Science

It encapsulated the fact that a species could have high mortality at one point in its life cycle, then low mortality at another, while a complementary species might have low mortality at the first point and high mortality at the second. The more similar this term was for two species, the more likely it was that a pair could live alongside each other despite competing for space and nutrition.

TLDR: There are way more species than you might expect in a system with inter-species competition because different lifespans allow for niches to exist across time as well.

The actual paper

On a muggy June night in Greenwich Village, more than 800 neuroscientists, philosophers and curious members of the public packed into an auditorium. They came for the first results of an ambitious investigation into a profound question: What is consciousness?

To kick things off, two friends — David Chalmers, a philosopher, and Christof Koch, a neuroscientist — took the stage to recall an old bet. In June 1998, they had gone to a conference in Bremen, Germany, and ended up talking late one night at a local bar about the nature of consciousness.

Using an extensive computer simulation of the climate, the global economy and the global energy system, researchers at Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) have been analyzing different ways of mitigating climate change, together with colleagues from the US, China, Ireland, Finland and Sweden.

People with a common history – often due to significant geographic or social barriers – often share genetics and language. New research finds that even a dialect can act as a barrier within a group.

By studying how the arachnids respond to static electricity, researchers may have found a new reason to dread the bloodsucking creatures.

On average, a single person can shed anywhere from 50 to 100 strands of hair per day. This contributes to a sizeable amount of waste which may take years to decompose into its natural form, or end up in incinerators, waste streams and dumps which produces toxic fumes including ammonia and sulfur dioxide during the decomposition process. Landfills of hair waste can leach toxic chemicals into bodies of water, harming marine wildlife and potentially lead to algal blooms. Furthermore, human hair can be breeding grounds for pathogens, putting nearby communities at risk of disease outbreaks.

As the human population increases, there will be increasing pressure to manage human hair waste. Instead of sending hair waste to the incinerator or landfill, it is worthwhile to repurpose hair waste for other potential applications.

The sexual division of labor among human foraging populations has typically been recognized as involving males as hunters and females as gatherers. Recent archeological research has questioned this paradigm with evidence that females hunted (and went to war) throughout the Homo sapiens lineage, though many of these authors assert the pattern of women hunting may only have occurred in the past. The current project gleans data from across the ethnographic literature to investigate the prevalence of women hunting in foraging societies in more recent times. Evidence from the past one hundred years supports archaeological finds from the Holocene that women from a broad range of cultures intentionally hunt for subsistence. These results aim to shift the male-hunter female-gatherer paradigm to account for the significant role females have in hunting, thus dramatically shifting stereotypes of labor, as well as mobility.

Researchers have demonstrated a new material for single-molecule electronic switches, which can effectively vary current at the nanoscale in response to external stimuli.

This material meets almost all of the requirements needed to serve in single-molecule electronic devices: it is stable in ambient conditions, can be cycled on/off many times, is conductive (although not as conductive as metal) and has different molecular states accessible to be utilized.

My friend's daughter is doing a project on biological immortality. It would be great if you could help her by answering a short survey.

She writes:

"This is a part of the primary research for my EPQ, titled: "To what extent does telomere biology hold the key to achieving biological immortality?"

By completing this form, you will be helping me to gather data for the second half of my project, which involves an evaluation of public understanding and perspectives on biological immortality. The results will be analysed and used as a source of information for my final dissertation."

An evolutionary analysis of behavioural traits across primate species may shed light on the question of whether humans are violent by nature

Part of a new low-cost British radar spacecraft is to be knitted from a gold-plated tungsten yarn.

Observations of high-energy astrophysical neutrinos have shown that they mostly originate from extragalactic sources such as active galaxies. However, gamma ray observations show bright emission from within the Milky Way galaxy, and astrophysical gamma rays and neutrinos are expected to be produced by the same physical processes. The IceCube Collaboration searched for neutrino emission from within the Milky Way (see the Perspective by Fusco) and found evidence of extra neutrinos emitted along the plane of the Galaxy, which is consistent with the distribution of gamma-ray emission. These results imply that high-energy neutrinos can be generated by nearby sources within the Milky Way.

-Editor’s summary from the Science article

For the first time, the IceCube Neutrino Observatory has produced an image of the Milky Way using neutrinos—tiny, ghostlike astronomical messengers with energies millions to billions of times higher than those produced by the fusion reactions that power stars

In a time of income inequality and ruthless politics, people with outsized power or an unrelenting willingness to browbeat others often seem to come out ahead.

New research from Dartmouth, however, shows that being uncooperative can help people on the weaker side of the power dynamic achieve a more equal outcome—and even inflict some loss on their abusive counterpart.

NEW YORK (AP) — Scientists have observed for the first time the faint ripples caused by the motion of black holes that are gently stretching and squeezing everything in the universe.

They reported Wednesday that they were able to “hear” what are called low-frequency gravitational waves — changes in the fabric of the universe that are created by huge objects moving around and colliding in space.

“It’s really the first time that we have evidence of just this large-scale motion of everything in the universe,” said Maura McLaughlin, co-director of NANOGrav, the research collaboration that published the results in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Why is a planet orbiting a star that should have gone through a giant phase?

archived 28 Jun 2023 20:06:16 UTC

By looking at electrical signals octopuses produce in their brain while asleep and awake, researchers have gathered some of the best evidence yet that the cephalopods dream

COVID-19 continues to have profound health and economic consequences around the world. Aside from the large number of deaths from this viral infection…

IceCube and NANOGrav will be making announcements tomorrow, July 29th.

https://www.sciencealert.com/two-major-announcements-about-the-universe-are-happening-this-week-heres-what-we-know-so-far

An in-depth look at the construction of Rome’s Pantheon and its famous concrete dome.

When you can’t remember a word, it might only feel like it’s on the tip of your tongue

A cute mathematical trick can "rescale" the Universe so that it isn't actually expanding. But can that "trick" survive all our cosmic tests?

The newly discovered duck-billed dinosaur, Gonkoken nanoi, likely grew to around 13 feet long and weighed up to 1 ton, new analysis reveals.