Tropical ecosystems are famous for their teeming, exuberant diversity. In fact, the dramatic increase in biodiversity from the poles to the tropics—known as the latitudinal diversity gradient—is pervasive across branches of the tree of life, and fossil evidence suggests it has existed for millennia.
Private retirement savings are an increasingly important topic in public debate. One popular idea is to phrase savings reminders in one of two ways: either you emphasize what someone stands to lose if they don't save, or you emphasize what they stand to gain if they do. To date, research into which of the two reminder messages is more effective in terms of influencing people's efforts to save has produced conflicting results.
Armed with dozens of motion-sensing cameras, William Grooms spent this past summer documenting wildlife across Carson National Forest in northern New Mexico. It was his first field season collecting photos for a two-year study to understand how forest structure influences biodiversity in the Southern Rocky Mountains.
There are at least 14 million insect species on Earth, and they play highly diverse roles in sustaining the natural world. Insects provide many well-known benefits—what scientists often call "ecosystem services." For example, you can thank a bee or a hoverfly for pollinating wildflowers and agricultural crops, or credit dung beetles for decomposing manure and other waste materials.
An academic abstract, a blog post and a public outreach article all place different demands on the writer. Readers' prior knowledge varies, as does the purpose of the text and what needs explaining. Mastering one kind of text therefore does not automatically mean being able to write another.
In a new Nature Physics study, researchers demonstrated the Aharonov-Bohm effect in a quantum simulation of a lattice gauge theory using a hybrid trapped-ion quantum computer.
We typically think of the moon as a static, floating object that has remained the same for basically its entire lifetime, with an occasional asteroid impact serving as an exception. That understanding is grounded in physics—the moon should have cooled rapidly after forming when a huge protoplanet hit the early Earth around 4.5 billion years ago. But some lunar material returned from the Chang'e-5 mission was notably formed only around 2 billion years ago, yet appeared to be volcanic in origin.
