A songbird species that flourishes on the salmon-rich side of dams in the western United States struggles when it tries to nest on the side closed off from the fish and the nutrients they leave behind.

But the songbird and the rest of the divided ecosystem rebounds, faster than some experts expected, when dams come down and rivers are allowed to resume their natural flow.

Two new studies led by Christopher Tonra, assistant professor of avian wildlife ecology at The Ohio State University, illustrate the stress dams impose on species that rely on salmon and the impact of dam removal on the well-being of that wildlife.

The areas previously depleted of salmon are on a fast track to recovery in a shorter time than he ever expected after the dam removal, Tonra said.

"It's exciting to be able to show a real positive outcome in conservation. We don't always get that," he said. "That these rivers can come back within our own generation is a really exciting thing."

During his time conducting the studies in Washington, Tonra watched reservoir beds that looked like moonscapes return to vibrant, rich habitat and cascades emerge where none had been, at least for the last century.

US scientists have developed a new polymer that has a unique capacity to remove pollutant substances from water "in seconds." The discovery could revolutionize the water-purification industry, make the process cheaper, and involve minimum energy. A team of researchers from Cornell University made the breakthrough. The full research has been published in Journal Nature this week.

"What we did is make the first high-surface-area material made of cyclodextrin [sugar molecules bound together in a ring]," said Will Dichtel, associate professor of chemistry, who led the research, "combining some of the advantages of the activated carbon with the inherent advantages of the cyclodextrin." "These materials will remove pollutants in seconds, as the water flows by," he said. "So there's a potential for really low-energy, flow-through water purification, which is a big deal."

The polymer has already shown the "uptake of pollutants through adsorption at rates vastly superior to traditional activated carbon - 200 times greater in some cases,"says the press release of the university. According to Dichtel, activated carbons don't bind pollutants as strongly as the new polymer. "We knew that [water filtering] would be a likely application if we were successful," Dichtel says. "We were definitely pleasantly surprised with just how good the performance is."

Dichtel hopes this new material can open ways to commercial water purification and also improve life in developing countries.

Modern science is only beginning to catch up to the wisdom of the ancients: plants possess sentience and a rudimentary form of intelligence.

Plants are far more intelligent and capable than we given them credit. In fact, provocative research from 2010 published in Plant Signaling & Behavior proposes that since they cannot escape environmental stresses in the manner of animals, they have developed a "sophisticated, highly responsive and dynamic physiology," which includes information processes such as "biological quantum computing" and "cellular light memory" which could be described as forms of plant intelligence. Titled, "Secret life of plants: from memory to intelligence," the study highlights one particular "super power" of plants indicative of their success as intelligent beings:

There are living trees that germinated long before Jesus Christ was born. What sort of life wisdom evolved in plants to make it possible to survive and propagate for so long a time in the same place they germinated?"

Mars's gullies may be formed by dry ice processes rather than flowing liquid water, as previously thought. This is the conclusion of a study conducted by two French scientists published online on December 21st in Nature Geoscience.

They show that, during late winter and spring, underneath the seasonal CO2 ice layer heated by the sun, intense gas fluxes can destabilize the regolith material and induce gas-lubricated debris flows which look like water-sculpted gullies on Earth.

Since 2000, the cameras in orbit around Mars have transmitted numerous images of small valleys cut into slopes, similar in shape to gullies formed by flowing water on Earth. The gullies seem less than a few million years old-and sometimes less than a few years old. This suggested that significant volumes of liquid water may form on Mars today.

This scenario has recently been questioned by frequent monitoring of the Martian surface by the HiRISE camera aboard NASA Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. This revealed that gully formation is ongoing on present-day Mars, at seasons when the surface environment of Mars is much too cold for liquid water to flow. However, the observed gully activity seems to occur when CO2 ice (condensed from the atmosphere during winter) is defrosting on the Martian surface. Can the two phenomena be related? If so, how could a thin seasonal dry ice layer deposited above the regolith trigger the formation of decametre-scale debris flows behaving as if they were lubricated by liquid?

A team of astronomers from Armagh Observatory and the University of Buckingham report that the discovery of hundreds of giant comets in the outer planetary system over the last two decades means that these objects pose a much greater hazard to life than asteroids.

The team, made up of Professors Bill Napier and Duncan Steel of the University of Buckingham, Professor Mark Bailey of Armagh Observatory, and Dr David Asher, also at Armagh, publish their review of recent research in the December issue of Astronomy and Geophysics, the journal of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The giant comets, termed centaurs, move on unstable orbits crossing the paths of the massive outer planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. The planetary gravitational fields can occasionally deflect these objects in towards Earth.

Centaurs are typically 50 to 100 kilometres across, or larger, and a single such body contains more mass than the entire population of Earth-crossing asteroids found to date. Calculations of the rate at which centaurs enter the inner solar system indicate that one will be deflected onto a path crossing Earth's orbit about once every 40,000 to 100,000 years. Whilst in near-Earth space they are expected to disintegrate into dust and larger fragments, flooding the inner solar system with cometary debris and making impacts on our planet inevitable.

