Showing 20 articles starting at article 541

< Previous 20 articles        Next 20 articles >

Categories: Mathematics: Modeling, Offbeat: Earth and Climate

Return to the site home page

     (via sciencedaily.com) 

What drives crocodile evolution? Is climate a major factor or changes in sea levels? Determined to find answers to these questions, researchers discovered that while changing temperatures and rainfall had little impact on the crocodiles' gene flow over the past three million years, changes to sea levels during the Ice Age had a different effect.

     (via sciencedaily.com) 

In the 'butterfly effect,' an insect can flap its wings and create a microscopic change in initial conditions that leads to a hurricane halfway around the world. This chaos is seen everywhere, from weather to labor markets to brain dynamics. And now researchers explored how to turn the twisting, fractal structures behind the science into jewelry with 3D printing. The jewelry shapes are based on the Chua circuit, a simple electronic system that was the first physical, mathematical, and experimental proof of chaos.

     (via sciencedaily.com) 

A researcher has created a computer reconstruction of a virus, including its complete native genome. Although other researchers have created similar reconstructions, this is believed to be the first to replicate the exact chemical and 3D structure of a 'live' virus.

     (via sciencedaily.com) 

Antarctica is a tough place to work, for obvious reasons -- it's bitterly cold, remote, and wild. However, it's one of the best places in the world to hunt for meteorites. That's partly because Antarctica is a desert, and its dry climate limits the degree of weathering the meteorites experience. On top of the dry conditions, the landscape is ideal for meteorite hunting: the black space rocks stand out clearly against snowy fields.

     (via sciencedaily.com)     Original source 

Research into how echidnas might respond to a warming climate has found clever techniques used by the animal to cope with heat, including blowing bubbles to wet its nose tip, with the moisture then evaporating and cooling its blood.

     (via sciencedaily.com) 

Artificial intelligence (AI) may help improve care for patients who show up at the hospital with acute chest pain, according to a new study.

     (via sciencedaily.com) 

Using artificial intelligence, engineers have simplified and reinforced models that accurately calculate the fine particulate matter (PM2.5) -- the soot, dust and exhaust emitted by trucks and cars that get into human lungs -- contained in urban air pollution.

     (via sciencedaily.com) 

Disturbances to Earth's magnetic field can lead birds astray -- a phenomenon scientists call 'vagrancy' -- even in perfect weather, and especially during fall migration. While other factors such as weather likely play bigger roles in causing vagrancy, researchers found a strong correlation between birds that were captured far outside of their expected range and the geomagnetic disturbances that occurred during both fall and spring migrations.

     (via sciencedaily.com) 

A study examined the effects of anthropogenic noise on cognition, beak color, and growth in the zebra finch. Researchers first tested adult zebra finches on a battery of cognition assays while they were exposed to playbacks of urban noise versus birds tested without noise. Urban noises caused the birds to take longer to learn a novel foraging task and to learn an association-learning task. Urban noise exposure also resulted in treated males to develop less bright beak coloration, and females developed beaks with brighter orange coloration, respectively, than untreated birds. Findings suggest that urban noise exposure may affect morphological traits, such as beak color, which influence social interactions and mate choice.

     (via sciencedaily.com) 

Combing computational physics with experimental data, researchers have developed computer models for determining a drug candidate's ability to target and bind to proteins within cells.

     (via sciencedaily.com) 

Only a fraction of the 7,000 to 8,000 languages spoken around the world benefit from modern language technologies like voice-to-text transcription, automatic captioning, instantaneous translation and voice recognition. Researchers want to expand the number of languages with automatic speech recognition tools available to them from around 200 to potentially 2,000.

     (via sciencedaily.com) 

Researchers are employing sparsification, a method from graph theory and computer science, to identify which links in a network are the most important for the spread of disease.

     (via sciencedaily.com) 

A new paper presents a mathematical model for the motion of bacteria that includes cell division and death, the basic ingredients of the cell cycle.

     (via sciencedaily.com) 

Taking Hong Kong's famous Peak Tram up to Victoria Peak offers stunning views of its central business district, Victoria Harbor, and the surrounding islands. But a team of international scientists has recently discovered that the trams winding journey provides a previously unrecognized situation where our vertical perception gets distorted.

     (via sciencedaily.com) 

New research shows that glassfrogs -- known for their highly transparent undersides and muscles -- perform their 'disappearing acts' by stowing away nearly all of their red blood cells into their uniquely reflective livers. The work could lead to new avenues of research tied to blood clots, which the frogs somehow avoid while packing and unpacking about 90 percent of their red blood cells into their livers on a daily basis.

     (via sciencedaily.com) 

Researchers have developed a novel machine-learning framework that uses scene descriptions in movie scripts to automatically recognize different characters' actions. Applying the framework to hundreds of movie scripts showed that these actions tend to reflect widespread gender stereotypes, some of which are found to be consistent across time.

     (via sciencedaily.com) 

A small tax on robots, as well as on trade generally, will help reduce income inequality in the U.S., according to economists.

     (via sciencedaily.com) 

New research reveals that the animals that perceive time the fastest are those that are small, can fly, or are marine predators.

     (via sciencedaily.com) 

An international research team examines a rich fossil bed in the renowned Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park in Nevada's Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest, where many 50-foot-long ichthyosaurs (Shonisaurus popularis) lay petrified in stone. The study offers a plausible explanation as to how at least 37 of these marine reptiles came to meet their ends in the same locality -- a question that has vexed paleontologists for more than half a century. The research presents evidence that these ichthyosaurs died at the site in large numbers because they were migrating to this area to give birth for many generations across hundreds of thousands of years.

     (via sciencedaily.com) 

Researchers suggest how scientists can circumvent the need for massive data sets to forecast extreme events with the combination of an advanced machine learning system and sequential sampling techniques.