Phys.org

One of the major challenges facing the agricultural sector is reserving the post-harvest quality of fruits. Significant economic losses can be caused by rapid ripening and deterioration in tropical fruits, such as bananas, which are among the world's most important staple crops. Bananas are highly prone to spoilage during transportation, storage, and marketing because of their high sensitivity to post-harvest degradation.

New UBC Okanagan research shows that wildfire can change how much water remains in streams during the driest months of the year.

For more than a decade, local and state laws have been increasingly focused on providing more protection and agency to workers fighting wage theft, according to new data published on LawAtlas.org and analysis in a new article in the American Journal of Public Health.

Today, as Greenland once again becomes a strategic prize, history seems poised to repeat itself. Staying with the Polar Inuit means refusing to speak of territory while erasing those who inhabit it.

In early January, a giant sinkhole formed at an intersection in the West Oak Lane neighborhood of North Philadelphia after a water main break. Just two weeks earlier, the city reopened a section of the Schuylkill River Trail in Center City that had been shut down for two months due to a sinkhole. Last summer, some residents of Point Breeze in South Philly also waited two months for a sinkhole on their block to be repaired.

The ocean is continuously ventilated when surface waters sink and transport, for example, oxygen and carbon to greater depths. The efficiency of this process can be estimated using the so-called water age, which describes the time elapsed since a water mass last was in contact with the atmosphere.

Pūkeko use sound elements to create calls and combine them to create complex call sequences in order to expand the range of options for expressing themselves—these are the findings of an international team including Konstanz researchers. Until now, this behavior had only been known in vocal learning animals, such as primates, whales or songbirds.

A new analysis of air quality data from the past 70 years shows that Canada's record wildfire smoke in 2023 is part of a broader, continent-wide trend toward smokier skies across North America.

Light is a universal stimulus that influences all living things. Cycles of light and dark help set the biological clocks for organisms ranging from single-celled bacteria to human beings. Some bacteria use photosynthesis to convert sunlight into energy just like plants, but other bacteria sense light for less well-known functions.

What effect does it have on our well-being when we put our smartphones aside for a while or otherwise disconnect from digital media? Alicia Gilbert, a research associate at the Department of Communication at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU), together with two colleagues from Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU), examined this question. The results of their study were published in Communication Research.