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Image copyright Christine Cassidy Image caption Red Squirrels face pressure for food Volunteers are being sought to survey 120 woods in Northern Ireland for a protected mammal. They are being asked to help gather information about red squirrels. Experts claim that, without intervention, the animals could be extinct with 35 years. Grey squirrels out-perform reds for food and carry a disease __that can kill them. They have spread rapidly...
The phrase "reinventing the wheel" usually means someone is wasting time and effort trying to fix something __that isn't broken. The same could be said for reinventing straws, which is something __that McDonald's has half-jokingly tried to do with its new STRAW (Suction Tube for Reverse Axial Withdrawal). On February 24, the fast food corporation will be giving out 2,000 J-shaped, holey straws in select locations across the country, and they're only good for one thing: "This straw has no purpose other than allowing you to drink a milkshake that...
The following is an excerpt from Power Play: How video games can save the world by Asi Burak and Laura Parker. One of the most successful examples of citizen science is Lab in the Wild, an experimental platform for conducting online behavioral experiments. It was launched in 2012 by Krzysztof Gajos, an associate professor of computer science at Harvard University’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, with the help of one of his postdoctoral researchers, Katharina Reinecke. The platform administers game-like tests online to unpaid volunteers....
Today, the seeds of 49,000 varieties of crops—including cabbages, wheat, lentils, sweet peas, and many others—will be wheeled into a vault in a mountainside. There they will lay in in sturdy black plastic boxes in a frigid underground vault high above the Arctic Circle, an insurance policy for the entire world’s food supply. Remarkably, some of the packets being deposited today are descendants of seeds __that were removed in 2015, when the remnants of a Syrian-based seed bank withdrew the first seeds from the Svalbard vault, in order to re-establish...
Most galaxies in the universe have at least one thing in common: supermassive black holes tend to sit in their centers, silently gorging on interstellar gas and dust and obliterating anything __that comes within range of their event horizon. But scientists know very little about the origin of these behemoths or how they got to be so supermassive. "We don't understand particularly well how black holes grow," says James Mullaney of the University of Sheffield. "Especially how they grew back in the early universe, when the first stars were starting...
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption President Trump's attitude to climate change has drawn protests in many parts of the world The UN’s new climate chief says she’s worried about President Donald Trump - but confident __that action to curb climate change is unstoppable. President Trump said he’d withdraw from the UN climate deal and stop funding the UN’s clean energy programme. But former Mexican diplomat Patricia Espinosa...
Image copyright Warner Bros Image caption In the film Interstellar, astronauts leave Earth in search of other habitable planets Astronomers have discovered a small planet around Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the Sun. But how do astronomers decide whether a planet is hospitable to life? In the science fiction film Interstellar, astronauts leave a dying Earth in search of a hospitable planet for the human race to settle. But...
Media captionAll seven planets are thought to have Earth-like characteristics (Photo credit: Nature) Astronomers have detected a record seven Earth-sized planets orbiting a single star. The researchers say __that all seven could potentially support liquid water on the surface, depending on the other properties of those planets. But only three are within the conventional "habitable" zone where life is considered a possibility. The compact system of exoplanets orbits Trappist-1, a low-mass, cool star located 40 light-years away from...
The following is an adapted excerpt from A Big Bang in a Little Room: The Quest to Create New Universes by Zeeya Merali, available in stores now. In the book, Merali explores the possibilities of creating an infant universe in a laboratory. In this excerpt, she meets with noted futurist Anders Sandberg to discuss the ethics of potentially creating new intelligent life in a baby universe, or the possibility of sentience evolving in a computer simulation. When Anders Sandberg was a kid in the 1980s, he enjoyed making simulations on his Sinclair...
I get it—we’re all still bitter about Pluto. We wanted it to stay a planet, so we’ll cling to our righteous anger until the day we die. Scientists are always changing their minds about all these categories and designations, and it sometimes seems totally unnecessary. Does it really matter if Pluto is a planet, or if there are eight continents instead of seven? Yes. Yes it does. The real problem with this argument is __that it’s based on a valid premise—that all categories are arbitrary—and yet draws a false conclusion. It is all arbitrary. But...
Image copyright NSF/LIGO Image caption A wider partnership could give UK researchers even more access to US facilities The UK and US are in talks to extend their "special relationship" in science after the UK leaves the European Union, the BBC understands. British institutions are in talks with their US colleagues to try to make it easier for scientists to travel, collaborate and share facilities. Research Councils UK said it would...
Between the eighth and second centuries BCE, potters in the kingdom of Judah (near Jerusalem) made a bunch of jars with official state seals on the handles. They needed to hold supplies, and they wanted people to know who those supplies belonged to. Simple, right? The jars themselves are fairly non-descript but for thousands of years they've hidden important information about the Earth’s geomagnetic history. In a study published Monday in PNAS, Israeli researchers announced __that they had turned the fragmented artifacts into an archive on Earth’s...
In China, the famed man in the moon is a bunny. Confused? So, it seems, are our eyes, according to a new study in the journal PLOS ONE. The study looks at why people see so many different images when we stare at Rorschach inkblots. Since their inception, Rorschach ink blots—named after Hermann Rorschach, the Swiss psychoanalyst who invented them—have been known to confuse the visual cortex. We tend to see what we want to see in them. And although their use in psychology has been debunked (whether you see a butterfly or a dancing clown in the above...
In January of last year, drones captured video of houses perched perilously on rapidly-eroding cliffs along California’s coast. Those houses in Pacifica, California weren’t alone, as waves driven by El Niño tore away huge chunks of the shoreline over the winter of 2015-2016. Now, researchers have had a chance to take stock of the damage, and found __that in many places, the shoreline eroded far past the normal beating taken during winter storms. In a study published Tuesday in Nature Communications, researchers found __that the shorelines eroded...
Image copyright Dr Alan Jamieson, Newcastle Uni Image caption The amphipods were retrieved from the Pacific's Kermadec and Mariana trenches Chemicals banned in the 1970s have been found in the deepest reaches of the Pacific Ocean, a new study shows. Scientists were surprised by the relatively high concentrations of pollutants like PCBs and PBDEs in deep sea ecosystems. Used widely during much of the 20th Century, these chemicals were...
Image copyright Axel Hochkirch Image caption The Crau plain grasshopper is confined to a small area of the South of France The first comprehensive assessment of Europe's crickets and grasshoppers has found __that more than a quarter of species are being driven to extinction. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the insect group is the most threatened of those assessed so far in Europe. Europe harbours...
Hailed as the King of grains, quinoa doesn’t need more hype to cement its position as a superfood in the American supermarket. But now scientists have a hold of quinoa’s real identity—and what underlies the grain’s nutritious profile —thanks to its newly-sequenced genome. “There are a lot of things __that can be done to improve quinoa. And understanding the genome of it is the first step,” says Mark Tester, the leader of an international team __that just published the first genome sequence of quinoa in Nature. Tester, a plant scientist at King...
Nearly 1,000 Dead Sea Scrolls—the oldest known biblical manuscripts—were found scattered throughout 11 caves in the Judaean Desert between 1946 and 1956. Now scientists think they've found a 12th cave where scrolls were stored—but the texts themselves seem to have been stolen decades ago. The evidence __that the cave, found near the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea in the West Bank, once contained a precious scroll is compelling: Researchers from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Liberty University in Virginia found storage jars and lids...
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