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Baylor University researchers, in collaboration with an international team of scientists, have discovered definitive evidence of the environment inhabited by the early ape Proconsul on Rusinga Island, Kenya. The groundbreaking discovery provides additional information that will help scientists understand and interpret the connection between habitat preferences and the early diversification of the ape-human lineage.

(Phys.org) —Self-replicating malware has struck some older Linksys routers and Linksys has acknowledged awareness of the malware, called “TheMoon.” They plan to make firmware fixes for all affected products available “Linksys will be working on the affected products with a firmware fix that is planned to be posted on our website in the coming weeks,” according to a company statement. Only those routers with Remote Management Access enabled within the administrative settings are vulnerable

Ignition – the process of releasing fusion energy equal to or greater than the amount of energy used to confine the fuel – has long been considered the “holy grail” of inertial confinement fusion science. A key step along the path to ignition is to have “fuel gains” greater than unity, where the energy generated through fusion reactions exceeds the amount of energy deposited into the fusion fuel.

Cochlear implants—medical devices that electrically stimulate the auditory nerve—have granted at least limited hearing to hundreds of thousands of people worldwide who otherwise would be totally deaf. Existing versions of the device, however, require that a disk-shaped transmitter about an inch in diameter be affixed to the skull, with a wire snaking down to a joint microphone and power source that looks like an oversized hearing aid around the patient’s ear.

The pollutants measured in the sediments of Guánica Bay, Puerto Rico, in a new NOAA study were among the highest concentrations of PCBs, chlordane, chromium and nickel ever measured in the history of NOAA’s National Status & Trends, a nationwide contaminant monitoring program that began in 1986.

An extensive study by Radboud University Nijmegen on excrement and rumen fluids in plant-eating mammals from all over the whole world shows that the ciliates in their guts have evolved in parallel with them. This is the result of a five-year research project performed by evolution biologists, microbiologists and computer scientists at Radboud University Nijmegen and published this week in the European Journal of Protistology.

Children and adults sidelined by serious illness and immobility from life as healthy people know it b may find relief from anxiety and depression with a “pill” in the form of online games, a drug-free mood enhancer that reminds them they are still in the game of life. For quadriplegics, a mouth-operated game controller can open up the experience of console games; the controller has been launched in a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter.

Sponges are an important animal for marine and freshwater ecology and represent a rich animal diversity found throughout the world, from tropical climates to the arctic poles. For evolutionary biologists, they also present an interesting animal for comparative study because they are simple filter feeders, and lack nervous, digestive or circulatory systems, suggesting that they diverged early from other animals.

(Phys.org) —Horses face high risks of developing eye problems, and Cornell clinicians have developed a new way to detect and diagnose them more safely and quickly than before. Published online in January in the journal Veterinary Ophthalmology, their findings are the first to show how horses with microscopic foreign objects in their eyes can benefit from in vivo corneal confocal microscopy, a human medical technique that allows doctors to take pictures of living eyes in microscopic detail without a scratch.