115 articles from MONDAY 13.9.2021

Jet stream changes could amplify weather extremes by 2060s

New research provides insights into how the position and intensity of the North Atlantic jet stream has changed during the past 1,250 years. The findings suggest that the position of the jet stream could migrate outside of the range of natural variability by as early as the year 2060 under unabated greenhouse gas emissions, with potentially drastic weather-related consequences for societies on...

Public will pay over $500 million a year for hurricane forecast improvements, study finds

A recent survey of people recently affected by hurricanes across four states found that the public is willing to pay more than $500 million a year to improve hurricane forecasts. The study, led by a group of atmospheric scientists and economists at the University of Miami (UM) Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, comes at a time when Hurricane Ida's path caused widespread damage...

Elephant project recordings evoke the rainforest

More than a million hours of sound recordings are available from the Elephant Listening Project (ELP) in the K. Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology—a rainforest residing in the cloud.

Researchers design sensors to rapidly detect plant hormones

Researchers from the Disruptive and Sustainable Technologies for Agricultural Precision (DiSTAP) interdisciplinary research group of the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), MIT's research enterprise in Singapore, and their local collaborators from Temasek Life Sciences Laboratory (TLL) and Nanyang Technological University (NTU), have developed the first-ever nanosensor to...

Success of past rewilding projects shows path to restoring damaged ecosystems

Concept is now widely accepted after initial controversy around projects such as Yellowstone wolves – though opposition remainsScientists raise £15m to bring mammoth back from extinctionThe news that scientists are planning to bring back woolly mammoths to the Arctic tundra, by splicing DNA from Asian elephants with that of their extinct ancestors, has raised a few eyebrows in the world of...

Researchers develop new tool for analyzing large superconducting circuits

New research tools are needed to fully develop quantum computers and advance the field. Now researchers have developed and tested a theoretical tool for analyzing large superconducting circuits. These circuits use superconducting quantum bits, the smallest units of a quantum computer, to store information. Circuit size is important since protection from detrimental noise tends to come at the cost...

Thousands of tiny anchors keep our cells in place – and now we know how

Most of our cells are locked into place with the help of tiny anchors (called 'focal adhesions'). But if a cell morphs into a cancer cell, the chain can break, letting the cancer spread to other parts of the body. A team of scientists have now found the specific protein (or link) in the chain responsible for upholding the connection. The discovery gives scientists new directions for future cancer...

Scientists claim that overeating is not the primary cause of obesity

A perspective article challenges the 'energy balance model,' which says weight gain occurs because individuals consume more energy than they expend. According to the authors, 'conceptualizing obesity as a disorder of energy balance restates a principle of physics without considering the biological mechanisms underlying weight gain.' The authors argue for the 'carbohydrate insulin model,' which...