When farmers spray their fields with pesticides or other treatments, only 2 percent of the spray sticks to the plants. A significant portion of it typically bounces right off the plants, lands on the ground, and becomes part of the runoff that flows to streams and rivers -- often causing serious pollution. But a team of MIT researchers aims to fix that.
Heavens
Pasadena, CA--An international team of astronomers, including Carnegie's Eric Persson, has charted the rise and fall of galaxies over 90 percent of cosmic history. Their work, which includes some of the most sensitive astronomical measurements made to date, is published by The Astrophysical Journal.
Birds that have to work harder during breeding season will feel the effects of their exertions the following year, according to research by Oxford University scientists.
A new study published in the Journal of Animal Ecology found that migratory seabirds suffered negative repercussions when they had to spend more time rearing chicks, including decreased breeding success when they returned to the colony the following spring.
Tropical Storm Lionrock moved over Honshu, the big island of Japan and then proceeded over the Hokkaido, the northernmost island, when NASA's Terra satellite passed overhead and analyzed the storm's cloud top temperatures.
Trying to understand a system of atoms is like herding gnats - the individual atoms are never at rest and are constantly moving and interacting. When it comes to trying to model the properties and behavior of these kinds of systems, scientists use two fundamentally different pictures of reality, one of which is called "statistical" and the other "dynamical."
The two approaches have at times been at odds, but scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory announced a way to reconcile the two pictures.
Snowy Owls capture the imagination, but ornithologists know surprisingly little about how these birds of the far north fare during the harsh winters they endure. The researchers behind a new study in The Auk: Ornithological Advances trapped and tracked Snowy Owls wintering in Canada and found that while age and sex affect the birds' condition, most do fairly well, showing few signs of starvation and some even putting on weight over the winter months.
BEER-SHEVA, Israel ...August 30, 2016 - Researchers at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) have determined that a child pedestrian's ability to safely cross the road is hindered more during a cell phone conversation than an adult's. The study will be published in the November, 2016 issue of Safety Science (Elsevier).
In making decisions about infrastructure development and resource allocation, city planners rely on models of how people move through their cities, on foot, in cars, and on public transportation. Those models are largely based on surveys of residents' travel habits.
But conducting surveys and analyzing their results is costly and time consuming: A city might go more than a decade between surveys. And even a broad survey will cover only a tiny fraction of a city's population.
For years, astronomers have puzzled over a massive star lodged deep in the Milky Way that shows conflicting signs of being extremely old and extremely young.
Researchers initially classified the star as elderly, perhaps a red supergiant. But a new study by a NASA-led team of researchers suggests that the object, labeled IRAS 19312+1950, might be something quite different - a protostar, a star still in the making.
The sympathetic nerve system has long been thought to respond the same regardless of the physical or emotional stimulus triggering it. However, in a new study from Karolinska Institutet published in the Nature Neuroscience, scientists show that the system comprises different neurons that regulate specific physiological functions, such as erectile muscle control.
Washington, DC-- In the race to discover a proposed ninth planet in our Solar System, Carnegie's Scott Sheppard and Chadwick Trujillo of Northern Arizona University have observed several never-before-seen objects at extreme distances from the Sun in our Solar System. Sheppard and Trujillo have now submitted their latest discoveries to the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center for official designations. A paper about the discoveries has also been accepted to The Astronomical Journal.
The center of the Milky Way galaxy is currently a quiet place where a supermassive black hole slumbers, only occasionally slurping small sips of hydrogen gas. But it wasn't always this way. A new study shows that 6 million years ago, when the first human ancestors known as hominins walked the Earth, our galaxy's core blazed forth furiously. The evidence for this active phase came from a search for the galaxy's missing mass.
The Global Precipitation Measurement mission or GPM core satellite passed over Tropical Depression 8 as it formed off the coast of North Carolina in the Atlantic Ocean. GPM measured rainfall rates and analyzed the heights of storm cloud tops to assess the storm's strength.
NASA's Aqua satellite passed over Hurricane Gaston as it was strengthening into a major hurricane, almost 600 miles away from Bermuda in the Atlantic Ocean. Aqua provided a visible look at the powerful hurricane.
When NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite passed over hurricane Lester it was on the verge of becoming a major hurricane. That happened less than 12 hours later.