A 10,000-kilometre-long fibre-optic cable owned by Google that is at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean can be used to detect deep-sea seismic activity and ocean waves. Zhongwen Zhan at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California, and his colleagues, including researchers at Google, used traffic data from one of the tech giant’s optical fibres to measure changes in pressure and strain in the cable. Using this data, they could detect earthquakes and ocean waves called swells generated by storms. Over a nine-month period, the team recorded around 30 ocean storm swell events and around 20 earthquakes over magnitude…

Pufferfish are the only bony fish that can close their eyes, and now we know how they do it. They sink their eyeballs deep into their sockets and then pucker the skin surrounding the eye together, like a camera’s aperture closing. Also known as blowfish, pufferfish produce a blink-like response when researchers direct gentle jets of water towards their eyes. But instead of relying on eyelids that slide vertically or horizontally – blinking as we know it – their eyes close in a circular way towards the centre, says Keisuke Ogimoto at the Shimonoseki Marine Science Museum in Japan. The…

A 10,000-kilometre-long fibre-optic cable owned by Google that is at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean can be used to detect deep-sea seismic activity and ocean waves. Zhongwen Zhan at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California, and his colleagues, including researchers at Google, used traffic data from one of the tech giant’s optical fibres to measure changes in pressure and strain in the cable. Using this data, they could detect earthquakes and ocean waves called swells generated by storms. Over a nine-month period, the team recorded around 30 ocean storm swell events and around 20 earthquakes over magnitude…

Whales, dolphins and porpoises are much better at fighting cancer than we are, and now we might be closer to understanding why cetaceans can do this. Generally speaking, cetaceans are the most long-lived mammals, with some whale species reaching their 200th birthday. Why this should be possible is a mystery given that their size means their bodies contain far more cells than the human body does. “If you have more cells, that means that the risk that one of those cells… becomes cancerous increases,” says Daniela Tejada-Martinez at the Austral University of Chile. “So, if you are big or live…

Ice has an electrical charge, which could be exploited to create devices that easily defrost car windows and aeroplane wings. As frost forms, its exposed surface becomes warmer than its lower layers, which are shielded from the air. This temperature difference causes positively and negatively charged ions within the frost to sink. The positive ions seem to move faster – why is unclear – so the bottom of the frost becomes more positively charged than the top. Jonathan Boreyko at Virginia Tech and his colleagues wanted to use this natural phenomenon to develop a tool to remove frost. “We wanted…

Our distant ancestors may have swung from branches and knuckle-walked like a chimpanzee – challenging recent thinking that the earliest hominins did neither. That is the conclusion of an analysis of 4.4-million-year-old Ardipithecus ramidus, thought to be one of the earliest known hominins. In popular thinking, humans are often imagined to have evolved from a chimpanzee-like ape, but many researchers now challenge this idea – particularly in light of fossil evidence from A.ramidusthat was published in 2009. One well-preserved individual – nicknamed Ardi – had bones that suggested it typically walked along branches like a monkey rather than swinging below…

Testing new computer chips for security and reliability often takes longer than designing them. A new method for modelling them virtually and testing them with programs conventionally used for software instead of hardware could slash development time. Current hardware testing either randomly probes a chip to find flaws or seeks to formally test every single possible input and output on each computer chip. The first approach can easily miss problems and the second quickly becomes infeasible for all but the simplest designs. Either way, it can take months. But a single flaw in a piece of hardware can make computers…

THE coronavirus sweeping around the world isn’t the first to make the leap into humans and it won’t be the last. Vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 were developed in record time and are performing well. But now we urgently need a different kind of vaccine, say scientists: one that will protect us against other coronaviruses, even those we haven’t met yet. It is a daunting challenge, yet work has already begun on creating such a universal vaccine, with the first human trials of potential candidates planned to start later this year. In the past 20 years, humanity has endured three outbreaks of…

AROUND 6200 years ago, farmers living on the eastern fringes of Europe, in what is now Ukraine, did something inexplicable. They left their neolithic villages and moved into a sparsely inhabited area of forest and steppe. There, in an area roughly the size of Belgium between the modern cities of Kiev and Odessa, they congregated at new settlements up to 20 times the size of their old ones. This enigmatic culture, known as the Cucuteni-Trypillia, predates the earliest known cities in Mesopotamia, a civilisation that spanned part of the Middle East, and in China. It persisted for 800 years, but…

Testing new computer chips for security and reliability often takes longer than designing them. A new method for modelling them virtually and testing them with programs conventionally used for software instead of hardware could slash development time. Current hardware testing either randomly probes a chip to find flaws or seeks to formally test every single possible input and output on each computer chip. The first approach can easily miss problems and the second quickly becomes infeasible for all but the simplest designs. Either way, it can take months. But a single flaw in a piece of hardware can make computers…