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Categories: Ecology: Trees, Offbeat: General

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A new study expands the search for life beyond our solar system by indicating that 17 exoplanets (worlds outside our solar system) could have oceans of liquid water, an essential ingredient for life, beneath icy shells. Water from these oceans could occasionally erupt through the ice crust as geysers. The science team calculated the amount of geyser activity on these exoplanets, the first time these estimates have been made. They identified two exoplanets sufficiently close where signs of these eruptions could be observed with telescopes.

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A 20-year experiment in the Sierra Nevada confirms that different forest management techniques -- prescribed burning, restoration thinning or a combination of both -- are effective at reducing the risk of catastrophic wildfire in California. These treatments also improve forest health, making trees more resilient to stressors like drought and bark beetles, and they do not negatively impact plant or wildlife biodiversity within individual tree stands, the research found.

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Much of the discussion around implementing artificial intelligence systems focuses on whether an AI application is 'trustworthy': Does it produce useful, reliable results, free of bias, while ensuring data privacy? But a new article poses a different question: What if an AI is just too good?

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In a study that could help fill some holes in quantum theory, the team recreated a 'quantum bomb tester' in a classical droplet test.

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The Colorado Ultraviolet Transit Experiment (CUTE) spacecraft is about the size of a cereal box. It has also recorded incredibly detailed measurements of the atmospheres of planets hundreds of light-years from Earth.

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Artificial intelligence (AI) systems are often depicted as sentient agents poised to overshadow the human mind. But AI lacks the crucial human ability of innovation, researchers have found.

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A team of scientists had a close encounter with a non-human (aquatic) intelligence. The Whale-SETI team has been studying humpback whale communication systems in an effort to develop intelligence filters for the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. In response to a recorded humpback 'contact' call played into the sea via an underwater speaker, a humpback whale named Twain approached and circled the team's boat, while responding in a conversational style to the whale 'greeting signal.' During the 20-minute exchange, Twain responded to each playback call and matched the interval variations between each signal.

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While the lithium-ion batteries in disposable electronic cigarettes are discarded after a single use, they can continue to perform at high capacity for hundreds of cycles, according to a new study. The analysis highlights a growing environmental threat from these increasingly popular vape pens, which are not designed to be recharged.

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Why did professional skateboarding arise in southern California in the 1970s? Was it a coincidence, or was it a perfect storm of multiple factors? It's fairly well-known that a drought in southern California in the mid-1970s led to a ban on filling backyard swimming pools, and these empty pools became playgrounds for freestyle skateboarders in the greater Los Angeles area. But a new cross-disciplinary study shows that beyond the drought, it was the entanglement of environmental, economic and technological factors that led to the explosive rise of professional skateboarding culture in the 1970s.

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Researchers have described a Japanese mosasaur the size of a great white shark that terrorized Pacific seas 72 million years ago. The mosasaur was named for the place where it was found, Wakayama Prefecture. Researchers call it the Wakayama Soryu, which means blue dragon.

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A striking and extremely rare half-female, half-male bird has been spotted by a zoologist.

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Fairy circles, a nearly hexagonal pattern of bare-soil circular gaps in grasslands, initially observed in Namibia and later in other parts of the world, have fascinated and baffled scientists for years. New research suggests that all theories to date have overlooked the coupling between two robust mechanisms essential for understanding ecosystem response: phenotypic plasticity at the level of a single plant, and spatial self-organization in vegetation patterns at the level of a plant population.

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The current emoji library doesn't accurately represent the 'tree of life' and the breadth of biodiversity seen in nature according to a new analysis. A team of conservation biologists categorized emojis related to nature and animals and mapped them onto the phylogenetic tree of life. They found that animals are well represented by the current emoji catalog, whereas plants, fungi, and microorganisms are poorly represented. Within the animal kingdom, vertebrates were over-represented while arthropods were underrepresented with respect to their actual biodiversity.

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While auroras occur at high latitude, the associated phenomena Steve and the picket fence occur farther south and at lower altitude. Their emissions also differ from aurora. A physics graduate student has proposed a physical mechanism behind these emissions, and a rocket launch to test the theory. She argues that an electric field in the upper atmosphere parallel to Earth's magnetic field could explain the green picket fence spectrum and perhaps Steve and the enhanced aurora.

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In hopes of producing concrete structures that can repair their cracks, researchers are putting a new twist on an old trick for improving the durability of concrete. Fiber reinforcement has been around since the first masons were mixing horsehair into their mud. But this research team is taking this method to the next level by turning reinforcing fibers into a living tissue system that rushes concrete-healing bacteria to the site of cracks to repair the damage.

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New miniature virtual reality (VR) goggles provide more immersive experiences for mice living in laboratory settings. By more faithfully simulating natural environments, the researchers can more accurately and precisely study the neural circuitry that underlies behavior. Compared to current state-of-the-art systems, which simply surround mice with computer or projection screens, the new goggles provide a leap in advancement.

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A team has realized a key milestone in the quest for stable, scalable quantum computing. For the first time, the team has created a programmable, logical quantum processor, capable of encoding up to 48 logical qubits, and executing hundreds of logical gate operations. Their system is the first demonstration of large-scale algorithm execution on an error-corrected quantum computer, heralding the advent of early fault-tolerant, or reliably uninterrupted, quantum computation.

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According to anthropologists and geologists, it's time to acknowledge humans have become the dominant force shaping the moon's environment by declaring a new geological epoch for the moon: the Lunar Anthropocene. They argue the new epoch may have dawned in 1959 when the USSR's unmanned spacecraft Luna 2 alighted on the lunar surface.

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The complexity of living organisms is encoded within their genes, but where do these genes come from? Researchers resolved outstanding questions regarding the origin of small regulatory genes, and described a mechanism that creates their DNA palindromes. Under suitable circumstances, these palindromes evolve into microRNA genes.

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ChatGPT may do an impressive job at correctly answering complex questions, but a new study suggests it may be absurdly easy to convince the AI chatbot that it's in the wrong.