330 articles from WEDNESDAY 16.9.2020

Slow-moving storms that deluge coasts become regular part of Atlantic hurricane season

For Grant Saltz, who runs a barbecue restaurant in Mobile, Alabama, what struck him about Hurricane Sally was its steady, deliberate pace, after the storm rumbled into the U.S. Gulf Coast on Wednesday as a powerful Category 2 hurricane. Sally is not the most powerful storm to batter the U.S. Gulf Coast in recent memory, but its glacial pace is becoming a regular feature of the deadly storms,...

Climate crisis 233m years ago reshaped life on Earth, say scientists

Volcanic eruptions drove global heating, causing mass extinctions and ushering in dinosaur eraA mass extinction event sparked by a sudden shift in climate more than 200m years ago reshaped life on Earth and ushered in the age of the dinosaurs, scientists claim.An international team reviewed geological evidence and the fossil record and found that enormous volcanic eruptions in what is now western...

Database of parliamentarians' tweets opens new research opportunities

Researchers have compiled a new database of tweets from parliament members from 26 European countries and illustrated how this resource could help address challenges in the burgeoning field of Twitter research. Livia van Vliet of the University of Amsterdam, Netherlands, and colleagues present the new database and findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on September 16, 2020.

Diet and prior training show no impact on cognitive decline in aging pet dogs

A new study of older pet dogs found that problem solving, sociability, boldness and dependency decline with age, and reported no associations between an enriched diet, lifelong training experiences, and measures of behavior and cognition after a one-year diet period. A team of researchers at the University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna, Austria, and University of Liverpool, UK present these...

Mapping cavefish brains leads to neural origin of behavioral evolution

For more than 1 million years, independent cavefish populations that are geographically and hydrologically isolated from one another have evolved to include about 29 different populations. Among them, the tiny Mexican tetra, Astyanax mexicanus, which comprises river-dwelling surface fish and multiple independently evolved populations of blind cavefish. Many of the behaviors between these cavefish...

Discovery of a new mass extinction

It's not often a new mass extinction is identified; after all, such events were so devastating they really stand out in the fossil record. In a new paper, published today in Science Advances, an international team has identified a major extinction of life 233 million years ago that triggered the dinosaur takeover of the world. The crisis has been called the Carnian Pluvial Episode.

Synthetic clothing fibers contribute vast amounts of plastic pollution on land

176,500 metric tons of synthetic microfibers—chiefly polyester and nylon—are released every year onto terrestrial environments across the globe, according to a new study in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Jenna Gavigan and colleagues at the University of California at Santa Barbara. The microfibers are shed from clothing during washing, and the amount ending up on land now exceeds the...

The megafires and pandemic expose the lies that frustrate action on climate change | Tim Flannery

If there was a moment of true emergency in the fight to preserve our climate, it is nowThis is part of a series of essays by Australian writers responding to the challenges of 2020I was in Melbourne in late January, watching as more and more people donned face masks to protect themselves against the bushfire smoke that had thickened the air for weeks and that was causing hundreds of deaths....

New data processing module makes deep neural networks smarter

Artificial intelligence researchers have improved the performance of deep neural networks by combining feature normalization and feature attention modules into a single module that they call attentive normalization. The hybrid module improves the accuracy of the system significantly, while using negligible extra computational power.

New photoactivation mechanism for polymer production

A team of researchers has demonstrated a way to use low-energy, visible light to produce polymer gel objects from pure monomer solutions. The work not only poses a potential solution to current challenges in producing these materials, it also sheds further light on the ways in which low energy photons can combine to produce high energy excited states.

Reforestation can only partially restore tropical soils

Tropical forest soils play a crucial role in providing vital ecosystem functions. They provide nutrients for plants, store carbon and regulate greenhouse gases, as well as storing and filtering water, and protection against erosion. Scientists have investigated how the properties and ecosystem functions of tropical soils change when forests are cut down, and whether reforestation can reverse such...

A ferry protein in the pancreas protects it from the stress induced by a high-fat diet

Scientists have now uncovered a key mechanism by which pancreatic function is maintained in response to a high-fat diet. A protein present in pancreatic insulin-producing cells protects them from damage under the stress induced by a high-fat diet. As the world increases its intake of high-fat foods and as type 2 diabetes incidence rises as a result, this protein could be a novel therapeutic target...

A new species of spider

During a research stay in the highlands of Colombia conducted as part of her doctorate, a PhD student has discovered and zoologically described a new species of spider.