Open-access, peer-reviewed scientific journal published by the Royal Society, covering research across the natural sciences, engineering, and mathematics.
Researchers testing 118 people found guesses about strangers' tastes were more accurate when the strangers differed more from the guesser. Participants still started from their own ratings, and Phys.org calls the result surprising.
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Cassius Morrison's team used CT scans of a 1924 museum braincase to name Invictibellatrix amberina, a possible first megaraptoran for Europe. It rests on one partial skull, so the European first depends on how that skull is classified.
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Paul Burke's team used CT scans to name Herugavialis cairensis, a new gavial, from Egyptian fossils filed as Tomistoma since the 1920s. The reread adds a species to the Mediterranean's fossil crocodile record, which the authors tie to past changes in climate and sea level.
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Durham psychologists who digitally lowered the voices of 17 filmed men found raters judged them stronger and more dominant but no more attractive. The authors take that as evidence that deep male voices evolved more to intimidate rivals than to win mates.
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Technical University of Munich ecologists found male pigeons raised their incubation share from 17% to 22% as food-short females fell from 81% to 75%. The eggs stayed covered almost as fully, so city feeding bans left incubation running.
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Male green swordtails in a University of Exeter experiment bred on-screen females more than 24% larger over nine generations of virtual mate choice. The method lets a two-screen test range over far more possible mates, on evidence from 23 fish watching video.
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UCL researchers tracked 90 skilled adult readers and found Bionic Reading's bolded word starts moved their eyes but did not make them read faster. That leaves the speed claim unsupported for fluent adults, while readers with dyslexia and long-term use fell outside the test.
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Alain Goriely worked through the refinements one at a time and found that either nobody has demonstrated the illusion or the effect is too small to see, and the earliest claim of intent postdates the temple by 400 years.
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Alain Goriely sets the stylobate's six-centimetre rise beside published curve-detection thresholds. Up close, he argues, the platform looks curved; at the distances where a sag would matter, the eye cannot see the curve at all.
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Some elite track cyclists cross the start line already moving, and a Royal Society Open Science model finds the speed comes from a timed body movement inside the few centimetres the starting gate allows.
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The lesion stops short of the marrow cavity, and that is what sends the Spanish team's diagnosis outward into soft tissue rather than inward to a fracture or a tumour, though the bacteria themselves are inferred from modern ulcers.
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A KU Leuven and Valladolid team gave 18 commercial colonies a choice of robotic flowers, and only the ones exposed to a larva-killing fungus learned to prefer the antimicrobial nectar, though the study did not measure whether that preference actually helps the colony.
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Pre-bunking has strong evidence behind it, though the cost of producing it has been prohibitive. The Caltech-led team's fix is to spend the human expertise once. The trial measured stated belief, leaving open how the pre-bunk affects forwarding behavior.
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Six years of one-second GPS data on 92 young golden eagles found that no measure of flight skill predicted when a bird left home. Competence arrives early; departure waits on something else.
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