Science

Unlike modern crocodiles, which mostly lurk in rivers and swamps, mekosuchines were an extraordinarily diverse and adaptable group. They filled ecological roles unlike any reptiles alive today. Some species were small and land-dwelling, while others may have hunted in forests rather than waterways.

UNSW paleontologist Professor Michael Archer describes them with a kind of gleeful disbelief. “It’s a bizarre idea,” he says, “but some of them appear to have been terrestrial hunters in the forests.”

Even more astonishing are the “drop crocs”—semi-arboreal species that, according to fossil evidence, may have climbed trees and leapt down on unsuspecting prey below. Archer likens them to reptilian leopards. “They were perhaps hunting like big cats—dropping out of trees on any unsuspecting thing they fancied for dinner,” he says.

Such behavior challenges our assumptions about crocodiles, painting a picture of ancient ecosystems filled with agile, cunning predators unlike anything in Australia today.

Via BBC news

Illustration from Science News

cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/41671286

Archived version

The European Commission is preparing to block Chinese institutions from significant portions of its €95.5 billion ($110 billion) Horizon Europe research program, citing intellectual property risks and links between Chinese universities and Beijing's military.

A draft document for the Horizon Europe "main" work program for 2026/2027 proposes excluding Chinese entities from three of the six research areas: civil security and society; health; and digital, industry and space technologies.

The proposals have not yet been adopted or endorsed by the European Commission, although they are clearly being considered.

The restrictions respond to lack of progress on an EU-China cooperation roadmap established at the 2019 Innovation Cooperation Dialogue. The Commission points to persistent concerns about protecting trade secrets and potential transfer of knowledge to China's military, which it says are "supported rather than deterred" by Beijing's policies.

"In view of the persistent lack of progress in the discussions on the Roadmap and the substantive concerns in relation to the undesired transfer of IP to China supported by both legislative and policy initiatives, cooperation involving entities established in China needs to be calibrated accordingly," it states.

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Just outside my door, using a cell phone. The sky was very subtly reddish, but hard to tell. Using the phone it immediately popped out.

Edit: not Aurora, CO, but an Aurora visible in Colorado.

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China’s leadership is moving further away from its promises, despite Xi [Jinping]’s claims of ostensible progress, asserting that Chinese women are now “participating in the entire process of national and social governance with unprecedented confidence and vigor,” and positioning them as “protagonists.” The clearest testament to this regression lies in Xi’s addresses to the All-China Women’s Federation (ACWF) – the official state women’s organization under the Communist Party – in 2013, 2018, and 2023. Across these speeches, Xi consistently advanced patriarchal narratives that cast women primarily as caretakers and moral anchors within the family. Yet his 2023 address marked a further step, urging the cultivation of “a new type of marriage and parenting culture” and the promotion of childbirth, effectively marginalizing women’s professional work and silencing their agency beyond domestic and reproductive roles.

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Women in STEM are celebrated as symbols of national progress [in China], yet this recognition often amounts to ideological instrumentalization. They are valued primarily as a labor force to drive national development goals and to project an image of modernity, progress, and national strength, rather than as fully empowered agents in their own right. Simultaneously, this exists in stark tension with the state’s enduring patriarchal and pro-natalist policies, driven by demographic concerns, which continue to frame women primarily as reproducers and custodians of family life.

This paradox is also exposed by the data which reveals that beneath the state’s celebration of women’s purported achievements in science and technology lies a persistent pattern of underrepresentation, pay disparities, and barriers that limit advancement. Official figures show that nearly 40 million women are employed in science and technology, making up 45.8 percent of China’s STEM workforce. Yet fewer than three million work in research and development.

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In 2022–23, women accounted for 63 percent of all new university entrants, but in elite institutions and STEM-focused majors, male dominance quickly reasserts itself. At the prestigious C9 universities (China’s top tier), female undergraduates make up only 37.7 percent, well below the national average. Disciplinary divides are even starker: physics departments in some universities record male-to-female ratios of 19:1, while women comprise only 25–30 percent of students in computer science and electronic engineering.

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Women also face systemic disadvantages in funding and visibility. They are underrepresented on peer review panels and high-level selection committees, reducing their chances of securing grants. Although women make up roughly half of university instructors, they occupy only one-third of master’s advisor roles and fewer than 17 percent of doctoral advisor positions. Pay disparities are substantial: across sectors and education levels, women earn on average only 71.6 percent of what men do. In high-prestige publishing, the imbalance is also stark: in 2023, only five of 101 corresponding authors with Chinese affiliations in “Nature” were women, highlighting their scarcity in global scientific leadership.

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Yet the challenges women face in STEM are not isolated – they reflect a longer history of gendered constraints and feminist activism in China. As early as the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Western feminism, rooted in liberal ideals of individual rights and autonomy, sought to affirm women as rational citizens entitled to legal and political recognition. Chinese feminism, by contrast, emerged in the context of national modernization and liberation from feudalism and imperialism. Following 1949, Mao Zedong’s famous dictum that “women hold up half the sky” reframed empowerment as a collective contribution to socialist nation-building rather than a pursuit of individual rights.

