Tropical forests store more than 60% of the world's vegetation biomass and are among the most important ecosystems for regulating the global carbon cycle and climate. However, their regulatory role is greatly influenced by the forests' carbon residence time—how long carbon remains in the vegetation biomass pool before it is released again into the atmosphere. This figure is tied to the rate of biomass turnover—how quickly vegetation is replaced through growth and mortality. [...]
In a forest of pine and eucalyptus trees in central Portugal, chainsaws and diggers hum away clearing paths blocked by trees uprooted in winter storms, but the threat now is a high risk of summer fires. [...]
Micheline Nzonzi cradled a small and sleepy bonobo, an orphan whose life she will try to save over the next three years or so. [...]
More than a decade after the Nagoya Protocol, which aims to fairly share the benefits of utilizing genetic resources, became law, microbiologists and other scientists still face practical challenges and confusion. A new guide published by a team of European microbiologists provides universally applicable frameworks for anyone working with biological resources. [...]
The sci-fi film Project Hail Mary, currently in theaters, is capturing the attention of both audiences and the scientific community for its science-based content. It manages to engage viewers with complex, cutting-edge topics—from astrophysics to language—without sacrificing entertainment. Yet not all films strike this balance. Many have promoted inaccurate or even misleading scientific ideas, and, thanks to their wide reach, have contributed to shaping distorted public perceptions of science. [...]
It's autumn in the Southern Hemisphere, which means it's fog season in the Victorian Alps. NASA's Terra satellite captured this view of morning fog filling valleys in several national parks across the mountains of eastern Victoria in May. [...]
Archaeologists have found something unexpected inside a 1,600-year-old Roman-era Egyptian mummy: a fragment of Homer's Iliad. It wasn't placed beside the body, but inside the mummy's abdomen. But the real surprise isn't just where the fragment was found. It's how it got there. To understand, we must go back—to the Iliad itself, and to what it became in the Roman world. [...]
Iodine deficiency is often seen as a problem of the past, but this isn't entirely true. During the 20th century, the iodization of salt became one of the most effective public health interventions for preventing conditions caused by a lack of this mineral, including goiter (enlargement of the thyroid gland) and preventable damage to neurological development. [...]
Ganymede, Jupiter's largest moon, is also the solar system's largest satellite, even larger than the planet Mercury. It is also the only celestial body aside from Earth (and the gas giants) to have an intrinsic magnetic field. As if this didn't make the icy body interesting enough, scientists also predict that it has a massive interior ocean with more water than all of Earth's oceans combined. At present, the European Space Agency's (ESA) Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) is in transit to Ganymede to explore it for signs of habitability. [...]
Gravitational wave researchers working on the world's most sensitive scientific instruments have found a way to tune their detectors using a process akin to the pitch-correction used in music production. [...]
Harbor porpoises were once found across a much wider area of the Baltic Sea than they are today, including regions where they are now rare or absent. This is shown in a new study that uses centuries-old Swedish newspapers to reconstruct past distribution patterns. [...]
The largest-ever survey of physicists from around the world—released today—shows a distinct lack of consensus across many of physics's most important questions, from the nature of black holes and dark matter, to the still-incomplete unification of Einstein's theory of gravity with quantum mechanics. [...]
With plastic pollution at an all-time high, the need for biodegradable materials has never been higher. Most packaging is "single use" and is made from sources, like natural gas, that take hundreds of years to decompose in the environment. This is greatly contributing to the plastic pollution buildup in parks, street corners and shelterbelts. [...]
Beneath the tropical trees of southern Mexico, enormous shoals of sulfur mollies blanket the water surface of toxic sulfur springs, where survival depends on collective defense against relentless attacks from predatory birds. The tiny fish survive attacks of birds through creating spectacular collective waves. [...]
Technion researchers have developed, for the first time, a comprehensive physical model explaining how the properties of a radiating material, including absorption, emission, and quantum efficiency, affect the fundamental characteristics of the light it emits as a function of temperature. In essence, the emitted light changes its color, intensity, and randomness according to the material's properties and its temperature. The discovery was published in Optica and opens new possibilities for designing advanced light sources, optical sensors, and thermally based photonic systems. [...]
Scientists have discovered that they can eavesdrop on the secret lives of birds using networks of inexpensive microphones, revealing complex behaviors across vast wilderness areas, according to research published in the journal Ecology. Previously, microphone technology that records sounds from wildlife had mostly been used to determine if a species was present in an area. Recordings could tell researchers what birds were present, but not what the birds were doing. [...]
