The archipelago is around 80 km wide and has a total area of approximately 1400 sq km. The official language of the Faroe Islands is Faroese, a Nordic language that derives from the language of the Norsemen who settled on the islands over 1000 years ago. The islands have a population of around 50 000 inhabitants – as well as 70 000 sheep. Around 40% of the population resides in the capital and largest city of the Faroe Islands, Tórshavn, visible on the island of Streymoy, slightly above the center of the image....

“For a long time, people wondered about the culture behind these very important statues,” says Field Museum scientist Laure Dussubieux, one of the study’s authors. “This study shows how people were interacting, it’s helping to revise the theory.” “The idea of competition and collapse on Easter Island might be overstated,” says lead author Dale Simpson, Jr., an archaeologist from the University of Queensland. “To me, the stone carving industry is solid evidence that there was cooperation among families and craft groups....

Scientific journals are expected to consider research manuscripts dispassionately and without favor. But in a study published on November 23rd, 2021, in the open access journal PLOS Biology, Alexandre Scanff, Florian Naudet and Clara Locher from the University of Rennes, and colleagues, reveal that a subset of journals may be exercising considerable bias and favoritism. To identify journals that are suspected of favoritism, the authors explored nearly 5 million articles published between 2015 and 2019 in a sample of 5,468 of biomedical journals indexed in the National Library of Medicine....

A team of engineers from the National University of Singapore (NUS) recently discovered that a naturally occurring bacterium, Thermoanaerobacterium thermosaccharolyticum TG57, isolated from waste generated after harvesting mushrooms, is capable of directly converting cellulose, a plant-based material, to biobutanol. A research team led by Associate Professor He Jianzhong from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at NUS Faculty of Engineering first discovered the novel TG57 strain in 2015. They went on to culture the strain to examine its properties....

A fresh look at data collected by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft during its 2001 flyby of Jupiter shows that Europa’s tenuous atmosphere is even thinner than previously thought and also suggests that the thin, hot gas around the moon does not show evidence of plume activity occurring at the time of the flyby. The new research provides a snapshot of Europa’s state of activity at that time, and suggests that if there is plume activity, it is likely intermittent....

Complementarity relation of wave-particle duality is analyzed quantitatively with entangled photons as path detectors. The twenty-first century has undoubtedly been the era of quantum science. Quantum mechanics was born in the early twentieth century and has been used to develop unprecedented technologies which include quantum information, quantum communication, quantum metrology, quantum imaging, and quantum sensing. However, in quantum science, there are still unresolved and even inapprehensible issues like wave-particle duality and complementarity, superposition of wave functions, wave function collapse after quantum measurement, wave function entanglement of the composite wave function, etc....

Experiments in a chamber under Martian-like conditions in a University of Oregon lab suggest that small sparks may be triggered by friction under normal atmospheric conditions. Friction caused by dry Martian dust particles making contact with each other may produce electrical discharge at the surface and in the planet’s atmosphere, according University of Oregon researchers. However, such sparks are likely to be small and pose little danger to future robotic or human missions to the red planet, they report in a paper published in the journal Icarus....

COVID-19. We’ve been living with it for what sometimes seems like forever. Given the number of deaths that have occurred from the disease, it’s perhaps not surprising that some consumers are turning to drugs not approved or authorized by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). One of the FDA’s jobs is to carefully evaluate the scientific data on a drug to be sure that it is both safe and effective for a particular use....

After having put young adults with normal vision through a battery of tests, scientists were able to conclude that females are better at discriminating among colors, while males excel at tracking fast-moving objects and discerning detail from a distance. These evolutionary adaptations might be linked to the hunter-gatherer past of humans. The scientists published their findings in the journal Biology of Sex Differences. Israel Abramov, lead author and psychologist at Brooklyn College, performed the color experiments, finding that men and women tend to ascribe different shades to the same objects....

The scientists published their findings in the journal Nature. This behavior is part of Desulfobulbus‘ respiration and ingestion process. It was thought to be impossible to move electrons over such enormous biological distances. Scientists had previously discovered inexplicable electric currents along the sea floor. In new experiments, it was revealed that these currents are mediated by multicellular bacteria that act as living power cables. It was surprising to find out that this process was occurring inside a single organism....

