Science News

• share
• favorite_border

Before five shark attacks left four people dead and one wounded on the Jersey Shore in 1916, there was widespread doubt a shark would even bite a human.

• share
• favorite_border

Thousands of remarkable fossil birds from the time of the dinosaurs have been uncovered in China. However, most of these fossils are flattened in the rock, even though they commonly preserve fossils.

• share
• favorite_border

Pipelines carrying crude oil to ports in British Columbia may spell bad news for salmon, according to a new University of Guelph-led study. Exposure to an oil sands product – diluted bitumen – impairs the swimming ability and changes the heart structures of young salmon.

• share
• favorite_border

A team of engineers from Washington University in St. Louis is looking to capitalize on the sense of smell in locusts to create new biorobotic sensing systems that could be used in homeland security applications.

• share
• favorite_border

New research by Sarah Horton, an anthropologist at the University of Colorado Denver, reveals that employers in agricultural industries often take advantage of migrants' inability to work legally by making their employment contingent upon working under the false or borrowed identity documents provided by employers.

• share
• favorite_border

Rising sea temperatures in the Mediterranean are encouraging alien lionfish species to invade and colonise new territories with potentially serious ecological and socioeconomic impacts.

• share
• favorite_border

A new Hubble Space Telescope image shows a firestorm of star birth lighting up one end of the diminutive galaxy Kiso 5639. The dwarf galaxy is shaped like a flattened pancake, but because it is tilted edge-on, it resembles a skyrocket, with a brilliant blazing head and a long, star-studded tail. Kiso 5639 is a member of a class of galaxies called "tadpoles" because of their bright heads and elongated tails. This galaxy resides relatively nearby, at 82 million light-years away. Tadpoles are rare in the local universe but more common in the distant cosmos, suggesting that many galaxies pass through a phase like this as they evolve.

• share
• favorite_border

DNA tests have confirmed that one of the three southern rockhopper penguin chicks born at Osaka Aquarium Kaiyukan between June 4 and 6 was conceived through artificial insemination. This is the result of a project led by Kaiyukan with the collaboration of Associate Professor KUSUNOKI Hiroshi (Kobe University Graduate School of Agricultural Science). It is the world's first successful case of a southern rockhopper penguin being conceived through artificial insemination.

• share
• favorite_border

Oxford, June 28, 2016 - Owning a car or bicycle has the strongest influence on how much active travel a Londoner engages in. Car ownership leaves them two to three times less likely to travel actively. And in Outer London, simply owning a bicycle makes you more likely to get 30 minutes of active travel in, even if you have not used it recently. These findings, published in a study in the Journal of Transport & Health, will help policymakers better target interventions to promote active travel.

• share
• favorite_border

Circadian rhythms are internal clocks that determine many of an organism's daily rhythms, for example sleep-wake, feeding, urinary output and hormone production. Aligned with the environment by external forces such as sunlight and ambient temperature, circadian rhythms are important for animal health and survival. Disturbances of the circadian clock are associated with a variety of diseases in humans and animals, including cancer, mental illnesses and metabolic disorders, such as diabetes and obesity.

• share
• favorite_border

Caltech and DOE Joint Genome Institute researchers used a recently refined technique to identify both individual active cells, and single clusters of active bacteria and archaea within microbial communities. The DOE is interested in learning how the planet’s microbial dark matter can be harnessed for energy and environmental challenges.

• share
• favorite_border

A small, squishy vehicle equipped with soft wheels rolls over rough terrain and runs under water. Future versions of the versatile vehicle might be suitable for search and rescue missions after disasters, deep space and planet exploration, and manipulating objects during magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), according to its creators at Rutgers University. Their most important innovation is a soft motor that provides torque without bending or extending its housing.

• share
• favorite_border

A team of researchers from Los Alamos National Laboratory and Curtin University in Australia developed a theoretical model to forecast the fundamental chemical reactions involving molecular hydrogen.

• share
• favorite_border

A research team at Clarkson University reports an interesting conclusion that could have major impacts on the future of nano-manufacturing. Their analysis for a model of the process of random sequential adsorption (RSA) shows that even a small imprecision in the position of the lattice landing sites can dramatically affect the density of the permanently formed deposit.

• share
• favorite_border

Making an explosive safer tends to reduce its performance, while increasing its performance typically makes it somewhat less stable. So the question is: Can you create an explosive that performs just as well as conventional explosives, but is safer?

• share
• favorite_border

In response to the threats of wildlife and forestry crime and illegal fishing to the Sundarbans—the world’s largest mangrove forest—the Government of Bangladesh through its Forest Department has expanded the scope of its current protection efforts.

• share
• favorite_border

Parental involvement is crucial to a child’s development into an adult, but Florida State University researchers are finding that crossing the line between supportive and too involved could indirectly lead to issues such as depression and anxiety for young adults.

• share
• favorite_border

The immune system in the elderly is dysfunctional and infections are more prevalent, more severe, and harder to defeat. Drinking alcohol has a variety of damaging effects on the immune system and organs – like the gut, liver and lung – which can be worsened by pre-existing conditions as well as consumption of prescription and over-the-counter medications that aged individuals often take. This presentation addresses how alcohol affects the elderly more dramatically, and also suppresses their ability to battle infections, like pneumonia, much more severely than it does younger individuals.

• share
• favorite_border

From 2008 to 2015, state and federal water resource managers spent about $125 million to control invasive aquatic plants in Florida, according to an April Extension document co-written by Lyn Gettys, a UF/IFAS assistant professor of agronomy and aquatic weed specialist. Of all the invasive plants in Florida’s waterways, hydrilla costs the most to contain -- $66 million over a seven-year period.

• share
• favorite_border

By engineering a novel enzyme involved in lignin synthesis, scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory and collaborators have altered the lignin in plant cell walls in a way that increases access to biofuel building blocks without inhibiting plant growth.