259 articles from TUESDAY 16.6.2020

Plantlife: one man went to mow … but maybe he should wait

Lawns that are only cut once a month can give low-growing plants a chance to flower, letting insects thriveLawn mowers are back in action now that June is wet and the grass is growing again after the spring drought, but it’s worth mowing less often to let wildflowers and their insect pollinators thrive.A survey by volunteers for the charity Plantlife found that 80% of lawns supported the...

New ideas in the search for dark matter

Since the 1980s, researchers have been running experiments in search of particles that make up dark matter, an invisible substance that permeates our galaxy and universe. Coined dark matter because it gives off no light, this substance, which constitutes more than 80 percent of matter in our universe, has been shown repeatedly to influence ordinary matter through its gravity. Scientists know it is...

Research reveals the chemistry behind the bombardier beetle's extraordinary firepower

If you want to see one of the wonders of the natural world, just startle a bombardier beetle. But be careful: when the beetles are scared, they flood an internal chamber with a complex cocktail of aromatic chemicals, triggering a cascade of chemical reaction that detonates the fluid and sends it shooting out of the insect's spray nozzle in a machine-gun-like pulse of toxic, scalding-hot vapor. The...

'Relaxed' T cells critical to immune response

Like finding that needle in the haystack every time, your T cells manage what seems like an improbable task: Quickly finding a few invaders among the many imposters in your body to trigger its immune response.

The nexus between economic inequality and social welfare

Equity (or, its counterpart, inequity) plays a fundamental role in the evaluation of the different dimensions of social welfare. But how can we consider and compare its different dimensions? These issues are in fact traditionally considered and compared across individuals—be it within national boundaries or across countries, but also over time, when we consider the distribution of resources over...

Coal-burning in Siberia led to climate change 250 million years ago

A team of researchers led by Arizona State University (ASU) School of Earth and Space Exploration professor Lindy Elkins-Tanton has provided the first ever direct evidence that extensive coal burning in Siberia is a cause of the Permo-Triassic Extinction, the Earth's most severe extinction event. The results of their study have been recently published in the journal Geology.