the process of domestication through the last 5,500 years, but also reveals the cost of this domestication. An international research group reports that a significant part of the genetic variation in modern domesticated horses could be attributed to interbreeding with the descendants of a now extinct population of wild horses. This population was distinct from the only surviving wild horse population.

New algorithm a Christmas gift to 3-D printing, and the environment Posted: 15 Dec 2014 11:09 AM PST A computer science professor reveals how to print a 3-D Christmas tree efficiently and with zero material waste, using the world's first algorithm for automatically decomposing a 3-D object into what are called pyramidal parts.

Far from powerless: Ant larvae cannibalize eggs, are influenced by relatedness, sex Posted: 15 Dec 2014 11:08 AM PST By exploring the evolutionary causes and consequences of selfish larvae behavior, a new study sheds new light on the evolutionary constraints of competition in social insect colonies, and demonstrates how in complex societies, even the youngest individuals are potential players in social conflict.

Virtual bodyswapping diminishes people's negative biases about others Posted: 15 Dec 2014 09:30 AM PST Researchers explain how they have used the brain's ability to bring together information from different senses to make white people feel that they were inhabiting black bodies and adults feel like they had children's bodies. The results of such virtual bodyswapping experiments are remarkable and have important implications for approaching phenomena such as race and gender discrimination.

Linguistic methods uncover sophisticated meanings, monkey dialects Posted: 15 Dec 2014 08:48 AM PST The same species of monkeys located in separate geographic regions use their alarm calls differently to warn of approaching predators, a linguistic analysis by a team of scientists reveals. The study reveals that monkey calls have a more sophisticated structure than was commonly thought.

Squid supplies blueprint for printable thermoplastics Posted: 15 Dec 2014 08:45 AM PST Squid, what is it good for? You can eat it and you can make ink or dye from it, and now a team of researchers is using it to make a thermoplastic that can be used in 3-D printing.

Do you speak cow? Researchers listen in on 'conversations' between calves and their mothers Posted: 15 Dec 2014 07:16 AM PST Researchers have been eavesdropping on 'conversations' between calves and their mothers — measuring the process of how cows communicate using detailed acoustic analysis for the first time.

Show us how you play and it may tell us who you are Posted: 15 Dec 2014 06:43 AM PST The way in which toys are handled and combined with one another during object play can tell use a lot about the cognitive underpinnings of the actors. An international team of scientists studied parrot species, as well as crow species, with the same set of toys and found out that the birds willingly brought objects into complex spatial relationships: behaviors that occur in only a few species of primates.

Stretched-out solid exoplanets Posted: 15 Dec 2014 05:44 AM PST Astronomers could soon be able to find rocky planets stretched out by the gravity of the stars they orbit. Since the first discovery in 1993, more than 1800 planets have been found in orbit around stars other than our Sun. These 'exoplanets' are incredibly diverse, with some gaseous like Jupiter and some mostly rocky like the Earth. The worlds also orbit their stars at very different distances, from less than a million km to nearly 100 billion km away.

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