Biology: Marine Biology: Zoology Ecology: Sea Life Geoscience: Oceanography Offbeat: Earth and Climate Offbeat: Plants and Animals
Published

Barnacles may help reveal location of lost Malaysia Airlines flight MH370      (via sciencedaily.com)     Original source 

Geoscientists have created a new method that can reconstruct the drift path and origin of debris from flight MH370, an aircraft that went missing over the Indian Ocean in 2014 with 239 passengers and crew. 

Biology: Marine Ecology: Animals Ecology: Extinction Ecology: Sea Life Environmental: Ecosystems Geoscience: Earth Science
Published

Vegetarian diet of corals explains age-old mystery dating back to Darwin      (via sciencedaily.com)     Original source 

A new study has revealed why coral reefs can thrive in seemingly nutrient poor water, a phenomenon that has fascinated scientists since Charles Darwin.

Computer Science: Artificial Intelligence (AI) Computer Science: General Offbeat: Computers and Math
Published

How artificial intelligence gave a paralyzed woman her voice back      (via sciencedaily.com) 

Researchers have developed a brain-computer interface (BCI) that has enabled a woman with severe paralysis from a brainstem stroke to speak through a digital avatar.

Biology: Marine Biology: Zoology Ecology: Sea Life Offbeat: Plants and Animals
Published

This fish doesn't just see with its eyes -- it also sees with its skin      (via sciencedaily.com)     Original source 

Without a mirror, it can be hard to tell if you're blushing, or have spinach in your teeth. But one color-changing fish has evolved a clever way to keep watch on the parts of itself that lie outside its field of view -- by sensing light with its skin.

Chemistry: Inorganic Chemistry Computer Science: Artificial Intelligence (AI) Computer Science: General
Published

Sharing chemical knowledge between human and machine      (via sciencedaily.com) 

Researchers have developed a platform that uses artificial neural networks to translate chemical structural formulae into machine-readable form. With this platform, they have created a tool with which this information from scientific publications can be automatically fed into databases. Until now, this had to be done literally by hand and was time-consuming.

Biology: Evolutionary Biology: Marine Ecology: Invasive Species Ecology: Sea Life Paleontology: Fossils Paleontology: General
Published

The modern sea spider had started to diversify by the Jurassic, study finds      (via sciencedaily.com)     Original source 

An extremely rare collection of 160-million-year-old sea spider fossils from Southern France are closely related to living species, unlike older fossils of their kind.

Computer Science: Artificial Intelligence (AI) Computer Science: General
Published

A roadmap to help AI technologies speak African languages      (via sciencedaily.com) 

From text-generating ChatGPT to voice-activated Siri, artificial intelligence-powered tools are designed to aid our everyday life -- as long as you speak a language they support. These technologies are out of reach for billions of people who don't use English, French, Spanish or other mainstream languages, but researchers in Africa are looking to change that. Scientists now draw a roadmap to develop better AI-driven tools for African languages.

Biology: Marine Ecology: Sea Life Geoscience: Environmental Issues Geoscience: Oceanography
Published

Microplastics found embedded in tissues of whales and dolphins      (via sciencedaily.com)     Original source 

Microscopic plastic particles have been found in the fats and lungs of two-thirds of the marine mammals in a graduate student's study of ocean microplastics. The presence of polymer particles and fibers in these animals suggests that microplastics can travel out of the digestive tract and lodge in the tissues.

Computer Science: Artificial Intelligence (AI) Mathematics: Modeling
Published

Turning ChatGPT into a 'chemistry assistant'      (via sciencedaily.com) 

Developing new materials requires significant time and labor, but some chemists are now hopeful that artificial intelligence (AI) could one day shoulder much of this burden. In a new study, a team prompted a popular AI model, ChatGPT, to perform one particularly time-consuming task: searching scientific literature. With that data, they built a second tool, a model to predict experimental results.

Biology: Marine Ecology: Sea Life
Published

Gray whales feeding along the Pacific Northwest coast are smaller than their counterparts who travel farther to forage      (via sciencedaily.com)     Original source 

Gray whales that spend their summers feeding off the coast of Oregon are shorter than their counterparts who travel north to the Arctic for food, new research shows.

