Infectious diseases can substantially reduce the size of wildlife populations, thereby affecting both the dynamics of ecosystems and biodiversity. Predicting the long-term consequences of epidemics is thus essential for conservation. Researchers from the Leibniz Institute for Zoo … | Continue reading
The Annamite mountains of Vietnam and Lao PDR (Laos) harbour exceptional species richness and endemism, but its wildlife is under threat from widespread and intensive poaching. The region is home to the Annamite striped rabbit (Nesolagus timminsi), a little-known lagomorph only d … | Continue reading
Large amounts of the potent greenhouse gas methane are being released from an Icelandic glacier, scientists have discovered. | Continue reading
Using an affordable, portable device that attaches to a smartphone, a University of Arizona researcher and his collaborators hope to save lives in rural Africa. | Continue reading
When professional divers jump from a springboard, their hands are perpendicular to the water, with wrists pointed upward, as they continue toward their plunge at 30 mph. | Continue reading
President Donald Trump's recent comments blaming forest managers for catastrophic California wildfires have been met with outrage and ridicule from the wildland fire and forestry community. Not only were these remarks insensitive to the humanitarian crisis unfolding in California … | Continue reading
A small team of researchers at Université Paris Diderot has come up with a way to combine pneumatics with a hydrogel to create a baromorph for soft robotics applications—a baromorph is a soft material that self-configures when inflated. In their paper published in the journal Nat … | Continue reading
Takashi Miyata at Kansai University and colleagues report in Nature Communications a temperature-responsive gel that absorbs moisture and, when heated, releases it in the form of water. Applications include energy-efficient materials for condensing moisture into water. | Continue reading
Researchers at the DogStudies lab at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History have shown that dogs possess some "metacognitive" abilities—specifically, they are aware of when they do not have enough information to solve a problem and will actively seek more infor … | Continue reading
Touchscreens and digital graphics are everywhere, but for people who are visually impaired, they can be a major hurdle to using modern technology. But this is set to change, thanks to tactile technology that automatically converts complex digital graphics into braille and stick-o … | Continue reading
In cities, access to parks is strongly linked with better health for both people and neighborhoods. | Continue reading
When a U.S. senator asked Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, "Can you define hate speech?" it was arguably the most important question that social networks face: how to identify extremism inside their communities. | Continue reading
Scientists have discovered that bacteria in the deepest parts of the seafloor are absorbing carbon dioxide and could be turning themselves into an additional food source for other deep-sea life. | Continue reading
Multilingualism is the norm in India. But rather than enjoying the cognitive and learning advantages seen in multilingual children in the Global North, Indian children show low levels of learning basic school skills. Professor Ianthi Tsimpli is trying to disentangle the causes of … | Continue reading
Today's prosthetic limbs are tools – literal attachments to the body. | Continue reading
A report from Cardiff University reveals the extent to which public service provision is now being influenced by data analytics. | Continue reading
To decode the underlying laws that govern the organization of life into molecules, cells and tissues are the great scientific challenges of our time. Dr. Carlo Vittorio Cannistraci from the Biotechnology Center (BIOTEC) at the Technical University Dresden, Germany, explored the q … | Continue reading
A team of researchers from China, the U.S. and Norway has found that urging rural residents to switch from burning wood and grasses to cleaner fuels for cooking has resulted in less fine particulate matter being spewed into the air. In their paper published in Proceedings of the … | Continue reading
Birds are the surviving descendants of predatory dinosaurs. However, since the likes of Tyrannosaurus and Velociraptor, some parts of their anatomy have become radically transformed. The skull, for instance, is now toothless, and accommodates much larger eyes and brain. Skulls ar … | Continue reading
WASHINGTON—People could add years to their lives in smog-plagued parts of the world if authorities could reduce particulate pollution—soot from cars and industry—to levels recommended by the World Health Organization, a new study reported Monday. | Continue reading
Tiny particles of sodium salt float in the air over the pristine Amazon basin. Why? The only explanation before now has been that winds blow marine particles hundreds of miles inland from the Atlantic Ocean. An international team of scientists used chemical imaging and atmospheri … | Continue reading
A new scientific article shows that 25 European waterbird species can change their wintering areas depending on winter weather. Warm winters allow them to shift their wintering areas northeastwards, whereas cold spells push birds southwestwards. Species wintering in deep waters s … | Continue reading
Whether they're tracking the future spread of an epidemic, or determining where best to distribute a vaccine during an outbreak, today's disease researchers depend on reliable computer models. | Continue reading
The fight against water scarcity is becoming one of the main 21st century challenges, with securing a clean supply key to efforts. The REGROUND project has developed a novel, green ground water-innovation and is ready to introduce it to European markets. | Continue reading
The San Francisco Volcanic Field is a 4,700 square kilometers (1,800 square miles) area in the southern boundary of the Colorado Plateau. The field contains more than 600 scoria cones active in the past six million years. The Sunset Crater is the youngest of these scoria cones, a … | Continue reading
World War II-era oil pumping under Los Angeles likely triggered a rash of mid-sized earthquakes in the 1930s and 1940s, potentially leading seismologists to overestimate the earthquake potential in the region, according to new research published in AGU's Journal of Geophysical Re … | Continue reading
A RUDN professor, together with his colleagues from other Moscow universities, has described the mechanism of byproducts produced in the course of the synthesis of perovskites—minerals that have numerous prospective applications, e.g. as superconductors. The discovery could make … | Continue reading
A team of researchers from the School of Physics at the University of St Andrews have developed tiny lasers that could revolutionise our understanding and treatment of many diseases, including cancer. | Continue reading
German manufacturing conglomerate Siemens will build almost 100 new trains to replace the decades-old rolling stock on London Underground's Piccadilly Line, the group said in a statement Tuesday. | Continue reading
Observable effects of climate change that scientists had predicted in the past are now a reality: Glaciers are shrinking, plant and animal ranges have shifted and trees are flowering sooner. | Continue reading
Norwegian aviation executives like to joke among themselves that when God created aviation, he was thinking of Norway. | Continue reading
Astrophysicists of the University of Zürich, ETH Zürich and the NCCR PlanetS show how the icy moons of Uranus were born. Their result suggests that such potentially habitable worlds are much more abundant in the Universe than previously thought. The unprecedentedly complex comput … | Continue reading
Chemical clues in waters near Marcellus Shale gas wells in rural Pennsylvania can identify new drilling-related sources of methane contamination, according to scientists. | Continue reading
A bacterial toxin that allows an infectious strain of bacteria to defeat its competitors has been discovered by Imperial College London scientists. | Continue reading
Different subpopulations of a plant species can have distinct traits, varying in size, seed count, coloration, and so on. The primary source of this variation is genes: different versions of a gene can lead to different traits. However, genes are not the only determinant of such … | Continue reading
In a study released on Nature Climate Change's website today, scientists draw from recent findings to underscore the multifaceted dynamics of surface melting in Antarctica. The study authors come from Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, the Cooperative Institu … | Continue reading
Copenhagen has been struggling with air pollution for many years now. Pollution from lorries, vans, buses and cars each year costs lives. Now, research conducted by the University of Copenhagen and a series of collaborators shows that the average lifespan of Copenhageners could i … | Continue reading