A new digital reconstruction of the face of the 3.67‑million‑year‑old Australopithecus fossil, Little Foot, provides new insight into the evolution of the human face. 

The new findings, published in Comptes Rendus Palevol, offer fresh insight into the diversity of the fossil hominin (i.e., extant human and their ancestors and relatives) face across Africa 4-3 million years ago.

The University of Portsmouth, as part of Space South Central (SSC), one of the UK’s largest regional space clusters, is leading a new international partnership with Saudi space-tech company SARsatX. Together, they are developing the concept for an Earth observation satellite mission aimed at supporting a range of sectors, including climate science and environmental resilience.

Severe parameter coupling between electrical and thermal transport limits the performance of GeTe-based thermoelectrics. A research team led by Prof. Lei Miao and Prof. Jie Gao successfully mitigated this trade-off through a synergistic Sb/Ni co-doping strategy. By leveraging Ni-induced shallow impurity levels to enhance carrier effective mass and forming in situ NiGe nanophases to suppress lattice thermal conductivity, the study optimized the interdependent transport properties. This approach yielded a peak figure of merit (ZT) of 2.15 and a single-leg device conversion efficiency of ~10%, demonstrating significant potential for mid-temperature waste heat recovery.

While the Amazon River is world-renowned for its massive flow, a significant portion of its water evaporates before it can reach calm water reservoirs or the ocean. Anshul Yadav, a doctoral student in the civil and environmental engineering department at Texas A&M University, has received a prestigious Future Investigators in NASA Earth and Space Science and Technology (FINESST) fellowship to measure this invisible loss.

Dogs come in all shapes and sizes: from giant fluffy Newfoundlands to tiny short-haired Chihuahuas. And many furry companions like to spend their days inside near their humans. An initial study published in ACS’ Environmental Science & Technology reports that dogs — both big and small — impact indoor air quality. The researchers found that small active dogs produced more airborne particles, but larger animals released more microbes into the air than people did.

As members of the public increasingly turn to AI chatbots to understand their world, even subtle latent biases in the underlying models could affect public understanding of the present—and past. Daniel Karell and colleagues explored the effects of both unintentional and intentional political biases in LLMs by asking 1,912 research participants to read GPT-4o and Wikipedia summaries of two 20th century historical events: the 1919 Seattle General Strike and the 1968 Third World Liberation Front student protests calling for greater ethnic minority representation in academia, which led the establishment of Ethnic Studies departments. 

MediaTek, a global leader in wireless communications and semiconductors, has established a joint research laboratory with the Singapore University of Technology and Design to advance communications and connectivity through AI-powered, satellite-connected, and greener wireless networks. The partnership, MediaTek’s first in Singapore, represents a total investment of over S$34 million to accelerate 6G research and prototype development.