The Biological Dynamics of Forest Fragments Project (BDFFP), located near Manaus, Brazil, began in 1979 and is the world's longest-running experimental study of tropical forest fragments. A new paper in The Condor: Ornithological Applications summarizes four decades of data from … | Continue reading
In most animals, females are larger than males, but in most mammals, males are larger than females. A new analysis published in Mammal Review examines the potential drivers of these differences. | Continue reading
Chemotherapeutic drugs, also known as antineoplastic agents, that are prescribed to treat a range of cancer types, enter the aquatic environment via human excretion and wastewater treatment facilities. A review published in Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry indicates that ve … | Continue reading
The bright chirp of the coquí frog, the national symbol of Puerto Rico, has likely resounded through Caribbean forests for at least 29 million years. | Continue reading
As COVID-19 spreads across the globe, a common question is, can infectious diseases be connected to environmental change? Yes, indicates a study published today from the University of California, Davis' One Health Institute. | Continue reading
Often considered desolate, remote, unalterable places, the high seas are, in fact, hotbeds of activity for both people and wildlife. Technology has enabled more human activity in areas once difficult to reach, and that in turn has brought a growing presence of industries such as … | Continue reading
Tropical Cyclone Harold brought heavy rains and hurricane-force winds to Vanuatu and was moving toward Fiji when NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite provided forecasters with an image of the storm. | Continue reading
Infertility is estimated to affect 9% of reproductive-aged couples globally, and many couples consequently turn to assisted reproductive technology (ART). Selecting embryos with maximum development potential plays a pivotal role in obtaining the highest rate of success in ART tre … | Continue reading
In complex fault zones, multiple seemingly disconnected faults can potentially rupture at once, increasing the chance of a large damaging earthquake. Recent earthquakes including the 1992 Landers, 1999 Hector Mine and 2019 Ridgecrest earthquakes in California, among others, ruptu … | Continue reading
A selective mating experiment by a curious butterfly breeder has led scientists to a deeper understanding of how butterfly wing color is created and evolves. The study, led by scientists at University of California, Berkeley, and the Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, is p … | Continue reading
Bacterial canker of tomato is a disease that leads to wilt, cankers, and eventually death. The disease was first discovered in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1909, but annual outbreaks now affect tomato production areas worldwide. For some farmers, bacterial canker can be devastating … | Continue reading
The twisting and bending capabilities of the human muscle system enable a varied and dynamic range of motion, from walking and running to reaching and grasping. Replicating something as seemingly simple as waving a hand in a robot, however, requires a complex series of motors, pu … | Continue reading
Tiny biohybrid robots on the micrometer scale can swim through the body and deliver drugs to tumors or provide other cargo-carrying functions. The natural environmental sensing tendencies of bacteria mean they can navigate toward certain chemicals or be remotely controlled using … | Continue reading
Team disagreements might be the key to helping soldiers identify objects in battle, researchers say. While studies on combat identification typically focus on how technology can help identify enemy forces, researchers sought to understand how teams work together to identify armo … | Continue reading
When modeling the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) ocean-climate cycle, adding satellite sea surface salinity—or saltiness—data significantly improves model accuracy, according to a new NASA study. | Continue reading
New research from Adelphi University has revealed the first forensically-assessed archeological discovery of remains of a group of domineering mounted archer-lancers and their kin of the Eastern Roman Empire from the turbulent ProtoByzantine period, which spanned the fourth to se … | Continue reading
A team of Clemson University College of Science researchers, in collaboration with international colleagues, has reported the first definitive detection of a relativistic jet emerging from two colliding galaxies—in essence, the first photographic proof that merging galaxies can p … | Continue reading
While the concept of crowdfunding is still in its early phases of development, a group of marketing researchers have conducted a study that reveals the most powerful drivers behind effective crowdfunding campaigns. According to the researchers, there are three primary mechanisms … | Continue reading
One aspect of bacterial activity is the production of so-called extracellular membrane vesicles (MVs): biological 'packages' wrapped in a lipid-bilayer membrane, carrying for example genetic material. Apart from having specific biological functions, MVs are increasingly used in n … | Continue reading
A pair of chemicals used by wallflowers and their kin to ward off predators have evolved to complement each other, with one targeting generalist herbivores and the other targeting specialised herbivores that have become resistant to the generalist defence. | Continue reading
A new genome editing system enhances the efficiency of an error-free DNA repair pathway, which could help improve agronomic traits in multiple crops. | Continue reading
Long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs), which are longer than 200 nucleotides in length and lack protein coding potential, are pervasively transcribed in eukaryotic genomes. It is well established that lncRNAs play important roles in gene expression in diverse cellular and biological prog … | Continue reading
In June 2018, large wildfires broke out on Saddleworth Moor and Winter Hill Saddleworth Moor in the northwest of England. The fires burned for roughly three weeks, 100 firefighters and the army attended and smoke from the fires spread widely across the northwest of England. | Continue reading
