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The oldest fossil of a modern bird yet found dates from the age of dinosaurs and was found in a limestone quarry near the Belgian-Dutch border, making it the first modern bird from the age of dinosaurs found in the northern hemisphere.

If the kids are out of school and missing homework, or you're tired of them playing Fortnite, here are seven fun projects they can get involved with courtesy of the National Science Foundation.1. Use on-the-go science tools to explore the world around you (all ages)Foldscopes are paper microscopes that give you a deeper look at the world around you. Peer at the cell structure in an onion's skin, examine a human hair or look at the busy microbial world of pond scum.2. Become a citizen scientist and help collect and analyze data for scientific research (all ages).

Soft robotics is a newer field, so no one is quite sure what to do with them, but sturdy softness could be useful in homes and workplaces where traditional robots could cause injury. Since they are squishy, they could be tools for disaster response.For now, they may play basketball. Or at least pick one up. Maybe eventually they will be a delightful companion that can still get down to business like Baymax from the Big Hero 6 cartoon and comics. 

A vegetarian diet is promoted as beneficial to heart health and even the environment in more advocacy-based studies, but as its popularity has grown images of thin beautiful people are being supplanted by reality of just as many obese people as in a conventional diet.A vegetarian diet can't perform miracles, it's still about calories. 

Your ears enjoy music but your heart may also benefit, according to a new study presented at the American College of Cardiology's Annual Scientific Session.Patients with early post-infarction angina, episodes of chest pain after a heart attack, reported significantly lower levels of anxiety and pain if they listened to music for 30 minutes a day. While that's hard to pin down biologically, 700,000 people survive a heart attack just in the U.S. each year and roughly 1 in 9 heart attack survivors experience subsequent episodes of chest pain and anxiety within the first 48 hours, so whatever works to reduce that.

We haven't had a widespread flu problem since 2018. Yet despite it only being 2020, some insist this year's coronavirus must be the product of government scientists, though some also suggest it was the result of 5G cellular service in Wuhan. Then China claimed it might be the U.S.What is the truth?The novel SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus that emerged in the city of Wuhan is the product of natural evolution, finds an analysis of genome sequence data from SARS-CoV-2 and related viruses published today.

Stegosaurs are among the most recognizable dinosaurs because they left a lasting impression, including on a Scottish island.Analysis of footprints show stegosaur roamed the Isle of Skye about 170 million years ago. it wasn't an isle then, it was a long-lost island in the Atlantic, and the site on the north-east coast was at the time a mudflat on the edge of a shallow lagoon. It contains a mixture of footprints, which means dinosaurs on Skye were more diverse than known. 

In Ukraine and the west Russian Plain, there remain mysterious bone circles made from the remains of dozens of mammoths long ago. About 70 of them are known to exist. One, outside the modern village of Kostenki 250 miles south of Moscow, has been dated to 20,000 years in the past, making it the oldest such circular structure built by humans. A total of 51 lower jaws and 64 individual mammoth skulls were used to construct the walls of the 30 foot by 30 foot structure, now called Kostenki 11, and scattered across its interior. The bones were likely sourced from animal graveyards, and the circle was then hidden by sediment and is now a foot below current surface level.

Though implicit bias - the belief that you are prejudiced, it's just a matter of degree - is controversial, that's only because it lacks scientific footing. A new study seeks to advance that.We all have likes and dislikes but when it becomes bias or prejudice is subjective. If you prefer dark haired men, does that mean you are prejudiced against redheads? It does, in things like the Implicit Association Test. 

Drosophila flies lose long-term memory of a traumatic event when kept in the dark, and the authors of a new study link that to a specific molecular mechanism responsible. Memories are difficult to erase but breakthroughs could be important for sufferers of trauma, because while most normal events won't be recalled even the same day, a particularly shocking event may be consolidated into our long-term memory, whereby new proteins are synthesized and the neuronal circuits in our brain are modified.

A rock carving found in the Teymareh rock art site in Khomein county in Central Iran is part man and part mantis, with six limbs.  Was it a mistake? The world's first graphic novel? A way to inspire warriors to fight their foes? We may never know. It's hard to even know its age.Rock carvings - petroglyphs - of invertebrate animals are rare, so for a new paper  entomologists teamed up with archaeologists to try and identify the motif. They compared the carving with others around the world and with the local six-legged creatures which its prehistoric artists could have encountered.

The 2019 version of the coronavirus that has spread to about 50 countries across the world doesn't appear to be transmittable from pregnant mothers to newborns at birth. The new case study is the second out of China within the last month to confirm that mothers infected with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) during pregnancy did not infect their babies.All four mothers in the current study gave birth at Wuhan's Union Hospital while infected. Wuhan in Hubei Province was the epicenter of the current outbreak that has sickened more than 100,000 people worldwide and killed more than 3,400, mostly in China.