At least 230 new emoji, when different skin tones and genders are included, are due to be released this year. That’s a leap on 2018 when only 157 emoji were added to the Unicode Standard – the code used to support emoji on different platforms.
Culture
Light pollution affects the skies over most of the world's key wildlife areas, new research shows.
The study, by the University of Exeter and Birdlife International, focussed on "skyglow" - light scattered and reflected into the atmosphere that can extend to great distances.
Researchers found less than a third of the world's Key Biodiversity Areas (KBAs) have completely pristine night skies, and more than half lie entirely under artificially bright skies.
Night-time light has been shown to have wide-ranging effects on individual species and entire ecosystems.
Adding olefin enables efficient solvent-free cross-coupling reactions, leading to environmentally friendly syntheses of a wide range of organic materials.
Philadelphia, February 11, 2019 - As marijuana legalization sweeps North America, use of the substance has been on the rise, and the public's attitude is shifting. An increasing number of people believe that "weed" is the safest recreational drug, one that carries health benefits that outweigh its risks.
At least 230 new emoji, when different skin tones and genders are included, are due to be released this year. That’s a leap on 2018 when only 157 emoji were added to the Unicode Standard – the code used to support emoji on different platforms.
Most plants have developed mechanisms to prevent self-fertilization and its detrimental effects of inbreeding depression. Traits promoting selfing in plants have been approached mainly from the perspective of a loss of function, or even only considered as a by-product of non-adaptive evolutionary processes. However, the shift from cross-fertilization to selfing has been identified as one of the most frequent evolutionary transitions. Therefore, adaptive mechanisms actively promoting selfing should be usual in the plant kingdom, but, remarkably, they have not been frequently found.
Under climate change, plants and animals will shift their habitats to track the conditions they are adapted for. As they do, the lands surrounding rivers and streams offer natural migration routes that will take on a new importance as temperatures rise.
An open-access study led by the University of Washington pinpoints which riverside routes in Washington, Oregon, Idaho and western Montana will be the most important for animals trying to navigate a changing climate. The study was published this fall in PLOS ONE.
Acrylics are an incredibly diverse and useful family of chemicals used in all kinds of products, from diapers to nail polish. Now, a team of researchers from UConn and ExxonMobil describe a new process for making them. The new method would increase energy efficiency and reduce toxic byproducts, they report in the Feb. 8 issue of Nature Communications.
NEW YORK, NY (Feb. 8, 2019)--Athletes know a vigorous workout can release a flood of endorphins: "feel-good" hormones that boost mood. Now there's evidence that exercise produces another hormone that may improve memory and protect against Alzheimer's disease, according to a study co-led by Ottavio Arancio, MD, PhD, a researcher at Columbia University's Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons and Taub Institute for Research on Alzheimer's Disease and the Aging Brain.
The study was published in Nature Medicine.
Small suppliers who believe they are fairly treated by big supermarkets will put more resources into their relationship with buyers and perform better, according to academics at the University of East Anglia (UEA).
The research explored the concept of relational justice, specifically how small-scale food and drink producers perceive their treatment by 'key customers' - in this case supermarkets - and the impact this has on their allocation of resources and business performance.
Facial recognition technology, being trialled by two major police forces in Britain, should be subjected to more rigorous testing and transparency, according to new research from the University of East Anglia (UEA) and Monash University.
Using data from Bristol's Children of the 90s study the research is one of a series from the University of Bristol, that examines a parental personality attribute known as the 'locus of control'. This is a psychological measure of how much someone believes that they have control over the outcome of events in their life or whether external forces beyond their control dictates how life turns out.
Human tissues experience a variety of mechanical stimuli that can affect their ability to carry out their physiological functions, such as protecting organs from injury. The controlled application of such stimuli to living tissues in vivo and in vitro has now proven instrumental to studying the conditions that lead to disease.
Physicists from the University of Basel have developed a new method to examine the elasticity and binding properties of DNA molecules on a surface at extremely low temperatures. With a combination of cryo-force spectroscopy and computer simulations, they were able to show that DNA molecules behave like a chain of small coil springs. The researchers reported their findings in Nature Communications.