A team led by researchers from the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science has created a super-strong yet light structural metal with extremely high specific strength and modulus, or stiffness-to-weight ratio. The new metal is composed of magnesium infused with a dense and even dispersal of ceramic silicon carbide nanoparticles. It could be used to make lighter airplanes, spacecraft, and cars, helping to improve fuel efficiency, as well as in mobile electronics and biomedical devices.

To create the super-strong but lightweight metal, the team found a new way to disperse and stabilize nanoparticles in molten metals. They also developed a scalable manufacturing method that could pave the way for more high-performance lightweight metals. The research was published today in Nature.

"It's been proposed that nanoparticles could really enhance the strength of metals without damaging their plasticity, especially light metals like magnesium, but no groups have been able to disperse ceramic nanoparticles in molten metals until now," said Xiaochun Li, the principal investigator on the research and Raytheon Chair in Manufacturing Engineering at UCLA. "With an infusion of physics and materials processing, our method paves a new way to enhance the performance of many different kinds of metals by evenly infusing dense nanoparticles to enhance the performance of metals to meet energy and sustainability challenges in today's society."

Structural metals are load-bearing metals; they are used in buildings and vehicles. Magnesium, at just two-thirds the density of aluminum, is the lightest structural metal. Silicon carbide is an ultra-hard ceramic commonly used in industrial cutting blades. The researchers' technique of infusing a large number of silicon carbide particles smaller than 100 nanometers into magnesium added significant strength, stiffness, plasticity and durability under high temperatures.

Scientists at the National University of Singapore (NUS) have demonstrated a new way of controlling electrons by confining them in a device made out of atomically thin materials, and applying external electric and magnetic fields. This research, published on Dec. 23, 2015 in the prestigious scientific journal Nature, was led by Professor Antonio Castro Neto and his research team at the Centre for Advanced 2D Materials (CA2DM) of the NUS Faculty of Science.

Almost all modern technology like motors, light bulbs and semiconductor chips runs on electricity, harnessing the flow of electrons through devices. Explained Prof Castro Neto, "Not only are electrons small and fast, they naturally repel each other due to their electric charge. They obey the strange laws of quantum physics, making it difficult to control their motion directly."

To control electron behaviour, many semi-conductor materials require chemical doping, where small amounts of a foreign material are embedded in the material to either release or absorb electrons, creating a change in the electron concentration that can in turn be used to drive currents.

However, chemical doping has limitations as a research technique, since it causes irreversible chemical change in the material being studied. The foreign atoms embedded into the material also disrupt its natural ordering, often masking important electronic states of the pure material.

Chinese TV channel's newest employee is a weather forecasting robot, according to media reports.

On December 22, Shanghai Dragon Television introduced its newest employee - an artificial intelligence software suite called Xiaoice.

The AI made its debut during the Morning News live program where it performed the role of a 'trainee anchor' charged with delivering weather forecast, the Daily Mail reports.

Xiaoice is an advanced natural language artificial conversational entity (or chatbot) developed by Microsoft. While this is the first time the program was used during a television broadcast, it has already become popular on Chinese apps like Weibo and WeChat.

While Xiaoice usually only writes messages, the developers outfitted it with a breakthrough Text-to-Speech technology specifically for this project, resulting in what the audience called a 'cute' voice, the newspaper adds.

In a new time-lapse video, NASA's Mars Opportunity takes an 11-year journey across 26 miles of the red planet.

As NASA continues to work toward sending humans to Mars, people who prefer to view the red planet from the comfort of their homes are in luck. On July 13, the space agency released an 8-minute time-lapse video of Mars Opportunity.

From January 2004 to April 2015, the exploration rover roamed 26.2 miles from where it first landed. Pretty good for a rover that was only designed with a 90-day life expectancy.

"It's a marathon run across another planet!" Mike Deliman wrote on his Facebook page following the video's debut.

As part of the senior technical staff at Wind River, the Intel subsidiary behind the smart software powering the Opportunity rover and other spacecraft, Deliman knows how much work goes into these projects.

The Yutu rover, part of the Chang'e-3 unmanned lunar mission, has identified a type of basalt unlike anything collected by previous Soviet or US missions

Chinese scientists have identified a new kind of rock on the moon. An unmanned Chinese lunar lander, launched in 2013, has explored an ancient flow of volcanic lava and identified mineral composition entirely unlike anything collected by the American astronauts between 1969 and 1972, or by the last Soviet lander in 1976.

The news, dispatched from an impact crater in the Mare Imbrium, is another reminder that planetary exploration is no longer the preserve of the Russians, the Americans or the European Space Agency: Japan, India and China have all launched lunar orbiters on their own rockets. Britain launched its own satellite, Prospero, on its own rocket, Black Arrow, from its own launch site in Woomera, Australia, in 1971 and then withdrew from the space race.