Imagine a man wants to buy a new shirt for work that he plans to wear once a week for at least the next five years. When browsing for options, he finds one shirt from a lower-quality brand priced at £20 and one shirt from a high-quality brand for £50. Which one should he buy? [...]
A recent study published in Physical Review Letters reveals that many widely used signatures of criticality in brain data may be statistical artifacts. They propose a more robust framework that, when applied to whole-brain fMRI data, confirms the brain operates near, but not exactly at, a critical point. [...]
A history of job changes could be a red flag on a résumé, or it could signal a job candidate with an important "mobility benefit" that will help them begin a new job, says new research from Rebecca Kehoe, professor of Human Resources Studies in Cornell's ILR School. [...]
WEHI researchers have led a major global effort to create the first authoritative atlas for a class of enzymes that regulate almost every cellular process in the human body. Published in Cell, the study establishes the first gold-standard reference for all human E3 ligases, resolving nearly two decades of inconsistencies within the field. [...]
Many countries have adopted ambitious climate protection targets, typically measuring progress through emissions reductions and the expansion of renewable energy. But according to a research team led by Germán Bersalli of the Research Institute for Sustainability, such indicators offer only limited insight. In Current Research in Environmental Sustainability, the researchers introduce a method designed to better capture the underlying drivers of change and apply it to four European countries. Their findings reveal a consistent pattern: despite measurable advances, none of the countries has yet achieved the comprehensive, system-wide transformation required for a fully CO₂-free energy system. [...]
With a new lab-based experiment, researchers in the UK and France have recreated the characteristic cascades of energy and angular momentum that underpin key features of Earth's atmosphere. Reporting in Physical Review Letters, a team led by Peter Read at the University of Oxford has gained fresh insights into how energy fluctuations in turbulent flows are linked to their size, while also uncovering behaviors that current atmospheric models can't yet explain. [...]
Suspicion and affection. Apprehension and excitement. Most people have mixed feelings about AI English, whether or not they always recognize it. When reading text generated by AI, people feel it sounds off, or fake. When reading English by a human, people are more likely to feel it has a characteristic voice or a personal touch. [...]
Offshore wind farms are an important pillar of the European Union's strategy for renewable energy—by 2050, the EU aims to increase capacity in the North Sea more than tenfold. A new study by the Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon shows that the expansion of wind farms can alter the natural transport and deposition of sediments on a large scale and over the long term. The German Bight is particularly affected. The researchers have published their findings in the journal Nature Communications Earth & Environment. [...]
Through new improvements to existing AI models, researchers in China have created a framework that can methodically identify useful new forms of solid carbon. With their approach, Zhibin Gao and colleagues at Xi'an Jiaotong University hope that numerous new materials could be discovered, exhibiting combinations of exotic properties that are inaccessible via conventional search methods. [...]
Ever woken up to find that a crafty raccoon has overturned your garbage bin and spread the discarded contents of your life across the street? Raccoons—sometimes referred to as "trash pandas"—are renowned as excellent innovators and problem-solvers who can often find their way through the trickiest barriers in their search for food. [...]
Evidence of some of the earliest dogs has been identified at two University of Liverpool/British Institute at Ankara archaeological excavation projects in central Anatolia, Turkey. Shedding new light on the development and spread of early domestic dogs, the findings are documented in two papers published in Nature. [...]
Chemists at Wageningen University & Research (WUR) and Utrecht University have developed a new method to produce a promising chemical building block from biomass. This compound can serve as a precursor for useful products such as plastics, pharmaceuticals, and flavor and fragrance ingredients. Conventionally, its production requires hazardous chemicals. The Dutch research team now demonstrates that the process can instead be driven by electricity, using a simple setup and without the addition of dangerous chemicals. They published the results in ChemSusChem. [...]
In their landmark 1961 paper on the lac operon, Nobel laureates François Jacob and Jacques Monod speculated that RNA might control gene activity in bacteria through base-pairing interactions. But once protein transcription factors were discovered, the idea was tossed aside. Sixty years later, a multi-institutional team of biologists shows that Jacob and Monod were on to something. Some species of bacteria, reports the team in Nature, have evolved an RNA-guided gene activating system by transforming a copy of a CRISPR-Cas gene-cutting system. [...]
When we think of asteroids, we almost immediately think of giant rocks bouncing around like the iconic chase scene in "The Empire Strikes Back," and we often hear how they are remnants from the birth of the solar system. While the asteroids that comprise the Main Asteroid Belt of our solar system are not only spread far apart from one another, they are also not all made of rock. One asteroid approximately the size of the state of Massachusetts called 16 Psyche is made of metal, which planetary scientists hypothesize could be the remnants of a protoplanet's core that didn't build into a full-fledged planet. But how did such a unique asteroid form? [...]
