377 articles from THURSDAY 17.9.2020

Seven footprints may be the earliest evidence of humans on the Arabian Peninsula

Experts say discovery of 120,000-year-old prints could shed new light on spread of Homo sapiens out of AfricaA set of seven footprints made at a lake about 120,000 years ago have been hailed as the earliest evidence of modern humans on the Arabian Peninsula – a discovery experts say could shed light on the spread of our species out of Africa.The path by which Homo sapiens spread around the world...

European Space Agency awards Hera asteroid mission to German firm

Deal worth £118m covers design, manufacturing and testing of ESA’s first planetary defence missionThe European Space Agency has awarded a €129m (£118m) contract to the German space company OHB. The deal covers the design, manufacturing and testing of Hera, the ESA’s first planetary defence mission.Hera is the European contribution to an experiment called the asteroid impact and deflection...

Polarization over energy and climate in Canada

Positive Energy today released new survey results examining Canadians' views on the role of oil and gas in Canada's current and future economy, and the respective roles of federal and provincial governments in the country's energy and climate future. This novel survey explores how party affiliation, ideology, region, gender, and age may influence opinions on these topics. The survey, conducted by...

Race to rescue animals as Brazilian wetlands burn

Wildlife guide Eduarda Fernandes steers a speedboat up the Piquiri river in western Brazil, scanning the horizon for jaguars wounded in the wildfires ripping through the Pantanal, the world's biggest tropical wetlands.

'Cellular compass' guides stem cell division in plants

The stem cells tasked with creating and maintaining biological tissues have a difficult job. They have to precisely divide to form new specialized cells, which are destined to different fates even though they contain identical DNA. An obvious question then is: How do the cells divide in all the right ways to produce a healthy tissue? This was the grand motivating question for Andrew Muroyama, a...

Study shows quizzes improve academic performance

About a year ago, a conversation during a faculty meeting piqued Marcus Crede's interest. A senior faculty member in Iowa State University's Department of Psychology said that he believed frequent quizzes help students better grasp classroom material. Crede, an associate professor of psychology, was skeptical that something as simple as a quiz could positively impact students' academic...

NASA finds a fading wispy Tropical Depression Vicky

NASA's Terra satellite found Vicky to be a shadow of its former self, devoid of precipitation around its low-level center. Any precipitation had been pushed far to the northeast from wind shear. Vicky looked like a wispy ring of clouds on visible satellite imagery and nearby Hurricane Teddy is not helping.

Hurricane Sally's Fierce Rain Shows How Climate Change Raises Storm Risks

As hurricanes go, Sally was not especially powerful. Rated a Category 2 storm when it struck the Gulf Coast on Wednesday, it was soon downgraded. But climate change likely made it more dangerous by slowing it down and feeding it more moisture, setting it up to pummel the region with wind and catastrophic rainfall.Sally was crawling at about 3 mph when its eye made landfall early Wednesday near...

New high-speed test shows how antibiotics combine to kill bacteria

Researchers at Uppsala University have developed a new method to determine—rapidly, easily and cheaply—how effective two antibiotics combined can be in stopping bacterial growth. The new method is simple for laboratories to use and can provide greater scope for customizing treatment of bacterial infections. The study is published in PLOS Biology.

Satellite catches nighttime view of major hurricane Teddy

An early morning infrared image of Hurricane Teddy taken from NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite shows the proximity of the strengthening hurricane to the Lesser Antilles island chain and Puerto Rico. Teddy is a major hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale.

Poop knives, arachnophobic entomologists win 2020 Ig Nobels

Maybe this year's Ig Nobels, the spoof prizes for dubious but humorous scientific achievement, should have been renamed the Ick Nobels. An anthropologist who tested an urban legend by fashioning a knife out of frozen human feces, and a man who found that spiders oddly give scientists who study insects the heebie-jeebies, are among the 2020 winners. Because of the coronavirus pandemic, Thursday's...

Hubble captures crisp new portrait of Jupiter's storms

This latest image of Jupiter, taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope on Aug. 25, 2020, was captured when the planet was 406 million miles from Earth. Hubble's sharp view is giving researchers an updated weather report on the monster planet's turbulent atmosphere, including a remarkable new storm brewing, and a cousin of the famous Great Red Spot region gearing up to change color—again.

From support function to growth engine: The future of AI and customer service

When it comes to imagining the future, customer service often gets painted in a dystopian light. Take the 2002 sci-fi film Minority Report. Tom Cruise’s John Anderton walks into the Gap, an identity recognition system scans him, and a hologram asks about a recent purchase. This content was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not written by MIT...

New study identifies wheat varieties that resist the destructive stripe rust disease

Stripe rust is one of the most destructive wheat diseases in the world, especially in the United States. While the disease can be controlled by chemicals, those may be harmful to humans, animals, and the environment and the application can cost millions of dollars to wheat production. Rather than use chemicals, many farmers would prefer to grow wheat varieties that resist stripe rust and the...