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111 articles from PhysOrg

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.

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.

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.