A new national report has shown for the first time how generative AI (GenAI) is already being used by some universities to assess the quality of their research—and it could be scaled up to help all higher education institutions (HEIs) save huge amounts of time and money. [...]
Economic abuse may not be as obvious as physical abuse, but for the millions of people it affects in the UK, economic abuse can be totally devastating. [...]
New research from the University of Portsmouth reveals how overlooked menstrual health is in the workplace, highlighting its significant impact on women's well-being, attendance, productivity and inclusion. [...]
From shifting economic policy to disrupted supply chains, there seems to be no lack of challenges for businesses nowadays. Rising inflation, shifting interest rates, labor shortages and geopolitical tensions can make things worse, pushing businesses into a crisis mode. [...]
Like so many conflicts before it, the Russo-Ukraine war has forced both sides to innovate. Since they have been able to gain control of opposition air space, neither side has made wide use of traditional air assets such as fast fighter jets, which take much time and money to manufacture and so can't be risked in active operations. [...]
Women commit far fewer sexual offenses than men, and their risk of reoffending after returning to the community is also much lower. [...]
A major milestone has been reached, with experts across Europe, including those at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Cambridge, UK, sequencing 1,000 species of butterflies and moths. This includes almost all UK butterflies, opening the door to help understand and protect UK biodiversity. [...]
As cities across Canada try to cut emissions from homes, a new Concordia study shows significant differences in how well they're doing it. [...]
Entire areas of Sri Lanka's capital were flooded on Sunday after a powerful cyclone triggered heavy rains and mudslides across the island, with authorities reporting nearly 200 dead and dozens more missing. [...]
Climate change is already shaping our well-being. It affects mental health, spreads infectious diseases, disrupts work, damages food supplies and forces families to leave their homes because of conflict, hunger or flooding. [...]
Every second, trillions of tiny parcels travel through your bloodstream—carrying vital information between your body's cells. Now, scientists at the Baker Heart and Diabetes Institute have opened this molecular mail for the first time, revealing its contents in astonishing detail. [...]
In a dimly lit office in a corner of the French National Institute for Art History, Sudanese archaeologist Shadia Abdrabo studies a photograph of pottery made in her country around 7,000 B.C. She carefully types a description of the Neolithic artifact into a spreadsheet. [...]
A planet's habitability is determined by a confluence of many factors. So far, our explorations of potentially habitable worlds beyond our solar system have focused exclusively on their position in the "Goldilocks Zone" of their solar system, where their temperature determines whether or not liquid water can exist on their surface, and, more recently, what their atmospheres are composed of. That's in part due to the technical limitations of the instruments available to us—even the powerful James Webb Space Telescope is capable only of seeing the atmospheres of very large planets nearby. [...]
A new study has revealed that successful environmental restoration is dependent on bridging the gap between ecological science and understanding the social and economic forces that drive change. [...]
Men are earning on average A$9,753 more than women each year in the form of performance bonuses, allowances and overtime pay. [...]
Speed matters. When an X-ray photon excites an atom or ion, making a core electron jump onto a higher energy level, a short-lived window of opportunity opens. For just a few femtoseconds, before an electron fills the void in the lower energy level, a second photon has the chance to be absorbed by another core electron, creating a doubly excited state. [...]
On Heard Island, a remote Australian subantarctic island some 4,000 km southwest of Perth, scientists were concerned after observing high mortality rates in the elephant seal population. [...]
Since the 1950s, humanity has been searching for extraterrestrial life with increasingly sophisticated tools. But after decades of space probes, meteorite analysis, radio telescopes, and UFO investigations, what have we actually found? A new piece of analysis by a team led by Seyed Sina Seyedpour Layalestani from the Islamic Azad University in Iran has looked at the most compelling evidence to date; from ancient space rocks that fell to Earth carrying the building blocks of life itself. The paper is published in the International Journal of Astrobiology. [...]
Researchers from the Center for Food Policy at City St George's, University of London and Scotland's Rural College have set out six key areas for action that could help households cut down on food waste in a new comment article published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour. [...]
"Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature's inexorable imperative," wrote H. G. Wells. This principle—that survival requires change—was mastered billions of years ago by single-celled organisms living in extreme heat. Over the past few decades, studies of these organisms' adaptive mechanisms have yielded revolutionary technologies—from rapid DNA replication (PCR) and the production of heat-resistant proteins to the generation of fuels and chemicals. [...]
One of the most elegant theories about the origins of life on our planet is that it was kick-started by a delivery from outer space. This idea suggests that prebiotic molecules—the building blocks of life—were transported here by asteroids or other celestial bodies. While these molecules have been found in meteorite samples that have crash-landed on Earth, the findings have been complicated by the possibility of contamination from our environment. [...]
This week, researchers reported that weight and health markers may rebound when patients stop using some of the new hormonal gastric inhibitory polypeptide drugs. A prototype device can restore lost olfactory sense. And a new universal law predicts how brittle objects shatter. [...]
In a study published in Physical Review Letters, physicists have demonstrated that black holes satisfy the third law of thermodynamics, which states that entropy remains positive and vanishes at extremely low temperatures, just like ordinary quantum systems. The finding provides strong evidence that black holes possess isolated ground states, a hallmark of quantum mechanical behavior. [...]
Past psychology and behavioral science studies have identified various ways in which people's acquisition of new knowledge can be disrupted. One of these, known as interference, occurs when humans are learning new information and this makes it harder for them to correctly recall knowledge that they had acquired earlier. [...]
Across Africa, distance education has become one of the most powerful forces for expanding access to higher learning. Open and distance learning institutions such as the Open University of Tanzania, the Zimbabwe Open University and the National Open University of Nigeria have joined long-standing providers like the University of South Africa in offering flexible study opportunities to millions of students who would otherwise be excluded from higher education. [...]
Have you ever seen a dog focused on nuzzling their expensive treat under a blanket, behind a couch cushion, or into a freshly dug hole in the backyard? You might think they are behaving like a paranoid doomsday prepper, but dogs aren't stockpiling their food due to anxiety about impending disaster. [...]
Marine litter is a serious environmental problem worldwide. Reducing it would require implementing a global monitoring system, agreeing on the use of common methods and protocols for data collection, and categorizing all components of marine debris. This involves a tremendous scientific, political, and social effort at the international level—one that cannot be carried out with the same intensity by all countries—given the magnitude of what is still unknown about the pollution of seas and oceans, particularly the deep ocean, where the vast majority of marine litter accumulates. [...]
The first Bible to feature a map of the Holy Land was published 500 years ago in 1525. The map was initially printed the wrong way round—showing the Mediterranean to the East—but its inclusion set a precedent which continues to shape our understanding of state borders today, a new Cambridge study argues. [...]
When three bright minds from different disciplines come together, something exceptional can happen. This is exactly what Prof. Patricia Hidalgo, Dr. Beatrix Santiago-Schübel, and Dr. Mercedes Alfonso-Prieto achieved at Forschungszentrum Jülich. In an interdisciplinary project, they investigated how cells recognize and remove defective calcium channels—work that could prove significant not only for basic science, but also for future therapies for neurodegenerative diseases. [...]
Writing using computers is a vital life skill. We are constantly texting, posting, blogging and emailing. [...]
13°C
13°C