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Categories: Ecology: Endangered Species, Offbeat: Computers and Math

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Newly identified plant fossils found in Argentina suggest that a group of spurges long thought to have Asian origins may have first appeared in Gondwanan South America.

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Scientists have found that competition between strains of beneficial bacteria in the soil degrades the service that the bacteria provide to their hosts.

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Memories can be as tricky to hold onto for machines as they can be for humans. To help understand why artificial agents develop holes in their own cognitive processes, electrical engineers have analyzed how much a process called 'continual learning' impacts their overall performance.

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Climate change is affecting the types of plant varieties we can cultivate, as well as how and where we can do so. A new collection of articles in the open access journal PLOS Biology explores the twin challenges of engineering plants for resilience to climate change and enhancing their carbon-capture potential.

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Approximately 99.9% of fish and shark species are 'cold-blooded', meaning their body tissues generally match the temperature of the water they swim in -- but researchers have just discovered the mighty basking shark is a one-in-a-thousand exception. Instead, these sharks keep the core regions of their bodies warmer than the water like the most athletic swimmers in the sea such as great white sharks, mako sharks and tuna.

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Scientists have demonstrated experimentally a long-theorized relationship between electron and nuclear motion in molecules, which could lead to the design of materials for solar cells, electronic displays and other applications that can make use of this powerful quantum phenomenon.

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A new technique enables a human to efficiently fine-tune a robot that failed to complete a desired task with very little effort on the part of the human. Their system uses algorithms, counterfactual explanations, and feedback from the user to generate synthetic data it uses to quickly fine-tune the robot.

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For approximately 3,000 years, generations of green sea turtles have returned to the same seagrass meadows to eat. The fact that this stretches over many generations highlights the importance of protecting seagrass meadows along the coasts of North Africa.

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In a new study, researchers have found that the restoration efforts of the critically endangered species elkhorn coral depend largely on the animal's location, microbiome, and the right conditions to provide an abundance of food.

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Oceanic islands provide useful models for ecology, biogeography and evolutionary research. Many ground-breaking findings -- including Darwin's theory of evolution -- have emerged from the study of species on islands and their interplay with their living and non-living environment. Now, an international research team has investigated the flora of the Canary Island of Tenerife. The results were surprising: the island's plant-life exhibits a remarkable diversity of forms. But the plants differ little from mainland plants in functional terms. However, unlike the flora of the mainland, the flora of Tenerife is dominated by slow-growing, woody shrubs with a 'low-risk' life strategy.

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Plant diversity in nature is generally highest in tropical regions around the equator, with decreasing diversity closer to the poles. Researchers now show that the plant specimens housed in herbaria in Europe and North America are more comprehensive and diverse than the collections housed in the countries with more natural plant diversity.

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Many landscapes in the tropics consist of a mosaic of different types of land use. How people make use of these different ecosystems, with their particular plant communities, was unclear until now. Researchers, many of them from Madagascar, have now investigated this. When considering biodiversity, forests often get the most attention. But this research shows that rural households use a wide range of plant species and services provided by many nearby ecosystem types.

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Soft robotic grippers could greatly increase productivity in many fields. However, currently existing designs are overly complex and expensive. A research team has developed ROSE, a novel embracing soft gripper inspired by the blooming and closing of rose flowers. Bearing a surprisingly simple, inexpensive, and scalable design, ROSE can pick up many kinds of objects without damaging them, even in challenging environments and conditions.

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The future of electronics will be based on novel kinds of materials. Sometimes, however, the naturally occurring topology of atoms makes it difficult for new physical effects to be created. To tackle this problem, researchers have now successfully designed superconductors one atom at a time, creating new states of matter.

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Why do some people take part in genetic studies while others do not? The answer may lie within our genetic makeup. According to a groundbreaking study, people who participate in genetic studies are genetically more likely to do so, leaving detectable 'footprints' in genetics data. This breakthrough equips researchers with the ability to identify and address participation bias, a significant challenge in genetic research.

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For the first time, a person with an arm amputation can manipulate each finger of a bionic hand as if it was his own. Thanks to revolutionary surgical and engineering advancements that seamlessly merge humans with machines, this breakthrough offers new hope and possibilities for people with amputations worldwide. A study presents the first documented case of an individual whose body was surgically modified to incorporate implanted sensors and a skeletal implant. A.I. algorithms then translated the user's intentions into movement of the prosthesis.

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The same AI technology used to mimic human art can now synthesize artificial scientific data, advancing efforts toward fully automated data analysis.

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Over the past several years, researchers have been developing soft analogues of traditionally rigid robotic components. In fluid-driven robotic systems, pumps control the pressure or flow of the liquid that powers the robot's movement. Most pumps available today for soft robotics are either too large and rigid to fit onboard, not powerful enough for actuation or only work with specific fluids. Researchers have now developed a compact, soft pump with adjustable pressure flow versatile enough to pump a variety of fluids with varying viscosity, including gin, juice, and coconut milk, and powerful enough to power soft haptic devices and a soft robotic finger.

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Mars rovers have teams of human experts on Earth telling them what to do. But robots on lander missions to moons orbiting Saturn or Jupiter are too far away to receive timely commands from Earth. Researchers developed a novel learning-based method so robots on extraterrestrial bodies can make decisions on their own about where and how to scoop up terrain samples.

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Algorithms can predict what movies or songs you might like, but they can also predict which species a predator would most likely eat. Researchers have been using machine learning to identify species interactions, and can predict which species are most likely to go extinct, so that intervention can be planned before this happens.