When people have an audience watching them, it can change their performance for better or worse. Now, researchers reporting in iScience on November 8 have found that chimpanzees' performance on computer tasks is influenced by the number of people watching them.

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The researchers made the discovery after analyzing thousands of sessions in which chimpanzees completed a touch screen task over six years.

They found in three different number-based tasks that chimpanzees performed better on the most difficult task as the number of experimenters watching them increased. In contrast, they also found that, for the easiest task, chimpanzees performed worse when being watched by more experimenters or other familiar people.

A new species of rock skink has been discovered in central Australia by Monash University researchers.

Characterised by its orange, pointed snout, the Central Ranges rock skink, or Liopholis aputja, inhabits the hills of the Mann-Musgrave Ranges near the northern border of South Australia.

Jules Farquhar, who led the research for Monash University's School of Biological Sciences, said "aputja" is a local Aboriginal word meaning "of the hills".

After we published our research, the story of driving rats went viral in the media. The project continues in my lab with new, improved rat-operated vehicles, or ROVs, designed by robotics professor John McManus and his students. These upgraded electrical ROVs – featuring rat-proof wiring, indestructible tires and ergonomic driving levers – are akin to a rodent version of Tesla's Cybertruck.

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While we can't directly ask rats whether they like to drive, we devised a behavioral test to assess their motivation to drive. This time, instead of only giving rats the option of driving to the Froot Loop Tree, they could also make a shorter journey on foot – or paw, in this case.

Surprisingly, two of the three rats chose to take the less efficient path of turning away from the reward and running to the car to drive to their Froot Loop destination. This response suggests that the rats enjoy both the journey and the rewarding destination.

Astronomers have spotted pure chaos lurking in the cosmos. Thousands of light years away from Earth, a small yet intensely heavy star is releasing bursts of material as powerful as repeating atomic bombs while spinning wildly on its own axis.

Using NASA's NICER (Neutron Star Interior Composition ExploreR) telescope, a team of astronomers discovered the strange object, and it's now one of the fastest spinning objects ever observed. This neutron star, the collapsed core of a massive star, completes 716 rotations per second while pulling material from its companion star and releasing it in the form of thermonuclear bursts. The discovery is detailed in a paper recently published in The Astrophysical Journal.

When a volcanic eruption buried the Roman city of Pompeii nearly 2,000 years ago, a thick layer of volcanic ash encased the bodies, preserving their forms.

The bodies, later immortalized by plaster casts, inspired narratives about who the victims were: for example, a mother holding her child, and two sisters embracing in their final moments.

New DNA evidence has upended some of those assumptions about the identities, lives and relationships of the ancient people. A group of four long-dead Pompeiians, for instance — once thought to be parents and their children — turned out to have no biological relation to one another.

Many black holes detected to date appear to be part of a pair. These binary systems comprise a black hole and a secondary object — such as a star, a much denser neutron star, or another black hole — that spiral around each other, drawn together by the black hole's gravity to form a tight orbital pair.

Now a surprising discovery is expanding the picture of black holes, the objects they can host, and the way they form.

In a study appearing today in Nature, physicists at MIT and Caltech report that they have observed a "black hole triple" for the first time. The new system holds a central black hole in the act of consuming a small star that's spiraling in very close to the black hole, every 6.5 days — a configuration similar to most binary systems. But surprisingly, a second star appears to also be circling the black hole, though at a much greater distance. The physicists estimate this far-off companion is orbiting the black hole every 70,000 years.

PFAS are in Miami's rainwater. And it is the latest evidence the synthetic "forever chemicals" — that have raised health concerns for people and wildlife — hitch a ride on the water cycle, using the complex system to circulate over greater distances.

For more than a year, FIU researchers collected and analyzed 42 rainwater samples across three different sites in Miami-Dade County. A total of 21 perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, were detected, including PFOS and PFOA (since phased out of production over cancer concerns), as well as the newer varieties used in manufacturing today.

While profiles of several PFAS matched back to local sources, others did not. According to the study, published in Atmospheric Pollution Research, this suggests Earth's atmosphere acts as a pathway to transport these chemicals far and wide — contributing to the worldwide pollution problem.

"PFAS are practically everywhere," said FIU Assistant Professor of Chemistry and study author Natalia Soares Quinete. "Now we're able to show the role air masses play in potentially bringing these pollutants to other places where they can impact surface water and groundwater."

Oxygen, the molecule that supports intelligent life as we know it, is largely made by plants. Whether underwater or on land, they do this by photosynthesising carbon dioxide. However, a recent study demonstrates that oxygen may be produced without the need for life at depths where light cannot reach.

The authors of a recent publication in Nature Geoscience were collecting samples from deep ocean sediments to determine the rate of oxygen consumption at the seafloor through things like organisms or sediments that can react with oxygen. But in several of their experiments, they actually found oxygen was increasing as opposed to decreasing as they would have expected. This left them questioning how this oxygen was being produced.

