Heat waves and wildfires combined with human-caused emissions this year to expose one-third of the world's population to extremely high levels of ozone pollution, a European Union report said Wednesday.
The hunt is over: After trawling through dozens of applications, an Australian animal welfare group has found a successor to a hero hound credited with saving more than 100 koalas from fires.
While insects provide an essential food source for many vertebrate species, they're more than just a protein-laden snack. Chimpanzees use them to sterilize wounds, and herons use them as fishing bait. Sloths rely on moths to maintain the algae in their fur, which they then eat. Birds and reptiles lay their eggs inside the temperature-controlled sanctuary of termite mounds, while some desert frogs reside in ant nests because of the humidity.
Storms routinely wash marine material ashore, providing food for land animals and other organisms. This is known as marine subsidization (MS). Today, MS is particularly common in coastal ecosystems and is especially important to animals when land ecosystems produce less food than usual, such as during droughts. A new Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution study has shown that dinos and their prey, too, may have eaten seafood washed onto beaches.
In materials chemistry, identifying common parameters that can organize magnetic ground states across complex intermetallic compounds remains a central challenge. Researchers have long used chemically tunable parameters to control magnetic properties. One is valence-electron concentration, commonly discussed as the electron-per-atom (e/a) ratio. The e/a ratio has been widely used to classify magnetic ground states in metallic systems such as Heusler alloys and approximant crystals.
Research into bird collisions with offshore wind turbines has taken an important step forward. A yearlong pilot study at an offshore wind turbine has shown that thermal cameras and artificial intelligence can be used to directly observe potential collisions at sea. The technology proved effective under challenging conditions while also generating rare real-world data on bird movements around a wind turbine.
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Software created by University of Queensland scientists could help AI platforms overcome a blind spot limiting their value in plant research. UQ Ph.D. student Tianqi Wei said even advanced vision-language models (VLMs) had difficulty interpreting images of microscopic plant details.
Birds are not only beautiful to look at and listen to; they also play important roles in nature. They eat pests and disperse seeds. They are generally considered indicators of a healthy environment. When birds thrive, soil and water quality often benefit as well. A new study published in the journal Landscape Ecology shows that growing a variety of crops in small field patches creates better habitats for birds.
Researchers have coated mitochondria with innovative materials without compromising their function, according to a study by IRCCS Fondazione Istituto Neurologico Carlo Besta (FINCB) and Politecnico di Milano. The research was conducted as part of the BraiNs joint laboratory, inaugurated in 2023.
