198 articles from MONDAY 28.11.2022

Study: Canada geese beat humans in longstanding territory battle

Canada geese collide with aircraft, intimidate unassuming joggers, and leave lawns and sidewalks spattered with prodigious piles of poop. They're widely considered nuisance birds, and municipalities invest considerable time and money harassing geese to relocate the feisty flocks. But new University of Illinois research shows standard goose harassment efforts aren't effective, especially in winter...

NASA's Lunar Flashlight SmallSat readies for launch

When NASA's Lunar Flashlight launches no earlier than Nov. 30, the tiny satellite will begin a three-month journey, with mission navigators guiding the spacecraft far past the moon. It will then be slowly pulled back by gravity from Earth and the sun before settling into a wide science-gathering orbit to hunt for surface water ice inside dark regions on the moon that haven't seen sunlight in...

Image: Hubble glimpses a glittering gathering of stars

This glittering gathering of stars is Pismis 26, a globular star cluster located about 23,000 light-years away. Many thousands of stars gleam brightly against the black backdrop of the image, with some brighter red and blue stars located along the outskirts of the cluster. The Armenian astronomer Paris Pismis first discovered the cluster in 1959 at the Tonantzintla Observatory in Mexico, granting...

Study reveals genomic potential of active soil microbial populations under simulated winter conditions

Scientists estimate that northern peatlands contain one third of the Earth's soil carbon. This makes them important ecosystems for carbon storage, which keeps carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and controls climate change. In northern peatlands, carbon losses from soil during the winter can exceed carbon storage during the warm growing season. This is primarily because of the activity of...

A waste windfall: New process shows promise turning plastic trash into pharmaceuticals

Catalina Island, located 22 miles off the coast of Los Angeles, once collected Hollywood royalty, smugglers and silver miners. Now, it collects trash. Its windward-facing harbor is a collection point of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an enormous spread of microplastics with accumulated larger debris that stretches more 1.6 million square kilometers. It is stark evidence of the impact of...

The task of magnetic classification suddenly looks easier, thanks to machine learning

Knowing the magnetic structure of crystalline materials is critical to many applications, including data storage, high-resolution imaging, spintronics, superconductivity, and quantum computing. Information of this sort, however, is difficult to come by. Although magnetic structures can be obtained from neutron diffraction and scattering studies, the number of machines that can support these...

New analysis finds pandemic didn't dampen deforestation

Despite the massive upheavals in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, deforestation globally proceeded more or less as expected from the trends established over the last 15 years, according to a recent study from researchers at the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT.

Canada geese beat humans in longstanding territory battle

Canada geese collide with aircraft, intimidate unassuming joggers, and leave lawns and sidewalks spattered with prodigious piles of feces. They're widely considered nuisance birds, and municipalities invest considerable time and money harassing geese to relocate the feisty flocks. But new research shows standard goose harassment efforts aren't effective, especially in winter when birds should be...

Research unearths obscure heat transfer behaviors

Researchers have found that boron arsenide, which has already been viewed as a highly promising material for heat management and advanced electronics, also has a unique property. After reaching an extremely high pressure that is hundreds of times greater than the pressure found at the bottom of the ocean, boron arsenide's thermal conductivity actually begins to decrease. The results suggest that...

Calcifying organisms are under threat from a combination of ocean warming and acidification

A new study led by the Institut de Ciències del Mar (ICM-CSIC), with colleagues from the British Antarctic Survey, the Institute of Oceanology, the Polish Academy of Sciences and the University of Gdańsk, has revealed that global warming and ocean acidification threaten marine organisms that build their skeletons and shells with calcium carbonate (chalk) such as corals, bryozoans, mollusks, sea...

Social media can be a lifesaver for new international ventures

The use of social media can be beneficial to international new ventures and help them to survive. A new study from the University of Vaasa, Finland, shows that newly established international firms and start-ups with limited resources can effectively use social media to learn about their new foreign markets and customers in a fast and inexpensive way.

NASA’s Juno Mission Spots Two Jovian Moons

NASA’s Juno mission completed its 38th close flyby of Jupiter. As the spacecraft sped low over the giant planet’s cloud tops, its JunoCam instrument captured this look at two of Jupiter’s largest moons. News Article Type: Homepage ArticlesPublished: Monday, November 28, 2022 -...

Examining US policy-making and China's efforts in Southeast Asia

Was there effectively a "Chinese problem" in Southeast Asia in the decades following World War II, with millions of Chinese in the region potentially sympathetic to communist China? American policy-makers seem to have thought so at the start of the Cold War, given China's influence around the region. At a time of immense turmoil and upheaval in Asia, including the Vietnam War, US politicians...

Friendly fire: How conflicts can reduce stress in the workplace

Stress and conflict are unavoidable aspects of life and can be highly destructive forces when left unchecked. A survey conducted by the UK government found that work-related stress led to a loss of 17.9 million working days in 2019, which directly affected the country's economic productivity.

Adventurous bird personalities can help population cope with climate change

Red knots of all ages and sexes show behavioral traits. These remain mostly unchanged over time but differ across individuals. Some individuals are more adventurous and show more exploratory behaviors a in new environment than others. Other individuals take less risks and hardly dare to move around in a new environment. These "personalities" have ecological and evolutionary consequences, but to...

Phytoplankton May Be Abundant Under Antarctic Sea Ice, Study Suggests

Portal origin URL: Phytoplankton May Be Abundant Under Antarctic Sea Ice, Study SuggestsPortal origin nid: 484237Published: Monday, November 28, 2022 - 15:10Featured (stick to top of list): noPortal text teaser: Scientists using underwater instruments and a NASA satellite have found evidence of potentially significant phytoplankton blooms beneath the sea ice encircling...

Americans would rather harm their own political cause than help an opposing one, finds study

Both Democrats and Republicans would rather take away funding from their political party than give money to the other party, reveals a new University of California San Diego Rady School of Management study. The research also assesses people's preferences regarding two other contentious issues—gun rights and reproductive rights—and finds the same result: people would rather hurt the cause they...

Novel sex-determination mechanism revealed in mammals

In mammals, the distinction between male and female at the chromosomal level is due to the X and Y chromosomes. Typically, females have two X chromosomes (XX) while males have an X and a Y chromosome (XY). The Sry gene on the Y chromosome triggers the formation of the testes. However, there exist a handful of rodent species in which the Y chromosome has disappeared, taking with it the Sry gene....

Beavers found to have lived in family clans in the Allgäu for more than 11 million years

For paleontologists, Hammerschmiede in the Allgäu region—the site where the great ape Danuvius was discovered—is a treasure trove unlike any other: More than 140 fossil vertebrate species have been found here. Finds have now also enabled them to outline the way of life and development of an extinct species of beaver: Steneofiber depereti was a little smaller than the modern beaver and settled...

The replication crisis: Researchers reveal a hidden universe of uncertainty

The University of Luxembourg's Department of Social Sciences contributed to a large-scale replication study that aimed to understand the role of decisions that scientists make during the research process. Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study highlights the importance of open science and collaboration among scientists.

Offshore wind farms change marine ecosystems, study shows

The expansion of offshore wind farms in the North Sea is making progress. But the consequences for the marine environment they are built in have not yet been fully researched. Scientists at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon have already provided valuable insights into the effects of wind farms in past studies.