News Articles

News Account

News Account

News Releases From All Over The World, Right To You
RSS Feed
Predicting Landslides With Light

Predicting Landslides With Light

Optical sensors are used all around the world to monitor the condition of difficult-to-access places like the underbellies of bridges, the exterior walls of tunnels, the feet of dams, long pipelines and railways in remote areas.

Triple R: California Drought Linked To Global Warming

Triple R: California Drought Linked To Global Warming

Though the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has asked climate scientists not to attribute weather conditions to climate change, a new paper is doing just that. 
A team writing in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society says that the atmospheric conditions associated with the unprecedented drought currently afflicting California are "very likely" linked to human-caused climate change.

The Origin Of Neptune And Uranus

The Origin Of Neptune And Uranus

A team of researchers has proposed a solution to the problematic chemical composition of Neptune and Uranus, perhaps providing clues for understanding their formation. Uranus and Neptune, which post-Pluto are considered the outermost planets in the Solar System by the International Astronomical Union, each have a mass approximately fifteen times that of the Earth and consist of up to 90% ice, with highly enriched in carbon. 

Cartoons May Teach Machines To Understand The Visual World

Cartoons May Teach Machines To Understand The Visual World

A human child can look at a cartoon picture of a chicken and recognize it is a chicken, but that is a show-stopper for machine learning. Unless it matches a cartoon chicken programmed in, it will not understand cartoon chicken-ness.Devi Parikh of Virginia Tech has been given $92,000 of unrestricted funding by Google to work directly with Google researchers and engineers as they explore how to best teach machines from visual abstractions. Obviously if anything comes of it, that will be a real bargain.Image: freepik.com

Nordic Seas Saline - It's The Gulfsream, Not The Melting Arctic

Nordic Seas Saline - It's The Gulfsream, Not The Melting Arctic

There is less saline in Nordic Seas but that can't be blamed on more Arctic waters due to global warming. Instead, it is that the Gulf Stream has provided less salt. The Nordic Seas have freshened substantially since 1950. This has happened at the same time as there has been observed increased river runoff and net ice melting in the Arctic. The concurrence of a less saline ocean and Arctic freshwater input has given the climate research community reason for concern, but a new study finds that the source of fresher Nordic Seas since 1950 is rooted in the saline Atlantic, as opposed to Arctic freshwater that is the common inference.

Less Evolutionary Admixture - A 2,300 Year Old Skeleton From The Ancient Genome World Found

Less Evolutionary Admixture - A 2,300 Year Old Skeleton From The Ancient Genome World Found

In a region where modern humans are believed to have originated roughly 200,000 years ago,  
 DNA from the skeleton of a man who lived 2,330 years ago has a DNA profile that places it among the 'earliest diverged' – oldest in genetic terms – found to-date. Somehow the group broke off early in human evolution and became geographically isolated so the skeleton is modern, but its DNA is old.

Epigenetics Of Being Without Electricity For A Few Days

Epigenetics Of Being Without Electricity For A Few Days

Epigenetics has been used and abused in many ways - can it tell researchers that an expectant mother had no electricity for a few days?In January of 1998, what came to be called the North American Ice Storm of 1998 occurred. It knocked out power for days in cities and weeks in remote areas, impacting up to 4 million people. It was so worrisome that the government, concerned about panic among peaceful Canadians, deployed nearly 25 percent of its armed forces to keep peace in Quebec.

A Constant In A Changing World: Hand Size Keeps Us Grounded

A Constant In A Changing World: Hand Size Keeps Us Grounded

We know our bodies don't just change in size, which makes it an effective metric in a world in motion.
Psychologists have found that people tend to perceive their dominant hand as staying relatively the same size even when it's magnified, lending support to the idea that we use our hand as a constant perceptual "ruler" to measure the world around us.
To size up the world around us, we need to be able to translate the information that comes in through our eyes into units that are relevant to our everyday lives. The body is a particularly effective metric because it allows us to relate information about object size to actions that we're able to perform on or with the object.

If Trees Could Talk What Tales They'd Tell

If Trees Could Talk What Tales They'd Tell

Permafrost thaw kills forests in Canada, while drought kills trees in India and Borneo. In the U.S., in Virginia, over-abundant deer eat trees before they reach maturity, while nitrogen pollution has changed soil chemistry in Panama. 
Continents apart, trees have many similar ways to die. Many of the changes occurring in forests worldwide are attributable to human impacts on climate, atmospheric chemistry, land use and animal populations - no surprise, writing papers lamenting humanity is why many conservation groups exist. And hyperbolic cultural pandering has led to calls for a new geologic period in Earth's history—the Anthropocene, the Age of Humans. 

GABA And Getting Control Over Tourette Syndrome

GABA And Getting Control Over Tourette Syndrome

Tourette syndrome is a developmental disorder characterized by involuntary, repetitive, and stereotyped movements or utterances.
New evidence explains how those with Tourette syndrome in childhood often manage to gain control over those tics.
In individuals with the condition, a portion of the brain involved in planning and executing movements shows an unusual increase compared to the average brain in the production of a primary inhibitory neurotransmitter known as GABA. 

Spin-Based Computing: Single Material Is Both Semiconductor And Magnetic

Spin-Based Computing: Single Material Is Both Semiconductor And Magnetic

Electricity and magnetism rule our digital world but they are really 19th century advancements still being optimized in the 21st.
In our current scheme, semiconductors process electrical information while magnetic materials enable long-term data storage but research team has discovered a way to fuse these two distinct properties in a single material.