353 articles from WEDNESDAY 14.10.2020

Mapping out rest stops for migrating birds

A team of researchers have developed a new metric called the stopover-to-passage ratio that can help determine if a majority of birds are flying over a particular site or stopping at the site to refuel or rest. The answer to this question can have important implications for what action is ultimately taken on the ground to help migratory birds.

How leaves reflect light reveals evolutionary history of seed plants

The way leaves reflect light, known as plant reflectance spectra, can illuminate the evolutionary history of seed plants, according to researchers. The researchers found that by measuring the light spectrum reflected by leaves, they can identify the plant and its chemistry, evolution and place in the tree of life.

Big payoff if Nature 'restored' in the right places

Restoring 30 percent of ecosystems long-since converted to agriculture and other human needs could avoid 70 percent of predicted species extinctions and absorb half the CO2 humanity has released into the atmosphere since the industrial revolution, according to an ambitious blueprint for healing the planet released Wednesday.

AI Reads Human Emotions. Should it?

AI can read your emotional response to advertising and your facial expressions in a job interview. But if it can already do all this, what happens next? In part two of a series on emotion AI, Jennifer Strong and the team at MIT Technology Review explore the implications of how it’s used and where it’s heading in the future. We meet: Shruti Sharma, VSCO Gabi Zijderveld,...

Whitebark pine declines may unravel the tree's mutualism with Clark's Nutcracker

The relationship between the whitebark pine (Pinus albicaulis), an iconic tree of western mountaintops, and the Clark's Nutcracker (Nucifraga columbiana), a brash bird in the crow family, is often used as an example of the biological concept of mutualism: a relationship between species where both benefit. The pine provides large, nutritious seeds to the nutcracker. The nutcracker buries these...

A New Space Pact Seeks to Ensure Peace and Prosperity—on the Moon

Laws have long been portable things. Human beings settled frontiers with tools and muscle—and too often with weapons, seizing lands that belong to others. One other thing the settlers also brought along were their legal systems, rules of the road to govern their behavior in the new communities they built. That was true when all our exploring was terrestrial, and it remained true when we...

Ancient Hittite cuneiform scripts will soon be accessible online

The Hittites lived in Anatolia some 3,500 years ago. They used clay tablets to keep records of state treaties and decrees, prayers, myths, and summoning rituals, using a language that researchers were only able to decipher around 100 years ago. Now, the Hittites' texts, which were written in cuneiform, are being made fully accessible online. The collection will be based on around 30,000 documents,...

Novel software assesses phonologial awareness

Understanding sounds in language is a critical building block for child literacy, yet this skill is often overlooked. Researchers have now developed a new software tool to assess children's phonological awareness -- or, how they process the sound structure of words.

What laser color do you like?

Researchers have developed a microchip technology that can convert invisible near-infrared laser light into any one of a panoply of visible laser colors, including red, orange, yellow and green. Their work provides a new approach to generating laser light on integrated microchips.

Cells at San Diego Zoo lead to cloning of endangered horse

Little Kurt looks like any other baby horse as he frolics playfully in his pen. The rare, endangered Przewalski’s horse was created from cells taken from a stallion that had sat frozen at the San Diego Zoo for 40 years before they were fused with an egg from a domestic horse. With the egg's nucleus removed, ensuring Kurt would be basically all Przewalski's horse, they were implanted in the...

NASA to Broadcast OSIRIS-REx Asteroid Sample Collection Activities

Portal origin URL: NASA to Broadcast OSIRIS-REx Asteroid Sample Collection ActivitiesPortal origin nid: 465471Published: Wednesday, October 14, 2020 - 15:24Featured (stick to top of list): noPortal text teaser: NASA will broadcast coverage of a first for the agency as its Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx)...

Earth breaks September heat record, may reach warmest year

Earth sweltered to a record hot September last month, with U.S. climate officials saying there’s nearly a two-to-one chance that 2020 will end up as the globe’s hottest year on record. Boosted by human-caused climate change, global temperatures averaged 60.75 degrees (15.97 Celsius) last month, edging out 2015 and 2016 for the hottest September in 141 years of recordkeeping, the National...