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To capture images of birds, such as this yellow-rumped warbler (Setophaga coronata), flying at night, one research-team member detected the thermal signature of the bird and shone a torch at it. Another team member then took a snap with a digital camera. (Ross Gallardy/Macaulay Library)
Researchers have used thermal imaging technology to reveal and track the movements of bird species that travel at night. Some birds complete legs of their migrations at night because the air is cooler than during the day, and possibly to make it more difficult for predators to see them. But their nocturnal activities have long stumped ornithologists wanting to catalogue the birds’ movements. The ability to visualize night-flying birds could help reveal which species are most vulnerable to threats such as wind turbines and light pollution, says ecologist Felix Liechti.
Reference: Ornithology paper
Dozens of artificial-intelligence models designed to predict a person’s risk of stroke or diabetes are trained on dubious datasets. Researchers found that many such models used one of two open-access health datasets that provide little information about where the data come from, and contain multiple oddities that suggest the data could have been fabricated. At least two of these models have been used in hospitals in Indonesia and Spain, although it’s unclear whether this has led to any flawed diagnoses.
Nature | 7 min read Reference: medRxiv preprint (not peer reviewed)
The US National Science Foundation (NSF) has announced a record number — 2,599 — of prestigious Graduate Research Fellowship Program awards. The increase came as a surprise after the number of awards was cut in half last year, this year’s application window opened late and some submissions were rejected without peer review. Quantum science and AI — priorities of the administration of US President Donald Trump — were the big winners this year, but biological sciences also got an unexpected boost.
Features & opinion
Renewable energy sources are the best way to stymie the rising costs of fossil fuels driven by conflicts such as the ongoing war in Iran, argues climate economist Gernot Wagner. Abandoning fossil fuels could cause temporary ‘greenflation’ — price hikes for tech such as solar panels in the face of increased demand — but the solution is to accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels by producing more low-carbon technologies, Wagner writes. “Shifting to technologies that can only get cheaper and better over time is an investment in geopolitical and price stability.”
The disappearance of formal taxonomy training at undergraduate level could hobble the development of medical and agricultural artificial-intelligence systems that rely on biological data, argues systems biologist Chris Bivins. Without formal, scientifically meaningful classification for organisms such as fungi, of which only 10% have been described, they don’t appear in the literature on which large language models are trained. That could result in AI systems that can’t distinguish between organisms that are benign and dangerous to humans, with potentially harmful consequences in fields such as drug development, Bivins writes.
People who look at a mirror-like image of a childlike version of their own face can better recall early memories, write cognitive neuroscientists Jane Aspell and Utkarsh Gupta. People who saw their ‘younger face’ recalled significantly “richer, more vivid details” of childhood memories than those who viewed their unaltered appearance, say the researchers. The results suggest “that the bodily self isn’t just a backdrop but instead is foundational to how memories are encoded and organized in the brain”.
Scientific American | 8 min read
Reference: Scientific Reports paper
On Saturday, the beloved science-sidekick C. elegans was launched on its very own space mission in its very own space pod. The nematode worms are housed inside a miniature laboratory dubbed the Petri Pod, which will be mounted on the outside of the International Space Station to help understand the effects of deep-space journeys. It’s not the first time that the tiny worms have slipped the surly bonds of Earth: they’ve helped measure muscle loss over multiple generations on the Space Station and some even survived the tragic destruction of the Space Shuttle Columbia.
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