Human-made shelters don’t always keep creatures out of harm’s way. Can technology help design a better protect birds and possums?
Tag: research
It has been almost 12 years since the author left his hometown, which was at the center of the Syrian uprising. He’s made an academic career studying the impact of war on architecture and cities and researching acts of deliberate destruction.
Threatened with extinction, these little creatures, often feared, nonetheless provide us with significant ecological services.
Like many creatures, hummingbirds consume alcohol, which they’re able to metabolize quickly. A new study explains how they do it — and how it might just helps us understand why humans are so attracted to alcohol.
Traders in Bangladesh use lead chromate to enhance the appearance of turmeric roots. But the use of the chemical compound has now been linked to potential kidney and brain damage, and could cause developmental delays in children.
In 2020, Salt Lake City abruptly terminated its K9 unit for pursuing and apprehending suspects. Not much changed. In fact, a lot of the evidence around using police dogs is sketchy, and the practice has worrying connections with racial terror.
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A year after scientific academies called for rebuilding the country’s intellectual infrastructure, not much has changed, as many researchers fled the country and still aren’t planning on coming back to a landscape of destroyed equipment and underfunded programs.
Copenhagen is a great example of the positive impacts of pedestrianization: it provides €400,000 in profit for every kilometer of bike lane, and helps to decrease the deadly effects of air pollution.
To head-off a new spillover, scientists are combining a menagerie of animals, AI-driven models, and open communication.
On two or four legs, the robots from this MIT spin-off are among the most advanced in the world. And while their videos have conquered YouTube, their new playground is less spectacular, but just as strategic: logistics warehouses.
Scientists are increasingly seeing evidence of “dark extinction” in museum and botanical garden collections.
Everyone from Elon Musk to Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak to top Artificial Intelligence researchers have signed a public petition calling on a six-month moratorium on AI research. The ultimate decision will be left in the hands of humans, who are smart, but also vain and greedy.
The Indian authorities’ decision to hide factual reports on the land subsidence in Joshimath only furthers a sense of paranoia.
Applying Artificial intelligence to vocal cues is increasingly being used to detect a range of illnesses from COVID-19 to asthma and even depression. But such technology also comes with serious ethical concerns.
Struggling to save trapped and injured bats, scientists endure Russian shelling and accusations of spreading bioweapons.
Perpetuating the silence around sex and body issues can lead to misinterpreting historical events, and prevent us from taking action to right wrongs.
Bot did you get it?
Opening bee skulls. Electric shocks for cockroaches. Some researchers want to grant more invertebrates ethical consideration, questioning long-held assumptions on consciousness.
From self-induced trance to psychedelics, altered states of consciousness are experiencing a renewed interest in the scientific community for their therapeutic value.
Even as it celebrates this year’s literature prize going to Tanzanian author Abdulrazak Gurnah, Africa is again completely absent from the list of Nobel winners in science. In research as elsewhere, money is the key.
Police in the Netherlands were working at the time of the cyber attack on the investigation into the downing of flight MH17 from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur that was shot down on July 17, 2014 over eastern Ukraine.
‘Covidization’ of healthcare systems worldwide has led to rising mortality rates in pathologies like cancer, and more births in the Third World.
Local investors and entrepreneurs should learn from past mistakes to harvest the best results from the country’s decision to authorize marijuana production.
In far southern Argentina, writer Pablo Bizón recalls a chance encounter with a woman who followed her passion for science all the way from Kent State to Patagonia.
NEW DELHI — In an article in The Atlantic, Patrick Collison and Michael Nielsen express their concerns about the perceived slowdown of scientific progress. With “more scientists, more funding for science, and more scientific papers published than ever before,” they ask whether the rising investment in scientific research is yielding proportionately rising dividends, or whether we are “investing vastly more merely to sustain (or even see a decline in) the rate of scientific progress?” Yet, as they concede, it’s unclear how to measure the rate of scientific progress. Much ink has been spilled on the misplaced reification of the Nobel […]
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Is Empathy Determined By Genes?
Education and experience certainly play a role in how well an individual understands other people’s feelings. But there may be certain genetic predispositions at work too.
In spite of dynamic consumer figures, Latin America lags when it comes to investment in research and development, those crucial agents of social and economic development.
Once again, life imitates art. In his masterpiece 1984, George Orwell wrote, “Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered.” This quote has proven particularly relevant in recent weeks as activists in the West suddenly […]
GENEVA — There are those few rare researchers through the ages so devoted to science that they have used their own bodies as a laboratory for their experiments. After inventing the hallucinogenic substance LSD, the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann unintentionally, and then intentionally, took doses of the drug. In his autobiography published in 1980, Hofmann […]
GENEVA — At the Geneva University Hospitals, pneumologist Jean-Paul Janssens receives patients suffering from Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS). This rare disease is caused by the degeneration of motor neurons and kills patients within a few years. It is incurable. And yet patients often receive invitations from private clinics or doctors promising a miracle cure using […]
PARIS — Find the distribution of random paths on a directed graph. Of course, when you say it like that, such a problem will hardly excite the masses. But if you had managed to find this mysterious distribution, you would have obtained the PageRank algorithm. And if you have PageRank, you have Google, now the […]
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Russians Hack DNC, French Violence, Hot Damn
SPOTLIGHT: PALESTINIAN PRISON LETTER “My release is bound to happen, sooner or later … “ The most charismatic living Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti, who has been in an Israeli prison since 2002, offered a rare written exchange recently with Le Monde. Some see the 56-year-old, who was sentenced to five life imprisonments in 2004 for […]
Kazakhstan-born computer engineer Alexandra Elbakyan is now an international copyright outlaw. Her Sci-Hub website offers free access to millions of academic publications, a direct challenge to the entire publishing and academic establishment.
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China’s Seven Sins Of Academic Misconduct
BEIJING — Chinese academia has a widely acknowledged deficit in ethics and integrity. As part of President Xi Jinping’s broader national battle against corruption, Caixin reports that the Chinese Ministry of Education has published a draft law that identifies seven forms of academic misconduct. Here’s the list in the bill presented last week: plagiarism; tampering […]
PARIS — One of France’s state institutions is under fire for what critics call a textbook example of “biopiracy,” an issue that is also at the heart of a new bill the French Senate approved just last month. Last year, the country’s Research Development Institute (IRD) earned a patent on a molecule extracted from the […]
In the faraway verdant landscape of Easter Island, isolated in the Pacific Ocean, lives a rare type of bacteria that could be the key to curing a host of debilitating illnesses. Rapamycin, named for what the indigenous call the island it is found on — Rapa Nui — is used to produce an antibiotic named […]
Though their conclusions have been criticized as racist and fatalistic, a group of researchers argues that civil wars are more likely in countries where there are vast genetic, and therefore aesthetic, differences among populations.
Latin America is starting to measure happiness or “well-being” levels to gauge social trends and set public policy. Surprising results in Cali, Colombia.
BEIJING — “Innovation” has become a favorite word for Chinese headline writers. From individuals to private firms and even public institutions, everybody and everything aims to be an innovator. Though the OECD Economic Outlook 2014 predicted that China will probably become the country in the world which invests most in Research and Development (R&D) within […]