Phys.org

Experiencing a natural disaster in childhood can shape how business leaders approach workplace safety decades later, according to a new Concordia-led study. The study found that CEOs who have lived through events like major earthquakes, floods or hurricanes early in life run firms that prioritize safer workplaces. According to mandatory disclosure statistics supplied to the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), their companies report fewer work-related injuries and illnesses... Читать дальше...

On April 20, 2023, a juvenile great white shark (Carcharodon carcharias) measuring approximately 210 cm and weighing between 80 and 90 kg was incidentally caught by local fishermen off the coast of the eastern peninsula within the Spanish Exclusive Economic Zone. This rare encounter prompted researchers to dive deep into past records spanning from 1862 to 2023, compiling an extensive review now published in the open-access journal Acta Ichthyologica et Piscatoria.

New research led by the University of Michigan is painting a more comprehensive picture of how noise pollution is impacting birds around the world. "The major takeaway from this study is that anthropogenic noise affects many aspects of bird behavior, with some responses more directly tied to fitness," said Natalie Madden, lead author of the new study published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Deep soils found in forests may be less effective at storing carbon in the long term than previously assumed, potentially reducing the net climate benefits of tree planting, a University of Stirling professor has warned. Professor Jens-Arne Subke of the University's Faculty of Natural Sciences has co-authored a new commentary with Dr. Thomas Parker of the James Hutton Institute that builds on recent research led by Professor Subke that cautioned that the climate benefits of tree-planting could be... Читать дальше...

Scientists have uncovered new DNA-binding proteins from some of the most extreme environments on Earth and shown that they can improve rapid medical tests for infectious diseases. The work has been published in Nucleic Acids Research. The international research team, led by Durham University and working with partners in Iceland, Norway and Poland, analyzed genetic material from Icelandic volcanic lakes and deep-sea vents more than two kilometers below the surface of the North Atlantic Ocean.

It's February, and you grab a box of cheap Valentine's chocolate from the grocery store on your lunch break. Later, you're eating it at your office desk when you realize someone else is watching. Suddenly, you feel a flicker of embarrassment. You hide the box away, make a joke or quietly wish they hadn't noticed—not because the chocolate tastes bad, but because you don't want to be judged for choosing it.

School restrictive smartphone policies may save a small amount of money for schools, primarily by reducing the amount of time staff spend on managing phone-related behaviors, but they make little difference to pupils' quality of life or mental well-being, finds a health economic analysis, published in the online journal BMJ Mental Health.

A Dartmouth study finds that molecular hitchhikers living within bacteria can make their hosts extra resistant to medical treatment by corralling them into tightly packed groups. The findings introduce a previously unknown avenue through which bacterial infections can become more difficult to treat, the researchers say.

Farmers now have more reasons to consider rotating their crops, University of Alberta research shows. Widely used to restore soil health, the agricultural practice boosts the diversity of bacterial and fungal microbes that benefit soil function, according to a new study published in Nature Communications.

What was the political and economic importance of the ancient city Alexandria on the Tigris? How was the city laid out? And what does the material culture of the international trade hub look like? These are the questions that Stefan Hauser, professor of ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern archaeology at the University of Konstanz, and his British colleagues Jane Moon, Robert Killick and Stuart Campbell have been working on since 2016. With the help of modern geophysics methods, thousands of drone images and a systematic surface survey... Читать дальше...

If you've ever watched a glass blower at work, you've seen a material behaving in a very special way. As it cools, the viscosity of molten glass increases steadily but gradually, allowing it to be shaped without a mold. Physicists call this behavior a strong glass transition, and silica glass is the textbook example. Most polymer glasses behave very differently, and are known as fragile glass formers. Their viscosity rises much more steeply as temperature drops, and therefore they cannot be processed... Читать дальше...

Water is made of hydrogen and oxygen, and sometimes these atoms are slightly heavier than usual. These heavier forms are called isotopes. As water evaporates or moves through the atmosphere, the amount of these isotopes changes in predictable ways. This can act as a fingerprint, allowing researchers to trace the movement of water at global scales.

First names in Western countries today are more diverse than they were before early modern states evolved. This difference started to emerge in the 17th century in response to a change that took place in the naming system in large parts of Europe and the English-speaking world. Societies moved away from attributive last names—based on occupation or appearance like John (the) Short—to inherited surnames.

A new international study reveals the unexpected importance of acoustic communication in the evolution of boxfishes. This discovery offers new perspectives on the role of acoustic communication in the evolutionary history of numerous fish groups. The findings are published in the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society.

A century ago, the section of U.S. federal law governing public health and welfare was relatively small and loosely connected to the rest of the legal system. Today, it is one of the largest and most interconnected parts of the United States Code.

Neural crest cells are a population of stem cells that invade the embryo in early development. They play a big role in what you look like: the pigments of your eyes, of your skin, and the bone structure of your face are all neural crests. Inside your body, the neural crest will form the myelin sheath of your peripheral nervous system and the entire nervous system of your intestine, the so-called "second brain."

The standard cosmological model (present-day version of "Big Bang," called Lambda-CDM) gives an age of the universe close to 13.8 billion years and much younger when we explore the universe at high-redshift. The redshift of galaxies is produced by the expansion of the universe, which causes emitted wavelengths to lengthen and move toward the red end of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Researchers have significantly enhanced an artificial intelligence tool used to rapidly detect bacterial contamination in food by eliminating misclassifications of food debris that looks like bacteria. Current methods to detect contamination of foods such as leafy greens, meat and cheese, which typically involve cultivating bacteria, often require specialized expertise and are time-consuming—taking several days to a week.

A new software tool, ovrlpy, improves quality control in spatial transcriptomics, a key technology in biomedical research. Developed by the Berlin Institute of Health at Charité (BIH) in international collaboration, ovrlpy is the first tool to identify cell overlaps and folds in tissue sections, thereby reducing previously unrecognized sources of misinterpretations. The researchers have published their results in the journal Nature Biotechnology.

Scientific findings are in the news. They're cited on food packages and beverage labels. They are discussed in podcasts and argued over by politicians and pundits. And each finding sits within a specific frame. If researchers discover an intervention that affects how people spend discretionary income, for example, they could describe it as a method that increases savings or decreases spending. A medication could be said to increase attention spans or, conversely, decrease attention lapses.