Humans may not be the only ones who aid their friends when they're hurt. Mice may do it, too, as shown by a new research study led by scientists at the Keck School of Medicine of USC published recently in Science.

Scientists have been trying to understand why social mammals appear to help injured members of their species. There are numerous factors that determine empathetic behavior and social bonding in mammals, said Li Zhang, the principal investigator of the study and professor of physiology and neuroscience at Keck School of Medicine. "But this study is the first time we're seeing a first responder-like behavior in mice."

The study shows that mice tend to help other mice they know are unconscious. Their response ranges from gentle sniffing and grooming to more forceful actions such as mouth or tongue biting, before finally escalating to pulling the tongue out of the unconscious mouse.

[Brent] Chapman, who is blind in both eyes, is one of three Canadians undergoing osteo-odonto keratoprosthesis (OOKP) — or as it's more commonly known, tooth-in-eye surgery — at a B.C. hospital this week.

It involves removing a patient's tooth, usually the canine, installing a plastic optical lens inside it, and then implanting the whole thing into the eye.

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Why a tooth? Because teeth have dentine, which is the hardest substance the body produces, making it the ideal casing to bridge the plastic lens and the patient's eye, says Dr. Greg Moloney, an ophthalmologist and surgeon at Mount Saint Joseph Hospital in Vancouver.

An Indian man has been awarded damages in a legal case against the country's biggest movie theater chain after he complained that it showed too many commercials before a movie.

Abhishek M R, a 31-year-old lawyer from the southern city of Bangalore, decided to take action against the PVR INOX chain after he was forced to cancel work calls because the movie overran the scheduled finish time.

In a case brought before Bangalore's District Consumer Disputes Redressal Commission, he claimed that his time was wasted and that he suffered "mental agony" as a result of the 25 minutes of commercials that preceded a 2023 screening of the film "Sam Bahadur."

A beloved Australian bird best known for its stunning tail and powers of mimicry may have a cunning hidden talent.

New research has revealed the superb lyrebird to be a resourceful farmer, creating micro-habitats to host and fatten its prey before returning later to feast.

Scientists from La Trobe University observed the ground-dwelling birds working to create habitats suitable for their diet of worms, centipedes and spiders.

The reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park in the 1990s had a cascading effect that benefited the entire ecosystem, a new study finds.

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The new study, published Jan. 14 in the journal Global Ecology and Conservation, used 20 years' worth of data, collected from 2001 to 2020, regarding willow shrubs (Salix) along streams in Yellowstone. The researchers looked at willow crown volume — the total space occupied by a shrubs' branches, stems and leaves. Measuring crown volume enabled the researchers to calculate the shrubs' overall biomass: the amount of organic material available at the plant level of the food web, and the energy that will be passed on through the food web when animals eat these plants.

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The analysis found a 1,500% increase in willow crown volume along streams over the study period, demonstrating a major recovery of these shrubs. The study links this significant willow shrub recovery to a reduction in elk browsing, probably influenced by the return of predators to the region, which enabled willows to grow back in some areas.

Once upon a time, in the dark days of the early 2000s, we were beset on all sides by horny profiles. This was a replicable genre, wherein a writer—usually, but not always a man, met a subject—usually, but not always, a woman, often a model or an actress—and spent the entire time with his tongue unrolling like a Tex Avery cartoon wolf, his eyes bugging out of his head, and his lust so unrestrained that he began to compulsively mix his metaphors, purple his prose and expand his word count beyond all bounds of taste or readability. These profiles were badly written, they needed a cold shower, and there were so many of them.

The horny profile is now, mercifully, a mostly-dead genre, something that withered along with the popularity and influence of men's magazines. But to re-read the horniest of them is to consider what function they once served, and to guard ourselves, as if against an infectious disease—an STI, if you really want to belabor the point—against their recurrence.

Citigroup erroneously credited $81 trillion, instead of $280, to a customer's account and took hours to reverse the transaction, a "near miss" that shows up the bank's operational issues it has sought to fix, the Financial Times reported on Friday.

The error, which occurred last April, was missed by a payments employee and a second official assigned to check the transaction before it was cleared to be processed the next day, FT said, citing an internal account and two people familiar with the event.

A third employee caught the error one-and-a-half hours after the payment was processed and the transaction was ultimately reversed several hours later, FT said.

