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90 articles from PhysOrg

Study finds cable news networks have grown more polarized

Even though it seems that Americans are constantly on their phones, studies have shown that the majority of Americans still get their news from television. At the beginning of 2020, the average American adult consumed around nine-and-a-half hours of television news per week, according to Nielsen.

AI can reveal new cell biology just by looking at images

Humans are good at looking at images and finding patterns or making comparisons. Look at a collection of dog photos, for example, and you can sort them by color, by ear size, by face shape, and so on. But could you compare them quantitatively? And perhaps more intriguingly, could a machine extract meaningful information from images that humans can't?

Research finds mechanically driven chemistry accelerates reactions in explosives

Scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) Energetic Materials Center and Purdue University Materials Engineering Department have used simulations performed on the LLNL supercomputer Quartz to uncover a general mechanism that accelerates chemistry in detonating explosives critical to managing the nation's nuclear stockpile. Their research is featured in the July 15 issue of...

Legacy of ancient ice ages shapes how seagrasses respond to environmental threats today

Deep evolution casts a longer shadow than previously thought, scientists report in a new paper published the week of Aug. 1 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Smithsonian scientists and colleagues looked at eelgrass communities—the foundation of many coastal marine food webs along the north Atlantic and Pacific coasts—and discovered their ancient genetic history can play a...

Automating neutron experiments with AI

Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers are developing a first-of-its-kind artificial intelligence device for neutron scattering called Hyperspectral Computed Tomography, or HyperCT. The fully automated, AI-driven platform can rotate a sample in almost any direction, eliminating the need for human intervention and significantly reducing lengthy experiment times.

Fires increase in Brazilian Amazon in July

The number of forest fires in the Brazilian Amazon increased by eight percent last month compared with July 2021, according to official figures released Monday, the latest alarm bell for the world's biggest rainforest.

Signaling 'stressed-out' plants

A plant scientist from the University of Missouri has discovered a new way of measuring stress in plants, which comes at a time when plants are experiencing multiple stressors from heat, drought and flooding because of extreme weather events.

VegSense makes sense for forest studies

Rice researchers set up a Microsoft HoloLens as a mixed-reality sensor to feed VegSense, their application to measure understory vegetation, plant life that grows between the forest canopy and floor.

The many versions of a female scientist

Depictions of women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) are powerful sources of inspiration for young women who aspire to a career in those fields. But stereotypes of female scientists persist, and we have some way to go to vanquish them. So says Alexandra Phillips, a researcher at UC Santa Barbara's National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS), in a paper...

Have the past misdeeds of John James Audubon come home to roost?

It was a risk that likely was not perceived back in 1886, when Forest and Stream magazine editor George Bird Grinnell, distraught over the mass slaughter of birds, decided to name his new organization after one of the most noted artists and naturalists of his time, John James Audubon.

Formation of dwarf galaxy observed using India's AstroSat

An international team of researchers has observed part of the formation of a dwarf galaxy, helping to explain how they evolve from a dwarf state to maturity. In their paper published in the journal Nature, the group describes finding evidence of maturation in such galaxies.