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43 articles from ScienceDaily

How to tackle climate change, food security and land degradation

How can some of world's biggest problems -- climate change, food security and land degradation -- be tackled simultaneously? Some lesser-known options, such as integrated water management and increasing the organic content of soil, have fewer trade-offs than many well-known options, such as planting trees, according to a new study.

Our animal inheritance: Humans perk up their ears, too, when they hear interesting sounds

Many animals move their ears to better focus their attention on a novel sound. That humans also have this capability was not known until now. A research team now has demonstrated that we make minute, unconscious movements of our ears that are directed towards the sound want to focus our attention on. The team discovered this ability by measuring electrical signals in the muscles of the vestigial...

1.5 billion people will depend on water from mountains

Global water consumption has increased almost fourfold in the past 100 years, and many regions can only meet their water demand thanks to essential contributions from mountain regions. In 30 years, almost a quarter of the world's lowland population will strongly depend on runoff from the mountains. Only sustainable development can ensure the important function of mountain areas as Earth's ''water...

Dopamine neurons mull over your options

Researchers have found that dopamine neurons in the brain can represent the decision-making process when making economic choices. As monkeys contemplated whether or not to choose an item, a subset of dopamine neurons transitioned from indicating the item's value to indicating the monkey's ultimate decision. Encoding of the decision into these dopamine neurons happened earlier than it did in other...

Excitation of robust materials

So-called topological materials have special electronic properties, which are very robust against external perturbations. In tungsten ditelluride such a topologically protected state can be ''broken up'' using special laser pulses within picoseconds and thus change its properties. This could be a key requirement for realising extremely fast, optoelectronic switches. For the first time, physicists...

Interplay of impact, moral goals influences charitable giving to different causes

With the rise of globalization, geographic borders are becoming less relevant for making charitable donations, which means nonprofits and charities can make more effective pitches to donors by emphasizing higher-level concepts such as morality and idealistic values, said Carlos Torelli, a professor of business administration and the James F. Towey Faculty Fellow at Illinois.

Brain structural elements in psychiatric disorders

While researchers have previously identified brain structural signatures associated with individual neurological diseases using techniques such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), a team of scientists has now compared data from multiple studies to find brain structural abnormalities shared between four different neuropsychiatric conditions. The researchers also found brain signatures that were...

Microscopic structures could improve perovskite solar cells

Solar cells based on perovskite compounds could soon make electricity generation from sunlight even more efficient and cheaper. The laboratory efficiency of these perovskite solar cells already exceeds that of the well-known silicon solar cells. An international team has found microscopic structures in perovskite crystals that can guide the charge transport in the solar cell. Clever alignment of...

New collection of stars, not born in our galaxy, discovered in Milky Way

Astrophysicists announced the discovery of Nyx, a new collection of 250 stars that they believe are the remnant of a dwarf galaxy that merged with the Milky Way eons ago. The research combined massive cosmological simulations and observational data from the Gaia space observatory. It required large scale supercomputers and deep learning algorithms. The team plans to explore Nyx further using...

A key gene modifies regulatory T cells to fine-tune the immune response

The human immune system is a finely-tuned machine, balancing when to release a cellular army to deal with pathogens, with when to rein in that army, stopping an onslaught from attacking the body itself. Now, researchers have discovered a way to control regulatory T cells, immune cells that act as a cease-fire signal, telling the immune system when to stand down.

Cooling mechanism increases solar energy harvesting for self-powered outdoor sensors

Thermoelectric devices, which use the temperature difference between the top and bottom of the device to generate power, offer some promise for harnessing naturally occurring energy. Authors tested one made up of a wavelength-selective emitter that constantly cools the device during the day using radiative cooling. As a result, the top of the device is cooler than the bottom, causing a temperature...

Engineers use electricity to clean up toxic water

Powerful electrochemical process destroys water contaminants, such as pesticides. Wastewater is a significant environment issue. Researchers say the technology could be readily applied to the wine industry, paper processing and pharmaceutical manufacturing.

Microplastic pollution harms lobster larvae, study finds

Microplastic fiber pollution in the ocean impacts larval lobsters at each stage of their development, according to new research. A study reports that the fibers affect the animals' feeding and respiration, and they could even prevent some larvae from reaching adulthood.