- CBC - Technology & Science News
- 20/8/10 23:32
Canmore-based wildlife photographer John E. Marriott was just out for a bit of camping with his family when an epic grizzly showdown between Split Lip and The Boss began right next to his...
256 articles from MONDAY 10.8.2020
Canmore-based wildlife photographer John E. Marriott was just out for a bit of camping with his family when an epic grizzly showdown between Split Lip and The Boss began right next to his...
Electronic filters are essential to the inner workings of our phones and other wireless devices. They eliminate or enhance specific input signals to achieve the desired output signals. They are essential, but take up space on the chips that researchers are on a constant quest to make smaller. A new study demonstrates the successful integration of the individual elements that make up electronic...
One way to cut back on deforestation in the Amazon rainforest - and help in the global fight against climate change - is to grant more of Brazil's indigenous communities full property rights to tribal lands.
The rise in firearm violence has coincided with an increase in the severity of injuries firearms inflict as well as the cost of operations.
What is the role and molecular basis of electrical signaling in higher plants? This can now be investigated non-invasively for the first time.
A new study found that common gastrointestinal (GI) symptoms such as diarrhea, constipation and bloating are linked to troubling sleep problems, self-harm and physical complaints in preschool children. According to the study, these GI symptoms are much more common and potentially disruptive in young kids with autism.
Sophisticated agtech labs and equipment used for crop and animal breeding, seed testing, and monitoring of plant and animal diseases could easily be adapted for diagnostic testing and tracing in a human pandemic or epidemic, researchers say.
It is conventional wisdom that Americans cherish democracy—but a new study by Yale political scientists reports that only a small fraction of U.S. voters are willing to sacrifice their partisan and policy interests to defend democratic principles.
Just as redeploying a fleet of small British fishing boats helped during the Battle of Dunkirk, marshalling the research equipment and expertise of the many agtech labs around the world could help combat pandemics, say the authors of a just-published article in Nature Biotechnology.
Biological sex is typically understood in binary terms: male and female. However, there are many examples of animals that are able to modify sex-typical biological and behavioral features and even change sex. A new study, which appears in the journal Current Biology, identifies a genetic switch in brain cells that can toggle between sex-specific states when necessary, findings that question the...
University of Toronto Engineering researchers have discovered a dose threshold that greatly increases the delivery of cancer-fighting drugs into a tumor.
Brittany Goddard's final semester at Howard University isn't the dream ending she imagined in Washington, D.C.
Dwarf planet, believed to be a barren space rock, has an ‘extensive reservoir’ of brine beneath its surface, images showThe dwarf planet Ceres – long believed to be a barren space rock – is an ocean world with reservoirs of sea water beneath its surface, the results of a major exploration mission showed on Monday.Ceres is the largest object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter and...
Huge stocks of greenhouse gases tied up in peatlands could be released as the world...
Huge stocks of greenhouse gases tied up in peatlands could be released as the world warms.
Optogenetics denotes the manipulation of cellular processes by light-based biological techniques. An international research team led by the Würzburg plant scientists Rainer Hedrich, Georg Nagel and Dirk Becker has succeeded in applying this method to higher plants: Light impulses can now be used to trigger electrical excitation in plants.
One way to cut back on deforestation in the Amazon rainforest—and help in the global fight against climate change—is to grant more of Brazil's indigenous communities full property rights to tribal lands. This policy focus is suggested by a new University California of San Diego study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Social protection programs can facilitate progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) but can also create trade-offs across divergent social and environmental goals that can undermine their effectiveness, say the authors of new research published in the journal PNAS. This is one of the largest studies on the sustainability implications of social protection, funded by the Grantham...
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), nine of the world's 10 most polluted cities are in India. Yet, researchers have almost no idea how air pollution is affecting non-human organisms. In some of the first research to address the physiological and molecular impacts of air pollution on wild plants and animals, scientists from the Bangalore Life Science Cluster show that air pollution...
The discovery in the 1970s of hydrothermal vents, where volcanoes at the seafloor produce hot fluid exceeding 350 degrees Celsius, or 662 degrees Fahrenheit, fundamentally changed the understanding about Earth and life. Yet, life at and underneath the seafloor is still very much a mystery today.
New research suggests that education provides little to no protection against the onset of cognitive declines later in life. It can, however, boost the cognitive skills people develop earlier in life, pushing back the point at which age-related dementia begins to impact a person's ability to care for themselves.
Eavesdropping on the shudders and groans echoing deep inside alien worlds like Mars and the moon is revealing what lies far beneath their surfaces and could teach us more about how our own planet formed.
A simple blood test that does not require overnight fasting has been found to be an accurate screening tool for identifying youth at risk for type 2 diabetes and heart disease risk later in life.
Coronaviruses were detected in a high proportion of bats and rodents in Viet Nam from 2013 to 2014, with an increasing proportion of positive samples found along the wildlife supply chain from traders to large markets to restaurants, according to a new study.
As the world continues to closely monitor the newest coronavirus outbreak, the government of South Korea has been able to keep the disease under control without paralyzing the national health and economic systems.
Intensified rainstorms predicted for many parts of the United States as a result of warming climate may have a modest silver lining: they could more efficiently water some major crops, and this would at least partially offset the far larger projected yield declines caused by the rising heat itself.
