ScienceDaily: Strange Science News

Astronomers have found a previously overlooked treasure trove of massive black holes in dwarf galaxies. The newly discovered black holes offer a glimpse into the life story of the supermassive black hole at the center of our own Milky Way galaxy.

Researchers have developed a trajectory-planning system for autonomous vehicles that enables them to travel from a starting point to a target location safely, even when there are many different uncertainties in the environment, such as unknown variations in the shapes, sizes, and locations of obstacles.

Researchers have developed soft robots that are capable of navigating complex environments, such as mazes, without input from humans or computer software.

Researchers have documented in a vertical wind tunnel the amazing ability of one species of salamander -- which spends its entire life in the tops of redwoods -- to parachute, glide and maneuver in mid-air. Ground-dwellers, on the other hand, freak out during free-fall. The salamander's skydiving skills are likely a way to steer back to a tree it has fallen or jumped from to avoid terrestrial predators.

On cold, dark winter mornings, small black crows known as jackdaws can be heard calling loudly to one another from their winter roosting spots in the U.K. before taking off simultaneously right around sunrise. Now, researchers who've studied their daily activities in unprecedented detail report evidence that these groups of hundreds of individuals rely on a 'democratic' decision-making process to coordinate with one another and take to the skies all at once.

Nearly half of Sun-size stars are binary. According to new research, planetary systems around binary stars may be very different from those around single stars. This points to new targets in the search for extraterrestrial life forms.

A specific retinal pathway enables mice to detect incredibly dim shadows -- nearly reaching the limit of what's physically possible. The same circuit is in human eyes, which might enable researchers to probe visual diseases at unprecedented resolution.

A comprehensive family tree, based on DNA sequences, has revealed that drywood termites have made at least 40 oceanic journeys over the last 50 million years to reach far flung landmasses.

A team has synthesized a belt-shaped molecular nanocarbon with a twisted Möbius band topology, i.e., a Möbius carbon nanobelt.

What links a finger bone and some fossil teeth found in a cave in the remote Altai Mountains of Siberia to a single tooth found in a cave in the limestone landscapes of tropical Laos? The answer to this question has been established by an international team of researchers from Laos, Europe, the US and Australia. The human tooth was chanced upon during an archaeological survey in a remote area of Laos. The scientists have shown it originated from the same ancient human population first recognised in Denisova Cave (dubbed the Denisovans), in the Altai Mountains of Siberia (Russia).