Stars die in lots of ways. Most low-mass stars like our Sun shed their outer layers and eventually fade to white dwarf stars. Larger ones prefer to burn out rather than fade away so they go supernova and create ultradense objects like neutron stars and black holes. When two stellar remnants form a binary system, they also can collide. 

Yet a new paper shows there may be a fourth way - a collision where non-binary stars in dense regions can be forced together. The work used a long-duration gamma-ray burst with the Gemini South telescope in Chile.

If you have traveled, you have seen someone who is a frequent traveler be offered an upgrade but decline because they are with someone else and want to stay together. This is rare in other species. 

Yet not all experiences get equal treatment - if a parent is traveling with a child they may take the upgrade to give it to the child - and a new paper sought to understand how consumers make trade-offs between experience quality and togetherness. The authors write that consumers prioritize physical togetherness with relationship partners over opportunities that would improve an experience in real time.

Cooperative breeders, where we count on the help of others to raise offspring,is not unique to humans. It may only appear that way.

A new paper amassed data from 90 human populations comprising 80,223 individuals from many parts of the world — both historical and contemporary. They compared the records for men and women to lifetime data for 45 different nonhuman, free-ranging mammals. The argue that humans are a non-exceptional species of mammal. Says first author Cody Ross, PhD, anthropologist at the Max Planck Institute; “we can quite successfully model reproductive inequality in humans and nonhumans using the same predictors.”

A new demography paper argues that there is a reason more black women have voted for Democrats than men have since 1980 - more black men are in jail.

CRISPR/Cas9 technology has led to a “homing gene drive system” based on a specific Drosophila suzukii gene called doublesex that can suppress populations of D. suzukii vinegar flies – the “spotted-wing Drosophila” that devastate soft-skinned fruit in North America, Europe and parts of South America.

A new study suggests alcoholism coupled with genetic susceptibility is associated with changes to gene expression indicative of disease progression in the brains of mice that are genetically predisposed to Alzheimer’s. When repeatedly exposed to intoxicating amounts of alcohol, these mice showed signs of cognitive decline approximately two months sooner than they usually would.