Tag: science news

More than a third of urban Chinese living in sinking cities, study finds

May 14, 2024 admin

People walk on an overpass past office towers in the Lujiazui financial district of Shanghai, China October 17, 2022. | Photo Credit: Reuters Across the world, many cities are slowly sinking. Most are on the coast, including tropical megacities like Jakarta in Indonesia or Manila in the Philippines, or places like New Orleans, Vancouver or…

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Africa dramatically dried out 5,500 years ago

May 9, 2024 admin

Around five and half millenia ago, northern Africa went through a dramatic transformation. The Sahara desert expanded and grasslands, forests and lakes favoured by humans disappeared. Humans were forced to retreat to the mountains, the oases, and the Nile valley and delta. As a relatively large and dispersed population was squeezed into smaller and more…

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Why NASA’s Mars Sample Return mission has a shaky future

May 1, 2024 admin

A critical NASA mission in the search for life beyond Earth, Mars Sample Return, is in trouble. Its budget has ballooned from US$5 billion to over $11 billion, and the sample return date may slip from the end of this decade to 2040. The mission would be the first to try to return rock samples…

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Sex differences don’t disappear as a country’s equality develops: study

April 30, 2024 admin

The more gender equal a society is, the more similar men and women will be, adopting more similar interests, personality traits and behavioural patterns. Or so many people seem to believe. Statements like this might sound like truisms, but science shows reality may be more complicated. Several studies have found that some psychological sex differences, such as those…

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The mind-bending maths that could stop ‘quantum hackers’

April 30, 2024 admin

Image for Representation | Photo Credit: Getty Images/iStockphoto Imagine the tap of a card that bought you a cup of coffee this morning also let a hacker halfway across the world access your bank account and buy themselves whatever they liked. Now imagine it wasn’t a one-off glitch, but it happened all the time: imagine…

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Why do we shiver when it is cold?

April 30, 2024 admin

A: Shivering (physical thermogenesis) occurs when the tension of the skeletal muscles rises beyond a critical level or when the body temperature falls below the critical level of 37.1 degrees C. Shivering is actually an involuntary contraction of muscles to maintain body temperature during fever and in cool environments. It involves oscillating skeletal-muscle contractions that…

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Longer-lasting ozone holes over Antarctica expose seal pups and penguin chicks to much more UV

April 26, 2024 admin

Over the last 25 years, the ozone hole which forming over Antarctica each spring has started to shrink. But over the last four years, even as the hole has shrunk it has persisted for an unusually long time. Our new research found that instead of closing up during November it has stayed open well into December. This…

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Argentine scientists find speedy 90-million-year-old herbivore dinosaur

April 26, 2024 admin

Argentine palaeontologist Sebastian Rozadilla holds a fossil of the Chakisaurus nekul, an newly-discovered herbivorous dinosaur that lived about 90 million years ago in the Patagonia region, at the Buenos Aires’ Natural Science museum, in Buenos Aires, Argentina April 24, 2024. | Photo Credit: Reuters Palaeontologists from Argentina announced the discovery of a new medium-sized herbivorous…

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Understanding of Earth’s flowering plants blossoms in genome study

April 25, 2024 admin

Flowering plants – from corn, wheat, rice and potatoes to maple, oak, apple and cherry trees as well as roses, tulips, daisies and dandelions and even the corpse flower and voodoo lily – are cornerstones of Earth’s ecosystems and essential for humankind. | Photo Credit: Reuters Flowering plants – from corn, wheat, rice and potatoes…

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Huge energetic flare from magnetic neutron star detected

April 25, 2024 admin

An artist’s impression of a type of neutron star called a magnetar. Magnetars are the cosmic objects with the strongest magnetic fields ever measured in the universe. | Photo Credit: Reuters Magnetars are among the universe’s most extreme objects – a class of the compact stellar remnants called neutron stars that possess immensely strong magnetic…

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