A newly discovered collection of rare dinosaur tracks is helping scientists shed light on some of the biggest animals ever to live on land.

Hundreds of footprints and handprints made by plant-eating sauropods around 170 million years ago have been found on the Isle of Skye in Scotland.

The discovery - which is the biggest dinosaur site yet found in Scotland - helps fill an important gap in the evolution the huge, long-necked animals, which were the biggest of the dinosaurs.

This is an artist's impression of sauropod dinosaurs on the Isle of Skye. Credit: Jon Hoad

University of Groningen scientists have designed a unique experiment to study ageing in yeast cells. By following molecular processes inside ageing yeast, they discovered that an overproduction of the proteins needed to make new proteins could be the root cause of the cellular processes that eventually kill the cells. Their results have been published online in the journal eLife.

There are claims by some that many diseases we now get more frequently are "lifestyle" diseases, caused by decadent Western  problems like plentiful food and too much science. Instead, it has also been posited, we simply are not killed by lots of other things young (organic food, lack of medicine. unheated homes) and that makes diseases of age look like diseases of lifestyle.

A new study adds to that, using using modern imaging techniques on hearts more than 400 years old found at an archaeological site. Archaeologists with the National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research excavating the basement of the Convent of the Jacobins in Rennes, France, unearthed several grave sites dating back to the late 16th or early 17th century. 

Army ants build living bridges by linking their bodies to span gaps and create shortcuts across rainforests in Central and South America. An international team of researchers has now discovered these bridges can move from their original building point to span large gaps and change position as required.

The bridges stop moving when they become so long that the increasing costs incurred by locking workers into the structure outweigh the benefit that the colony gains from further shortening their trail. Bridges dismantle when the ants in the structure sense the traffic walking over them slows down below a critical threshold.

An international team of astrophysicists led by a Johns Hopkins University scientist has for the first time witnessed a star being swallowed by a black hole and ejecting a flare of matter moving at nearly the speed of light.

The finding reported Thursday in the journal Science tracks the star -- about the size of our sun -- as it shifts from its customary path, slips into the gravitational pull of a supermassive black hole and is sucked in, said Sjoert van Velzen, a Hubble fellow at Johns Hopkins.

"These events are extremely rare," van Velzen said. "It's the first time we see everything from the stellar destruction followed by the launch of a conical outflow, also called a jet, and we watched it unfold over several months."

New research finds that progesterone supplements in the first trimester of pregnancy do not improve outcomes in women with a history of unexplained recurrent miscarriages.

The study of 826 women with previously unexplained recurrent miscarriage showed that those who received progesterone treatment in early pregnancy were no less likely to miscarry than those who received a placebo. This was true whatever their age, ethnicity, medical history and pregnancy history.

Two new studies report dramatic changes in phytoplankton abundance and nature, changes that have important implications for storing excess carbon. Collectively, these studies suggest that certain types of carbon-intensive algae are flourishing and will play increasingly prominent roles as carbon pumps, removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Using the isotopic signature of phytoplankton amino acids embedded in skeletons of deep water soft corals, Kelton McMahon and colleagues determined how plankton dominance changed in the North Pacific over the past millennium. Their analysis reveals that there was a transition from dominance by non-nitrogen-fixing cyanobacteria to that by eukaryotic microalgae.