A new study, revisiting fossil specimens from the enormous crocodylian, Deinosuchus, has confirmed that the beast had teeth 'the size of bananas', capable to take down even the very largest of dinosaurs.
An international team has made a key discovery related to 'presolar grains' found in some meteorites. This discovery has shed light on stellar explosions and the origin of chemical elements. It has also provided a new method for astronomical research.
An analysis of cervical cancers in Ugandan women has uncovered significant genomic differences between tumors caused by different strains of human papillomavirus (HPV), signifying HPV type may impact cervical cancer characteristics and prognosis.
A new study suggests that future reductions in seasonal snowpack as a result of climate change may negatively influence forest growth in semi-arid climates, but less so in wetter climates.
Biological sex is typically understood in binary terms: male and female. However, there are many examples of animals that are able to modify sex-typical biological and behavioral features and even change sex. A new study identifies a genetic switch in brain cells that can toggle between sex-specific states when necessary, findings that question the idea of sex as a fixed property.
The dwarf planet Ceres—long believed to be a barren space rock—is an ocean world with reservoirs of sea water beneath its surface, the results of a major exploration mission showed Monday.
By combining purpose-built materials and neural networks, researchers at EPFL have shown that sound can be used in high-resolution imagery.
Arctic sea ice is melting more quickly than once assumed. Today's climate models have yet to incorporate the steep rise in temperatures that have occurred over the past 40 years. This, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Copenhagen and other institutions.
Corals precipitate their calcareous skeletons (calcium carbonate) from seawater. Over thousands of years, vast coral reefs form due to the deposition of this calcium carbonate. During precipitation, corals prefer carbonate groups containing specific variants of oxygen (chemical symbol: O). For example, the lower the water temperature, the higher the abundance of a heavy oxygen variant, known as...
Scientists have tracked a 'boomerang' earthquake in the ocean for the first time, providing clues about how they could cause devastation on land.
A new study suggests that future reductions in seasonal snowpack as a result of climate change may negatively influence forest growth in semi-arid climates, but less so in wetter climates.
After Tropical Depression 07W formed close to the western Philippines, it moved away and strengthened into a tropical storm in the South China Sea. NASA's Terra satellite provided a look at the strength of the storms that make up the tropical cyclone.
Thousands of chemical processes used by the energy industry and for other applications rely on the high speed of catalytic reactions, but molecules frequently are hindered by molecular traffic jams that slow them down. Now an entirely new class of porous catalysts has been invented, using unique fins to speed up the chemistry by allowing molecules to skip the lines that limit the reaction.
An international team led by the Plant Phenotyping and Imaging Research Centre (P2IRC) at the University of Saskatchewan (USask) and researchers at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC) has decoded the full genome for the black mustard plant—research that will advance breeding of oilseed mustard crops and provide a foundation for improved breeding of wheat, canola and lentils.
Analysis of meteorite content has been crucial in advancing our knowledge of the origin and evolution of our solar system. Some meteorites also contain grains of stardust. These grains predate the formation of our solar system and are now providing important insights into how the elements in the universe formed.
All life is subject to evolution in the form of mutations that change the DNA sequence of an organism's offspring, after which natural selection allows the 'fittest' mutants to survive and pass on their genes to future generations. These mutations can generate new abilities in a species, but another common driving force for evolution is horizontal gene transfer (HGT)—the acquisition of DNA from...
Intensified rainstorms predicted for many parts of the United States as a result of warming climate may have a modest silver lining: they could more efficiently water some major crops, and this would at least partially offset the far larger projected yield declines caused by the rising heat itself. The conclusion, which goes against some accepted wisdom, is contained in a new study published this...
A new study, revisiting fossil specimens from the enormous crocodylian, Deinosuchus, has confirmed that the beast had teeth "the size of bananas," capable of taking down even the very largest of dinosaurs.
How much effort should be spent trying to keep Venice looking like Venice—even as it faces rising sea levels that threaten the city with more frequent extreme flooding?
Classical phase transitions are governed by temperature. One of the most familiar examples is the phase transitions of water from solid to liquid to gas. However, other parameters govern phase transitions when temperatures approach absolute zero, including pressure, the magnetic field, and doping, which introduce disorder into the molecular structure of a material.
Albert Einstein once said, "I see my life in terms of music." Perhaps inspired by his words, scientists at the Center for Self-assembly and Complexity (CSC), within the Institute for Basic Science (IBS, South Korea) now see chemical reactions in the presence of music. The IBS research team has reported that audible sound can control chemical reactions in solution by continuously supplying energy...
The world's 'best of the last' tropical forests are at significant risk of being lost, according to a paper released today in Nature Ecology and Evolution. Of these pristine forests that provide key services—including carbon storage, prevention of disease transmission and water provision—only a mere 6.5 percent are formally protected.
A new study, published this week in the journal Nature Climate Change, supports predictions that the Arctic could be free of sea ice by 2035.
Tiny factories float inside our cells and provide them with almost all the energy they need: the mitochondria. Their effectiveness decreases when we get older, but also when we face many diseases such as diabetes, cancer or Parkinson's. This is why scientists are increasingly interested in how they work. At EPFL, a team has developed a protocol to measure their activity live in living animals....