By David Adams MIAMI (Reuters) - A great white shark being tracked by marine researchers and weighing more than a ton is keeping scientists guessing after it has made its way from Massachusetts’ Cape Cod to the northeast Gulf of Mexico this week. Tagged in 2013 with a satellite tracking device, the great white known as Katharine is charting a groundbreaking map of the shark highway as scientists seek to discover its seasonal feeding grounds....
In cities worldwide, coronavirus outbreaks have been linked to restaurants, cafes and gyms. Now, a new model using mobile-phone data to map people’s movements suggests that these venues could account for most COVID-19 infections in US cities. The model, published in Nature today, also reveals how reducing occupancy in venues can significantly cut the number of infections. The model “has concrete pointers as to what may be cost-effective measures to contain the spread of the disease, while at the same time, limiting the damage to the economy”, says Thiemo Fetzer, an economist at the University of Warwick in Coventry....
The surging seas and vicious winds that Hurricane Michael unleashed on the Florida Panhandle last October have long since died down. Yet the scars left by the strongest storm ever to strike the region have ramped up the risk of another type of natural disaster for years to come: across millions of acres of forest stretching into southern Georgia, the carcasses of pine trees—snapped like matchsticks by the storm’s winds—pose a major wildfire threat....
Hoping that if you build it, they will come, IBM plans to roll out the world’s first commercial ‘universal’ quantum-computing service some time this year, the company announced on 6 March. Named IBM Q, the system will be accessible over the Internet for a fee. It will not outperform conventional computers, at least not yet. But the company says that the system will be crucial in developing a market for future quantum machines that can handle complex calculations currently out of reach of classical computers....
By Jeff Tollefson of Nature magazine The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) sparked a firestorm in December last year when it released a draft report suggesting that the use of hydraulic fracturing — or ‘fracking’ — to extract natural gas had contaminated groundwater near Pavillion, Wyoming. Industry officials have long denied that fracking affects groundwater, and Pavillion has become the first high-profile test of this claim. On 26 September, the US Geological Survey (USGS) released data showing the presence of groundwater contamination in the region....
After seven years of studying three-toed sloths, scientists at the University of Wisconsin–Madison have made it official: the tree-dwelling animals are the slowest mammals on earth, metabolically speaking. “We expected them to have low metabolic rates, but we found them to have tremendously low energy needs,” says ecologist Jonathan Pauli. To reach this conclusion, Pauli and his colleague M. Zachariah Peery measured the metabolic rates of 10 three-toed sloths and 12 of the two-toed variety in Costa Rica and compared the results with similar studies of 19 other species of leaf-eating mammals....
My first city was Conan Doyle’s London, in the company of Holmes and Watson. My mother gave me a two-volume omnibus edition when I was 10. London was a vast, cozy, populous mechanism, a comforting clockwork. Foreigners and criminals served as spices, highlighting the assumed orderliness and safety of the Empire’s capital (assuming one were sufficiently comfortably placed in society, and in Doyle one tended to be). I lived in rural southwestern Virginia, the nearest cities several hours away and those were smallish cities....
Nearly a million stars seem to have gone missing from the nearby globular cluster Messier 12, located within the constellation Ophiuchus. Our own Milky Way, scientists say, may be to blame. “In the solar neighborhood and in most stellar clusters, the least massive stars are the most common by far,” explains Guido de Marchi, an astronomer with the European Space Agency and lead author of the paper presenting the findings in yesterday’s Astronomy & Astrophysics....
Scott Guzewich spent six years as a weather forecaster in the Air Force before switching to his dream career as a planetary scientist. Guzewich now studies the Martian atmosphere as a postdoctoral fellow at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. But Guzewich’s dream job may be turning into a nightmare. On 3 December, NASA’s planetary science division announced a restructuring of how it funds its various research and analysis programs....
Medicine is not exclusively a human invention. Many other animals, from insects to birds to nonhuman primates, have been known to self-medicate with plants and minerals for infections and other conditions. Behavioral ecologist Helen Morrogh-Bernard of the Borneo Nature Foundation has spent decades studying the island’s orangutans and says she has now found evidence they use plants in a previously unseen medicinal way. During more than 20,000 hours of formal observation, Morrogh-Bernard and her colleagues watched 10 orangutans occasionally chew a particular plant (which is not part of their diet) into a foamy lather and then rub it into their fur....
