The West African chimpanzee population has declined by nearly 80 percent in recent decades. Habitat loss is threatening their livelihoods across the continent, and especially in Senegal, where corporate mining has started eating up land in recent years. The geographical distribution of West African chimps overlaps almost perfectly with gold and iron ore deposits, and…
What do pizza slices, sea slugs and one possible design for future soft-bodied robots have in common? They all have frilly surfaces, and new insights about the surprising geometry of frilly surfaces may help a future generation of energy-efficient and extremely flexible soft-body robots move. The complex folds of a frilly surface like coral reefs…
Industrial physics plays a significant role in driving the U.S. economy, according to a new report by the American Physical Society, which will be described this week at the 2019 APS March Meeting in Boston. The report, “The Impact of Industrial Physics on the U.S. Economy,” found that industrial physics contributed an estimated $2.3 trillion…
Scientists looking for signs of life beyond our solar system face major challenges, one of which is that there are hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy alone to consider. To narrow the search, they must figure out: What kinds of stars are most likely to host habitable planets? A new study finds a…
It’s widely accepted within agriculture that maintaining genetic diversity is important. In areas where crop plants are more diverse, pathogens might kill some plants but are less likely to wipe out an entire crop. Few studies, however, have focused on such highly specialized pathogens in natural plant communities. In diverse plant communities, pathogens are thought…
“The joy of science lies in pondering the magnificent and seeking answers to the unknown,” writes Jonathon McPhetres, a PhD candidate in psychology at the University of Rochester, and the author of a new study published in the journal Cognition & Emotion. McPhetres finds that feeling awe leads to greater awareness of the things we…
Marine scientists from WCS (Wildlife Conservation Society) and other groups examining the ecological status of coral reefs across the Indian and Pacific oceans have uncovered an unsettling fact: even the best coral reef marine parks contain less than half of the fish biomass found in the most remote reefs that lie far from human settlements.…
Scientists at Tokyo Institute of Technology have fabricated a multiplexer/demultiplexer module based on a property of light that was not being exploited in communications systems: the optical vortex. Such devices will be crucial for improving optical networks, which are the backbone of today’s Internet, so that they can meet the traffic demands of tomorrow. In…
New research published in Diabetologia (the journal of the European Association for Study of Diabetes [EASD]) shows that, in women who develop gestational diabetes (GDM) during pregnancy, the risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD) in the years following childbirth is doubled compared to women who do not develop GDM. This increased risk remains even if women…
Weaving stories and intriguing names into children’s education about the natural world could help to engage them with species’ conservation messages, new research shows. A team at the University of Birmingham carried out a study to explore the potential of species’ cultural heritage for inspiring the conservationists of the future. Focusing on magpies, one of…