Tag: Science

Archaeologists analyzed trees engraved by the Indigenous Sámi of Arctic Europe, revealing the significance of these rare remnants of Sámi culture and the importance of preserving them from ongoing deforestation.

The changes in society and the phenomena surrounding us are becoming more unexpected and interconnected than ever before. This increasing complexity challenges strategic management, making it harder to predict trends and developments. According to a new study from the University of Vaasa, Finland, increased complexity demands new approaches to strategic management.

The international BIOCAL expedition, led by the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (ICTA-UAB), provided new evidence on the phenomenon of "atlantification" of the Arctic Ocean, a process related to climate change that involves the progressive invasion of Atlantic waters into the polar Arctic Ocean.

Forests with few tree species pose a considerably higher risk of being damaged, and the introduced lodgepole pine is especially vulnerable. This is the finding of a new study published in Ecosphere by researchers from Umeå University and the Swedish University of Agricultural Science in Uppsala. The results can be useful for preventing forest damage and financial losses related to the forest industry.

Ralstonia solanacearum is a soil-borne pathogen that devastates tomato and other Solanaceae crops globally. Traditional chemical controls have proven inadequate and environmentally damaging.

The human skin is home to a wide variety of bacteria. The composition of the community of bacteria—called the "skin microbiota"—has serious implications for skin health. A healthy balance between different species of bacteria on the skin often translates to healthy skin.

Quantitative disease resistance (QDR) is a complex but durable form of plant disease resistance that provides partial protection against a broad range of pathogens. Unlike qualitative resistance, driven by major resistance (R) genes, QDR is polygenic and manifests in various ways, such as delayed lesion development or reduced infection frequency.

Rice is a staple food crop for more than half the world's population, but most farmers don't grow high-yielding varieties because the seeds are too expensive. Researchers from the University of California's Davis and Berkeley campuses have identified a potential solution: activating two genes in rice egg cells that trigger their development into embryos without the need for fertilization, which would efficiently create high-yielding clonal strains of rice and other crops.

Noninvasive phenotyping has emerged as a vital tool in plant science, enabling the study of stress indicators without disrupting plant growth. While most studies have historically focused on analyzing stress responses in leaves, this novel research adopts a multi-organ view, assessing the dynamic interplay between leaves, stems, and roots when exposed to abiotic stress.

Normally found only in heavy metal bands or certain post-apocalyptic films, a "flame-throwing guitar" has now been spotted moving through space. Astronomers have captured movies of this extreme cosmic object using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and Hubble Space Telescope.

What Universal Impact has learnt from a year of producing the Research Reach Roundup newsletter

The latest Independent Social Research Foundation conference heard how refugees have died after becoming trapped at the border between Poland and Belarus

Alfred Hermida: ‘The scholars who write for The Conversation are taking on journalistic practices, guided and mentored by our team of professional journalists’

The Conversation UK, Curtis Brown and Faber are pleased to announce our three judges for The Conversation Prize for writers: Miriam Frankel, senior science editor at The Conversation UK, Priya Atwal, historian…

The 3MT® competition was sponsored by The Conversation’s Universal Impact subsidiary

Our articles are about 4,000 words in length, and have a distinct storytelling style with rounded characters and compelling narrative arcs.

Are you an academic keen to develop a writing career? Do you have a book idea that has the potential to be a nonfiction bestseller? The Conversation Insights, in partnership with talent agency The Curtis…

Getting into a taxi with a stranger at 11pm could be an awkward experience. The Conversation makes things easier though.

A new series delves into the big questions surrounding the nature of our universe.

The format produced a stimulating discussion, highly revelant to the work we do here at The Conversation.

A new study expands on recent research which suggests that oceanic crust accumulates in the mid-mantle. The new seismological constraints advance our understanding of thermo-chemical planetary evolution.

A recent study offers an alternative perspective on why some fault segments slide smoothly, whereas others get stuck and produce earthquakes.

Compound weather events—such as extreme cold or heat combined with severe dryness or precipitation—have a greater effect on wetland methane emissions than discrete weather extremes do.

Global ocean salinity products have become increasingly inconsistent since 2015, coinciding with a drift to higher salinity values in a number of Argo sensors.

Early in the pandemic, people living near oil and gas wells experienced higher rates of COVID-19 and related mortality compared with those with no exposure to well pollution.

New research shows that that less than 3% of all minerals are named after women, and progress has stalled since 1985.

在2022年汤加火山喷发后，对其火山口的测量持续了数月。

The Landslide Blog is written by Dave Petley, who is widely recognized as a world leader in the study and management of landslides. I was recently pondering some of the most interesting landslides on which I have worked during my career, and was reminded of the 8 October 2005 Hattian Bala landslide in Kashmir, Pakistan. […]

Tourism and biomass burning in the Southern Hemisphere are boosting black carbon levels and accelerating ice melt in Antarctica.

