SciGlow | All Science News In One Place
SciGlow is a newsletter of science stories from the major research labs. Headlines link to in-depth articles and editorials. SciGlow keeps scientists and others up-to-date on current research.
The Galápagos Islands finches named after Charles Darwin are starting to sing a different tune because of an introduced pest on the once pristine environment. International bird ecology experts, including Professor Sonia Kleindorfer and Dr Katharina Peters from Flinders University in South Australia, have found the beaks of Darwin’s finches have changed to cope with … Read more
People living in countries that have experienced armed conflict are five times more likely to develop anxiety or depression, a University of Queensland research collaboration has found. UQ School of Public Health researcher Dr Fiona J. Charlson said the study, conducted with the World Health Organisation (WHO) and University of Washington, highlighted the serious effects … Read more
Previous research has shown that falcons intercept prey using the same guidance law as homing missiles, called proportional navigation. This guidance law is optimal against smoothly-manoeuvring aerial targets, but is prone to being thrown off by the zigzagging manoeuvres of terrestrial prey like hares or jackrabbits, and will not necessarily lead to a feasible flight path … Read more
For the first time ever, scientists at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and Stockholm University, have compiled a global analysis of all plant extinction records documented from across the world. This unique dataset published today in leading journal Nature, Ecology & Evolution, brings together data from fieldwork, literature and herbarium specimens, to show how many … Read more
Scientists at IESL-FORTH in Crete have created an atomtronic accelerator ring for neutral atoms. It is capable of accelerating Bose-Einstein Condensates up to hypersonic speeds and to transport them over record distances. This will enable novel quantum technologies capable of extremely sensitive rotation and gravity sensors. Atomtronics manipulates atoms much in the way that electronics … Read more
On June 10, 2019, the British academic journal Nature Astronomy published a major breakthrough in the measurement of interstellar magnetic field: “Magnetic Field Morphology in Interstellar Clouds with the Velocity Gradient Technique”. The result came from the University of Wisconsin-Madison Alex Lazarian Professor’s research team, including UW-Madison physics graduate student Yue Hu and astronomy graduate student … Read more
A new paper in The Condor: Ornithological Applications, published by Oxford University Press, finds that some songbird species benefit from the spread of fracking infrastructure while others decrease in population. The shale gas industry has grown rapidly in recent years and its resulting infrastructure can have negative consequences for native wildlife communities. While other studies have … Read more
Frogs aren’t meant to be able to store a mental map in their brains. 20 years ago, Lainy Day from the University of Mississippi, USA, tested the place memory of amphibians and lizards, but none appeared capable of forming complex spatial memories. Frogs’ brains were just too simple to carry a map it seemed. However, Sabrina Burmeister from … Read more
The researchers, from the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford, applied climate and ecological modelling to illustrate how the distribution of major bird groups is linked to climate change over millions of years.However, while past climate change often occurred slowly enough to allow species to adapt or shift habitats, current rates of climate change may be … Read more
The vast subtropical “gyres” – large systems of rotating currents in the middle of the oceans – cover 40 percent of the Earth’s surface and have long been considered biological deserts with stratified waters that contain very little nutrients to sustain life. These regions also are thought to be remarkably stable, yet scientists have documented … Read more