Seal pups and seabird chicks are suffering in extreme weather. How can we protect them?
Extreme weather is becoming the new normal, disrupting human communities across the globe.
Extreme weather is becoming the new normal, disrupting human communities across the globe.
Artificial light spilling into coastal waters from cities, ports, roads and hotels is disrupting sleep in coral reef fish and is associated with changes in markers linked to brain health, according to a new study from Bar-Ilan University. The paper, published in Current Biology, shows that even low levels of nighttime illumination can significantly alter the behavior and physiology of reef fish. Fish exposed to artificial light slept less, showed more fragmented sleep, became more aggressive and fed at unusual hours, effectively behaving as if night had turned into day.
A new white paper from eight major EU-funded pollinator projects warns that the resilience of Europe's vital societal functions and food security are at stake if the EU fails to halt and reverse wild pollinator declines and support managed pollinators. Behind the report is an interdisciplinary team of 135 leading researchers with expertise ranging from ecosystem ecology, pollinator ecology, ecological economics, social science, environmental history, behavioral psychology, political science and environmental law.
A study conducted by UC Santa Barbara researchers and collaborators has found that California has lost more than half of its coastal dune systems. The researchers' assessment—the first of its kind for the California coast—estimates that 60% of dune systems that existed from 1850 have been lost, due to a combination of urban development, land-use changes and erosion.
In a rapidly changing climate landscape, the plants we rely on for food, textiles and more face a multitude of challenges, including rising temperatures, drought and disease. Caltech's Gözde Demirer, the Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering, uses genetic engineering tools to make crops more resilient to such threats and enhance plant health. Now, she and a team of Caltech researchers have found a new solution to an old problem in an unlikely source: the zebra finch.
University of Massachusetts Amherst researchers have demonstrated a possible new avenue for developing flame-retardant and generally low-conductivity (low-heat-transfer) plastics that retain the benefits of being strong and flexible by limiting the accessibility of heat-carrying vibrational channels in the material. This new design framework has promising applications, including lightweight thermal insulation materials for spacesuits, thermal protection components for spacecraft, and advanced building materials that reduce heating and cooling losses. The study is published in the journal Materials Horizons.
Researchers at European XFEL, Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR), Rostock University and other collaborating institutions have used high-precision experiments to demonstrate that the most widely used models for the behavior of electrons in warm dense matter are inaccurate. Warm dense matter is challenging to study, but also is of key importance for a plethora of research, including the investigation of planetary interiors, materials science and laser fusion experiments. The study is published in Physical Review Letters.
Domestic cats age in remarkably similar ways to humans and show comparable age-related patterns of brain deterioration, according to an international collaboration among the University of Bath in the U.K., Auburn University College of Veterinary Medicine in the U.S. and École Nationale Vétérinaire de Toulouse in France.
Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) scientists are using a solar wind forecasting method combined with analytic and numerical heliosphere models to find out where the first plasma boundary of the outer heliosphere lies as NASA's New Horizons spacecraft hurtles toward this mysterious region of space.
The body's organs are in constant communication. Fat tissue tells the liver when to store or release energy, the immune system signals localized inflammation, and thousands of proteins carry these messages to organs throughout the body. But while scientists have long known these conversations exist, they have struggled to identify exactly which cells are sending which messages.