186 articles from THURSDAY 1.12.2022

Death Valley's Ubehebe Crater reveals volcanic hazard areas are underestimated

When magma bubbles up toward Earth's surface and meets groundwater, steam pressure builds, sometimes bursting into eruptions that spew currents of hot ash, potentially burning and asphyxiating people and burying nearby cities. Take, for example, similar ash currents that formed during the eruptions at Mount Vesuvius, which were responsible for many of the fatalities in the city of Pompeii around...

Shame or hope? How should we feel about climate change?

Is it OK to enjoy warmer summers, given they are caused by climate change? Should we feel shame when we fly? Is anxiety an overreaction, or a rational response to the current climate crisis? There is widespread disagreement about how we should feel regarding climate change. In a new award-winning article, two researchers at the Institute for Futures Studies (IFFS), Stockholm help us sort out our...

Where did Omicron come from?

First discovered a year ago in South Africa, the SARS-CoV-2 variant later dubbed 'Omicron' spread across the globe at incredible speed. It is still unclear exactly how, when and where this virus originated. A new study shows that Omicron's predecessors existed on the African continent long before cases were first identified, suggesting that Omicron emerged gradually over several months in...

An exotic interplay of electrons

Water that simply will not freeze, no matter how cold it gets -- a research group has discovered a quantum state that could be described in this way. Experts have managed to cool a special material to near absolute zero temperature. They found that a central property of atoms -- their alignment -- did not 'freeze', as usual, but remained in a 'liquid' state. The new quantum material could serve as...

A self-powered ingestible sensor opens new avenues for gut research

Engineering researchers have developed a battery-free, pill-shaped ingestible biosensing system designed to provide continuous monitoring in the intestinal environment. It gives scientists the ability to monitor gut metabolites in real time, which wasn't possible before. This could unlock a new understanding of intestinal metabolite composition, which significantly impacts human health overall.

In Canada, scientists are struggling with stagnant funding

OTTAWA, CANADA— Earlier this month, researchers attending Canada’s major annual science policy conference here got some seemingly good news when science minister François-Philippe Champagne announced the government would be awarding CA$1 billion to research projects. But disappointment soon set in. The $1 billion, scientists realized, was existing, not...

New research prompts urgent call to protect Madagascar's unique biodiversity before it's too late

In two new papers published today, December 1, in Science, researchers from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and partners from 50 global organizations have undertaken a major review of Madagascar's extraordinary biodiversity. Bringing together the most up to date resources and using cutting-edge techniques to predict conservation status, the team evaluated the threats facing terrestrial and...

Should we build a nature reserve on Mars?

There are 8 billion of us now. The UN says when the population peaks around the year 2100, there'll be 11 billion human souls. Our population growth is colliding with the natural world on a greater scale than ever, and we're losing between 200 and 2,000 species each year, according to the World Wildlife Federation.