“Our results suggest that people feel happier when they have more variety in their daily routines: when they go to novel places and have a wider array of experiences,” said New York University’s Dr. Catherine Hartley, lead co-author of the study.
“The opposite is also likely true: positive feelings may drive people to seek out these rewarding experiences more frequently.”
In the study, Dr. Hartley and colleagues investigated the following question: is diversity in humans’ daily experiences associated with more positive emotional states?
To do so, the researchers conducted GPS tracking of participants in New York and Miami for three to four months, asking subjects by text message to report about their positive and negative emotional state during this period.
The results showed that on days when people had more variability in their physical location — visiting more locations in a day and spending proportionately equitable time across these locations — they reported feeling more positive: happy, excited, strong, relaxed, and/or attentive.
Blooms of snow algae in Antarctica were first described by expeditions in the 1950s and 1960s.
They host a diverse range of algal species and are found around the Antarctic coastline, particularly on islands along the west coast of the Antarctic Peninsula. They grow in warmer areas, where average temperatures are just above zero degrees Celsius during the austral summer (November to February). [...]
“As Antarctica warms, we predict the overall mass of snow algae will increase, as the spread to higher ground will significantly outweigh the loss of small island patches of algae,” said Dr. Andrew Gray, a researcher in the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of Cambridge and NERC Field Spectroscopy Facility.
Biological homochirality was discovered in 1848 by the French biologist, microbiologist and chemist Louis Pasteur.
Since then, scientists have debated whether the handedness of life was driven by random chance or some unknown deterministic influence.
Pasteur hypothesized that, if life is asymmetric, then it may be due to an asymmetry in the fundamental interactions of physics that exist throughout the cosmos.
“We propose that the biological handedness we witness now on Earth is due to evolution amidst magnetically polarized radiation, where a tiny difference in the mutation rate may have promoted the evolution of DNA-based life, rather than its mirror image,” said Dr. Noémie Globus, a researcher in the Center for Cosmology & Particle Physics at New York University and the Center for Computational Astrophysics at Flatiron Institute. [...]
Their hypothesis is that, at the beginning of life of on Earth, this constant and consistent radiation affected the evolution of the two mirror life-forms in different ways, helping one ultimately prevail over the other.
Bumblebees are a resourceful bunch: when pollen is scarce and plants near the nest are not yet flowering, workers have developed a way to force them to bloom. Research published on Thursday in Science shows that the insects puncture the plants’ leaves, which causes them to flower, on average, 30 days earlier than they otherwise would. How the technique evolved and why the plants respond to bumblebee bites by blooming remain unclear. But researchers say the discovery of a new behavior in such a familiar creature is remarkable.
“This is one of those really rare studies that observes a natural phenomenon that hadn’t been documented before,” says John Mola, an ecologist at the U.S. Geological Survey’s Fort Collins Science Center in Colorado, who was not involved in the study. The new finding “offers all sorts of questions and potential explanations” about how widespread the behavior is and why it occurs, he says.
In a set of experiments by University of Michigan biologists and their Chinese colleagues, researchers hatched and reared hundreds of chickens on the Tibetan Plateau, at an elevation of nearly 11,000 feet, and at an adjacent lowland site in China's Sichuan Province. Some of the eggs from lowland chickens were hatched on the plateau, and some high-altitude eggs were hatched at a site 2,200 feet above sea level.
The goal was to assess the relative contributions of two types of phenotypic change—meaning changes to an organism's observable physical characteristics or traits—to the process of environmental adaptation. "Plastic" phenotypic changes involve altered gene activity but no rewriting of the genetic code in DNA molecules, while mutations cause altered gene activity by modifying the sequence of letters in the code itself. [...]
In the chicken study, researchers were specifically interested in how organisms readapt when reintroduced to ancestral environments. They found that plastic changes play a more prominent role when organisms return to an ancestral home than when they adapt to new environments.
Dr. Benjamin Brown from the School of Physics has developed a type of error-correcting code for quantum computers that will free up more hardware to do useful calculations. It also provides an approach that will allow companies like Google and IBM to design better quantum microchips.
He did this by applying already known code that operates in three-dimensions to a two-dimensional framework.
"The trick is to use time as the third dimension. I'm using two physical dimensions and adding in time as the third dimension," Dr. Brown said. "This opens up possibilities we didn't have before." [...]
"It's a bit like knitting," he said. "Each row is like a one-dimensional line. You knit row after row of wool and, over time, this produces a two-dimensional panel of material."
Archaeologists have found the bones of about 60 mammoths at an airport under construction just north of Mexico City, near human-built 'traps' where more than a dozen mammoths were found last year.
Both discoveries reveal how appealing the area—once a shallow lake—was for the mammoths, and how erroneous was the classic vision of groups of fur-clad hunters with spears chasing mammoths across a plain. Humans may have been smarter—and mammoths clumsier—than people had previously thought.
For the moment, however, Mexican archaeologists are facing a surfeit of mammoths, almost too many to ever excavate.
"There are too many, there are hundreds," said archeologist Pedro Sánchez Nava, of the National Institute of Anthropology and History.
Hundreds of researchers attempted to predict six life outcomes, such as a child’s grade point average and whether a family would be evicted from their home. These researchers used machine-learning methods optimized for prediction, and they drew on a vast dataset that was painstakingly collected by social scientists over 15 y. However, no one made very accurate predictions. For policymakers considering using predictive models in settings such as criminal justice and child-protective services, these results raise a number of concerns. Additionally, researchers must reconcile the idea that they understand life trajectories with the fact that none of the predictions were very accurate.
Medical Xpress
An improved urine-testing system for people suffering from kidney stones inspired by nature and proposed by researchers from Penn State and Stanford University may enable patients to receive results within 30 minutes instead of the current turnaround time of a week or more.[...]