Different receptors respond to different neurotransmitters or hormones, such as adrenaline involved in the fight-or-flight response, or dopamine linked to reward and motivation. Both the receptors themselves and the substances they recognize are often very similar, but still make the body react in completely different ways. [...]
If you've ever taken an introductory astronomy class, you've probably seen the Hertzsprung-Russell (HR) diagram. This graph maps out the life cycle of stars by plotting their temperature against their luminosity, and has been a "cheat sheet" for stellar astrophysics for over a century. But the universe is full of more than just stars, and a new paper in the journal Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific by Gabriel Steward and Matthew Hedman of the University of Idaho, attempts to do for the density and mass of all objects what the HR diagram did for the lifecycle of stars—provide a coherent, visual map to represent them. [...]
Soils are home to some of the most diverse animal communities on Earth. These animals—including nematodes, springtails, mites, earthworms, spiders and other arthropods—drive decomposition, regulate microbial communities and contribute to nutrient cycling. However, little is known about how these animals' trophic diversity—meaning the variety of feeding activities—is affected by land use and climate. [...]
A new study shows that a single radioactive cloud was responsible for a large share of the nuclear fallout during the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster on 11 March 2011. The work is published in the Journal of Hazardous Materials. [...]
NASA's Perseverance Mars rover recently took a self-portrait against a sweeping backdrop of ancient Martian terrain at a location the science team calls Lac de Charmes. Assembled from 61 individual images, the selfie shows Perseverance training its mast on a rocky outcrop on which it had just made a circular abrasion patch, with the western rim of Jezero Crater stretching into the background. The selfie was captured on March 11, the 1,797th Martian day (sol) of the mission, during the rover's deepest push west beyond the crater. [...]
Oil and natural gas are vital constituents of our energy ecosystem that need to be transported across long distances. Although steel pipelines are the infrastructure used for this purpose, thereby serving as the lifeline for crucial energy distribution, they introduce the added challenge of corrosion. Steels typically rust when exposed to aggressive environments and are coated with various types of polymer coatings to delay, if not completely inhibit the onset of corrosion. [...]
Human childbirth is commonly viewed as uniquely difficult and dangerous. The reason: The combination of bipedalism and large brains creates a tight fit between the baby and the birth canal. Research at the University of Vienna has now shown that many other mammals—from domestic livestock to wild species—face similar birth problems and mortality. In some species, these complications even occur as often as in some human populations, such as hunter-gatherers without modern medical care. The findings suggest that difficult childbirth is not uniquely human. The study is published in Biological Reviews. [...]
Proteins do most of the work in our body's cells. But when a protein is too active or does not function properly, it can lead to disease or other health problems. Researchers from the University of Toronto have discovered a molecule, CLEO4-88, that acts as a "molecular glue," binding together two proteins to inactivate one of them. The finding—enabled by the Canadian Light Source (CLS) at the University of Saskatchewan—points to the possibility of one day treating disease by controlling the activity of harmful proteins. [...]
Many creams and serums contain artificial ingredients that are harmful to the environment. Natural plant oils would be more sustainable but are difficult to process. ETH researcher Svitlana Mykolenko has developed a way of turning plant oils into stable gels without synthetic additives. [...]
What if fog isn't just misty air, but a living ecosystem? This question hung over cloud researcher Thi Thuong Thuong Cao. As a Ph.D. student at Arizona State University, her curiosity led her from knocking on the doors of microbiologists and chemists, to sampling fog before sunrise in Pennsylvania, to hours of peering through a lab's microscope. Finally, she found her answer. Her ASU research team found that bacteria floating in tiny fog droplets are alive, growing and (quite helpfully) breaking down pollutants in the air. [...]
Cornell astronomers are deploying a new instrument that grants them, for the first time, a better view of the universe's earliest galaxies, which can't be observed individually with traditional ground- or space-based telescopes. [...]
Educators should teach students how to use AI tools but with an emphasis on the ethics, social impact, and potential biases of the tech, experts said Thursday during a conversation sponsored by Harvard Education Press. [...]
The widespread hypothesis that climate warming will result in unprecedented agricultural pest populations and cause food insecurity worldwide is oversimplified, according to a new study by a team led by Mia Lippey, an entomologist at the University of California, Davis. But the study does indicate that pests fare better in warmer temperatures than their natural enemies, which researchers identified as a cause for concern. [...]
Australia is the driest inhabited continent on Earth. Somehow, it feels like it's getting hotter and drier every day. [...]