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There were 10 near misses of $1 billion or more at Citi last year, down from 13 the year before, according to an internal report seen by the FT. Citi declined to comment to FT on this report.

The owners of an island volcano in New Zealand where 22 tourists and local guides died in an eruption had their criminal conviction for failing to keep visitors safe thrown out by a judge on Friday.

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The case hinged on whether the company — which granted access to the volcano to tourism operators and scientific groups, for a fee — should have been in charge of safety practices on the island under New Zealand's workplace health and safety laws. Anyone in charge of a workplace must ensure management of hazards and the safety of all there, including at entry and exit points.

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In Friday's written ruling, Justice Simon Moore ruled the company did not have a duty under the relevant law to ensure that the walking tour workplace was without risks to health and safety. He agreed with the company's lawyers that the firm only granted access to the bare land through permits — and should not have been legally considered an entity that managed or controlled the workplace.

The world's oldest dated rune stone, a landmark discovery revealed in 2023, is just one piece of a larger, nearly 2,000-year-old slab, new research has found. Now, scientists in Norway are working to reassemble the ancient puzzle, a process that's starting to shed light on who carved the mysterious runic writing and what the words mean.

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Archaeologists who originally unearthed the oldest known rune stone in 2021 while investigating an ancient grave site in eastern Norway found the large piece covered with traces of runes. But as the fieldwork continued, the researchers uncovered additional sandstone fragments, some bearing similar runic inscriptions, in other nearby graves.

The broken pieces appeared to fit together, with some of the runic script from one stone continuing onto another, and the scientists realized the fragments were all once part of a single stone. The research team published the new findings in the February 3 issue of the journal Antiquity.

A team of environmental scientists at Duke University, working with colleagues from the University of New South Wales, the University of Queensland and the University of California, has found that green staghorn coral around Heron Island (part of the Great Barrier Reef) are more likely to survive warming water temperatures if hoof-clawed crabs live in the near vicinity.

The ʻalalā is a species of crow found only on the Hawaiian Islands, one that holds an important place in Native Hawaiian culture. When it was clear decades ago that the chatty, intelligent birds were heading toward extinction, they were brought into captivity as a last resort. They went extinct in the wild in 2002.

The species has held on thanks to a breeding program, but returning them to the wild has been challenging. A group released on Hawaii's Big Island was preyed upon by hawks. In captivity, the crows have become accustomed to human care, making it harder for them to survive in the wild.

Now, five young ʻalalā have been released in a remote forest of Maui, an environment free of hawks. A team of biologists and wildlife officials is monitoring them with the hope that this time, the crows endure and thrive.

In the Milky Way's central bulge, about 24,000 light-years from Earth, a peculiar pair of objects appears to be hurtling through space at breakneck speed.

Evidence suggests these objects are a high-velocity star and its accompanying exoplanet, a new study reports. If that's confirmed, it would set a new record as the fastest-moving exoplanet system known to science.

Stars are on the move throughout the Milky Way, typically at a few hundred thousand miles per hour. Our Solar System's average velocity through the galaxy's Orion Arm is 450,000 miles per hour, or 200 kilometers per second.

These two objects are careening twice as fast, at a speed of at least 1.2 million miles per hour (540 kilometers per second).

A fox kit leaps across a gap between logs in a pile, in Lac La Biche, Alberta, Canada.

In a rugged stretch of desert in one of the nation's most remote national parks, a volunteer's eyes were caught by a colorful sight sprouting up from the beige and brown of the Chihuahuan Desert — "devil"-ish blooms, flowers like bright red horns.

The volunteer, Deb Manley, walked into the dusty basin and snapped a photo of the eye-catching plant, then shared it on iNaturalist — a social media platform for sharing pictures of flora and fauna. Whether they knew it or not, Manley had just revealed a brand new species to the world, according to researchers.

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Due to the wooly devil's precarious situation, researchers provided only a vague area where the plants can be found, no exact locations. It's a secret, at least for now, and the geocoordinates are being withheld.

Birkenstocks: They are ubiquitous in summer, comfy and very German. Sometimes they look chic and sometimes shabby. But can these sandals be considered art?

That's the question Germany's Federal Court of Justice wrestled with Thursday, and it ruled they're just comfy footwear.

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The shoe manufacturer claimed its sandals "are copyright-protected works of applied art" that may not be imitated. Under German law, works of art enjoy stronger and longer-lasting intellectual property protections than consumer products.