Online conferences simplify planning needs, lower barriers to participation for a global audience, and reduce environmental footprints, but scheduling, pacing, and moderating sessions can be challenging.

On November 1, 2024 we announced the publication of 33 rebuttals based on the report "Rebutting 33 False Claims About Solar, Wind, and Electric Vehicles" written by Matthew Eisenson, Jacob Elkin, Andy Fitch, Matthew Ard, Kaya Sittinger & Samuel Lavine and published by the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School in 2024. Below is the blog post version of rebuttal #3 based on Sabin's report. The amount of waste that solar panels ar

This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections Governments around the world face a conundrum. Virtually none are on track to meet their Paris climate commitments. That includes the United States, which committed to cut its emissions at least 50% below 2005 levels by 2030 but is only on track for 32-43% cuts by 2030 based on current policies. And many of those policies, like the clean energy incentives passed in the Inflation Reduction Act – the landmark 2022 climate law – could be rolled back by the incoming Republican administration and Congress, leaving the U.S. even further short of its climate targets.

A listing of 33 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, November 10, 2024 thru Sat, November 16, 2024. Story of the week Our Story of the Week is completely "meta" (no, not that Meta). It's about our exploring how to improve the utility of the feature you're reading right now. Sharp-eyed or possibly even distracted regular readers of our weekly climate news roundup will have noticed some distinct differences in the prior two editions to this latest, compared with the past 634 releases.  Typically our weekly listing of news and analysis centered on climate change has been displayed in chronological order, more-or-less following the sequence of original article publication dates. This is a perspective that sometimes affords readers a sense of the development of particlarly prominent stories, a useful view of major de

Open access notables Microbial solutions must be deployed against climate catastrophe, Peixoto et al., Nature Communications [comment]: The climate crisis is escalating. A multitude of microbe-based solutions have been proposed, and these technologies hold great promise and could be deployed along with other climate mitigation strategies. However, these solutions have not been deployed effectively at scale. To reverse this inaction, collaborators across different sectors are needed — from industry, funders and policymakers — to coordinate their widespread deployment with the goal of avoiding climate catastrophe. Thi

In April 2024 we announced the (renewed) collaboration between Gigafact and Skeptical Science to create fact briefs, short but credibly sourced summaries that offer “yes/no” answers in response to claims found online. Our initial plan had been to publish one fact brief per week on Saturdays but - as happens with many good plans - this turned out to be a somewhat too ambitious target for the project. We therefore took it more solwly and while we sometimes managed to publish a fact brief on consecutive Saturdays, the production rate turned out to be one fact brief every other week on average. Regardless of that, we published fact brief #20 on November 9 and thought that this little milestone might make for a good reason to write a short blog post about this project.

On November 1, 2024 we announced the publication of 33 rebuttals based on the report "Rebutting 33 False Claims About Solar, Wind, and Electric Vehicles" written by Matthew Eisenson, Jacob Elkin, Andy Fitch, Matthew Ard, Kaya Sittinger & Samuel Lavine and published by the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School in 2024. Below is the blog post version of rebuttal #2 based on Sabin's report. Roughly 40% of new solar panels in th

This is a re-post from The Climate Brink, and an excerpt from a much more detailed State of the Climate Q3 2024 report that I published over at Carbon Brief today. See that for more details on climate model/observation comparisons, sea ice extent, and other climate variables. The warmest year on record In my latest quarterly state of the climate assessment over at Carbon Brief, I analysed records from five different research groups that report global surface temperature records: NASA&rsquo

A listing of 33 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, November 3, 2024 thru Sat, November 9, 2024. Summary of this week's topics We asked Google's Gemini again for help categorizing the articles we shared during the week, but it couldn't do it this time around. So, we tried with OpenAI's ChatGPT instead, which is why the format is different compared to last week's. Now that we have two different versions of generated summaries, we'd like to know which format you prefer, so please let us know in the comments! International Climate Conferences and Agreements COP16 Outcomes and Challenges

Skeptical Science is partnering with Gigafact to produce fact briefs — bite-sized fact checks of trending claims. This fact brief was written by Sue Bin Park from the Gigafact team in collaboration with members from our team. You can submit claims you think need checking via the tipline. Is there an expert consensus on human-caused global warming? A number of peer-reviewed studies found nearly all climate scientists agree carbon dioxide from human activities is warming the planet by making it more difficult for heat to escape the atmosphere.

Open access notables Anthropogenic warming has ushered in an era of temperature-dominated droughts in the western United States, Zhuang et al., Science Advances: Historically, meteorological drought in the western United States (WUS) has been driven primarily by precipitation deficits. However, our observational analysis shows that, since around 2000, rising surface temperature and the resulting high evaporative demand have contributed more to drought severity (62%) and coverage (66%) over the WUS than precipitation deficit. This increase in evaporative demand during droughts, mostly attributable to anthropogenic warming according to analyses of both observations and climate model simulat