Great Salt Lake on path to hyper-salinity, mirroring Iranian lake, new research shows
Starved for freshwater, the Great Salt Lake is getting saltier. The lake is losing sources of freshwater input to agriculture, urban growth and drought, and the drawdown is causing salt concentrations to spike beyond even the tolerance of brine shrimp and brine flies, according to Wayne Wurtsbaugh from Watershed Sciences in the Quinney College of Natural Resources.
On the fence: New research taps rancher expertise on living with carnivores
They say that good fences make good neighbors, which is especially true when you share space with gray wolves and grizzly bears.
15 spectacular photos from the Dark Energy Camera
From high atop a mountain in the Chilean Andes, the Dark Energy Camera has snapped more than one million exposures of the southern sky. The images have captured around 2.5 billion astronomical objects, including galaxies and galaxy clusters, stars, comets, asteroids, dwarf planets and supernovae.
Microbiologists improve taste of beer
Belgian investigators have improved the flavor of contemporary beer by identifying and engineering a gene that is responsible for much of the flavor of beer and some other alcoholic drinks. The research appears in Applied and Environmental Microbiology.
Testing: Space-bound US-European water mission passes finals
Before any NASA mission is launched, the spacecraft goes through weeks of harsh treatment. It's strapped to a big table that shakes as hard as the pounding of a rocket launch. It's bombarded with louder noise than a stadium rock concert. It's frozen, baked, and irradiated in a vacuum chamber that simulates the extremes of space. The Surface Water and Ocean Topography mission (SWOT), a...
Video footage provides first detailed observation of orcas hunting white sharks in South Africa
The first direct evidence of orcas killing white sharks in South Africa has been captured by both a helicopter and drone pilot, and a new open-access paper published today in The Ecological Society of America's journal Ecology presents both sets of video footage, which provide new evidence that orcas are capable of pursuing, capturing and incapacitating white sharks. One predation event was filmed...
Spin flips show how galaxies grow from the cosmic web
The alignment between galaxy spins and the large-scale structure of the universe reveals the processes by which different components of galaxies form.
Research team introduces advance in automatic forest mapping technology
How lightning travels from the sky to the ground inspired the concept behind a new algorithmic approach to digitally separate individual trees from their forests in automatic forest mapping.
Laughing gas found in space could mean life
Scientists at UC Riverside are suggesting something is missing from the typical roster of chemicals that astrobiologists use to search for life on planets around other stars—laughing gas.
Coral select algae partnerships to ease environmental stress
Corals live symbiotically with a variety of microscopic algae that provide most of the energy corals require, and some algae can make coral more resilient to heat stress. In assessing one of the main reef builders in Hawai'i, Montipora capitata (rice coral), researchers from the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa found that the symbiont community in those corals varied significantly in different...
Facebook posts seeking missing Black children get much less attention than posts of white kids
Social media could be an equalizer for finding missing children, highlighting posts about kids from all backgrounds without the filters of traditional media and police gatekeepers.
Protein family shows how life adapted to oxygen
Cornell scientists have created an evolutionary model that connects organisms living in today's oxygen-rich atmosphere to a time, billions of years ago, when Earth's atmosphere had little oxygen—by analyzing ribonucleotide reductases (RNRs), a family of proteins used by all free-living organisms and many viruses to repair and replicate DNA.
Alain Aspect, Nobel-winning father of quantum entanglement
Alain Aspect, who won a long-expected Nobel Physics Prize on Tuesday, not only helped prove the strange theory of quantum entanglement but also inspired a generation of physicists in his native France, according to former students and colleagues.
Smacked asteroid's debris trail more than 6,000 miles long
The asteroid that got smacked by a NASA spacecraft is now being trailed by thousands of miles of debris from the impact.
New genetic variation from old and exotic varieties for environmentally friendly wheat cultivation
Gene banks worldwide make an important contribution to the conservation of biological diversity. In the Federal Ex situ Gene Bank at the IPK Leibniz Institute alone, more than 150,000 old varieties are preserved. In addition to negative traits, old and exotic varieties possess many valuable gene variants that have been lost in modern varieties but may be crucial for plant production in the future....
New online portal aims to improve parks and green spaces around the world
The Parks & Green Space Research Portal promotes collaboration and shared research between academics and parks professionals worldwide.
Multi-organ chip detects dangerous nanoparticles
What happens when we breathe in nanoparticles emitted by, for example, a laser printer? Could these nanoparticles damage the respiratory tract or perhaps even other organs? To answer these questions, Fraunhofer researchers are developing the "NanoCube" exposure device.
Manufacturing microscopic octopuses with a 3D printer
Although just cute little creatures at first glance, the microscopic geckos and octopuses fabricated by 3D laser printing in the molecular engineering labs at Heidelberg University could open up new opportunities in fields such as microrobotics or biomedicine.
'Kipferl': Guiding the defense against jumping genes
A large part of our DNA is made up of selfish repetitive DNA elements, some of which can jump from one site in the genome to another, potentially damaging the genome. Researchers from the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (IMBA) describe how different types of repetitive DNA elements are controlled by the same silencing mechanism in fruit fly ovaries.
Driving high? Chemists make strides toward marijuana breath analyzer
A UCLA chemist and colleagues are now a step closer to their goal of developing a handheld tool similar to an alcohol Breathalyzer that can detect THC on a person's breath after they've smoked marijuana.
Bad roads reduce trade volumes by 18%
Economists from HSE University and the Vienna University of Economics and Business have figured out why, with all else being equal, trading goods across borders can be more expensive than trading the same goods within state borders. They argue that one of the reasons is underdeveloped infrastructure in border regions. Their study was published in the Journal of Urban Economics.
Ancient chemistry may explain why living things use ATP as the universal energy currency
A simple two-carbon compound may have been a crucial player in the evolution of metabolism before the advent of cells, according to a new study published October 4 in the open access journal PLOS Biology, by Nick Lane and colleagues of University College London, U.K. The finding potentially sheds light on the earliest stages of prebiotic biochemistry, and suggests how ATP came to be the universal...
New book examines gender on legal response to domestic violence
Over the past 40 years, considerable progress has been made in lowering rates of domestic violence (DV) in our communities. However, this progress has been uneven due to continuing misconceptions about the causes and dynamics of domestic violence.
Study: Black prosecutors are more punitive toward Black and Latinx defendants
Prosecutors exert considerable power in the criminal justice system, and while defendants are predominantly Black and Latinx, prosecutors are overwhelmingly White. Despite calls for addressing racial disparities in this field, we know little about whether recruiting minority prosecutors would yield more equitable outcomes for defendants.
Online fandom communities can facilitate state censorship, according to new research
Authoritarian regimes worldwide have embraced the digital age. And they have been generally effective at limiting the online presence of perceived adversaries within their borders—from intellectual dissidents to transnational activists.