149 articles from MONDAY 19.9.2022

Human composting: California clears the way for greener burial method

State is the fifth to legalize environmentally friendly process that allows for natural reduction of human remains to soilCalifornia lawmakers have approved a new way of returning those who have died to the earth, after Gavin Newsom signed into law a bill allowing human composting on Sunday.Cremation, which accounts for more than half of burials, is an energy-intensive process that emits...

U.S. math professor gets probation, not prison, in China Initiative case

An applied math professor at Southern Illinois University (SIU), Carbondale, was sentenced today to 1 year of probation—and no prison time—after being found guilty earlier this year of filing incorrect tax returns and failing to report a foreign bank account. Mathematician Mingqing Xiao was prosecuted under a controversial U.S. law enforcement effort launched in 2018, called...

Why you should pay attention to fly vomit

New research from the University of Massachusetts Amherst concerning "synanthropic" flies—or the non-biting flies that live with us—argues that we need to pay far more attention to them as disease carriers. While epidemiologists have focused their attention on the biting flies that can spread diseases by transferring infected blood from host to host, it turns out that what the non-biting flies...

Elusive atmospheric wave detected during Tonga volcanic eruption

The catastrophic eruption of the Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai volcano in 2022 triggered a special atmospheric wave that has eluded detection for the past 85 years. Researchers from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, Japan Agency for Marine–Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC), and Kyoto University relied on state-of-the-art observational data and computer simulations to discover the...

Research team creates new magnetic quasiparticle

From The City College of New York's Center for Discovery and Innovation and the Physics Department comes news of a new type of magnetic quasiparticle created by coupling light to a stack of ultrathin two-dimensional magnets. This achievement sprouting from a collaboration with the University of Texas at Austin lays the foundation for an emergent strategy to artificially design materials by...

Research team looks to past for insights on future of megafauna

Are elephants important? How about rhinoceros? Or lions? What happens if Earth loses its last remaining large animals? New research by Professor of Biology Felisa Smith at the University of New Mexico shows the profound impacts of losing large-bodied mammals, or megafauna, in ecosystems.

A better understanding of crop yields under climate change

Researchers use satellites to measure soil moisture around certain crops to solve a long-standing mystery about how water impacts agricultural production. The researchers found that models using soil moisture explain 30% to 120% more of the year-to-year variation in yield across crops than models that rely on rainfall. The research give scientists a better understanding of how crop yields will...

A better understanding of crop yields under climate change

You don't need a Ph.D. in agriculture to know that water is critical to crop production. But for years, people like Jonathan Proctor, who has a Ph.D. in Agriculture and Resource Economics from the University of California Berkeley, have been trying to explain why the importance of water isn't showing up in statistical models of crop yield.

How many ants are there on Earth?

How many stars are there in our galaxy? How many grains of sand in the Sahara? How many ants live on Earth? These are all questions that seem impossible to answer. However, through intensive and extensive data analysis, science is coming amazingly close to finding the solutions. When it comes to ants, a team led by Würzburg biologists Sabine Nooten and Patrick Schultheiss has done just that.

Amino acid supplement is a key to reproductive health in dairy cows

Lysine is an essential amino acid for dairy cows, helping boost milk production when added to the diet at adequate levels. But could lysine benefit cows in other ways? A new University of Illinois study shows rumen-protected lysine can improve uterine health if fed during the transition period. The study, "Effect of feeding rumen-protected lysine through the transition period on postpartum uterine...

Researchers create new magnetic quasiparticle

A new type of magnetic quasiparticle has been created by coupling light to a stack of ultrathin two-dimensional magnets. This achievement lays the foundation for an emergent strategy to artificially design materials by ensuring their strong interaction with light.

Undergrad publishes theory on immune dysfunction in space

It's been known for decades that though astronauts' immune systems become suppressed in space, leaving them vulnerable to disease, the exact mechanisms of immune dysfunction have remained a mystery. Now a Cornell undergraduate has found a potential solution.

Researchers transplant the RNA editing machine of moss into human cells

If everything is to run smoothly in living cells, the genetic information must be correct. But unfortunately, errors in the DNA accumulate over time due to mutations. Land plants have developed a peculiar correction mode: They do not directly improve the errors in the genome, but rather elaborately in each individual transcript. Researchers at the University of Bonn have transplanted this...

Wildfire smoke may have amplified Arctic phytoplankton bloom

Smoke from a Siberian wildfire may have transported enough nitrogen to parts of the Arctic Ocean to amplify a phytoplankton bloom, according to new research from North Carolina State University and the International Research Laboratory Takuvik (CNRS/Laval University) in Canada. The work, which appears in Communications Earth & Environment, sheds light on some potential ecological effects from...

Researcher helps identify new evidence for habitability in ocean of Saturn's moon Enceladus

The search for extraterrestrial life has just become more interesting as a team of scientists, including Southwest Research Institute's Dr. Christopher Glein, has discovered new evidence for a key building block for life in the subsurface ocean of Saturn's moon Enceladus. New modeling indicates that Enceladus's ocean should be relatively rich in dissolved phosphorus, an essential ingredient for...

