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80 articles from PhysOrg

NASA finds 2021 Arctic summer sea ice 12th-lowest on record

Sea ice in the Arctic appears to have hit its annual minimum extent on Sept. 16, after waning in the 2021 Northern Hemisphere spring and summer. The summertime extent is the 12th-lowest in the satellite record, according to scientists at the NASA-supported National Snow and Ice Data Center and NASA.

Seeking climate-smart strategies for root, tuber and banana crops in central Africa

Root, tuber and banana (RT&B) crops are widely cultivated across the landscapes of sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). These staple food crops play a fundamental role in smallholder farming systems due to their good economic value and high importance within the daily diets of most households. The extensive planting of RT&B crops highlights their adaptive nature, but a team of researchers has identified a...

Metals supercharge a promising method to bury harmful carbon dioxide under the sea

There's a global race to reduce the amount of harmful gases in our atmosphere to slow down the pace of climate change, and one way to do that is through carbon capture and sequestration—sucking carbon out of the air and burying it. At this point, however, we're capturing only a fraction of the carbon needed to make any kind of dent in climate change.

Study explores the role of landlords in housing discrimination

Examining the practices landlords use to screen potential tenants can offer significant insights into how racism continues to shape life outcomes. While sociological research on racial discrimination in housing has increasingly highlighted the key role that landlords play as gatekeepers to rental housing markets, this research has largely been operating under the fundamental assumption that...

A history of colorism sheds light on discrimination today

Colorism is a form of discrimination, typically within a racial or ethnic group, favoring people with lighter skin over those with darker skin. This pernicious form of discrimination is often overshadowed in discussions about racism, but it affects a broad swath of people across multiple populations.

Some animal species can survive successfully without sexual reproduction

In the framework of an international research project, a team of scientists have demonstrated for the first time that asexual reproduction can be successful in the long term. The animal they studied is the beetle mite Oppiella nova. Until now, the survival of an animal species over a geologically long period of time without sexual reproduction was considered very unlikely, if not impossible.

Continental growth is not a continuous process

The continents, a specific feature of our planet, still hold many secrets. Using chemical data on sedimentary rocks compiled from the scientific literature from the 1980s to the present day, CNRS researcher Marion Garçon has uncovered a new geological history of the continents. She shows that their growth was not a continuous process, and that they have always been rich in silica. This new study,...

Mimicking how water and wind create complex shapes in nature

Intricate natural formations like star-shaped sand dunes or arc-shaped rocks can appear so purposeful in form that it's easy to wonder whether someone has designed them. Scientists have long recognized that a particular combination of random and chaotic energy fields can, over a long period of time, give rise to these kinds of unique formations that dot our globe. Few, however, have succeeded in...

Online searches may reduce predisposed belief in misinformation

A new analysis suggests that online searches could help correct people's predisposed belief in misinformation, but that searching may still promote negative feelings about a targeted minority group, despite correction of specific information about the group. Tetsuro Kobayashi of City University of Hong Kong and colleagues present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on September 22,...

Early Homo sapiens groups in Europe faced subarctic climates

Using oxygen stable isotope analysis of tooth enamel from animals butchered by humans at the site of Bacho Kiro Cave, Bulgaria, Max Planck researchers show that human groups belonging to an early wave of dispersal of our species into Europe were faced with very cold climatic conditions while they occupied the cave between about 46,000 and 43,000 years ago. Archaeological remains at Bacho Kiro Cave...

Recording Roman resource exploitation and urban collapse

For hundreds of years, Carthage—the Phoenician city-state in North Africa—flourished, establishing itself as a robust trade empire with widespread colonies. As the Carthaginian and Roman empires expanded their reach across Mediterranean Europe and North Africa, escalating tensions over political dominance and trade culminated in the Three Punic Wars.

A new way to control qubits

A research team that includes two UO physicists have outlined new techniques for controlling the building blocks of quantum computing, a potentially significant step toward making such computers more accurate and useful.

Functioning of terrestrial ecosystems is governed by three main factors

Ecosystems on Earth's land surface support multiple functions and services that are critical for society, like biomass production, vegetation's efficiency of using sunlight and water, water retention and climate regulation, and ultimately food security. Climate and environmental changes, as well as anthropogenic impacts, are continuously threatening the provision of these functions. To understand...

Color coding molecular mirror images

Researchers at Kanazawa University report in Science Advances a new method for distinguishing between enantiomers, molecules that are mirror images of each other. The procedure, relevant for the pharmaceutical industry, involves the chemical reaction of target enantiomers with color indicator compounds consisting of one-handed helical polymers, leading to solutions showing different colors in...