West Greenland Ice Sheet total ice discharge and surface melting for April 2022 to April 2023. Credit: Ing et al. 2024. Ice melting has become an ever-pressing concern in recent decades as climate change has brought evocative images of lone polar bears floating on unsustainable small blocks of sea ice. Yet, the consequences are far-reaching … Read more
The health of a coral reef – like this one in Key West, Florida – can be heard in the sounds produced by the species living there, scientists say. Audio recordings of healthy reefs—an underwater chorus of fish songs and crackles from snapping shrimp—may help efforts to restore coral ecosystems harmed by climate and human … Read more
Credit: New Africa, Shutterstock Since the 1990s, fast fashion has enabled everyday people to buy the latest catwalk trends. But the sheer volume of garments being whipped up, sold and soon discarded is contributing to a global sustainability crisis. Now, just when the fashion industry should be waking up and breaking free of this vicious … Read more
A beluga whale, one of the very few other animals that experience menopause, which remains an evolutionary puzzle. Why do humans experience menopause? It’s a question that some women going through the symptoms might have asked themselves more than once. Scientists are also baffled. From an evolutionary perspective, animals generally take every chance they can … Read more
Children need some degree of self-confidence to grow up to be happy, thriving adults. Confidence is a key indicator of future success, research has shown, because children and adults are more likely to be motivated self-starters when they have faith that their own skills and efforts can lead to positive outcomes. Unfortunately, the best ways … Read more
Wager’s Action off Cartagena, 28 May 1708 by Samuel Scott (1772), a painting showing the moment the San José was blown up. Credit: National Maritime Museum The San José was a galleon ship owned by King Philip V of Spain (1683–1746) in the 18th century. It sailed from Portobelo in present-day Panama to Cartagena in … Read more
This extreme fragility might make quantum computing sound hopeless. But in 1995, the applied mathematician Peter Shor discovered a clever way to store quantum information. His encoding had two key properties. First, it could tolerate errors that only affected individual qubits. Second, it came with a procedure for correcting errors as they occurred, preventing them … Read more
Spectators watch plumes of smoke from volcanic activity between Hagafell and Stóri-Skógfell, Iceland, Saturday, March 16, 2024. Credit: AP Photo/Marco di Marco A volcano in Iceland erupted Saturday evening for the fourth time in three months, sending orange jets of lava into the night sky. Iceland’s Meteorological Office said the eruption opened a fissure in … Read more
Model of VP35 interacting with Ubiquitin. (A) The complex of VP35 (PDB ID 3JKE) and Ubiquitin (PDB ID 1UBQ) modeled using a combination of protein docking and molecular dynamics simulations. Within the complex, VP35 is shown on the left and Ubiquitin on the right. The K48 and K63 Ub residues are shown in cyan on … Read more
Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain In a study published in Journal of Biogeography, scientists from the Institute of Applied Ecology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences have shed light on understanding the driving mechanisms of the uniqueness of plant species composition in different life forms. Ecological uniqueness emphasizes the distinctiveness of species composition in different locations. … Read more
