299 articles from WEDNESDAY 6.5.2020

Climate change could reawaken Indian Ocean El Nino

Global warming is approaching a tipping point that during this century could reawaken an ancient climate pattern similar to El Niño in the Indian Ocean, new research led by scientists from The University of Texas at Austin has found.

Staghorn coral restoration projects show promise in Florida Keys

A new analysis of reef restoration projects in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary suggests they could play a key role in helping staghorn coral (Acropora cervicornis) recover from being endangered. Matthew Ware of Florida State University in Tallahassee and colleagues present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on May 6, 2020.

Arctic Edmontosaurus lives again: A new look at the 'caribou of the Cretaceous'

A new study by an international team from the Perot Museum of Nature and Science in Dallas and Hokkaido University and Okayama University of Science in Japan further explores the proliferation of the most commonly occurring duck-billed dinosaur of the ancient Arctic as the genus Edmontosaurus. The findings also reinforce that the hadrosaurs—known as the "caribou of the Cretaceous"—had a huge...

Safely relaxing social distancing comes down to numbers

Your house number could be the key to the safe relaxation of COVID-19-related restrictions if governments follow a new exit strategy, which proposes the use of an 'odds-and-evens' approach to allowing people to head back to work and enjoy other activities after weeks of lockdown.

Filtering out toxic chromium from water

Chemists have developed sponges to capture various target substances, like gold, mercury and lead, dissolved in solution. The sponges are actually porous crystals called metal organic frameworks, and now one exists for capturing toxic hexavalent chromium from water.

Wetter climate is likely to intensify global warming

New study indicates the increase in rainfall forecast by global climate models is likely to hasten the release of carbon dioxide from tropical soils, further intensifying global warming by adding to human emissions of this greenhouse gas into Earth's atmosphere.

Dual personalities visualized for shape-shifting molecule

Researchers have made a breakthrough in understanding the structure of a key genetic molecule, called RNA, and revealing for the first time how these changes impact RNA's function. The research team developed a bioinformatics technique to resolve separate structures of RNA rather than viewing them as a 'blur' that averaged multiple structures. This underpinned their discovery that the structure of...

An AI algorithm inspired by how kids learn is harder to confuse

Information firehose: The standard practice for teaching a machine-learning algorithm is to give it all the details at once. Say you’re building an image classification system to recognize different species of animals. You show it examples of each species and label them accordingly: “German shepherd” and “poodle” for dogs, for example. But when a parent is teaching a child, the...

New freeze-resistant trichinella species discovered in wolverines

A new freeze-resistant Trichinella species has been discovered in wolverines by Agricultural Research Service scientists and their colleagues. Trichinella are parasites that cause the disease trichinosis (formally referred to as trichinellosis), which people can get by eating raw or undercooked meat from infected animals.

Old democracies cope better with severe crisis than newer ones

In established democracies with a long experience of democracy, the risk of democratic breakdown, in the face of a crisis like the current corona-crisis, is low. The outlook is very different for new democracies, especially those with weak civil society and weak political parties, according to research from the University of Gothenburg.