170 articles from WEDNESDAY 11.1.2023
Why do our dogs and cats bring us dead animals?
What do a little penguin, a baby rabbit, a black rat and a Krefft's glider have in common? They've all been presented to me (when dead) by my animal companions. Chances are, if you live with a cat or dog, you've also been brought something similar.
China now publishes more high-quality science than any other nation. Should the US be worried?
By at least one measure, China now leads the world in producing high-quality science. My research shows that Chinese scholars now publish a larger fraction of the top 1% most cited scientific papers globally than scientists from any other country.
Human actions created the Salton Sea, California's largest lake. Here's how to save its ecosystem
The Salton Sea spreads across a remote valley in California's lower Colorado Desert, 40 miles (65 kilometers) from the Mexican border. For birds migrating along the Pacific coast, it's an avian Grand Central Station. In midwinter tens of thousands of snow geese, ducks, pelicans, gulls and other species forage on and around the lake. Hundreds of other species nest there year-round or use it as a...
Illegal mining has muddied tropical rivers worldwide
A mighty river is an efficient miner. Year after year, its waters erode and sluice rock away from mountains, liberating precious metals and whisking them to lowlands, where they are deposited among sediments in riverbeds and floodplains. No need to move mountains; the mountain moves to you.
But the process also draws human miners, especially in the tropics, where homespun...
New website compiles ocean data from landmark 19th-century scientific voyage
The HMS Challenger began a four-year voyage 150 years ago to explore the deep sea and the creatures that lived in it. The scientists aboard the ship discovered thousands of new species and recorded massive amounts of data about the oceans. The treasure trove of information they gathered is now available online in the first comprehensive database of the Challenger findings.
How grasses avoid inbreeding
Corn, rice, wheat, sugar cane—the grass family contains a number of species that are important food sources for humans and have been bred and cultivated for millennia. Wild and farm animals, too, depend heavily on grasses for feed: cows, sheep, horses as well as bison, deer and zebras predominantly eat grass. Almost 70% of Switzerland's agricultural area is grassland.
Final results from the STEREO experiment reject sterile neutrino hypothesis
After several years of operation, the STEREO collaboration published the final results of their antineutrino studies. With their data, the researchers excluded hints for the existence of sterile neutrinos, an additional neutrino state expected in many theories. The result, which appears in the January 11 issue of Nature, has important implications for many areas of fundamental physics.
Antarctic icebergs still exist today where 1700-era sailors spotted and tracked them
A new study comparing observations of large Antarctic icebergs from the 1700s with modern satellite datasets shows the massive icebergs are found in the same areas where they were pinpointed three centuries ago. The study shows that despite their rudimentary tools, the old explorers truly knew their craft, and it confirms that the icebergs have behaved consistently for more than 300 years.
Among less-educated young workers, women and Black men are paid far less
Less-educated U.S. workers often face a lifetime of financial challenges, but some among them are more disadvantaged than others: Young Asian and white men without college education are paid more—sometimes far more—than both Black men and women of all racial groups, according to a new study co-authored at UC Berkeley.
Cayman Islands to cull feral cats to protect brown boobies
The Cayman Islands has announced it will start culling feral cats to help save a dwindling colony of brown booby birds.
'A perfect little system': Physicists isolate a pair of atoms to observe p-wave interaction strength for the first time
"Suppose you knew everything there was to know about a water molecule—the chemical formula, the bond angle, etc.," says Joseph Thywissen, a professor in the Department of Physics and a member of the Centre for Quantum Information & Quantum Control at the University of Toronto.
French island plans mass rodent cull to save albatross eggs
Conservationists are workingto rid a remote French southern Indian Ocean island of rodents and stray cats by the end of next year to protect prized albatrosses and other birds.
Uprooted trees serve as physical record for extreme wind events, finds high-res forest mapping study
Take a walk in the woods in southern Indiana and you'll likely come across an uprooted tree, its displaced roots rising above a pit of soil on the hillslopes.
Despite challenging conditions, thousands of waterbirds breeding throughout NSW wetlands
Recent flooding and water flow management in previous years have led to vast numbers of waterbirds, including large nesting colonies of Straw-necked Ibis and Royal Spoonbill, breeding at wetlands throughout the Northern and Central Murray Darling Basin (MDB).
Origin of fireball spotted falling across UK discovered
An orange-sized space rock which blazed across the skies January 9 probably didn't make it to Earth.
Cis-and trans-regulatory variants affect flower color differentiation between lotus species
Gene expression rewiring often contributes to phenotypic evolution between newly diverged species. Changes in gene expression patterns can be caused by mutations in either cis-regulatory regions (promoter) of the gene itself or trans-acting regulatory genes (transcription factors). However, the effects of cis-and trans-regulatory variants at the whole genome level of gene expression leading to...
Ethical ancient DNA research must involve descendant communities, say researchers
The analysis of ancient DNA allows scientists to trace human evolution and make important discoveries about modern populations. The data revealed by ancient DNA sampling can be valuable, but the human remains that carry this ancient DNA are often those of the ancestors of modern Indigenous groups, and some communities have expressed concerns about the ethics of sampling by outside parties. A group...
Discovery of a new form of carbon called long-range ordered porous carbon
The most well-known forms of carbon include graphite and diamond, but there are other more exotic nanoscale allotropes of carbon as well. These include graphene and fullerenes, which are sp2 hybridized carbon with zero (flat-shaped) or positive (sphere-shaped) curvatures.
Toward 'green' ammonia and a 'greener' fertilizer: New MOFs use less energy to separate ammonia from chemical reactants
Industrial production of ammonia, primarily for synthetic fertilizer—the fuel for last century's Green Revolution—is one of the world's largest chemical markets, but also one of the most energy intensive.
Nuclear reactor mystery solved, with no need for new particles
A physics mystery has come to an end, with a resolution about as shocking as “the butler did it.” For a decade, physicists have pondered why nuclear reactors pump out fewer particles called neutrinos than predicted. Some suggested the elusive bits of matter might be morphing into weirder, undetectable “sterile” neutrinos. Instead, new results pin down what other experiments had...