ScienceDaily: Strange Science News

Domestic dogs show many adaptations to living closely with humans, but they do not seem to reciprocate food-giving according to a new study.

When there is a gas leak in a large building or at an industrial site, human firefighters currently need to go in with gas sensing instruments. Finding the gas leak may take considerable time, while they are risking their lives. Researchers have now developed the first swarm of tiny - and hence very safe - drones that can autonomously detect and localize gas sources in cluttered indoor environments.

A team of geneticists and archaeologists has sequenced the DNA from a 1,600-year-old sheep mummy from an ancient Iranian salt mine, Chehrabad. This remarkable specimen has revealed sheep husbandry practices of the ancient Near East, as well as underlining how natural mummification can affect DNA degradation.

An associate professor of marketing says digital avatars can replace a sales force and customer service employees at a fraction of the cost.

For 30 years, University of Tokyo Associate Professor Hisayoshi Nozaki has visited the Sagami River to collect algal samples to understand how living things evolved different sexes. The threes sexes of the Pleodorina starrii algae are male, female, and a third sex called bisexual in reference to the fact that it can produce both male and female sex cells in a single genotype and exists due to normal expression of the species' genes.