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.
For polar bears, the insulation provided by their fat, skin, and fur is a matter of survival in the frigid Arctic. For engineers, polar bear hair is a dream template for synthetic materials that might lock in heat just as well as the natural version. Now, materials scientists in China have developed such an insulator, … Read more
Just about everybody loves peanut butter. We put it on sandwiches and in candy, we use it to trick our dogs into taking their heartworm pills, and, when we have to, we bait mouse traps with it. But, as scientists learned when trapping rodents in the mountains of the Philippines, peanut butter isn’t for everyone. … Read more
Many people have heard of the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” a vast area of ocean between California and Hawaii where ocean currents concentrate plastic pollution. However, it turns out there may also be a lot of plastic far below the ocean’s surface. A newly-published study in Scientific Reports shows that plastic debris less than 5 millimeters across, … Read more
Researchers at Linköping University have examined how stress levels in dogs are influenced by lifestyle factors and by the people that the dogs live with. Previous work has shown that individuals of the same species can mirror each others’ emotional states. There is, for example, a correlation between long-term stress in children and in their … Read more
Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have come up with a way to manipulate tungsten diselenide (WSe2) –a promising two-dimensional material–to further unlock its potential to enable faster, more efficient computing, and even quantum information processing and storage. Their findings were published today in Nature Communications. Across the globe, researchers have been heavily focused on a class … Read more
Strange ring-shaped objects in a Bronze Age hillfort site represent a unique form of cereal-based product, according to a study published June 5, 2019 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Andreas G. Heiss of the Austrian Archaeological Institute (ÖAW-ÖAI) and colleagues. Agricultural practices are well known in the archaeological record, but less understood is how food … Read more
Thousands of annual heat-related deaths could be potentially avoided in major US cities if global temperatures are limited to the Paris Climate Goals compared with current climate commitments, a new study led by the University of Bristol has found. The research, published today in the journal Science Advances, is highly relevant to decisions about strengthening national … Read more
A long-held view that koalas get all their hydration from eating leaves has been overturned by new research published today from Dr Valentina Mella and colleagues at the University of Sydney. The study in PLOS ONE offers hope in the fight to conserve this threatened species, with researchers finding that koalas will regularly use artificial … Read more
Introducing predatory lizards to a set of small Caribbean islands causes resident lizard populations to change their behaviour, which alters the way lizards co-exist and leads to population extinctions. The study, reported in Nature, suggests that this effect could apply to predator-introduction scenarios on islands and lakes worldwide. Humans have accelerated the rate at which predators … Read more
Plate tectonics is a key geological process on Earth, shaping its surface, and making it unique among the planets in the Solar System. Yet, how plate tectonics emerged and which factors controlled its evolution remains controversial. Now, Stephan V. Sobolev from the German Research Centre for Geosciences GFZ and the University of Potsdam and Michael … Read more