Phys.org

A new international study led by Lund University examines what happened to population levels after the Kikai-Akahoya volcanic eruption in prehistoric Japan. The results paint a more complex picture than what had previously been believed. The paper is published in the journal Science Advances.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) researchers are developing three-dimensional simulations to examine how a nuclear device could be used to deflect or potentially disrupt an asteroid threatening Earth.

Qubits, the quantum equivalent of digital bits, are fragile and prone to errors. That makes building reliable quantum computers extremely difficult. One fix has been to use traditional magic state distillation, which filters out flaws, but it is extremely resource-intensive.

When a massive environmental disaster strikes, do societies simply collapse and disappear? Or do people find a way to adapt, rebuild and recover?

When someone is badly injured, doctors urgently need two facts: the patient's blood type, so that a transfusion is safe, and their hematocrit, the share of the blood made up of red blood cells, which reveals blood loss or anemia. Hospitals measure both with large machines that need electricity and trained staff, which are often unavailable in ambulances, disaster zones or remote clinics.

The ocean beneath Saturn's moon Enceladus lies under kilometers of ice, but some of its contents do reach the surface. Jets near the south pole spray out water vapor and icy particles, offering a way to investigate the hidden ocean without drilling down to it.

When scientists talk about scavengers, you might imagine an animal sniffing out or stumbling across a carcass, eating as much as possible and slinking away.

As human activity has increased temperatures globally, determining the costs directly incurred by climate change is challenging. The effects of climate change on extreme weather events—such as hurricanes and heat waves—can be locally specific and variable, and observations and climate modeling might not accurately capture those effects.

Astronomers using China's FAST radio telescope have discovered a compact cloud of hydrogen with no visible stars or galaxy around it. This could be one of the strongest candidates yet for an isolated "dark galaxy," containing nearly 500,000 times the sun's mass in neutral hydrogen. The discovery paper was posted to the arXiv preprint server on Sept. 24.

With about 30 visual pigments, compared to just three in humans, mantis shrimp possess a visual system that remains a mystery. Researchers from ULiège and Humboldt University in Berlin have, for the first time, analyzed these pigments one by one and discovered that some detect red light that very few animals can perceive. This finding, published in Science Advances, has potential applications in optogenetics.

In a discovery that could offer a new way to control quantum properties in two-dimensional materials, researchers at Cornell have found that electrically sliding the layers of ultrathin graphene can switch the material between distinct magnetic states that persist even after the voltage is removed.

Poor access to health care, limited local influence over research priorities and an unequal distribution of scientific benefits are undermining public confidence in science, experts warn, following the release of a global trust survey.

New research from Michigan State University finds that popular music has gradually become less explicit about emotion and relationships—both across generations of artists and within artists' careers.

The strong El Niño currently under way in the Pacific Ocean raises the specter of marine heat waves and coral bleaching once again threatening Australia's iconic Great Barrier Reef. And now new research has revealed the complex interplay of atmospheric patterns and weather systems thousands of kilometers apart that can combine in a recipe potentially fatal for coral reefs.

Alzheimer's disease is best known for its effects on memory and cognition, but the disease also involves changes in how brain cells produce and use energy. Mitochondria, the structures that supply much of a cell's energy, can become dysfunctional in Alzheimer's disease. At the same time, changes in blood flow and oxygen availability may place additional demands on brain tissue. Understanding how these processes interact could help researchers characterize metabolic changes that accompany the disease.

Naming a chicken and describing its favorite habits is enough to make preschoolers choose poultry less often. This effect translates into verbal declarations and actual meal choices, but food preferences still most often win over empathy, according to a new paper by researchers from SWPS University.

What happens when political violence is presented as a justified response to threat or injustice coming from an out-group? A study by Ursula Daxecker, director at the Max Planck Institute for Politics and Social Science in Göttingen, and Neeraj Prasad of the University of Amsterdam, published in The Journal of Politics, finds that legitimizing violence can increase public approval of both violence and the parties involved in it. Among BJP supporters, the effect went even further: when violence was portrayed as justified, they were less approving of a peaceful response by their own party.

Scientists have discovered a gene that determines whether Japanese snails develop shells that are left- or right-coiling—with implications for understanding the underlying handedness of our own bodies. The researchers from the University of Nottingham and Tohoku University studied wild Euhadra snails in Japan to understand what makes one snail a mirror image of another.

The European rabbit is a common sight in the British countryside today. Yet it was not always so. They are not native to the British Isles and are one of the most devastating invasive species.

A University of Missouri astronomer is leading a team of 130 researchers from 62 institutions—including NASA, the California Institute of Technology, Princeton University and Harvard University—on an ambitious mission to capture an unprecedented view of the early universe.