Inverting the seminar to recover what scientific papers leave out

online
Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain

A scientific paper reads as a clean progression from question to result. And yet, research almost never happens that way. Experiments fail, conversations redirect projects, and none of it survives into print. When the founders of a field retire, their tacit knowledge goes with them, and nothing records that it existed.

Spain safari park animals grazed calmly amid 'terror' of fire

There are about 2,000 animals at the park
There are about 2,000 animals at the park.

The bison carried on grazing peacefully as the flames approached, imperturbable despite the fires ravaging the land around their wildlife park west of Madrid.

Turkey battles wind-fueled wildfires on tourist coasts

A volunteer rests amid operations to tackle a wildfire in Fethiye, southwest Turkey
A volunteer rests amid operations to tackle a wildfire in Fethiye, southwest Turkey.

Hundreds of Turkish firefighters battled Thursday to contain wind-fueled wildfires spreading near key tourist regions on the country's Mediterranean coast.

This new alloy is up to 10 times stronger than steel and surprisingly flexible

Materials scientists can now reshape the internal structure of certain alloys at extremely small scales, allowing them to enhance properties such as strength, durability, and flexibility. One especially promising group of materials is known as intermetallics.

Listening to songbird dreams for clues to how sleeping brains learn

zebra finch
Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

Entering and manipulating dreams may sound like science fiction, but for Freeman Hrabowski Scholar Walter Gonzalez, these scenarios aren't confined to the big screen.

Ancient DNA reveals Ice Age humans targeted female woolly mammoths

Ancient DNA reveals Ice Age humans preferred female mammoths
Excavation in Langmannersdorf 2025. Credit: Marc Händel/Austrian Academy of Sciences

Analyzing ancient DNA from more than 500 mammoth bones, an international team of researchers found that Ice Age humans selectively targeted female woolly mammoths. The results of the study, published in Current Biology, show that, in contrast to the sex ratio among naturally occurring woolly mammoth remains, large bone accumulations associated with ancient human activity are dominated by females.

Learning more about Australia's remote Northwest reefs with Indigenous rangers

Learning more about Australia's remote Northwest reefs with Indigenous rangers
Riley (left) and Richard (right) worked with AIMS scientists and technicians to prepare equipment for surveys. Credit: Chris Teasdale

Offshore Northwest reefs Rankin Bank and Glomar Shoal are remote and little known, but Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) researchers are using technology and people power to help us understand them better.

Little red dots may mark temporary black hole phase

Webb explores family tree of newly discovered distant objects
Scientists synthetically shifted the Saguaro, a lower-redshift spiral galaxy, to a higher redshift to find out how it would appear if it was in the early universe. Its compact red appearance suggests that little red dots are a phase of highly active supermassive black holes. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, Pierluigi Rinaldi (Steward Observatory); Image Processing: Alyssa Pagan (STScI); Illustration: Leah Hustak (STScI)

Since their discovery by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope in 2022, little red dots (LRDs) have been the subject of great interest to astronomers. Understanding the nature of these extremely distant, compact red sources has been a puzzling scientific endeavor.

Gold-MXene catalyst converts nitrate to ammonia using sunlight and 1.5 volts

Turning Nitrate into Ammonia with Sunlight and Gold
Light strikes the material, and the energy is transferred to gold particles, where ammonia is produced. Credit: TU Wien

Researchers find factors that cause respiratory impacts after flooding

Researchers find factors that cause respiratory impacts after flooding
Hurricane Ian as seen from NOAA’s GOES-East satellite in September 2022. Credit: NOAA

Researchers at the FAMU-FSU College of Engineering and Florida State University's Resilient Infrastructure and Disaster Response Center have identified how hurricane flooding can affect health long after a storm. In research published in the Journal of Cleaner Production, the researchers identified the factors most likely to create hazardous respiratory conditions inside homes after flooding.