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DNA tweaks let birds that eat nectar or fruit manage their metabolism and blood pressure The New Holland honeyeater is a nectar-sipping bird from Australia. It can thrive on its sickeningly sweet diet due to genetic adaptations, changing the way its body responds to sugar. Listen to this article This is a human-written story voiced by AI. Got feedback? Take our survey . (See our AI policy here .) To eat a sugar-filled diet, birds had to evolve some sweet genetic tricks. Birds that feed on nectar and fruits have important variants in genes that control metabolism, fat processing and even blood pressure. Findings published February 26 in Science show how different lineages of birds converged on similar genetic workarounds to let them live the high sugar life. Several groups of birds have evolved to eat these sickeningly sweet diets, including parrots, hummingbirds, honeyeaters and
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Earth’s first sponges were soft, skeleton-free pioneers—rewriting the origin story of animal life. The earliest sponges were soft-bodied creatures without the mineral skeletons seen in their modern relatives, which explains their missing early fossils. Credit: Shutterstock Sponges rank among the oldest known animals on Earth, yet scientists have struggled to pinpoint exactly when they first appeared. DNA from living sponges and chemical traces preserved in ancient rocks indicate they emerged at least 650 million years ago. The findings are reported in Science Advances. That early date has sparked debate because it predates the oldest confirmed sponge fossils by at least 100 million years. To resolve this long standing conflict, an international research team led by Dr. M. Eleonora Rossi of the University of Bristol's School of Biological Sciences took a closer look at how sponge skeletons evolved. The Fossil Record and the Missing Spicules Modern sponges contain skeletons made of countless microscopic, glass-like structures called spicules. These durable elements fos
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A DNA analysis traced the history of mosquitoes’ initial human bites A close look at mosquito DNA reveals when the insects switched from biting nonhuman primates to our early human ancestors. Mosquitoes have been biting people for more than a million years and probably much longer. An analysis of 38 modern mosquitoes’ DNA suggests an ancestral mosquito species developed a preference for feeding on early humans between 2.9 and 1.6 million years ago, researchers write February 26 in Scientific Reports. The team studied 11 mosquito species from the Anopheles leucosphyrus group, chosen because they gave a good overview of the entire group’s genetics. Some species were “anthropophilic” mosquitoes — human feeders — including Anopheles dirus and Anopheles baimaii, both of which spread malaria, while others fed only on nonhuman primates (mostly monkeys) or on both. The team used the genetic data to reconstruct the insects’ evolutionary history from the mutation rates in their genes. That let the researchers estimate when mosquitoes first bit
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A surprisingly mature barred spiral galaxy was already taking shape when the Universe was only 2 billion years old. An unsharp mask overlaid onto the F200W, F277W, and F356W filter composition. The white lines are logarithmic spirals fitted to points along the arm structures and a line segment fitted to the approximately North to South aligned bar structure. Credit: Daniel Ivanov, et. al. A research team led by Daniel Ivanov, a physics and astronomy graduate student in the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences at Pitt, has identified a strong candidate for one of the earliest known spiral galaxies with a stellar bar. These bright, elongated structures can strongly influence how galaxies grow and change over time. The Milky Way itself contains a stellar bar at its center. The newly studied galaxy, named COSMOS-74706, appears to have existed about 11.5 billion years ago. By analyzing its light, researchers were able to determine its place in cosmic history and narrow down when barred structures may have first formed in the universe. "This galaxy was
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Pouring 65,000 litres of sodium hydroxide into the Gulf of Maine removed up to 10 tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere without harming wildlife, according to the researchers behind an ocean alkalinity enhancement test Can we safely remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by counteracting ocean acidification? Maybe, suggests a trial in which ships poured 65,000 litres of alkaline sodium hydroxide into the Gulf of Maine off the East Coast of the US in August 2025. “We’re the first group to do a ship-based alkalinity enhancement experiment,” says Adam Subhas at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, whose team announced their initial findings at the Ocean Sciences Meeting in Glasgow, UK, on 25 February. “We can definitely say that there was additional CO2 uptake as a result of this experiment.” Between 2 and 10 tonnes
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MRIs show different brain activity patterns for kids with math learning disabilities When kids with math learning disabilities solve a math problem with number symbols, they approach and process it differently than typical kids. But differences disappear when numbers are shown as dots. Matt Chinworth Some kids struggle with math. Now, scientists have pinpointed some of the specific thinking processes and brain regions that might explain why math is a little harder for some than others. When given simple math problems, kids with math learning disabilities in a new study were less cautious about giving their answers and did not slow down after making errors compared with kids with typical math skills. But these differences disappeared when those same kids were given problems with dots to represent numbers instead of Arabic number symbols, researchers report February 9 in the Journal of Neuroscience. The idea that number symbols can be a challenge is not new. “There’s a very consistent observation that it’s the symbolic p
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The Moon wasn’t steadily magnetic — it had brief, explosive magnetic “heartbeats” that fooled scientists for decades. The Moon’s magnetic field was mostly weak — but occasionally flared to strengths even greater than Earth’s. Apollo samples exaggerated those powerful moments because astronauts unknowingly collected rocks from rare, titanium-rich hotspots. Credit: Shutterstock Scientists at the University of Oxford's Department of Earth Sciences have settled a decades long argument over the strength of the Moon's magnetic field. For years, researchers have questioned whether the Moon generated a powerful magnetic field or only a weak one during its early history (3.5 -- 4 billion years ago). A new study published February 26 in Nature Geoscience concludes that both views were partly right. By reexamining rock samples returned by the Apollo missions, the team found evidence that the Moon did experience periods of extremely strong magnetism, at times even surpassing Earth's. However, these intense phases were rare and brief. For most of its history, the Moon's magnetic f
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