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The authors of a Harvard study published in Nature Climate Change gathered their data from an unlikely source—the trip accounts of the Massachusetts Butterfly Club. Over the past 19 years, the amateur naturalist group has logged species counts on nearly 20,000 expeditions throughout Massachusetts. Their records fill a crucial gap in the scientific record. Once…
In the latest effort to contend with exploding quantities of digital data, researchers encoded an entire book into the genetic molecules of DNA, the basic building block of life, and then accurately read back the text. The experiment, reported in the journal Science, may point a way toward eventual data-storage devices with vastly more capacity…
The Arctic Ocean’s ice cover is shrinking at a record pace this year after higher-than-average temperatures hastened the annual break-up of the sea ice. The area of ocean covered by ice shrank to 1.9 million square miles on average for a 5-day period, according to the latest data from the U.S. National Snow and Ice…
Amateur cave explorers have found a new family of spiders in the Siskiyou Mountains of Southern Oregon, and scientists have dubbed it Trogloraptor — Latin for cave robber — for their fearsome front claws. The spelunkers sent specimens to the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, which has the West Coast’s largest collection of…
The implication that religion is basically malevolent is a standard assertion of the New Atheists. Their argument isn’t just that there probably is no God, or that intelligent design is laughable bunk, or that the Bible is far from inerrant. It’s that religion is obviously bad for human beings, condemning them to ignorance, subservience, and…
DARPA has released information about a new, chameleon-like soft robot that has a range of capabilities and can be produced at a very low cost. DARPA hopes the new “hiding in plain sight” robot will be used by various defense agencies for many types of missions. The robot can walk on its own, glow, carry…
According to a NOAA-led paper published in the journal Conservation Biology, high levels of background noise, mainly due to ships, have reduced the ability of critically endangered North Atlantic right whales to communicate with each other by about two-thirds. From 2007 until 2010, scientists used an array of acoustic recorders to monitor noise levels, measure…
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope recently observed two clusters full of massive stars that appear to be in the early stages of merging. The clusters are located some 170,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small satellite galaxy to our own Milky Way. What at first was thought to be only one cluster in…
When well-meaning campaigners want us to pay attention to global warming, they often end up pitching beyond the facts. And, while this may seem justified by a noble goal, such “policy by panic” tactics rarely work, and often backfire. Remember how, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Al Gore (and many others) claimed…
Small increases in temperature may have reduced the industrial and agricultural production of poor countries, according to a study by U.S. economists. Higher temperatures may also have contributed to political instability in these countries — defined as those with below-median per capita income, adjusted for the purchasing power of the country’s currency — according to…