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Researchers used an AI based on GPT architecture to map the brain, and they found it's way more complex than we thought. Instead of the ~52 broad regions we've been working with, the AI identified about 1,300 distinct areas.

They trained a model called Cell Transformer on mouse brain scans. Instead of learning language, it learned the "grammar" of how brain cells are organized relative to their neighbors. It then automatically drew the borders between brain regions with high precision, revealing hidden neighborhoods we never knew existed.

With a map this detailed, researchers can now pinpoint the tiny, specific cellular areas involved in conditions like Alzheimer's and depression. Having such a detailed map could massively speed up research and lead to much more targeted and effective treatments in the future.

Big Crunch, here we come! A new study is implying that the universe may actually be slowing down and that the culmination of the decrease in dark energy could spell a reverse big bang.

Archived version

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40% [of the investigated publications] were found to contain images with something wrong with them, as they describe in the latest edition of biology journal PLoS Biology. The erroneous images even appeared in top journals like Stroke.

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Some of the problematic cases they discovered involved malicious intent, [the researchers] believe. The scale of the problems is too great for any other explanation, they also write in their article. [One researcher]: ‘Some authors had dozens of publications to their name with erroneous images.’ Wever adds: ‘Images that appeared multiple times were sometimes rotated, mirrored or otherwise edited.’ In other words, there is no way that happened by accident. Meanwhile, these issues being brought to light only led to a warning label (an expression of concern) or withdrawal of the article in one tenth of cases.

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The findings of the Radboudumc researchers are not unique. The number of scientific articles that turn out to be partially or entirely fabricated is growing. This is partly because companies in countries such as Iran and China use this as a commercial model, the so-called paper mills. They write articles to order or sell authorships, for example via Telegram.

It is unclear whether the 243 problematic studies from the Nijmegen analysis are also products of paper mills. However, it is striking that five sixths of them came from China. Aquarius and Wever did not come across any problematic Dutch publications. One possible explanation put forward by the Nijmegen researchers in their PLoS article is that in China, researchers are under pressure to increase their research output to move up in international university rankings. And in a survey among hospital researchers in south-west China last year half indicated that they sometimes falsified research data.

'The first question you should ask about a publication is whether the study actually took place,' the researchers say.

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https://archive.li/WB5AE

Electrons inside solid materials behave in a surprisingly similar way. When they gain extra energy (for instance, when the material is struck by other electrons), they can sometimes break free from the solid. This process has been known for decades and forms the basis of many technologies. However, until recently, scientists had been unable to calculate it with precision. Researchers from several groups at TU Wien have now found the solution. Just as the frog must find the right opening, an electron also needs to locate a specific "exit," known as a "doorway state."

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The key discovery is that energy alone cannot determine whether an electron escapes. There are quantum states above the energy threshold that still fail to lead out of the material, a fact missing from earlier models. "From an energetic point of view, the electron is no longer bound to the solid. It has the energy of a free electron, yet it still remains spatially located where the solid is," says Richard Wilhelm. The electron behaves like the frog that jumps high enough but fails to find the exit.

"The electrons must occupy very specific states -- so-called doorway states," explains Prof. Florian Libisch from the Institute for Theoretical Physics. "These states couple strongly to those that actually lead out of the solid. Not every state with sufficient energy is such a doorway state -- only those that represent an 'open door' to the outside."

Using social media as an example, universities have a strong interest in promoting the work being done at their campuses far and wide. This is where traditional platforms fall short: algorithms typically prioritizing paid content, downrank off-site links, and prioritize sensational claims to drive engagement. When users are free from enshittification and can themselves control the platform’s algorithms, as they can on platforms like Bluesky, scientists get more engagement and find interactions are more useful.

Institutions play a pivotal role in encouraging the adoption of these alternatives, ranging from leveraging existing IT support to assist with account use and verification, all the way to shouldering some of the hosting with Mastodon instances and/or Bluesky PDS for official accounts. This support is good for the research, good for the university, and makes our systems of science more resilient to attacks on science and the instability of digital monocultures.

This subtle influence of intermediaries can also appear in other tools relied on by researchers, while there are a number of open alternatives and interoperable tools developed for everything from citation management, data hosting to online chat among collaborators. Individual scholars and research teams can implement these tools today, but real change depends on institutions investing in tech that puts community before shareholders.

Paywall Bypass Link https://archive.is/CHGfz

Another Astrum, another banger.

What to you think? Could we find another Earth-like planet within our lifetime? Or any life later at all? Maybe with in a far-off exoplanet or even within the Sol System (out solar system)? Well, we can only hope. I certainly have a feeling that we may.