Tech
Oxygen levels in the ancient oceans were surprisingly resilient to climate change, new research suggests.
Scientists used geological samples to estimate ocean oxygen during a period of global warming 56 million years ago - and found "limited expansion" of seafloor anoxia (absence of oxygen).
Global warming - both past and present - depletes ocean oxygen, but the new study suggests warming of 5°C in the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) led to anoxia covering no more than 2% of the global seafloor.
Divergences between scientific and Indigenous and Local Knowledge can provide a better understanding of why local pastoralists may be willing, or not, to participate in conservation initiatives for carnivores, a study from University of Helsinki suggests.
Any building project requires the formulation of a series of initial plans prior to starting construction to serve as a basis and guide for the whole process. A similar procedure is followed in software development, with the inclusion of a specific step known as modelling.
University of Otago researchers have added another piece to the puzzle about how best to translocate New Zealand lizards for conservation purposes - confine them.
In a paper just published in the New Zealand Journal of Ecology, the Department of Zoology researchers outlined how they translocated 19 barking geckos to Mana Island, using the method of penned release - enclosing them in a 100m² pen for three months so they get used to the site and hopefully establish a breeding population.
MEDFORD/SOMERVILLE (January 14, 2021) - A team of researchers led by engineers at Tufts University's School of Engineering and Stanford University's Program on Water, Health and Development have developed a novel and inexpensive chlorine dispensing device that can improve the safety of drinking water in regions of the world that lack financial resources and adequate infrastructure. With no moving parts, no need for electricity, and little need for maintenance, the device releases measured quantities of chlorine into the water just before it exits the tap.
There is a growing consensus among scientists as well as national and local governments representing hundreds of millions of people, that humanity faces a climate crisis that demands a crisis response. New research from the University of California San Diego explores one possible mode of response: a massively funded program to deploy direct air capture (DAC) systems that remove CO2 directly from the ambient air and sequester it safely underground.
Patients with type 2 diabetes who follow a strict low carbohydrate diet for six months may experience greater rates of remission compared with other recommended diets without adverse effects, suggests a study published by The BMJ today.
The researchers acknowledge that most benefits diminished at 12 months, but say doctors might consider short term strict low carbohydrate diets for managing type 2 diabetes, while actively monitoring and adjusting diabetes medication as needed.
Scientists claim to have found the 'missing link' in the process that leads to an ice age on Earth.
Melting icebergs in the Antarctic are the key, say the team from Cardiff University, triggering a series of chain reactions that plunges Earth into a prolonged period of cold temperatures.
The findings have been published today in Nature from an international consortium of scientists from universities around the world.
KU Leuven researchers have identified the biological mechanism that explains why some people experience abdominal pain when they eat certain foods. The finding paves the way for more efficient treatment of irritable bowel syndrome and other food intolerances. The study, carried out in mice and humans, was published in Nature.
Schools of fish exhibit complex, synchronized behaviors that help them find food, migrate and evade predators. No one fish or team of fish coordinates these movements nor do fish communicate with each other about what to do next. Rather, these collective behaviors emerge from so-called implicit coordination -- individual fish making decisions based on what they see their neighbors doing.
This type of decentralized, autonomous self-organization and coordination has long fascinated scientists, especially in the field of robotics.
Since the earliest microscopes, scientists have been on a quest to build instruments with finer and finer resolution to image a cell's proteins - the tiny machines that keep cells, and us, running. But to succeed, they need to overcome the diffraction limit, a fundamental property of light that long prevented optical microscopes from bringing into focus anything smaller than half the wavelength of visible light (around 200 nanometers or billionths of a meter) - far too big to explore many of the inner-workings of a cell.
Atomic nuclei are held together by the strong interaction between neutrons and protons. About ten percent of all known nuclei are stable. Starting from these stable isotopes, nuclei become increasingly unstable as neutrons are added or removed, until neutrons can no longer bind to the nucleus and "drip" out. This limit of existence, the so-called neutron "dripline", has so far been discovered experimentally only for light elements up to neon.
It is politically agreed and necessary for climate protection reasons that our entire economy becomes climate-neutral in the coming decades - and that applies to air travel, too. This is a technically feasible goal, and there are numerous ways to achieve it. ETH Professor Marco Mazzotti and his team have now compared the options that appear to be the easiest to implement in the short and medium term and evaluated them according to factors such as cost-effectiveness.
In a new study, researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden have used a urine test to identify and verify a patient's type of asthma. The study, which has been published in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, lays the foundation for a more personalized diagnosis and may result in improved treatment of severe asthma in the future.