What an ancient volcanic eruption teaches us about resilience today
When a massive environmental disaster strikes, do societies simply collapse and disappear? Or do people find a way to adapt, rebuild and recover?
When a massive environmental disaster strikes, do societies simply collapse and disappear? Or do people find a way to adapt, rebuild and recover?
When someone is badly injured, doctors urgently need two facts: the patient's blood type, so that a transfusion is safe, and their hematocrit, the share of the blood made up of red blood cells, which reveals blood loss or anemia. Hospitals measure both with large machines that need electricity and trained staff, which are often unavailable in ambulances, disaster zones or remote clinics.
The ocean beneath Saturn's moon Enceladus lies under kilometers of ice, but some of its contents do reach the surface. Jets near the south pole spray out water vapor and icy particles, offering a way to investigate the hidden ocean without drilling down to it.
When scientists talk about scavengers, you might imagine an animal sniffing out or stumbling across a carcass, eating as much as possible and slinking away.
As human activity has increased temperatures globally, determining the costs directly incurred by climate change is challenging. The effects of climate change on extreme weather events—such as hurricanes and heat waves—can be locally specific and variable, and observations and climate modeling might not accurately capture those effects.
Astronomers using China's FAST radio telescope have discovered a compact cloud of hydrogen with no visible stars or galaxy around it. This could be one of the strongest candidates yet for an isolated "dark galaxy," containing nearly 500,000 times the sun's mass in neutral hydrogen. The discovery paper was posted to the arXiv preprint server on Sept. 24.
With about 30 visual pigments, compared to just three in humans, mantis shrimp possess a visual system that remains a mystery. Researchers from ULiège and Humboldt University in Berlin have, for the first time, analyzed these pigments one by one and discovered that some detect red light that very few animals can perceive. This finding, published in Science Advances, has potential applications in optogenetics.
In a discovery that could offer a new way to control quantum properties in two-dimensional materials, researchers at Cornell have found that electrically sliding the layers of ultrathin graphene can switch the material between distinct magnetic states that persist even after the voltage is removed.
Poor access to health care, limited local influence over research priorities and an unequal distribution of scientific benefits are undermining public confidence in science, experts warn, following the release of a global trust survey.
New research from Michigan State University finds that popular music has gradually become less explicit about emotion and relationships—both across generations of artists and within artists' careers.