Researcher Samik Bhattacharya is studying how birds sweep their wings and use their tails during critical moments of takeoff and landing to improve the agility of drones. 

Lions and hyenas compete for food and will kill each other if they get the chance, but studying their power struggle is difficult — they roam over wide landscapes where it’s hard for scientists to follow them, and their most active hours are in darkness or twilight. Now scientists have taken advantage of GPS collars to plot the movements of different hyenas and lions, shedding new light on their competition. It’s well known that hyenas scavenge from lion kills, which gave scientists cause to think that hyenas followed lions through the bush. But this new evidence shows that the direction of pursuit runs the other way: male lions in particular approach hyenas when they encounter them, and hyenas retreat.

The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded $20 million to renew the Artificial Intelligence Institute for Advances in Optimization (AI4OPT) through 2031. Led by Georgia Tech in partnership with USC and the University of California, Berkeley, the institute combines expertise in AI and optimization.

UC Davis researchers have stripped down LSD to the base features responsible for its hallucinogenic and therapeutic effects. 

The average person takes thousands of steps each day, instinctively walking heel-to-toe. Although they hardly register them, those consistent heel-first strides are more unique to humans than previously thought and allowed early hominins to walk farther more efficiently, but at the cost of higher impact forces on bones and joints, according to a new study led by a researcher at Penn State.

A new study led by researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, has overturned decades of assumptions about Miracinonyx trumani, the extinct predator popularly known as the American "cheetah.” By analyzing nuclear paleogenomes and stable isotopes from fossils found as far north as the Yukon, scientists have discovered that this iconic cat was not a true cheetah, but a highly adaptable relative of the puma that specialized in eating fish to survive the Arctic.

Rice University researchers have used a magnetically levitated particle to search for ultraheavy dark matter, extending the hunt for some of the heaviest possible forms of the invisible matter thought to hold galaxies together. Led by Christopher Tunnell, associate professor of physics and astronomy, the researchers used a tiny floating magnet as a highly sensitive detector designed to register the faint push an ultraheavy dark matter particle could produce as it passed through.