Ecology: Sea Life Environmental: Biodiversity
Published

App-based tool quantifies pesticide toxicity in watersheds; identifies mitigation opportunities      (via sciencedaily.com)     Original source 

Pesticides are a leading source of chemical hazards in aquatic environments. Researchers have introduced a new tool to help evaluate toxicity at high resolution and suggests that targeting a small number of pesticides in a few watersheds could significantly reduce aquatic toxicity in California's agricultural centers.

Biology: Marine Ecology: Sea Life Environmental: Biodiversity Environmental: Ecosystems Geoscience: Oceanography
Published

Top fish predators could suffer wide loss of suitable habitat by 2100 due to climate change      (via sciencedaily.com)     Original source 

A study of 12 species of highly migratory fish predators -- including sharks, tuna, and billfish such as marlin and swordfish -- finds that most of them will encounter widespread losses of suitable habitat and redistribution from current habitats in the Northwest Atlantic Ocean (NWA) and the Gulf of Mexico (GOM) by 2100. These areas are among the fastest warming ocean regions and are projected to increase between 1-6°C (+1-10°F) by the end of the century, a sign of climate-driven changes in marine ecosystems.

Biology: Marine Ecology: Sea Life
Published

Protected sex: Grouper mating calls in marine managed areas      (via sciencedaily.com)     Original source 

Groupers produce distinct sounds associated with courtship, territoriality or reproduction. An autonomous mobile wave glider and passive acoustics were deployed to survey two marine protected areas on the western shelf of Puerto Rico to locate spawning aggregations of two commercially important species -- the Nassau and red hind groupers. Findings show these sites are critical habitat for both species and multiple previously unknown grouper species, which highlight the importance of expanding existing seasonal regulations.

Biology: Marine Ecology: Extinction Ecology: Sea Life Environmental: Ecosystems Geoscience: Environmental Issues Geoscience: Oceanography
Published

Land-sea relationship is major driver of coral reef health outcomes      (via sciencedaily.com)     Original source 

New research indicates that mitigating both local land and sea-based human impacts, especially in terms of pollutants and over-fishing, provides coral reef ecosystems with the best opportunity to persist under climate change. Along some highly populated areas on the shorelines of Hawai'i, wastewater pollution and urban runoff combine with fishing pressures to put immense stress on coral reefs.

Biology: Marine Ecology: Sea Life Environmental: Biodiversity Geoscience: Environmental Issues
Published

Marine protected areas overwhelmingly manage with climate change in mind      (via sciencedaily.com)     Original source 

Scientific findings don't always translate neatly into actions, especially in conservation and resource management. The disconnect can leave academics and practitioners disheartened and a bit frustrated.

Biology: Marine Ecology: Extinction Ecology: General Ecology: Research Ecology: Sea Life Environmental: Ecosystems
Published

Pause in recent coral recovery on much of Great Barrier Reef      (via sciencedaily.com) 

In-water monitoring shows hard coral cover across the Great Barrier Reef remains at similar levels to that recorded in 2022, with small decreases in the Northern, Central and Southern regions. AIMS' Annual Summary Report on Coral Reef Condition for 2022/23 found that while some reefs continued to recover, their increased hard coral cover was offset by coral loss on other reefs. Most reefs underwent little change in coral cover.

Computer Science: Artificial Intelligence (AI) Computer Science: General Computer Science: Quantum Computers Energy: Technology Engineering: Nanotechnology Offbeat: Computers and Math Physics: Quantum Computing Physics: Quantum Physics
Published

Quantum material exhibits 'non-local' behavior that mimics brain function      (via sciencedaily.com) 

New research shows that electrical stimuli passed between neighboring electrodes can also affect non-neighboring electrodes. Known as non-locality, this discovery is a crucial milestone toward creating brain-like computers with minimal energy requirements.

Biology: Marine Ecology: Extinction Ecology: Sea Life Offbeat: Paleontology and Archeology Offbeat: Plants and Animals Paleontology: General
Published

Whale-like filter-feeding discovered in prehistoric marine reptile      (via sciencedaily.com)     Original source 

A remarkable new fossil from China reveals for the first time that a group of reptiles were already using whale-like filter feeding 250 million years ago.