Astrophysicists from the University of Bath have developed a new method for pinpointing the whereabouts of extremely rare extragalactic objects. They hope their technique for finding ‘changing-look quasars’ will take scientists one step closer to unraveling one of greatest mysteries of the universe – how supermassive black holes grow. Quasars are believed to be responsible for regulating the growth of supermassive black holes and their host galaxies. A quasar is a region of spectacular luminosity at the center of a galaxy, powered by a supermassive black hole – the largest type of black hole, with a mass that exceeds that of our sun by millions or billions....

The smallest of newly found fossils can upend what paleontologists know about our history. A team of paleontologists from Virginia Tech and the U.S. Petrified Forest National Park, among others, have discovered the first “unmistakable” Triassic-era caecilian fossil — the oldest-known caecilian fossils — thus extending the record of this small, burrowing mammal by roughly 35 million years. The find also fills a gap of at least 87 million years in the known historical fossil record of the amphibian-like creature....

It is long known that an immune response can bias the competitive outcome of competing pathogens as it may affect one pathogen more than the other. Professor Sylvia Cremer and her team at the Institute of Science and Technology (IST Austria) could now provide first evidence that it is not only the immune system of the host individual which shapes the competitive outcome of coinfecting pathogens within the insect body, but that the social context can have a similar effect....

Researchers offer first proof that Ultraviolet C light with a 222 nm wavelength — which is safer to use around humans — effectively kills the SARS-CoV-2 virus. A study conducted by Hiroshima University researchers found that using Ultraviolet C light with a wavelength of 222 nanometers which is safer to use around humans effectively kills SARS-CoV-2 — the first research in the world to prove its efficacy against the virus that causes COVID-19....

Archaeological evidence has previously pointed to the Zagros Mountains of western Iran as providing the earliest evidence of goat management by humans. Here at the site of Ganj Dareh, the bone remains indicate deliberate slaughtering of male goats once they were fully grown. In contrast, female goats were allowed to reach older ages, meaning early goat-keepers maximized the number of breeding female animals, similar to herders in the area today....

NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter continues to set records, flying faster and farther on Sunday, April 25, 2021 than in any tests it went through on Earth. The helicopter took off at 4:31 a.m. EDT (1:31 a.m. PDT) , or 12:33 p.m. local Mars time, rising 16 feet (5 meters) – the same altitude as its second flight. Then it zipped downrange 164 feet (50 meters), just over half the length of a football field, reaching a top speed of 6....

The study, which was recently published in the journal Nature Communications, was led by Duygu Kuzum, a researcher in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at UC San Diego. Collaborators include researchers from Anna Devor’s lab at Boston University, Alysson R. Muotri’s lab at UC San Diego, and Fred H. Gage’s lab at the Salk Institute. Human cortical organoids are derived from human induced pluripotent stem cells, which are usually derived themselves from skin cells....

Their findings open up new avenues for research into the atomic-scale manipulation of materials important to the future, ranging from quantum computing to consumer electronics. “Rare earth elements are vital for high-technological applications including cell phones, HDTVs, and more. This is the first-time formation of rare-earth complexes with positive and negative charges on a metal surface and also the first-time demonstration of atomic-level control over their rotation,” said team lead Saw-Wai Hla, who has dual appointments as a scientist at Argonne and professor of physics and astronomy in the College of Arts and Sciences at Ohio University....

“Gravitational waves are vibrations in space-time, the material from which the universe is made”, explains Pedro Luis Luque, co-author of the article and head of the UJA group. In this sense, he insists that “when these waves are caused by the fusion of black holes that are too far away from each other, we are not able to distinguish them individually, and they form a kind of gravitational wave background noise that joins the one caused by the Big Bang itself, so that their detection would allow us to obtain information from both the first instants of creation and the formation and nature of black holes....

The scientists published their findings in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology. In the 15th century, Mexico was made up of warring city-states with different cultural identities. In 1428, several of these city-states joined together to form the Triple Alliance, which eventually become the Aztec empire. Xaltocan was located in central Mexico and was among the cities assimilated, but the exact details of what happened are unknown. Documents hint that the city was abandoned by the Otomí in 1395 following a military clash and was repopulated by the Aztecs in 1435....