Curated News: Featured: SciWire

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Rising sea temperatures in the Mediterranean are encouraging alien lionfish species to invade and colonise new territories with potentially serious ecological and socioeconomic impacts.

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Numerical models show hot, rocky exoplanets can change their chemistry by vaporizing rock-forming elements in steam atmospheres that are then partially lost to space.

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Scientists led by Durham University's Institute for Computational Cosmology ran the huge cosmological simulations that can be used to predict the rate at which gravitational waves caused by collisions between the monster black holes might be detected.

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Coffee is enjoyed by millions of people every day and the ‘coffee experience’ has become a staple of our modern life and culture. While the current body of research related to the effects of coffee consumption on human health has been contradictory, a study in the June issue of Comprehensive Reviews in Food Science and Food Safety, which is published by the Institute of Food Technologists (IFT), found that the potential benefits of moderate coffee drinking outweigh the risks in adult consumers for the majority of major health outcomes considered.

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Sparrows form pair bonds that are normally monogamous, but many females are unfaithful to their partner and have offspring with other males.

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Research teams on both sides of the Atlantic have shown that precise modeling of the universe and its contents will change the detailed understanding of the evolution of the universe and the growth of structure in it.

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Experts from WCS (Wildlife Conservation Society) and the National University of Singapore (NUS) have made a surprising discovery that could subvert the significance of traditional criteria used for species classification.

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The GRAVITY instrument is now operating with the four 8.2-metre Unit Telescopes of ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT - http://www.eso.org/public/teles-instr/paranal/) , and even from early test results it is already clear that it will soon be producing world-class science.

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Xi Chen, associate professor of earth + environmental engineering at Columbia Engineering, and Klaus Lackner at Arizona State University, reports an unconventional reversible chemical reaction in a confined nanoenvironment. The discovery, a milestone in clarifying the scientific underpinnings of moisture-swing chemical reaction, is critical to understanding how to scrub CO2 from the Earth's atmosphere; the researchers have already used it to capture CO2 more efficiently and at a much lower cost than other methods.

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Our universe came to life nearly 14 billion years ago in the Big Bang — a tremendously energetic fireball from which the cosmos has been expanding ever since. Today, space is filled with hundreds of billions of galaxies, including our solar system's own galactic home, the Milky Way. But how exactly did the infant universe develop into its current state, and what does it tell us about our future?

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Roughly 90 percent of the biggest black holes in the known universe are dormant, meaning that they are not actively devouring matter and, consequently, not giving off any light or other radiation. But sometimes a star wanders too close to a dormant black hole and the ensuing feeding frenzy, known as a tidal disruption event, sets off spectacular fireworks.

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New research suggests for the first time that wild boars and wart hogs have an internal magnetic compass that helps them orient themselves as they forage for food and inhabit new areas.

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Israel Science Foundation, Human Frontier Science Program, Jacob Blaustein Center for Scientific Cooperation, and the Society of Experimental Biology

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Earth's magnetosphere, the region of space dominated by Earth's magnetic field, protects our planet from the harsh battering of the solar wind. Like a protective shield, the magnetosphere absorbs and deflects plasma from the solar wind which originates from the Sun. When conditions are right, beautiful dancing auroral displays are generated. But when the solar wind is most violent, extreme space weather storms can create intense radiation in the Van Allen belts and drive electrical currents which can damage terrestrial electrical power grids. Earth could then be at risk for up to trillions of dollars of damage.

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When it comes to baking bread, the bigger the loaf, the better. But to determine the baking performance of wheat flour, food scientists had to bake a loaf of bread. That may not be necessary, thanks to a new mathematical model that uses specific dough parameters to predict loaf volume. That saves time and money.

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Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis have found a way to give photons, or light packets, their marching orders.

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Giant Ice Age species including elephant-sized sloths and powerful sabre-toothed cats ¬that once roamed the windswept plains of Patagonia, southern South America, were finally felled by a perfect storm of a rapidly warming climate and humans, a new study has shown.

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The brains of teenagers with serious antisocial behaviour problems differ significantly in structure to those of their peers, providing the clearest evidence to date that their behaviour stems from changes in brain development in early life, according to new research led by the University of Southampton and the University of Cambridge, in collaboration with the University of Rome “Tor Vergata” in Italy.

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Halfway between Hawaii and American Samoa lies a group of small islands and inlets. Among them is Palmyra Atoll, an almost 5-square-mile ring of coral.

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Environmental scientists from the University of Stirling have found beech forests across western Europe are increasingly at risk from drought - with areas of southern England worst affected.

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The protoplanetary disc around the young star TW Hydrae is the closest known example to Earth, at a distance of only about 170 light-years. As such it is an ideal target for astronomers to study discs. This system closely resembles what astronomers think the Solar System looked like during its formation more than four billion years ago.

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In the lead up to the World Barista Championships, University of Bath scientists say brewing more flavoursome coffee could be as simple as chilling the beans before grinding.

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For plants and animals fleeing rising temperatures, varying precipitation patterns and other effects of climate change, the eastern United States will need improved “climate connectivity” for these species to have a better shot at survival.

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Carbon dioxide emissions from dry and oxygen-rich environments will likely strengthen the climate forcing impact of thawing permafrost on top of methane release from oxygen-poor wetlands in the Arctic, according to a study led by Northern Arizona University assistant research professor Christina Schädel.