One year ago, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration published the first image of a black hole in the nearby radio galaxy M 87. Now the collaboration has extracted new information from the EHT data on the distant quasar 3C 279: they observed the finest detail ever seen i … | Continue reading
On the surface, it resembles a stainless steel spear, roughly 6 feet long with a silver-dollar diameter that ends in a 30-degree point. | Continue reading
Leafhoppers are tiny insects. They are only about 3 millimeters long, smaller than a grain of rice. But they can cause big damage to crops, including beans. | Continue reading
Human-caused increases in gaseous nitrogen (N) emissions to the atmosphere have accelerated terrestrial ecosystem N deposition over the past half-century. As forest productivity is usually N limited, accelerated N deposition can promote the growth of forest trees. But long-term e … | Continue reading
A homogeneous, consistent, high-quality in situ temperature dataset covering a period of decades is crucial for the detection of climate changes in the ocean. | Continue reading
Glassy fast ionic conductors can be used as solid electrolytes, cathode materials, conducting fibers and electrochromic glasses due to their high ionic conductivity and good transparency. While the conductivity of the conductors is highly dependent on the organization of glass ne … | Continue reading
A team of researchers at Google's DeepMind has developed an AI system that is able to predict the movement of glass molecules as the material transitions between liquid and solid states. They have published a paper outlining their work on the DeepMind website. | Continue reading
Insects, spiders and millipedes make up the majority of all animals on land. While today not many of them live in the water, their ancestors were once aquatic. | Continue reading
In recent years, chaos theory and other forms of computational modeling have sought to leverage findings in the social sciences to better describe—and maybe one day predict—how groups of people behave. One approach looks to update a widely used model to examine how changes in pol … | Continue reading
Bottle emptying is a phenomenon most of us have observed while pouring a beverage. Researchers from the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee discovered how to make bottles empty faster, which has wide-ranging implications for many areas beyond the beverage industry. | Continue reading
When a massive star in a distant galaxy collapses, forming a black hole, two giant jets of light-emitting plasma shoot from its core. These extremely bright gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are the most powerful explosions in the universe, and when a jet points towards Earth, the afterglo … | Continue reading
While the human toll of the COVID-19 pandemic has been apparent for some time, the economic picture is now starting to come into greater focus. Initial unemployment claims in the United States jumped from 280,000 to almost 3.3 million for the week ending March 21, then doubled to … | Continue reading
Some satellites are only slightly larger than a milk carton. This type of construction is now to be given a further simplified architecture and thus become even lighter and more cost-effective: This is the goal of the teams of Professors Sergio Montenegro of the University of Wür … | Continue reading
About half of international students in Australia are private renters and more than half of them rely on paid work to pay the rent, but most of the casual jobs they depend on have been lost in the coronavirus pandemic. The results of our recent survey (conducted pre-COVID-19) of … | Continue reading
It might surprise you to learn that nuclear bomb tests during the Cold War are now helping conserve whale sharks, the largest living fish. | Continue reading
Few technologies have made as big a splash in recent years as CRISPR/Cas9, and rightfully so. CRISPR/Cas9, or clustered regularly interspaced palindromic repeats (CRISPR) and associated genes, is a bacterial gene editing toolbox that allows researchers to edit genomic sequences m … | Continue reading
One of the first stories to use race-based data to talk about the risk that Black communities face because of COVID-19 came on March 30 from the Charlotte Observer. The article said Black residents in Mecklenburg County, in Charlotte, N.C., accounted for 43.9 percent of the 303 c … | Continue reading
Recent discoveries by two research teams in the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University are advancing the field of synthetic biology. | Continue reading
When you hear the term "evolutionary tree," you may think of Charles Darwin and the study of the relationships between different species over the span of millions of years. | Continue reading
Americans of all walks of life are working together to slow the spread of COVID-19 by practicing social distancing. Public agencies are doing their part by closing offices to the public, canceling or postponing hearings, and shifting services and proceedings to virtual formats. I … | Continue reading
Post-2020 Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) must safeguard and stimulate the preservation of carbon-rich soils through protection of peatlands. Functional peatlands are the most space efficient long-term carbon store and sink in our planet's biosphere. | Continue reading
Scientists at the University of Saskatchewan (USask) have published a study that shows beef cattle can tolerate higher concentrations of sulphates in drinking water than previously believed. | Continue reading
One of the central tenets of quantum mechanics is the wave-particle duality. It tells us that even massive objects behave like both particles and waves. A number of previous experiments have shown this for electrons, neutrons, atoms and even large molecules. Quantum theory mainta … | Continue reading
A huge quantity of organic waste from various sectors either ends up in landfills or gets incinerated, further increasing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and soil and water pollution. To address this issue, it's crucial to develop and implement a proper waste management plan. | Continue reading
Researchers at the Universities Vienna and Stuttgart have investigated a version of Maxwell's demon embodied by a delayed feedback force acting on a levitated microparticle. They confirmed new fundamental limits that time delay imposes on the demon's actions which are not covered … | Continue reading