Curated News: Staff Picks

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Current rates of climate change could trigger instability in a major Antarctic glacier, ultimately leading to more than 2m of sea-level rise.

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New geologic mapping in the Himalayan mountains of Kashmir between Pakistan and India suggests that the region is ripe for a major earthquake that could endanger the lives of as many as a million people.

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Researchers at Lund University in Sweden have successfully explained how iron-based dyes work on a molecular level in solar cells. The new findings will accelerate the development of inexpensive and environmentally friendly solar cells.

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A new study by University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law professor Christopher L. Peterson analyzes the U.S. government’s effort to create an effective consumer financial protection agency.

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A new highly efficient power amplifier for electronics could help make possible next-generation cell phones, low-cost collision-avoidance radar for cars and lightweight microsatellites for communications.

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Non-Hispanic blacks are almost twice as likely as non-Hispanic whites to be diagnosed with schizophrenia, but they’re significantly less likely to receive medication for treatment, according to researchers.

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Mountains aren’t the first thing that hit you when you look at images of Jupiter’s innermost moon, Io. But once you absorb the fact that the moon is slathered in sulfurous lava erupted from 400 active volcanoes, you might turn your attention to scattered bumps and lumps that turn out, on closer inspection, to be Io’s version of mountains.

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The ocean of Jupiter's moon Europa could have the necessary balance of chemical energy for life, even if the moon lacks volcanic hydrothermal activity, finds a new study.

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Researchers at King's College London have found no significant link between eating the evening meal after 8pm and excess weight in children, according to a paper published this month in the British Journal of Nutrition.

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94 percent of pregnant women studied had detectable levels of BPA, a chemical used in water bottles, canned foods, and paper receipts.

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Decommissioning the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant just got one step closer. Japanese researchers have mapped the distribution of boron compounds in a model control rod, paving the way for determining re-criticality risk within the reactor.

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People suffering from major depressive disorder may have altered purine metabolism, according to a new study from the University of Eastern Finland and Kuopio University Hospital. Purines are nitrogenous compounds that serve as building blocks for DNA and they also play a role in cellular signalling, among other things.

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Scientists from Austria, Finland and Hungary are using laser scanners to study the day-night rhythm of trees. As it turns out, trees go to sleep too.

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A new study from Uppsala University shows that compared to non-shift workers, shift workers needed more time to complete a test that is frequently used by physicians to screen for cognitive impairment. However, those who had quit shift work more than five years ago completed the test just as quick as the non-shift workers. The findings are published in the journal Neurobiology of Aging.

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Relationship satisfaction and the energy devoted to keeping a partner are dependent on how the partner compares with other potential mates, a finding that relates to evolution’s stronghold on modern relationship psychology, according to a study at The University of Texas at Austin.

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Carnegie's Allan Sandage, who died in 2012, was a tremendously influential figure in the field of astronomy. His final paper, published posthumously, focuses on unraveling a surprising historical mystery related to one of his own seminal discoveries.

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“How does it ‘feel’ to interact behaviorally with a machine?” To answer that, scientists created a virtual partner that can elicit emotional responses from its human partner while the pair engages in behavioral coordination in real-time. The virtual partner’s behavior is governed by mathematical models of human-to-human interactions in a way that enables humans to interact with the mathematical description of their social selves. Humans showed greater emotional arousal when they thought the virtual partner was a human and not a machine, although in all cases, they were interacting with a machine.

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Researchers at Lund University in Sweden and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States have developed a method to analyse and separate cells from the blood. Ultimately, the method, which goes under the name iso-acoustic focusing, can become significant to measure the efficiency of cancer treatments for individuals.

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Scientists have calculated, for the first time, the extent to which agricultural emissions must be reduced to meet the Paris climate agreement’s plan to limit warming to 2°C in 2100. Scientists estimate that the agriculture sector must reduce non-CO2 emissions by 1 gigaton per year in 2030. The analysis also revealed a major gap between the existing mitigation options for the agriculture sector and the reductions needed: current interventions would only deliver between 21-40% of mitigation required.

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Two factors—metabolism and gut microbes – have been credited by researchers as key players in the fight against obesity. However, there is an ongoing debate about whether exercise or diet better promotes metabolism and healthy shifts in gut microbes, the microscopic organisms in our intestines that break down food and can contribute to decreased obesity. New research from the University of Missouri confirms exercise plays a significant role in the fight against obesity.

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All throughout the universe, there are stars in varying phases and ages. Planetary diversity suggests that around other stars, initially frozen worlds could be the size of Earth and provide habitable conditions once the star becomes older. The oldest detected Kepler planets (exoplanets found using NASA’s Kepler telescope) are about 11 billion years old. Our sun is currently 4.6 billion years old. Astronomers usually looked at middle-aged stars like our sun, but to find habitable worlds, one needs to look around to stars of all ages, including red giants.

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Earth scientists from Rice University, Yale University and the University of Tokyo are offering a new answer to the long-standing question of how our planet acquired its oxygenated atmosphere.

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Most studies of the interactions between companies and consumers look at one piece of the puzzle: Advertising or social media or news coverage or "consumer sentiment" as measured in surveys. A new study from researchers at the University of Maryland, University of Tennessee and Massey University examines how messages about brands across various channels interact in a complex set of feedback loops the authors call the "echoverse." And the study offers advice for managers on navigating this new complex media world.

