Two University of Virginia scientists have been elected to the prestigious American Academy of Arts & Sciences, a storied group founded during the Revolutionary War by John Adams, John Hancock and 60 other scholar-patriots to advance the public good.

Penn Engineers have developed a new way to use AI to solve inverse partial differential equations (PDEs), a particularly challenging class of mathematical problems with broad implications for understanding the natural world. The advance, which the researchers call “Mollifier Layers,” could benefit fields as varied as genetics and weather forecasting, because inverse PDEs help scientists work backward from observable patterns to infer the hidden dynamics that produced them.

Tiny plankton shells used to reconstruct past polar ocean temperatures may contain two different chemical stories, a new study by iC3 researchers has found. 

The work shows that Neogloboquadrina pachyderma, a key species in polar climate archives, can grow an outer shell crust with a different chemical make-up from the shell beneath it, even when both are grown in the same conditions.

This discovery could help scientists produce more accurate records of past ocean change.

Wild parrots learn whether new types of food are safe to eat by observing other members of their social group, allowing dietary knowledge to spread rapidly through the community, according to a study by Julia Penndorf at the Australian National University and colleagues, publishing April 30^th in the open-access journal PLOS Biology.