Nanotech

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain A team of researchers from The University of Queensland has found employees experience more stress at work when interrupted with requests for unnecessary or unreasonable tasks. Associate Professor Stacey Parker from UQ’s School of Psychology led the study that investigated how interruptions during work can have an impact on employees’ stress … Read more

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain Since 2015, the Amazon has been slower to recover from increasing drought events, but, overall, the rainforest still shows a remarkable resilience. New international research led by KU Leuven Earth and environmental scientists shows that forest degradation due to drought has been most pronounced in the southern Amazon, where human impact … Read more

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain The authors of a major study on the critically endangered Arabian leopard say that the release of captive bred animals carefully selected for their genes can make a significant contribution to the successful recovery of the dwindling wild population and avert the prospect of extinction. An international collaboration led by scientists … Read more

Top Row: Geoff Hill, Emma Rhodes, Wendy Hood, Paulo Mesquita and Jesse Krause; Bottom: Jeff Yap. Credit: Auburn University For Wendy Hood and Geoffrey Hill in Biological Sciences, Andreas Kavazis in Kinesiology, and their team, Emma Rhodes, Paulo Mesquita, and Jeff Yap, traveling the country to unlock the mystery of mitochondria in migrating aviary species … Read more

ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti runs on the station’s T2 treadmill. Credit: ESA/NASA Future missions to the moon and Mars must address many challenges, including preventing loss of bone and muscle tissue in astronauts. Research on the International Space Station is helping to address this challenge. Without Earth’s gravity, both bone and muscle … Read more

Composer and software developer Carla Scaletti and chemistry professor Martin Gruebele used sound to investigate hydrogen-bond dynamics during the protein-folding process. Credit: Fred Zwicky By converting their data into sounds, scientists discovered how hydrogen bonds contribute to the lightning-fast gyrations that transform a string of amino acids into a functional, folded protein. Their report, published … Read more

Credit: CC0 Public Domain The California Fish and Game Commission has voted to ban salmon fishing in the Sacramento, American, Feather and Mokelumne rivers. This is the second consecutive year the commission has voted to ban in-river salmon sport fishing in the Klamath River Basin and Central Valley rivers, according to a news release from … Read more

Iso-propagation vortices promise faster optical communication with enhanced resilience. Credit: Yan et al., doi 10.1117/1.AP.6.3.036002. The future of optical communications just got brighter. In a development reported in Advanced Photonics, researchers from Nanjing University have introduced iso-propagation vortices (IPVs), a novel concept that offers a solution to a long-standing challenge faced by scientists and engineers: … Read more

Many in Brazil still associate coffee production with slavery. Raphael Brandao beams with pride as he describes the high-end Brazilian coffee he produces with beans sourced exclusively from Black farmers in a country where many still associate the product with slavery. The 31-year-old buys his coffee beans solely from farms owned by Afro-descendents and says … Read more

Success cubed: Hungarian inventor Erno Rubik, the man who created Rubik’s Cube. The naysayers said the maddening multicolored cube that Erno Rubik invented 50 years ago would not survive the 1980s. Yet millennials and Generation Z are as nuts about Rubik’s Cube as their parents were, much to the amusement of its 79-year-old creator, who … Read more