Although neighborhood cats may seem like a fun, charming presence, unowned cat populations have been criticized for causing harm to a community and its environment. Without proper management, stray cat populations can rise rapidly, leading to concerns about predation, disease, and public nuisance.
University of Queensland researchers are urging governments to use newly created national data to protect the country's last remaining ecosystems free of human pressures. The two new datasets map the extent of ecosystem disturbance across the country and show that while about 30% of Australia is still free or almost free of human pressures, many landscapes are becoming increasingly fragmented.
Sexually transmitted infections in Otago's gold rush era were less common than popular culture books portray, University of Otago—Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka research has found. The first-of-its-kind study, published in the Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand, explored hospital records and newspaper articles from 1864 to 1869 in Otago to reveal the prevalence of syphilis and gonorrhea infections and societal attitudes about those with them.
As winter comes to a close, many people look forward to warmer temperatures and spring blooms, but for land managers working to preserve or restore oak-dominated forests, it is prescribed burn season. Fire brings more light into forests, which is crucial for young oak tree growth, but many land managers are concerned about how non-native plants affect fire intensity and young tree survival rates.
Marketers need to pay more attention to how marketing practices normalize the consumption of products that are known to be harmful to public health and social well-being, University of Otago—Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka researchers argue. A new paper led by Associate Professor Leah Watkins and Professor Rob Aitken, of the Otago Business School, shows how industries such as tobacco, alcohol, gambling, and ultra-processed food have invested heavily in marketing strategies, including digital and social media channels, that increase the consumption of products associated with disease, addiction, and social harm. These strategies also disproportionately affect disadvantaged consumers and undermine traditional regulatory safeguards.
Accelerator programs are supposed to give entrepreneurs the mentorship, training and skills boost that will help launch them toward success. But in countries where the gender playing field still steeply tilts toward male advantage, women-led businesses that participated in accelerators showed no financial improvement, or even did worse, compared to ventures that applied but weren't accepted.
Scientists at Florida International University have identified a promising way to safely ship fish long distances without losing vital vitamin D, using a method already widely applied to preserve other foods—gamma irradiation.
August Weismann's germ plasm theory of the late 19th century posited that only germ cells, e.g., sperm and egg cells in animals or pollen and ovule cells in plants, transmit genetic information to the next generation, and that somatic mutations represent an evolutionary dead end. This theory has been highly validated in animals, whose germ cells are formed and segregated early in the organism's development.
For the first time since the Apollo era, humans are preparing not just to visit the moon, but to live and work there for weeks, months—and eventually years.
As part of the FED-tWIN Face-to-Face project, a multidisciplinary team bringing together the European Centre of Archaeometry (University of Liège, ULiège), the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium (RMFAB), CNRS-Sorbonne University and Ca' Foscari University of Venice has published a study on the conservation condition of "The Temptation of St Anthony" (1946) by Salvador Dalí, a major work held by the RMFAB since 1965.
