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“Global warming” and “climate change” succinctly describe a complicated phenomenon, and in just a few decades they have become common descriptors. But while global warming would be bad for the Earth as a whole, the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere would affect different areas in different ways, and local climate change is what…
Scientists are developing a salt-resistant variety of rice, a move prompted, in part, by last year’s Japan tsunami, which flooded some 20,000 hectares of rice paddies. The rice varieties Japanese farmers were growing in those paddies couldn’t survive in salt-contaminated soil. The new method hones in on the precise changes in a gene responsible for…
Current tropical timber practices are not sustainable and nations should consider the implications of ‘peak timber’, a study has suggested. A team of researchers says the standard cutting cycle of 30-40 years is too short to allow trees to grow to a volume required by commercial loggers. As a result, the pressure to harvest primary…
Scientists from the University of Bristol have developed a soap, composed of iron rich salts dissolved in water, that responds to a magnetic field when placed in solution. The soap’s magnetic properties were proved with neutrons at the Institut Laue-Langevin to result from tiny iron-rich clumps that sit within the watery solution. The generation of…
Tiny prints from baby dinosaurs dot the oldest dinosaur nesting site found to date, a 190-million-year-old nursery in South Africa, researchers said. The hatchery and the baby footprints around it are significant clues about the evolution of complex family behaviors in early dinosaurs, providing the oldest-known evidence that dinosaur hatchlings remained at nests long enough…
Psilocybin, the active ingredient in so-called magic mushrooms, may help people with depression, based on two studies that suggest that the drug could have an enduring effect on patients. In a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 30 healthy volunteers took psilocybin intravenously and had their brains observed with magnetic…
Obsessive gamers’ hours at the computer have now topped scientists’ efforts to improve a model enzyme, in what researchers say is the first crowdsourced redesign of a protein. The online game Foldit allows players to fiddle at folding proteins on their home computers in search of the best-scoring (lowest-energy) configurations. Researchers have previously reported successes…
Scientists at Denmark’s Niels Bohr Institute have figured out a cool new way to lower the temperature of hot semiconductors. In a seemingly paradoxical new study, the scientists showed that light from a laser caused the temperature of semiconductor material to drop–and not by just a few degrees. The temperature fell to -269 Celsius –…
NEOShield is a new international project that will assess the threat posed by Near Earth Objects (NEO) and look at the best possible solutions for dealing with a big asteroid or comet on a collision path with our planet. The major EU-funded initiative will pull together all the latest science, initiate a fair few laboratory…
Conservatives and liberals pay attention to their environments differently, meaning the two sides of the political spectrum quite literally don’t see eye-to-eye, a recent study found, suggesting conservatives pay more attention to negative stimuli compared with liberals. The findings could suggest a biological basis for political views “They’re essentially monitoring things that make them feel…