A new study of some Hesperornithiform bird fossils from the Cretaceous shows how several separate lineages evolved adaptations for diving. They began to go fishing.

Living at the same time as the dinosaurs,  Hesperornithiform has been found in North America, Europe and Asia in 65–95 million years old rocks. Dr. Alyssa Bell and Professor Luis Chiappe of the Dinosaur Institute, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, undertook a detailed analysis of their evolution, showing that separate lineages became progressively more adept at diving into water to catch fishes, like modern day loons and grebes.

Researchers have developed algorithms that enable robots to learn motor tasks through trial and error, using a process that more closely approximates the way humans learn.

They demonstrated their technique, a type of reinforcement learning, by having a robot complete various tasks -- putting a clothes hanger on a rack, assembling a toy plane, screwing a cap on a water bottle, and more -- without pre-programmed details about its surroundings. 

Though the popular imagery of farming is a small family operation on a tiny patch of land, that isn't really the case.

Over 90 percent of American farms are run by families but they are high-tech operations. Farmers want yields to go up and costs to come down and that means having data.

In recent years, the popularity of "electronic dance music" (EDM) and dance festivals has increased substantially throughout the US and worldwide.

Even though data from national samples suggests drug use among adolescents in the general US population has been declining, targeted samples have shown nightclub attendees tend to report high rates of drug use, above that of the general population. In spite of increasing deaths among dance festival attendees in recent years, no nationally representative studies have examined potential associations between nightlife attendance and drug use.

More than half of all Medicaid enrollees use hospital emergency departments to receive care for conditions that could be treated at a primary care clinic. Why? Some of it may be urgency, and it may be cheaper for them, since they won't miss work. But it isn't cheaper for the rest of society and as the Affordable Care Act ballooned the use of Medicaid, the costs have gone up as well.

"From a patient's perspective, having all imaging and laboratory studies done in one place is likely more cost effective than going to a [primary care provider] clinic and having gone elsewhere to get further testing," writes Roberta Capp, assistant professor of emergency medicine at the University of Colorado School of Medicine on the Anschutz Medical Campus in the journal Medical Care.

Some cases of male infertility are due to mutations in the maternal X chromosome that prevent development of viable sperm, according to a study led by researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and the Magee-Womens Research Institute (MWRI). The study was published online today in the New England Journal of Medicine.