Key Concepts Biodiversity Biology Soil Invertebrates Introduction Do you enjoy walking through piles of autumn leaves and hearing the crunch underneath your feet? Those leaves you’re stepping on might actually be home to a wide variety of plants and animals! Leaves, twigs and pieces of bark that have fallen to the ground make up leaf litter. Leaf litter is an important component of healthy soil. Decomposing leaf litter releases nutrients into the soil and also keeps it moist....
As the Trump administration slashes federal estimates of the future costs of climate change, new research suggests that even the much higher cost calculated by the Obama administration might be too low. A new study indicates that properly accounting for the impacts on agriculture could substantially raise estimates of how much global warming will cost the world in damages. While higher levels of carbon dioxide may provide some benefits to plants, research increasingly suggests that the negative effects of rising temperatures will outweigh these advantages on a global scale....
There are a variety of health risks associated with obesity. The condition can be hard on the corporate wallet, too, owing to medical expenses and missed days of work. A new study has concluded that the annual additional cost for an obese worker can reach $2,500. Scientists at RTI International Health, Social and Economics Research and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention used two data sets that encompass more than 45,000 full time workers between the ages of 18 and 64 for the new analysis....
By Eugenie Samuel Reich of Nature magazineShortly after 2p.m. on 30 September, with reporters watching by video link from a nearby auditorium, an operator at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois, will divert the final bunches of protons and antiprotons speeding around the Tevatron’s 6.3-kilometer ring, sending them barrelling into a solid metal block. The experiment that ruled high-energy physics for more than 25 years will then be over, its funding expired....
BONN, Germany—The United States won’t have its top two negotiators at the international climate conference here as the talks enter a crucial period in their final days. State Department Office of Global Change Director Trigg Talley had to leave the talks early this week due to a family emergency, and yesterday, the State Department announced that Undersecretary for Political Affairs Tom Shannon would also miss the talks due to a family emergency....
A tiny number of people in the world carry genetic mutations that were thought to guarantee the development of severe childhood diseases, but these people do not actually have these diseases, according to a new study. In the study, researchers looked at the genetic data from more than half a million people from around the world. The scientists found 13 adults who carried the exact genetic mutations that cause diseases such as cystic fibrosis, which severely affects the lungs and digestive system, or a condition called Pfeiffer syndrome, which affects the bones of the skull....
Neuroscientists today know a lot about how individual neurons operate but remarkably little about how large numbers of them work together to produce thoughts, feelings and behavior. What is needed is a wiring diagram for the brain—known as a connectome—to identify the circuits that underlie brain functions. The challenge is dizzying: There are around 100 billion neurons in the human brain, which can each make thousands of connections, or synapses, making potentially hundreds of trillions of connections....
When people hear “artificial intelligence,” many envision “big data.” There’s a reason for that: some of the most prominent AI breakthroughs in the past decade have relied on enormous data sets. Image classification made enormous strides in the 2010s thanks to the development of ImageNet, a data set containing millions of images hand sorted into thousands of categories. More recently GPT-3, a language model that uses deep learning to produce humanlike text, benefited from training on hundreds of billions of words of online text....
A person’s chances of acquiring a drug-resistant infection may be higher if she lives in a warmer area. A study appearing today in Nature Climate Change from researchers at the University of Toronto (U.T.) and Boston Children’s Hospital links the emergence of drug-resistant bacteria to a hotter climate. Researchers found a 10-degree Celsius increase in daily minimum temperature was associated with a small increase in resistance in common pathogens, including those that develop into methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), the root of many persistent and sometimes deadly hospital infections....
As I followed the news recently in Kentucky and Tennessee, I was dumbstruck. Severe storms are becoming more frequent, and more destructive. And even though, as a journalist, and a Texan, I’ve witnessed tornado destruction many times in my life, it’s still hard to wrap your head around the images of rubble, the overturned cars, and trees, and buildings torn to shreds next to ones barely touched. It’s been hard to fathom the number of lives lost in one weekend, in part because these storms came in the night, in December, when tornadoes are rare, and many people were asleep....
