By analyzing data on multilingual Twitter users and Wikipedia editors and on 30 years' worth of book translations in 150 countries, researchers at MIT, Harvard University, Northeastern University, and Aix Marseille University have developed network maps that they say represent the strength of the cultural connections between speakers of different languages.
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DURHAM, N.C. -- American children are generally safer and better-educated than they have been in 20 years, a new report from Duke University finds.
Stubborn problems remain, including high rates of child poverty and a still-raging obesity epidemic, the 2014 National Child and Youth Well-Being Index Report notes.
But "compared to 20 years ago, U.S. children are doing pretty well," said the report's lead author, Kenneth Land, the John Franklin Crowell Professor of Sociology at Duke.
ANN ARBOR--A set of eight hurricane-forecast satellites being developed at the University of Michigan is expected to give deep insights into how and where storms suddenly intensify--a little-understood process that's becoming more crucial to figure out as the climate changes, U-M researchers say.
The Cyclone Global Navigation Satellite System is scheduled to launch in fall 2016. At the American Geophysical Union Meeting in San Francisco this week, U-M researchers released estimates of how significantly CYGNSS could improve wind speed and storm intensity forecasts.
For years NASA has tracked changes in the massive Greenland Ice Sheet. This week scientists using NASA data released the most detailed picture ever of how the ice sheet moves toward the sea and new insights into the hidden plumbing of melt water flowing under the snowy surface.
The results of these studies are expected to improve predictions of the future of the entire Greenland ice sheet and its contribution to sea level rise as researchers revamp their computer models of how the ice sheet reacts to a warming climate.
According to experts' statistical analyses, if you're expecting 10 guests for dinner on Christmas day, 15 crackers--those festive cardboard tubes filled with a one-size-fits-no-one paper hat, a small toy, and a groan-inducing joke--should be enough to send everyone home happy. The experts came to their estimation by simulating 10,000 parties, with guest numbers ranging from 2 to 50. Their results are published in Significance.
A University of Otago, New Zealand, PhD student analysing dental calculus (hardened plaque) from ancient teeth is helping resolve the question of what plant foods Easter Islanders relied on before European contact.
Known to its Polynesian inhabitants as Rapa Nui, Easter Island is thought to have been colonized around the 13th Century and is famed for its mysterious large stone statues or moai.
A new study offers strategies for rekindling marriage after a spouse returns home from combat with post-traumatic stress symptoms present in one or both of the spouses.
Each day, thunderstorms around the world produce about a thousand quick bursts of gamma rays, some of the highest-energy light naturally found on Earth. By merging records of events seen by NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope with data from ground-based radar and lightning detectors, scientists have completed the most detailed analysis to date of the types of thunderstorms involved.
Tropical Cyclone Bakung ran into adverse conditions in the Southern Indian Ocean that weakened it to a remnant low pressure system when NASA's Aqua satellite spotted it on Dec. 15.
The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer or MODIS instrument that flies aboard Aqua captured a visible picture of Bakung's elongated remnants on Dec. 5 at 08:05 UTC (3:05 a.m. EST). The storm appeared to be stretched out from west to east in the visible image.
Early discoveries by NASA's newest Mars orbiter are starting to reveal key features about the loss of the planet's atmosphere to space over time.
The introduction of neutral umpires in Test cricket led to a drop in the number of LBW decisions going in favour of home teams, a study has revealed.
The findings from research by economists, published by the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, come amidst renewed debate on whether neutral umpiring is still required in Test matches following the introduction of the Decision Review System (DRS).
New research published in the journal genesis, by Kenneth Baughman, Dr. Eiichi Shoguchi, Professor Noriyuki Satoh of the Marine Genomics Unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University, and collaborators from Australia, reports an intact Hox cluster in the Crown of Thorns starfish, Acanthaster planci. This surprising result contrasts with the relatively disorganized Hox cluster found in sea urchins, which are also echinoderms, classification of animals including starfish, sea lilies, and sea cucumbers.
Airports are now subject to careful security surveillance, but many coastal towns and ports are not; they often lack radar installations to keep track of small boats, meaning terrorists could easily use speedboats to approach the coastline and bring explosives on land. Now, researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Communication, Information Processing and Ergonomics FKIE in Bonn developed a passive surveillance system for littoral regions based on mobile radio illumination called Passive Coherent Location (PCL).
Monstrous moonshine, a quirky pattern of the monster group in theoretical math, has a shadow - umbral moonshine. Mathematicians have now proved this insight, known as the Umbral Moonshine Conjecture, offering a formula with potential applications for everything from number theory to geometry to quantum physics.
Tropical Cyclone Bakung is moving in a westerly direction over the open waters of the Southern Indian Ocean and NASA's Aqua satellite captured an image of the sea storm.