The Indigenous Peoples of British Columbia have been harvesting shellfish from specially-constructed clam gardens for at least 3500 years, according to a study released February 27, 2019 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Nicole Smith of the Hakai Institute, Dana Lepofsky of Simon Fraser University, and colleagues. This research offers new methods for tracking…
Achieving the Paris Agreement global warming target could protect millions of tonnes in annual worldwide fisheries catch, as well as billions of dollars of annual revenues for fishers, workers’ income and household seafood expenditures, according to new research from the University of British Columbia. The study, released today in Science Advances, compared the ecosystem and…
Having a family member with persistent opioid use may be a risk factor for young adults continuing prescriptions long after their own surgeries, a new Michigan Medicine study suggests. The presence of one or more family members using long-term opioids before a procedure was associated with a higher likelihood that adolescents prescribed opioids for the…
Vegetatively propagated unrooted cuttings of annual ornamentals are typically grown in equatorial locations and shipped via airfreight to propagators located in temperate climates. Cutting quality, defined as the resistance to external forces — such as physical damage and pathogen infection — has an impact on postharvest durability during shipping and propagation. In an effort to…
Kurt Luther, Virginia Tech assistant professor of computer science, has developed a free software platform that uses crowdsourcing to significantly increase the ability of algorithms to identify faces in photos. Through the software platform, called Photo Sleuth, Luther seeks to uncover the mysteries of the nearly 4 million photographs of Civil War-era images that may…
In six well-regarded hydrology and water resources journals published in 2017, the estimated percentage of studies whose results could be fully reproduced was only between 0.06 and 6.8 percent. This low level of reproducibility is not uncommon in hydrology studies — a fact many scientists readily acknowledge. However, a team of researchers at Utah State…
More than 10 miles into the backcountry of Yellowstone National Park, on the edge of the caldera, lives a high-elevation community so diverse that Montana State University scientists call it “incredible, unique and truly weird.” The community of microorganisms lives in a sapphire blue hot spring 8,600 feet above sea level on the Continental Divide.…
Whetstone, a software tool that sharpens the output of artificial neurons, has enabled neural computer networks to process information up to a hundred times more efficiently than the current industry standard, say the Sandia National Laboratories researchers who developed it. The aptly named software, which greatly reduces the amount of circuitry needed to perform autonomous…
Some of the bacteria that live in ponds, lakes and other freshwater environments grow faster during the day, even though they don’t take in sunlight as an energy source, according to researchers at the University of Delaware. Special genes that absorb light could possibly explain this increased activity, as the research team recently described in…
Blocking two molecular pathways that send signals inside cancer cells could stave off esophageal adenocarcinoma (EAC), the most common esophageal malignancy in the United States, according to new research out of Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. Researchers identified the pathways using advanced computational and genetic analyses of tumor biopsies from EAC patients. They…