Student evaluations show bias against female professors

Despite earning more than half of all doctoral degrees conferred in the U.S., women are significantly underrepresented in faculty positions at colleges and universities. This is particularly true in tenure-track and tenured positions, with women making up just over a third of all full professors. Women are also less likely to receive tenure or be promoted to full professor, a situation known as...

How much (DNA) damage can a cancer cell tolerate?

A new study led by Claus M. Azzalin, group leader at Instituto de Medicina Molecular João Lobo Antunes- iMM and published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) shows, for the first time, that the cell's telomeres can set the damage threshold a cancer cell can sustain and above which cells cannot continue to divide and die. These results open new possibilities for...

India's history of monsoon droughts revealed by stalagmites and historical documentary sources

Western India was struck by the "Deccan famine" between 1630 and 1632 as crops failed after three consecutive years of Indian monsoon failures. While traveling through the region, Peter Mundy, an English merchant with the East India Company, vividly described the traumatic scenes of starvation, mass mortality, and even cannibalism in his travelog. In fact, such scenes of catastrophic...

When AI asks dumb questions, it gets smart fast

If someone showed you a photo of a crocodile and asked whether it was a bird, you might laugh—and then, if you were patient and kind, help them identify the animal. Such real-world, and sometimes dumb, interactions may be key to helping artificial intelligence learn, according to a new study in which the strategy dramatically improved an AI’s accuracy at interpreting novel images. The...

Genomic analysis reveals true origin of South America's canids

South America has more canid species than any place on Earth, and a surprising new UCLA-led genomic analysis shows that all these doglike animals evolved from a single species that entered the continent just 3.5 million to 4 million years ago. Scientists had long assumed that these diverse species sprang from multiple ancestors.

Quantum light source advances bio-imaging clarity

Texas A&M University researchers accomplished what was once considered impossible—they created a device capable of squeezing the quantum fluctuations of light down to a directed path and used it to enhance contrast imaging.

Mars is mighty in first Webb observations of Red Planet

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope captured its first images and spectra of Mars Sept. 5. The telescope, an international collaboration with ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency), provides a unique perspective with its infrared sensitivity on our neighboring planet, complementing data being collected by orbiters, rovers, and other telescopes.

Lanthanide doping could help with new imaging techniques

X-rays are electromagnetic waves with short wavelengths and strong penetrability in physical matter, including live organisms. Scintillators capable of converting X-rays into the ultraviolet (UV), visible or near-infrared (NIR) photons are widely employed to realize indirect X-ray detection and XEOL imaging in many fields. They include medical diagnosis, computed tomography (CT), space...

Pando in pieces: Understanding the new breach in the world's largest living thing

It's ancient, it's massive, and it is faltering. The gargantuan aspen stand dubbed "Pando," located in south-central Utah, is more than 100 acres of quivering, genetically identical plant life, thought to be the largest living organism on earth (based on dry weight mass, 13 million pounds). What looks like a shimmering panorama of individual trees is actually a group of genetically identical stems...

Design evolution through the martial art of Capoeira

Could an ancient martial art created by African slaves in Brazil unlock new perspectives on design? For his doctoral thesis, defended at Umeå Institute of Design, Umeå University, Nicholas Torretta drew upon his native culture to shine a light on the oppressive and consumeristic power structures that still permeate industrial design thinking. Inspired by the intrinsic decolonial traits within...

Exploring the synergy of westerlies and the monsoon on Mt. Everest, as well as their climatic and environmental effects

In May 2022, a group of monsoon researchers conducted "Earth Summit Mission 2022: Scientific Expedition and Research on Mt. Qomolangma" within the Himalayan Mountains. This mission implemented new advanced weather observation technologies, methods, and means to investigate both the vertical change characteristics and interaction mechanisms of the region's prevailing westerlies and monsoonal flow....

When life feels cluttered, a good tarot reading can slow down the rush to quick solutions | Andie Fox

Shuffling and studying the pictures on tarot cards can be like a moment of meditationMy first attempts with tarot readings began on a camping trip with a couple of close friends and their friends. It was Christmas before the pandemic and just before the rains.The ground was so thirsty that the deepest waterholes in the creek were stagnant (and carrying some kind of parasite, we heard later)....

Moss repair team also works in humans

If everything is to run smoothly in living cells, the genetic information must be correct. But unfortunately, errors in the DNA accumulate over time due to mutations. Land plants have developed a peculiar correction mode: they do not directly improve the errors in the genome, but rather elaborately in each individual transcript. Researchers have transplanted this correction machinery from the moss...

Hey suburbanites, meet the neighbors: Tick-carrying white-tailed deer

White-tailed deer are heavily overpopulated along the East Coast of the U.S., and they play an important role in spreading and supporting tick populations that transmit diseases like Lyme disease and anaplasmosis. Efforts to control deer populations have long been based on the assumption that deer live mostly in wooded parklands, primarily passing through neighborhoods at night to graze on gardens...