New study identifies Neanderthal ancestry in African populations and describes its origin

When the first Neanderthal genome was sequenced, using DNA collected from ancient bones, it was accompanied by the discovery that modern humans in Asia, Europe and America inherited approximately 2% of their DNA from Neanderthals – proving humans and Neanderthals had interbred after humans left Africa. Since that study, new methods have continued to catalogue … Read more

Novel memristor-enabled computation in memory architecture could revolutionize artificial-intelligence hardware

Artificial intelligence (AI) is revived these years because of the development of deep learning algorithms, which perform excellently in computer vision tasks (e.g. image recognition, detection) and nature language processing (e.g. machine translation, text generation). This is promising to revolutionize our society to enter an intelligent era. However, the fundamental computing hardware still face severe … Read more

Bionic jellyfish swim faster and more efficiently

Engineers at Caltech and Stanford University have developed a tiny prosthetic that enables jellyfish to swim faster and more efficiently than they normally do, without stressing the animals. The researchers behind the project envision a future in which jellyfish equipped with sensors could be directed to explore and record information about the ocean. Jellyfish use … Read more

The ‘firewalkers’ of Karoo: Dinosaurs and other animals left tracks in a ‘land of fire’

In southern Africa, dinosaurs and synapsids, a group of animals that includes mammals and their closest fossil relatives, survived in a “land of fire” at the start of an Early Jurassic mass extinction, according to a study published January 29, 2020 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Emese M. Bordy of the University of Cape Town … Read more

Early North Americans may have been more diverse than previously suspected

Ancient skulls from the cave systems at Tulum, Mexico suggest that the earliest populations of North America may have already had a high level of morphological diversity, according to a study published January 29, 2020 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Mark Hubbe from Ohio State University, USA, Alejandro Terrazas Mata from Universidad Nacional … Read more

Color-changing bandages sense and treat bacterial infections

According to the World Health Organization, antibiotic resistance is one of the biggest threats to global health. Sensing and treating bacterial infections earlier could help improve patients’ recovery, as well curb the spread of antibiotic-resistant microbes. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Central Science have developed color-changing bandages that can sense drug-resistant and drug-sensitive bacteria in wounds and … Read more

UBC research shows more needs to be done to alleviate user concerns about privacy and security

Surveys show that consumers are worried that smart speakers are eavesdropping on their conversations and day-to-day lives. Now University of British Columbia researchers have found that people are also concerned about something else: friends, family and others who may have access to these devices. The team spoke to 26 Canadian adults who used shared smart … Read more