Earth
The tail feathers of the peacock, the enormous horn of male rhinoceros beetles, the protruding antlers of some deer: In nature, there are countless examples of features which at first sight may only have disadvantages for their owners. After all, it is more difficult to hide from a predator when one is wearing a colourful plumage, and large antlers do not make escaping in the forest any easier. As a rule, it is the male that has such characteristics.
Mass extinctions of land-dwelling animals--including amphibians, reptiles, mammals, and birds--follow a cycle of about 27 million years, coinciding with previously reported mass extinctions of ocean life, according to a new analysis published in the journal Historical Biology.
Sexual health charity Brook has adopted these latest research findings in its teaching methods
A new nuanced way of teaching young people about consent that is based on their real-life experiences helps them develop a better understanding of sexual rights and ethics, a new study suggests.
By teaching consent using this continuum style approach, rather than by the legal definition of 'consent' alone, young people are able to talk more openly and honestly in a way that relates to their own sexual and relationship experiences.
A joint research led by City University of Hong Kong (CityU) has built an ultralow-power consumption artificial visual system to mimic the human brain, which successfully performed data-intensive cognitive tasks. Their experiment results could provide a promising device system for the next generation of artificial intelligence (AI) applications.
"Our research on rats with heart failure shows that exercise reduces the severity of the disease, improves heart function and increases work capacity. And the intensity of the training is really importance to achieve this effect," says Thomas Stølen, a researcher at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU).
Cells must utilize nutrient resources as efficiently as possible in order to ensure survival. This involves an intricate balance between the synthesis and degradation of cellular components, the latter of which can be used to liberate metabolites from unneeded components during periods of stress. Autophagy is a key intracellular degradation pathway that is triggered under such conditions.
Longer nocturnal respiratory events in patients with obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA) cause higher immediate heart rate variability, and greater changes in beat-to-beat intervals are associated with reduced daytime alertness, according to new research from the University of Eastern Finland.
Justifiable pride can be taken in the incremental accomplishments of international climate change cooperation, but it is "unthinkable" to continue at the current pace. The global response to climate change is completely insufficient and leaves the world on a "road to hell".
Be it with smartphones, laptops, or mainframes: The transmission, processing, and storage of information is currently based on a single class of material - as it was in the early days of computer science about 60 years ago. A new class of magnetic materials, however, could raise information technology to a new level. Antiferromagnetic insulators enable computing speeds that are a thousand times faster than conventional electronics, with significantly less heating.
Finding alternatives to antibiotics is one of the biggest challenges facing the research community. Bacteria are increasingly resistant to these drugs, and this resistance leads to the deaths of more than 25,000 around the world. Now, a multidisciplinary team of researchers from the Universitat Rovira i Virgili, the University of Grenoble (France), the University of Saarland (Germany) and RMIT University (Australia) have discovered that the mechanical deformation of bacteria is a toxic mechanism that can kill bacteria with gold nanoparticles.
ITHACA, N.Y. - To deflect future world food crises created by climate change and growing consumer demand, a Cornell University-led international team of economists, scientists and business experts has created a road map for global agricultural and food systems innovation, reform and sustainability.
The group's report - "Socio-Technical Innovation Bundles for Agri-Food Systems," funded by the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability - was published Dec. 10 on the Nature Sustainability website, in collaboration with its sibling journal, Nature Food.
As oceans warm and become more acidic and oxygen-poor, Smithsonian researchers asked how marine life on a Caribbean coral reef copes with changing conditions.
"During my study, water temperatures on reefs in Bocas del Toro, Panama, reached an alarming high of almost 33 degrees C (or 91 degrees F), temperatures that would make most of us sweat or look for air conditioning--options not available to reef inhabitants," said Noelle Lucey, post-doctoral fellow at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI).
As the deadly COVID-19 pandemic continues to wreak havoc around the world with no end in sight, new ways in which to stop the spread or mitigate the effects of the disease are few.
Although most experts agree that a vaccine would significantly slow or eventually stop the spread, the work to develop, approve and distribute such a vaccine are likely months away. That leaves us with only prevention efforts such as masks, social distancing and disinfecting, which partially due to human inconsistencies in behavior, have proven to be variable in effectiveness.
In a hard-hitting new paper leading ecologists and climate change specialists argue that current nature conservation practices are not sufficiently flexible and dynamic to weather the impacts of climate change.
Weight loss appears as a holy grail in our modern societies. DNP (2,4-dinitrophenol), a molecule decreasing the efficiency at which food is converted to cellular energy, was discovered in the early 1930s to be an efficient chemical treatment to promote weight loss in humans. Due to acute toxic effects and the death of several users, DNP was rapidly withdrawn from the market and not used for decades. Yet, DNP has re-emerged over the last decade for human usage through its illegal selling on Internet, leading to several death cases and the recent conviction of an online seller.