Debates about generative AI in higher education have been informed by studies of completed student papers, or self-reported survey data. Research shows that artificial intelligence tools can support learning, but has also raised concerns, including students' overreliance, cheating, and the potential degradation of critical thinking and engagement. [...]
Sea ice is sticking to Alaska's northern coast for less time each year, according to 27 years of data analyzed by University of Alaska Fairbanks scientists. Such landfast ice, which stays attached to the shoreline instead of drifting with winds and currents, also has covered less total area in recent winters. [...]
This week, we learned that across the animal kingdom, sperm cells have a short shelf life. A study implicated autoantibodies in the development of long COVID. And among its other drawbacks, the weedkiller glyphosate may foster the spread of multidrug-resistant bacteria. [...]
As the demand for cybersecurity professionals continues to rise, new research from the University of South Florida identified a growing interest among higher education institutions to incorporate work-based learning in cybersecurity programs to help close the gap between academic preparation and the skills employers are seeking. [...]
In a development that could shift our basic understanding of fluid mechanics, researchers from Drexel University have reported that, given the right circumstances, it is possible to induce a simple liquid to fracture like a solid object. Recently published in the journal Physical Review Letters, the research shows how viscous liquids can suddenly break if stretched with enough force. [...]
A new Stanford University study has helped solve a mystery about dramatic swings in sea ice extent around Antarctica. [...]
The astronauts set to become the first lunar visitors in more than half a century arrived at their launch site Friday, joining the towering rocket that stands poised to blast off next week and send them around the moon. [...]
Today's nearly $70 billion U.S. biofuels economy is powered by two technology toolboxes. Biochemical technologies—used to produce around 17 billion gallons of ethanol annually—leverage microorganisms to convert plant biomass sugars into alcohols, other biofuels, or chemicals. Chemical technologies, the second toolbox, use catalysts to turn biomass and wastes into similar target products. [...]
The transition from water to land is a question that still intrigues scientists. Those ancient organisms would have needed to adapt to several new challenges to life out of water. So, how did they do it? [...]
Odin was a kelpie. Attentive and protective, with a happy smile and an endless hope for food, he succumbed to a terminal disease late last year. At his death, a deep sense of grief ripped through the household of one of us (Andrew): While Odin was not human, he was an irreplaceable member of the family. [...]
Clathrate hydrates are crystalline structures formed at the bottom of seafloors, created by water molecules trapping methane, carbon dioxide or other molecules. While these materials are underutilized in technology, a University of Oklahoma researcher is helping scientists better understand them through a trailblazing study. [...]
Argonne and Northwestern University scientists teamed up to understand how light interacts with metallic nanoframes, with implications for biosensing, quantum information science and beyond. [...]
Museum collections have underpinned scientific research for centuries. But physical specimens in boxes and drawers don't easily lend themselves to the research techniques of the new millennium. "How can we apply these techniques to natural history collections, especially when much of the intrinsic information a specimen has to offer is difficult to quantify?" asks Katja Seltmann, director of UC Santa Barbara's Cheadle Center for Biodiversity & Ecological Restoration. Enter the Big Bee Project: a pioneering initiative to bring natural history collections into the century of AI, big data and networked databases. [...]
Understanding gene expression within the body has been a boon for 21st century biology and therapeutics, but most discoveries that use these technologies only focus on one organ or one small area of tissue. At the University of Chicago's Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (UChicago PME), Assoc. Prof. Nicolas Chevrier's group has developed a new system to understand how diseases affect molecules, cells, tissues, and organs across the whole body—a major goal of both scientists and physicians. The interdisciplinary work was led by Maggie Clevenger, a staff scientist in the lab, and involved several industrial and academic collaborators. [...]
It's fairly common for members of the public to ask bug experts if ticks that hitchhike into a house on people or dogs can actually survive indoors for any length of time. A new study provides the first scientific evidence that the answer is yes, showing that two species of ticks can live at least one week, and up to about three weeks, on hard-surface and carpeted floors. [...]
It is not unusual for laboratory monkeys to engage in abnormal repetitive behaviors (ARBs), such as pacing and hair-plucking. Conventional thinking is that these actions are linked to recent stresses or current housing conditions. But a new study published in the journal Biology Letters suggests the causes are often cumulative negative experiences that build up over an animal's entire life. [...]