Metabolic testing of a kidney stone patient's urine to identify metabolites such as minerals and solutes that cause stones to form is key for preventing future ones. This testing is currently done by requiring the patient to collect their urine over a 24-hour period in a large container. The container is then sent to a lab for analysis and the results normally come back in 7 to 10 days. [...]
SLIPS is a dynamic, extremely low-friction smooth surface created by locking lubricating liquids in micro/nanostructured substrates. This is inspired by nepenthes pitcher plants, which are carnivorous plants that have unique leaves shaped like pitchers and are filled with digestive liquid. The plants have evolved extremely slippery liquid-infused micro-textured rims that cause insects to fall into the "pitcher."
Part of science’s problem in linking words to meanings is (as experts in language repeatedly remind us) that there’s always a gap between a word and the reality it represents. “The word is not the thing,” the semanticist S.I. Hayakawa emphasized in his famous book Language in Thought and Action, just as a map is not identical to the territory it depicts. Some scientific terms serve as pretty reliable maps of reality, while others turn out to be decoys leading to dead ends. A major part of scientific progress is narrowing the gap between word and thing — transforming vague labels into more specific symbols...
...it’s remarkable how often words masquerading as ideas can eventually lead to successful scientific endeavors. Entire fields of scientific research have grown from word-seeds invented in the absence of substantiated ideas — atom and gene being the best examples. As Goethe went on to note in Faust:
“With words fine arguments can be weighted, with words whole systems can be created.”
But it might be a good idea to remember that the character speaking those lines was Mephistopheles, Goethe’s representative of the devil himself.
science daily
"The Asia-Pacific is host to one of the most amazing animal migrations on earth," Mr Gallo-Cajiao said.
"Every year, hundreds of thousands of shorebirds, wetland-dependent species, breed across the Arctic and boreal regions, moving south to Southeast Asia, Australia, and New Zealand along a migration corridor known as the East Asian-Australasian Flyway.
"The Flyway spans 22 countries, through which 61 species of shorebirds complete their epic annual migrations some covering up to 25,000 km each year.
"But many of these fascinating birds are unfortunately declining, with several on the brink of extinction.
"Until now, habitat loss due to the expansion of coastal infrastructure had been identified as one of the main causes of their declines, particularly around the Yellow Sea region of China and the Korean peninsula, where many birds stop to rest and feed on their migrations.
"The scale and significance of hunting was unknown prior to this study, and it's clear that it's likely contributed to declines of migratory shorebirds in this region."
Gesturing while speaking, or "talking with your hands," is common around the world. Many communications researchers believe that gesturing is either done to emphasize important points, or to elucidate specific ideas (think of this as the "drawing in the air" hypothesis). But there are other possibilities. For example, it could be that gesturing, by altering the size and shape of the chest, lungs and vocal muscles, affects the sound of a person's speech.
A team of UConn researchers led by former postdoc Wim Pouw (currently at Radboud University in the Netherlands) decided to test whether this idea was true, or just so much hand waving. The team had volunteers move their dominant hand as if they were chopping wood, while continuously saying "a" as in "cinema." They were instructed to keep the "a" sound as steady as they could.
Despite that instruction, when the team played audio recordings of this to other people, they found the listener could hear the speaker's gestures. When the listener was asked to move their arms to the rhythm, their movements matched perfectly with those of the original speaker.
world economic forum
In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, global media is reporting on a “silver lining” of the crisis: that nature is getting a break as people are forced to stay home. Penguins on the streets of Cape Town, a kangaroo roaming around Adelaide and a crab-eating fox exploring Bogotá suburbs are just a few examples. These stories are coupled with reports of clean air over Delhi, Seoul and even Los Angeles. [...]
Unfortunately, outside urban areas, the situation is very different. In rural areas, there is less wealth and the main savings account for people is nature, with hunting, fishing and logging necessary to provide food and support livelihoods. People who moved to cities and have now lost their employment and income opportunities due to the quarantines are returning to their rural homes, further increasing the pressure on natural resources while also increasing the risk of COVID-19 transmission to rural areas.
At the same time, opportunistic actors and criminal groups involved in land-grabbing, deforestation, illegal mining and wildlife poaching are taking advantage of the fact that governments are focused on COVID-19 instead of on conservation. There are reports of increased deforestation in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Areas dependent on tourism to fund conservation – such as community conservancies in Kenya and iconic natural World Heritage Sites like the Galápagos, Ecuador and the Tubbataha Reef in the Philippines – are facing reduced resources as tourism has come to a halt. Meanwhile, illegal mining for gold and precious stones in Latin America and Africa is on the rise, as prices spike and protected areas are left unguarded.
otoh — let’s also appreciate where nature gets a break from us
science
Perhaps one reason why the new design sux is the Director of Customer Services is attuned to expressions like “the bee’s knees.” (Emphasis added below)
PubMed, the massive database of biomedical literature maintained by the U.S. National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), is one of the U.S. government’s most popular websites, with some 2 million users daily. So when something at PubMed changes, it doesn’t go unnoticed.
Unfortunately for the site’s caretakers, however, a sweeping redesign unveiled this week has left many PubMed users fuming—and airing their sometimes curse-laden complaints on social media.
When asked to comment on such feedback, a spokesperson for the National Library of Medicine, which encompasses NCBI, directed ScienceInsider to NLM blog posts about the redesign. They note the remake aimed to provide PubMed users with a modern interface, easier navigation, and better search results based on machine learning algorithms. And in a January post, Bart Trawick, NCBI’s director of customer services, noted that: “Whether you think the new version of PubMed is the bee’s knees just the way it is, or you have a great insight on how to make it better—we will be waiting to hear from you.”
i hope this event doesn’t get 2020’d