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A prototype system that will test a planned array of 5,000 robots for a sky-mapping instrument is taking shape at Berkeley Lab. Dubbed ProtoDESI, the scaled-down, 10-robot system will run through a series of tests on a telescope in Arizona from August-September.

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If climate change continues on its current trajectory, the probability that any summer between 2061 and 2080 will be warmer than the hottest on record is 80 percent across the world's land areas, according to a study by the National Center for Atmospheric Research. If greenhouse gas emissions are reduced, however, that probability drops to 41 percent, according to the study.

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Researchers are investigating a new material that might help in nuclear fuel recycling and waste reduction by capturing certain gases released during reprocessing. Conventional technologies to remove these radioactive gases operate at extremely low, energy-intensive temperatures. By working at ambient temperature, the new material has the potential to save energy, make reprocessing cleaner and less expensive. The reclaimed materials can also be reused commercially.

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The new ALMA observation is the first direct evidence that cold dense clouds can coalesce out of hot intergalactic gas and plunge into the heart of a galaxy to feed its central supermassive black hole. It also reshapes astronomers' views on how supermassive black holes feed, in a process known as accretion.

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Nesting birds time their escape from an approaching predator depending on how well camouflaged their eggs and their own bodies are, researchers from the University of Exeter and the University of Cambridge have discovered.

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An international team of scientists have found a potentially viable way to remove anthropogenic (caused or influenced by humans) carbon dioxide emissions from the atmosphere – turn it into rock.

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A new study provides the first evidence that links melting ice in Greenland to a phenomenon known as Arctic amplification—faster warming of the Arctic compared to the rest of the Northern Hemisphere as sea ice disappears.

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A study appearing in the journal PLOS ONE this week shows that bioluminescence -- the production of light from a living organism -- is more widespread among marine fishes than previously understood.

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Astronomers using ALMA have witnessed a never-before-seen cosmic weather event – a cluster of towering intergalactic gas clouds raining in on the supermassive black hole at the center of an elliptical galaxy one billion light-years from Earth.

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New research raises concerns about how easily hackers could take control of flying drones and land or, more drastically, crash them.

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The move from life on land to life in the sea has led to the evolution of a new sense for sea snakes, a University of Adelaide-led study suggests.

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Overall impact of recreation on wildlife was minor compared with factors such as large undisturbed forest habitat and local housing density.

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Researchers describe the use of chemical analysis of ear-stones or “otoliths” to tease out details of a fish’s life story, potentially revealing the migratory routes and environments the fish encountered in its travels.

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New research reports that, contrary to popular belief, mammals began their massive diversification 10 to 20 million years before the extinction of the dinosaurs.

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Our Earth consists of silicate rocks and an iron core with a thin veneer of water and life. But the first potentially habitable worlds to form might have been very different. New research suggests that planet formation in the early universe might have created carbon planets consisting of graphite, carbides, and diamond. Astronomers might find these diamond worlds by searching a rare class of stars.

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A new disposable battery that folds like an origami ninja star could power biosensors and other small devices for use in challenging field conditions, says an engineer at Binghamton University, State University of New York. Seokheun “Sean” Choi, assistant professor of computer and electrical engineering at Binghamton University, along with two of his students, developed the device, a microbial fuel cell that runs on the bacteria available in a few drops of dirty water. They report on their invention in a new paper published online in the journal Biosensors and Bioelectronics.

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Australian researchers at the University of Adelaide have developed a method for embedding light-emitting nanoparticles into glass without losing any of their unique properties – a major step towards ‘smart glass’ applications such as 3D display screens or remote radiation sensors.

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Researchers from Michigan State University are using Mira to perform large-scale 3-D simulations of the final moments of a supernova’s life cycle. While the 3-D simulation approach is still in its infancy, early results indicate that the models are providing a clearer picture than ever before of the mechanisms that drive supernova explosions.

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Hubble Space Telescope astronomers have discovered that the universe is expanding 5-9% percent faster than expected. They made the discovery by refining the universe's current expansion rate to unprecedented accuracy, reducing the uncertainty to only 2.4%. The team made the refinements by developing innovative techniques that improved the precision of distance measurements to faraway galaxies. These measurements are fundamental to making more precise calculations of how fast the universe expands with time, a value called the Hubble constant.

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A University of Montana graduate student's research on Alaskan brown bears and red salmon is the May cover story of the high-profile journal Ecology.

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Archaeologists studying the distribution of ancient rice believe they may be close to solving one of the enduring mysteries of the ancient world - how people of South East Asian origin ended up living on the African island of Madagascar, 6,000 km away.

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Not all habits are bad. Some are even necessary. But inability to switch from acting habitually to acting in a deliberate way can underlie addiction and obsessive compulsive disorders. Working with a mouse model, an international team of researchers demonstrates what happens in the brain for habits to control behavior.

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At least 50 percent of the tallgrass prairie in the Flint Hills is burned every three to four years or less frequently and is susceptible to becoming shrubland if fire frequencies are not increased.

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A team of University of Wisconsin-Madison engineers has created the world's fastest stretchable, wearable integrated circuits, an advance that could drive the Internet of Things and a much more connected, high-speed wireless world.

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A study of more than 6,000 marine fossils from the Antarctic shows that the mass extinction event that killed the dinosaurs was sudden and just as deadly to life in the polar regions.

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A Utah mountainside collapsed 4,800 years ago in a gargantuan landslide known as a “rock avalanche,” creating the flat floor of what is now Zion National Park by damming the Virgin River to create a lake that existed for 700 years.