On NFL draft day, every team has the chance to win—or lose—big. With millions of dollars on the line and just minutes to make a final decision on each pick, a single choice can shape a franchise for years. Carnegie Mellon University experts said those intense moments offer a window into how people make decisions when the stakes are highest.
Taylor Little became so badly addicted to her smartphone that she felt she had lost many of her teenage years. "I was literally trapped by addiction at age 12 and lost my teenage years because of it," she said. Her addiction was to social media, which led to suicide attempts and prolonged depression.
An article published in CABI Agriculture and Bioscience calls for a diverse, participatory approach that combines indigenous, local knowledge systems with modern technologies to tackle plant diseases and strengthen food security in Africa. This comprehensive review proposes a strategy for "One Plant Health" management across the continent and aims to address challenges such as climate change and emerging plant viruses.
Eight CubeSats and one payload supported by the European Space Agency (ESA) have reached orbit, where they will demonstrate various applications aimed at improving how data is sent around and processed. Thanks to these demonstrations, practical and—sometimes—even life-saving data enabled from space will move more efficiently and reach the right actors on time in the future.
The ice giant Uranus is one of the most fascinating objects in the solar system, with its sideways rotation, intricate ring system, and unique family of moons. However, it is also one of the least explored objects in the solar system, owing to its extreme distance from the sun. With NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft remaining as the only spacecraft to visit Uranus, scientists continue to design and envision mission concepts for returning to explore Uranus and its icy secrets.
Most predators slow down when ocean temperatures shift. Great hammerhead sharks don't—not significantly anyway. These ocean predators are masters of the "thermal hustle," maintaining peak hunting performance across a surprisingly wide range of ocean temperatures between winter and summer months, according to new research published this week in Journal of Experimental Biology.
In the medieval European imagination, racial difference was often highly polarized. Black people were perceived either as exotic status symbols—including saints and wealthy rulers such as the Queen of Sheba—or as subjugated figures, considered inferior to white Christians.
A Université de Montréal study has found a previously unknown mechanism in bacterial reproduction that could be attacked by future antibiotics. Bacteria reproduce by dividing into two: they form a wall, or septum, between the two future cells while remodeling the old cell walls so the so-called "daughter" cells can separate without bursting. Until now, scientists had believed that once the dividing wall was built, bacteria gradually break down the links between its two sides to allow the cells to separate in a process called cleavage.
A new, miniature laser source developed by applied physicists in the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the Technical University of Vienna (TU Wien) could soon pack the power of a laboratory-based spectrometer—an important workhorse tool for precision environmental gas analysis—onto a single microchip.
Identifying weeds, checking out the pollen map, or discovering new plant life-forms are among the promising wealth of data available to users of PlantNet—a "Shazam!" for plants. Pierre Bonnet and computer scientist Alexis Joly introduced us to the digitally enhanced plant recognition application they developed.
