【推荐2】To reduce the carbon emissions from passenger jets and long-haul trucks, a vast volume of soy-based renewable fuel will be needed. To produce it, American farmers could ruin existing cornfields to clear space, plant millions of additional acres of soybeans and shut down all soybean exports. Researchers at startups and biotech giants alike have found ways to create a new kind of soybeans through genetic recombination that generates more oil.

One of the startups, ZeaKal Inc., funded in part by seed giant Corteva Inc., plans to introduce its first batch of high-oil seeds for commercial planting in 2024. Scientists have tricked the plant into sustaining photosynthesis for longer with genetic recombination, ultimately producing more oil as well as more protein.

Companies are racing to build more capacity to process soy, a critical component for expanding green fuel supplies. Tax credits make companies in the transportation industry switch to fuel with lower carbon emission. S&P Global sees domestic demand for renewable biofuel reaching 4 billion gallons in 2030, up from around 2.7 billion this year. It projects that the use of sustainable aviation fuel will total 1.7 billion gallons annually by the end of the decade, compared with just 182 million gallons a year now.

Despite the bullish predictions, the soy-based transportation fuel market is still a drop in the bucket for the fuel industry. And even if the new breed of high-oil seeds takes off, widespread adoption will take time. Farmers may be reluctant to become early adopters of a technology that hasn’t yet proven its benefits, especially if the oil content comes at the expense of existing genetic recombinations that improve disease or pest resistance.

Chicken producer Perdue Farms Inc. has signed a deal with Zeakal, agreeing to pay farmers a higher price for harvested supplies of the new variety, which is good for chicken feed because of its higher protein levels. If large oil companies follow suit, the soybean market might never look the same. “We could have an opportunity for the oil component of soybeans to actually become more important in some markets than the protein aspect,” says Mike Dillon, vice president of ZeaKal, “That’s a very dramatic shift.”

【推荐3】Though most dinosaurs are thought to have hunted primarily during the day, a little bird-like dinosaur may have been strictly a night hunter, a new study suggested.

The dinosaur, Shuvuuia deserti, was a small animal, about the size of a chicken, and it lived about 65 million years ago in the deserts of what is now Mongolia.

Shuvuuia's skeleton is among the most bizarre of all dinosaurs, the study said. It had a fragile, bird-like skull; strong arms with a single claw on each hand; and long legs. “ Acting at night, digging ability and long limbs are all features of animals that live in deserts today,“ said study lead author Jonah Choiniere, a University of the Witwatersrand scientist. “But it's surprising to see them all combined in a single dinosaur species that lived more than 65 million years ago." he added, “It had some of the largest pupils （瞳孔） ever measured in either birds or dinosaurs.”

“For many decades, dinosaurs were considered to be day-active,“ study coauthor Lars Schmitz, a biologist at the W.M. Keck Science Department in California, said in a statement. "Now we're adding new evidence that some small, predatory（食肉的）dinosaurs could have been night-active instead, which changes the thinking about dinosaurs."

The study investigated how vision and hearing abilities of dinosaurs and birds compared, and concluded that Shuvuuia's vision and hearing were not at all ideal for the daytime. Schmitz explained that the dinosaur's extraordinary hearing and night vision were beneficial for life in the desert, where high temperatures discouraged daytime hunting.

“We think it would have caught its prey — small mammals — at night when the temperatures were cooler, Schmitz told CNN.

The study was published Thursday in the peer-reviewed journal Science, a publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

【推荐1】Scientists at the Sanxingdui Ruins in southwest China’s Sichuan Province continue to unearth over 500 relics from an ancient Chinese civilization that dates back over 3,000 years.

The findings unearthed in June include a fully preserved gold mask, which stands at 37. 2cm wide and16. 5cm tall. The new gold mask reminded people of the one found in March, which was far more damaged. Scientists said the gold mask is the largest, and most well preserved, of similar golden relics discovered at the Sanxingdui Ruins, and it is consistent with the idea that gold was important to people of the area called the Shu state.

The gold mask has similar facial features to bronze statues discovered in the area. It has large eyes covering much of the face, a big nose, huge ears and a flat, wide mouth. The strange facial features led some people to suggest they were aliens. However, Wang Wei, the director of the Institute of Archaeology at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, explained, “There is no chance that Sanxingdui belongs to an alien civilization. These wide-eyed masks look strange because the makers wanted to copy the look of deities (神灵). They shouldn’t be considered as the look of everyday people.”

Besides the mask, other discoveries included bronze statues, a knife made out of jade and a series of relics made of ivory, among many others. Many of the bronze relics are brand new discoveries and unique to anything found before in China. Chinese scientists said they are highly detailed, with statues showing facial features that fit well with the gold mask, which make them as valuable resources for the research of ancient Shu and give better perceptiveness about the ancient Shu state, home to a mysterious civilization until the recent discoveries proved its existence. Chinese scientists believe they are entering a “key stage” and expect to find a series of relics that will change how people think about ancient China.

【推荐3】When the discovery of fossilized (化石的) footprints made in what’s now New Mexico was made public in 2021, it was an astonishing moment for archaeology (考古学), seemingly rewriting a chapter of the human story. Now new research is offering further evidence of their significance.

While they look like they could have been made yesterday, the footprints were pressed into mud 21,000 to 23,000 years ago, according to radiocarbon dating of the seeds of a water plant that were preserved above and below the fossils. This date dramatically pushed back the timeline of humans’ history in the Americas, the last land to be settled by prehistoric people. The 61 dated prints, which were discovered in the Tularosa Basin, near the edge of an ancient lake in White Sands National Park, were made at a time when many scientists think that massive ice sheets had stopped human passage into North America, indicating that humans arrived in the region even earlier.

However, some archaeologists questioned the age of the footprints established by those initial findings. They noted that water plants such as Ruppia cirrhosa — the one used in the 2021 study — can acquire carbon atoms from the water rather than the air, which can result in a misleadingly early date.

In a follow-up study published Thursday in the journal Science, researchers said they have produced two new lines of evidence to support their initial dates. “Even as the original work was being published, we were speeding up to test our results with multiple lines of evidence,” said Kathleen Springer, co-lead author on the new Science paper, in a news release. “We were confident in our original ages, as well as the strong evidence.”

When and how early humans first moved to the Americas has long been debated and remains poorly understood. Current estimates range from 13,000 years ago to more than 20,000 years ago. However, the earliest archaeological evidence for the region’s settlement is insufficient and often controversial, making the footprints especially important.