They found that this "dark" oxygen production at the seafloor seems to only happen in the presence of mineral concentrates called polymetallic nodules and deposits of metals called metalliferous sediments. The authors think the nodules have the right mixture of metals and are densely packed enough for an electrical current to pass through for electrolysis, creating enough energy to separate the hydrogen (H) and oxygen (O) from water (H₂O).

A team of astronomers at the University of Arizona, Tucson used NASA's Hubble and James Webb space telescopes for an unprecedented in-depth look at the nearly 100-billion-mile-diameter debris disk encircling Vega. "Between the Hubble and Webb telescopes, you get this very clear view of Vega. It's a mysterious system because it's unlike other circumstellar disks we've looked at," said Andras Gáspár of the University of Arizona, a member of the research team. "The Vega disk is smooth, ridiculously smooth."

The big surprise to the research team is that there is no obvious evidence for one or more large planets plowing through the face-on disk like snow tractors. "It's making us rethink the range and variety among exoplanet systems," said Kate Su of the University of Arizona, lead author of the paper presenting the Webb findings.

A tiny house full of exquisite frescos has been discovered in the ancient city of Pompeii. While the home is modest in size, researchers say that its decorations—including erotic scenes—are equal to those of much larger nearby residences.

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The newly discovered structure is called the House of Phaedra, named for a well-preserved painting of the mythological Hippolytus and Phaedra on its wall. In Euripides' ancient Greek tragedy Hippolytus, Phaedra, the wife of hero Theseus, falls in love with her stepson Hippolytus. In the fresco, Phaedra sits draped in cloth, while Hippolytus stands before her.

Other frescos show the sensual embrace of a satyr (a half-man, half-goat) and a nymph (a maiden goddess). Another wall painting likely depicts the goddess Venus with her beau Adonis, according to the park. One painted scene, though damaged, appears to illustrate the Judgment of Paris.

Traversed centuries ago by camel-back traders, two long-lost medieval cities that once thrived along the ancient Silk Road have been uncovered by drones sent searching for their secrets.

For centuries, these abandoned cities lay hidden beneath the mountains of Central Asia. But new research, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, reveals two fortified settlements that were once perched along a key crossroad of silk trade routes.

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Using modern drone mapping technology known as LiDAR — light detection and ranging equipment — the team of archaeologists found that the two cities, Tashbulak and Tugunbulak, were once bustling urban centers despite their isolation and elevation.

Dinosaur fossils have been discovered in Hong Kong for the first time, on a remote island in the financial center's countryside.

The fossils were found on Port Island, an uninhabitable expanse of rocks in the northeastern waters of the city, by Hong Kong's Agriculture, Fisheries and Conservation Department in March, the government said in a statement Wednesday.

A comet that was predicted to become bright enough to see with the naked eye at Halloween seems to be disintegrating right before our eyes.

It's called C/2024 S1, discovered on September 27, a rare Kreutz sungrazer comet whose trajectory is due to bring it within just 1.2 million kilometers (750,000 miles) of the Sun on 28 October 2024.

Alas, it seems that C/2024 S1 has, after billions of years, disintegrated. Images of the object taken over the course of October show it brightening with outburst activity before dimming, its nucleus appearing to vanish, leaving behind a tail of dust and gas, and, maybe, a cloud of cometary debris.

A team of behavioral ecologists, zoologists and crop protection specialists from Tel Aviv University reports that Oriental hornets have the highest-known tolerance to alcohol in the animal kingdom. In their study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the group fed ethanol solutions to hornets.

An "alarming" discovery from University of Guelph researchers raises concerns for bumblebee health, survival and reproduction.

U of G environmental sciences researchers Drs. Nigel Raine and Sabrina Rondeau have found that bumblebee queens are more likely to hibernate in soil contaminated with pesticides than in clean soil – for reasons they still don't quite understand.

"Some bee behaviours are not well understood, and we wanted to see if these bumblebee queens exhibited avoidance behaviour that might reduce their risk of harm from pesticide exposure in the field," Raine says. "But these results were alarming."

A celestial object discovered decades ago is actually twins orbiting each other, a new study confirms.

Scientists have puzzled over the object known as Gliese 229B, the first known brown dwarf discovered 30 years ago. Brown dwarfs are sometimes called failed stars because they're lighter than stars, but heavier than gas giant planets.

This object appeared too dim for its mass. Astronomers collected light and chemical clues using the Very Large Telescope in Chile and observed it's a duo circling close to each other.

Astronomers have observed Jupiter's legendary Great Red Spot (GRS), an anticyclone large enough to swallow Earth, for at least 150 years. But there are always new surprises – especially when NASA's Hubble Space Telescope takes a close-up look at it.

Hubble's new observations of the famous red storm, collected 90 days between December 2023 to March 2024, reveal that the GRS is not as stable as it might look. The recent data show the GRS jiggling like a bowl of gelatin. The combined Hubble images allowed astronomers to assemble a time-lapse movie of the squiggly behavior of the GRS.