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In the study, clearing the beach of flotsam and jetsam increased the number of nests by as much as 200 percent, while leaving the detritus decreased the number by nearly 50 percent.

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Recognised welfare outcome assessments within farm assurance schemes have shown a reduction in feather loss and improvement in the welfare of UK cage-free laying hens, according to the findings of a study from the AssureWel project by the University of Bristol, RSPCA and the Soil Association.

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Physicists are putting themselves out of a job, using artificial intelligence to run a complex experiment.

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A new evolutionary theory argues that women may have been evolutionarily designed to be sexually fluid--changing their sexual desires and identities from lesbian, to bisexual, to heterosexual and back again--in order to allow them to have sex with their co-wives in polygynous marriages, therefore reducing conflict and tension inherent in such marriages while at the same time successfully reproducing with their husbands in heterosexual unions.

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Emissions from farms outweigh all other human sources of fine-particulate air pollution in much of the United States, Europe, Russia and China, according to new research. The culprit: fumes from nitrogen-rich fertilizers and animal waste combine in the air with combustion emissions to form solid particles, which constitute a major source of disease and death, according to the new study.

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Theoretical chemists at Princeton University have pioneered a strategy for modeling quantum friction, or how a particle's environment drags on it, a vexing problem in quantum mechanics since the birth of the field. The study was published in the Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters.

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As climatologists closely monitor the impact of human activity on the world’s oceans, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have found yet another worrying trend impacting the health of the Pacific Ocean.

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The statistics on regular physical activity in the U.S. are bleak; only about 20 percent of Americans engage in recommended levels of regular physical activity and about 64 percent never do any physical activity.

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The sharing of genetic information from millions of cancer patients around the world could be key to revolutionising cancer prevention and care, according to a leading cancer expert from Queen’s University Belfast.

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A growing body of research is revealing associations between birth defects and a father’s age, alcohol use and environmental factors, say researchers at Georgetown University Medical Center. They say these defects result from epigenetic alterations that can potentially affect multiple generations.

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In a Veterans Affairs study of more than 300 enlisted Army National Guard and Army Reserve members who had deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, a majority reported symptoms consistent with a condition known as chronic multisymptom illness (CMI). The data were collected a year after the soldiers returned home.

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Resveratrol found in red wine could help counteract the negative impact of high fat/high sugar diets.

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The discovery of stone tools found in a Florida river show that humans settled the southeastern United States far earlier than previously believed—perhaps by as much as 1,500 years, according to a team of scientists that includes a University of Michigan paleontologist.

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The discovery of stone tools alongside mastodon bones in a Florida river shows that humans settled the southeastern United States as much as 1,500 years earlier than scientists previously believed, according to a research team led by a Florida State University professor. This site on the Aucilla River — about 45 minutes from Tallahassee — is now the oldest known site of human life in the southeastern United States. It dates back 14,550 years.

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Expectations have a lot of power over people as is evidenced by the placebo effect: Patients get pills that have no active ingredient. But the patients are not aware of that. Firmly believing that they are taking an effective drug, they actually get better afterwards. Only their expectations were at play here.

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Researchers call for socioeconomic infuences to be factored into future protection policies.

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Maternal stress and depression during pregnancy may activate certain protective mechanisms in babies. Psychologists from the University of Basel together with international colleagues report that certain epigenetic adaptations in newborns suggest this conclusion. Their results have been published in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience.

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The prevalence of celiac disease (CD), an autoimmune disease, is increasing. The only treatment for CD is a gluten-free diet. However, the increasing prevalence of CD does not account for the disproportionate increase in growth of the gluten-free food industry (136% from 2013 to 2015). A Commentary scheduled for publication in The Journal of Pediatrics discusses several of the most common inaccuracies regarding the gluten-free diet.

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NASA mission, with help from UMD physicists, is the first ever to observe how magnetic reconnection takes place, a critical step in understanding space weather.

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A unique and pioneering study of the ancient and modern DNA of the 'ship of the desert' -- the single humped camel or dromedary -- has shed new light on how its use by human societies has shaped its genetic diversity.

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Nearly 30 years of data collected on painted turtles in the Mississippi River near Clinton, Iowa, show that females suffer a steep dip in fertility before the end of their lives, a finding that flies in the face of what scientists have believed about turtles and aging.

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In a study of nearly 500,000 individuals in 22 countries, researchers could not find any evidence that these programs had an impact on changing individual behavior.

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A faint blue galaxy about 30 million light-years from Earth and located in the constellation Leo Minor has been identified by Indiana University astronomers as possessing qualities that could shed new light on conditions during the Big Bang.

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Researchers identify enzymes that convert the grassy smell into a sweeter scent.

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Scientists from Princeton University and NASA have confirmed that 1,284 objects observed outside Earth's solar system by NASA's Kepler spacecraft are indeed planets. Reported in The Astrophysical Journal on May 10, it is the largest single announcement of new planets to date and more than doubles the number of confirmed planets discovered by Kepler so far to more than 2,300.

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Cinemagoers' exhaled breath reveals the scene that is playing.

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Cells respond differently to lack of nutrients.