Switzerland’s direct democracy system allows popular votes on a vast array of issues. Switzerland, known for pristine countryside and snow-capped peaks, is facing scrutiny of its environmental policies after becoming the first country faulted by an international court for failing to do enough against climate change. The European Court of Human Rights’s ruling last week … Read more
An artist’s impression of the newly described fossil species Protemnodon viator and its relative Protemnodon anak, compared at scale to the living red kangaroo and eastern grey kangaroo. Credit: Flinders University Paleontologists from Flinders University have described three unusual new species of giant fossil kangaroo from Australia and New Guinea, finding them more diverse in … Read more
Deadly flash floods devastated Libya’s coastal city of Derna in September 2023. Coastal communities need to prepare for simultaneous extreme weather events as heat waves increasingly overlap with surges in sea levels due to climate change, a study published on Thursday warned. Extreme heat and sea levels are typically monitored and studied individually but researchers … Read more
Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain One of Brazil’s top scientists, Eneas Salati, once said, “The best thing you could do for the Amazon rainforest is to blow up all the roads.” He wasn’t joking. And he had a point. In an article published in Nature, my colleagues and I show that illicit, often out-of-control road building … Read more
Ceramic sherd selection. Photographs: Steve Morton. Credit: Quaternary Science Reviews (2024). DOI: 10.1016/j.quascirev.2024.108624 Pottery was largely unknown in Australia before the recent past, despite well-known pottery traditions in nearby Papua New Guinea and the islands of the western Pacific. The absence of ancient Indigenous pottery in Australia has long puzzled researchers. Over the past 400 … Read more
A Bonobo at animal park Planckendael in Muizen, near Mechelen, Belgium. Humankind’s two closest primate relatives are often said to embody contrasting sides of our nature: peace-loving bonobos versus violence-prone chimpanzees. But a new study out Friday in Current Biology says it’s not that simple. Male bonobos in fact fight each other more often than … Read more
“How are matter and energy distributed?” asked Peter Schweitzer, a theoretical physicist at the University of Connecticut. “We don’t know.” Schweitzer has spent most of his career thinking about the gravitational side of the proton. Specifically, he’s interested in a matrix of properties of the proton called the energy-momentum tensor. “The energy-momentum tensor knows everything … Read more
Latitudinal effects on EMF through multiple thresholds approach. Credit: WBG Ecosystem multifunctionality (EMF) is the ability of an ecosystem to provide multiple functions simultaneously. Microorganisms are proxies for soil communities and possess diverse functional traits that support multiple ecosystem functions. However, the complex relationships between the microbial network and EMF, especially at a large spatial … Read more
Three right whales observed from the air. (NMFS permit #21482 2). Credit: Mark Cotter/HDR Marine researchers have mapped the density of one of the most endangered large whale species worldwide, the North Atlantic right whale, using newly analyzed data to predict and help avoid whales’ harmful, even fatal, exposure to commercial fishing and vessel strikes. … Read more
The LHCb detector seen in 2018 during its opening. Credit: CERN Once a particle of matter, always a particle of matter. Or not. Thanks to a quirk of quantum physics, four known particles made up of two different quarks—such as the electrically neutral D meson composed of a charm quark and an up antiquark—can spontaneously … Read more
