Free-flying mosquitoes gravitate toward pads that emit carbon dioxide, which is found in human breath.
Bolts begin as a series of short pulses both on Earth and on its much bigger, gassier neighbour in the Solar System.
As pandemic slows and COVID-19 funding dwindles, researchers worry companies won’t have incentives to bring improved antibodies to market.
Since first evolving 350 million years ago, the tongue has taken myriad forms, unlocking new niches and boosting the diversity of life
Twice, quarterback Patrick Mahomes has led the Kansas City Chiefs to victory in the Super Bowl, the pinnacle of U.S. football. Although most fans have their eyes on the ball as Mahomes prepares to throw, his tongue does something just as interesting.
Prehistoric engravings depict vast hunting traps with extraordinary precision.
The oldest blueprints ever found might have been used to prepare for large-scale hunts1.
Engraved lines on a stone in Jordan might depict landscape features near a large-scale hunting structure.
But there is hope. The UK is not exactly known for its stringent environmental policy and following Brexit, many fear that standards are likely to deteriorate. But the UK is also home to coastal regions and islands characterized by wild beauty — and breathtaking diversity. The documentary takes us through some of the most remote landscapes of the country, from the Shetland Islands to Cornwall, the Hebrides and many other areas.
In each location, the film shows the amazing biodiversity of fauna and flora present. The Pembrokeshire Coast National Park in Wales is known for large breeding colonies of many seabird species. Few people live on the Hebrides, located off Scotland. These wild islands are still a natural paradise of rocks, sand and moor. As such, they are biotopes for exotic species such as puffins and guillemots.
In this cinematic journey to the most beautiful natural sites in Britain, viewers meet the people who are trying to protect species threatened by extinction by preserving their habitats. It is a story of hope, one that indicates that a change in people’s thinking is taking place.
Drying trends are prevalent worldwide
Sources from Mesopotamia contextualize the emergence of kissing and its role in disease transmission
Artificial skin mimics the sensory feedback of biological skin
Record temperature combined with an anticipated El Niño could devastate marine life and increase the chances of extreme weather.
The global ocean hit a new record temperature of 21.1 ºC in early April, 0.1 ºC higher than the last record in March 2016. Although striking, the figure (see ‘How the ocean is warming’) is in line with the ocean warming anticipated from climate change. What is remarkable is its occurrence ahead of — rather than during — the El Niño climate event that is expected to bring warmer, wetter weather to the eastern Pacific region later this year.
Machine-learning systems in chemistry need accurate and accessible training data. Until they get it, they won’t achieve their potential.
Many people are expressing fears that artificial intelligence (AI) has gone too far — or risks doing so. Take Geoffrey Hinton, a prominent figure in AI, who recently resigned from his position at Google, citing the desire to speak out about the technology’s potential risks to society and human well-being.
Meredith Broussard – MIT Press (2023)
An artificial-intelligence (AI) ‘glitch’ is a problem neither expected nor consequential. Bias, by contrast, is baked in and disastrous, argues data scientist Meredith Broussard, one of very few Black women in this field, who focuses on AI and journalism. “Tech is racist and sexist and ableist because the world is so,” she says. Vivid examples in her disturbing book include that of a man arrested by US police using facial-recognition technology — purely because both he and the suspect in a blurry surveillance photo were Black.
Eckart Frahm – Basic (2023)
The world’s first empire flourished in Assyria in the eighth and seventh centuries bc, and has long been seen as the epitome of barbarism. But, as Assyriologist Eckart Frahm reveals in his deeply informed, challenging history, Assyria produced many features of the modern world. Its innovations included long-distance trade, sophisticated communications networks, mass deportations and widespread political surveillance. Unlike most later empires, he writes, it was at least honest in its “open celebration of plunder, torture, and murder”.
Rebecca Struthers – Hodder & Stoughton (2023)
‘Time’ is “the most commonly used noun” in English, according to Rebecca Struthers, the first professional watchmaker in the United Kingdom to earn a PhD in horology. Each chapter of her exquisitely crafted history explores a pivotal moment in watchmaking from the past 500 years. Mechanical timekeepers, she argues, have influenced human culture as much as the printing press. Imagine trying to catch a train by depending on the Sun’s position, or to perform an organ transplant without measuring the patient’s heart rate precisely.
Michael Vecchione et al. Princeton Univ. Press (2023)
“For most people, the deep ocean is out of sight and out of mind,” write three zoologists and an oceanographer. The zone starts where penetration of sunlight can no longer support photosynthesis, about 200 metres down. This guidebook dissipates ignorance with superb colour photographs of astonishing organisms, accompanied by detailed captions and brief essays. For example, the vampire squid (Vampyroteuthis infernalis) is neither vampire nor squid, but was so named because its black ‘cloak’ reminded scientists of Dracula.
Christopher J. Preston – MIT Press (2023)
Humans and domestic animals make up 96% of the mass of the world’s mammals. The outlook for wildlife “remains dire”, writes philosopher Christopher Preston. But he describes signs of hope in his well-travelled, thoughtful study of recoveries. Populations of humpback whales in the western Indian Ocean have surged since the mid-twentieth century; those of Californian black bears have quadrupled in a few decades. He visits farmland, prairie, river, forest and ocean, exploring why only certain species are recovering.
Moves by WHO and U.S. usher pandemic into new phase of disease monitoring, even as coronavirus kills thousands weekly
Two extremely cool examples of ‘failed stars’ called brown dwarfs are found orbiting each other.
A cardinal feature of the immune system is its ability to distinguish self from nonself. Although many early immunologists thought that its powerful defenses could rarely, if ever, be turned against the host, pioneering research on autoimmune diseases beginning in the early 1900s has documented a different reality. More than 80 different autoimmune disorders have now been described that may affect up to 5% of the population.
Collaboration stifled as many scientists look to establish fieldwork elsewhere
A physician-scientist has probed Parkinson’s disease for more than 30 years. Now, he has it
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