Earth
Decades after farmland was abandoned, plant biodiversity and productivity struggle to recover, according to new University of Minnesota research.
Published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution, researchers examined 37 years of data tied to plant biodiversity (i.e., number of different species) and plant productivity (i.e., biomass or amount of plants) related to 21 grasslands and savannas in Minnesota. Most of these fields had been ploughed and abandoned for agricultural use between one and 91 years prior.
For older adults, Fitbits and other activity trackers may be popular gifts, but they may not be used for very long.
While counterintuitive, engaging in competition with family and friends decreases the odds of long-term use among older adults, perhaps because they feel it's demotivating, according to a new Michigan State University study.
And wanting to lose weight, become more active and monitor health doesn't seem to influence length of use either. But technological savviness does.
To study the swiftness of biology - the protein chemistry behind every life function - scientists need to see molecules changing and interacting in unimaginably rapid time increments - trillionths of a second or shorter.
Imaging equipment with that kind of speed was finally tested last year at the European X-ray Free-Electron Laser, or EuXFEL. Now, a team of physicists from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee has completed the facility's first molecular movie, or "mapping," of the ultrafast movement of proteins.
A discovery from a team of physicists and other researchers is breaking new ground in the study of ferroelectricity, a characteristic of certain dielectric materials that are used in high-technology applications. The findings appear today in the journal Nature Materials.
Uppsala researchers have developed a new method for investigating dynamic processes in large genetic libraries. By using this method to study cell cycle regulation, they help paint a clearer picture of the elusive control mechanism. The study is published in the journal Nature Methods.
There is more to foam than meets the eye. Literally. A study by Princeton scientists has shown that a type of foam long studied by scientists is able to block particular wavelengths of light, a coveted property for next-generation information technology that uses light instead of electricity.
Knowledge and awareness of antibiotic resistance and related issues is generally high among European healthcare workers, according to the first European survey to examine attitudes and behaviours in relation to antibiotic resistance in this group. However, the study also illustrates important knowledge gaps.
The study, published today, can serve as an important resource and baseline for EU/EEA countries when developing approaches and interventions to tackle antibiotic resistance, says the European Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (ECDC), which commissioned the study.
Electrocatalytic reaction, like other heterogenous catalytic reaction, commonly consists of multiple elementary reaction steps. For example, alkaline hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) involves: H2O + e- ?Had + OH- (Volmer step) and H2O + Had + e- ? H2 + OH- (Heyrovsky step) or Had + Had ? H2 (Tafel step). Compared with acidic HER, the Volmer step in alkaline electrolyte requires appropriate water molecule adsorption energy and extra energy to dissociate water molecule, leading to much slower kinetics.
A multidisciplinary group of scientists from the Geological and Mining Institute of Spain (IGME) and the Universities of Granada, Cologne, and Lisbon has demonstrated that the traditional careo underground aquifer recharge system used in Sierra Nevada is the oldest in Europe. This finding is the outcome of various research techniques conducted by experts from different fields including archaeology, sedimentology, geophysics, and hydrogeology.
Both the survival rate and the incidence of neuroblastoma have increased in the last decennia, as was shown by a study from the Princess Máxima Center. The improved chance of survival and the increase in the number of patients has been greatest in the high risk group; children older than 18 months with a stage 4 neuroblastoma.
Whether you are a company or a reporter trying to boost your visibility online, what is ok to do and what is considered "unfairly gaming the system?''
Is it ok to use keywords that you know people are searching for, but not ok for "bots'' to direct traffic to your site? Will you be punished, suspended or banned from Google, Facebook and Instagram because how you strategize with the algorithm is deemed illegitimate?
Essential genes are often expressed with high variability during the development of cells. Scientists call this phenomenon "biological noise" and suspect that it is also decisive for the fate of cells, i.e. the developmental pathway a cell takes. Max Planck researcher Dominic Grün now presents a method based on single-cell data to quantify this variability in gene expression. The advantage of the so-called VarID method is that the noise of gene expression can be measured across groups of very similar or related cell states.
Scientists have been looking at pollution affecting the air, land and water around the Athabaska Oil Sands for some time. After looking at contaminants in snow taken from up-to 25 km away from the oil sands, a McGill-led scientific team now suggests that oil sand pollution is also affecting the weather patterns in the surrounding regions.
Tropical Depression 21E never matured into a tropical storm and a NASA analysis of rainfall rates show the storm won't have that chance.
NASA has the unique capability of peering under the clouds in storms and measuring the rate in which rain is falling. Global Precipitation Measurement mission or GPM core passed over Tropical Depression 21E (TD21E) from its orbit in space and measured rainfall rates throughout the storm.
TD21E formed on Saturday, Nov. 16 and maintained depression status over the weekend.
With economies and populations surging, an industrial revolution is inevitable on the African continent. The question is, what's going to power it? With renewable energy cheaper and more efficient than ever, countries in Africa have the unique opportunity to harness abundant renewable sources like wind, solar and geothermal to leapfrog the dependence on fossil fuels that has poisoned the air and environment in Europe, the U.S., India and China.
But will they?