Science & Technology

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Exploring astronomical evolution with SPICA

Understanding the origin and evolution of galaxies, stars and planets are among the most fundamental objectives of Astronomy. Although a suite of space and ground-based telescopes have allowed impressive advances in recent years, our knowledge is still far from complete. In a suite of whitepapers for PASA we explore some of the key scientific breakthroughs that could be made with the Space Infrared Telescope for Cosmology and Astrophysics (SPICA).

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Resilience Frontiers 2017

From the 20th – 23rd August, Stockholm became the capital of Global Sustainability as it hosted more than 1000 experts from around the world at Resilience 2017, an international science conference on Resilience Frontiers for Global Sustainability.…

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Nanofibres in a spin

Nano-materials are seen as the future in fields as diverse as medicine, technology and chemistry, but the methods used to create them are not yet fully understood.…

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The Implications of Cosmic Silence

In a paper published Aug. 3 in the International Journal of Astrobiology, Daniel Whitmire applying a statistical concept called the principle of mediocrity and argues that if we are typical, it follows that species such as ours go extinct soon after attaining technological knowledge.

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Are we publishing too much?

The above figure shows that literature is growing faster than the value of money. While the value of $1.00 in 1990 was worth between $1.67 and $2.50 in 2010, ACL and PUBMED are growing at a rate of three to six times per decade.…

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Fantastic beasts and why to conserve them

Beliefs in magical creatures can impact the protection of biodiversity and the field of conservation needs to consider them seriously, researchers have warned. According to a new study, by the University of Leeds and Cardiff University, the conservation of threatened species has much to gain from acknowledging people’s spiritual, magical and cultural beliefs.

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Uncovering the status of the Arabian tahr, an icon of the Hajar Mountains of Oman and the UAE

Species distribution models are a method used by conservationists to make inferences from limited data sets, in a format that can facilitate conservation management across landscapes. They are particularly suitable for filling gaps in knowledge of scarce populations and those inhabiting inaccessible terrain. The Arabian tahr is one such species. Inhabiting the precipitous cliffs of north eastern Arabia, the species is rarely seen and poorly known.

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‘Lost city’ used 500 years of soil erosion to benefit crop farming

Researchers at the University of York working on a 700-year old abandoned agricultural site in Tanzania have shown that soil erosion benefitted farming practices for some 500 years. The study, published in Quaternary Research, shows that historical practices of capturing soils that were eroded from the hillside could be valuable to modern day farming techniques.

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Intrepid ecologists find treasure of birdlife

In a recent study published in Bird Conservation International, authors from Perth Edith Cowan University have carried out research in Papua New Guinea to understand how logging and palm oil plantations is affecting rare bird numbers.…

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Understanding Vortex Reconnection

A new paper published recently in Journal of Fluid Mechanics (JFM) looked at numerical simulations of a blade slicing through a vortex and understanding how this action affects the flow field could lead to the design of safer helicopters.

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World’s biggest shark goes to school, thanks to 3D printing

University of Florida researchers are taking down the Plexiglas walls between museum collections and K-12 classrooms with an educational program that uses 3-D printed fossils and hands-on lessons to spark young learners’ interest in science, technology, engineering and math. The researchers published an assessment of their pilot lesson plan in “Paleontological Society Special Publications” The study '3-D Fossils for K-12 Education: A Case Example Using the Giant Extinct Sharkcarcharocles Megalodon'

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How do birds fly?

When a bird flaps its wings it generates thrust force which keeps it airborne, but how does this actually work? And how hard and how fast should they flap?

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2016 JMR Paper of the Year awarded

Gayle and Cook have won the 2016 JMR Paper of the Year, for the development and modeling of an indentation method for mapping the time-dependent viscoelastic and time-independent plastic properties of polymeric-based materials.

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Humanoid Multi-Event Robot Athletes

Jacky Baltes, guest Editor for Knowledge Engineering Review, introduces the special issue on Humanoid Multi-Event Robot Athletes The FIRA HuroCup competition was started in 2002 to provide a challenging and state of the art benchmark problem for humanoid robots.…

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An investigation of the fatal 1985 Manchester Airport B737 fire

The paper, ‘Numerical investigation of the fatal 1985 Manchester Airport B737 fire’ published in the Aeronautical Journal, Vol 121, Number 1237, pp 287-319, 2017 by Edwin R Galea, Zhaozhi Wang,  and Fuchen Jia, provides an explanation for why 55 people lost their lives in the B737 fire at Manchester airport in 1985.…

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Solving the mystery of Antarctica’s ‘Blood Falls’

A study published in the Journal of Glaciology has solved a 100 year-old mystery involving a waterfall in Antarctica known as Blood Falls. New evidence links Blood Falls, a red waterfall in Antarctica, to a large source of salty water that may have been trapped underneath Taylor Glacier for more than a million years.

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Kids’ Wildlife Preferences Differ from Island to Mainland

Growing up on an island or mainland location can shape the way children think about wildlife, including which species they prefer, according to North Carolina State University research, published in Environmental Conservation. Comparison surveys of children living in the Bahamas and in North Carolina reveal significant differences and potential challenges for wildlife-conservation efforts on islands.

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Introducing Quaternary Research – an interdisciplinary journal

Quaternary Research has a nearly 50-year, distinguished history of publishing articles of interdisciplinary interest on the evidence for Quaternary climatic and environmental change, as well as its effects on landscapes, ecosystems, and human populations, and many significant articles have been published in the journal over the years.

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Celebrate Pi Day with Forum of Mathematics

Pi Day is celebrated around the world on the 14th day of the 3rd month. The date representation of 3.14 is the most basic ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, but it also has this going for it: Which, of course, means that mathematicians everywhere love their pi.…

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World Wildlife Day 2017: Survey of uncharted Myanmar region finds Southeast Asia’s last great wilderness

Photo credit: Karen Wildlife Conservation Initiative (KWCI).   Yangon, Myanmar (3 March) – The Karen Wildlife Conservation Initiative (KWCI), with financial support from WWF and other partners, have conducted six camera traps surveys in the hill forests of Northern Karen State, Myanmar, previously inaccessible to biologists and conservationists for security and political reasons. …

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Climate change helped kill off super-sized Ice Age animals in Australia

A new study in Paleobiology has compared the diet of a variety of Australian megafaunal herbivores from the period when they were widespread (350,000 to 570,000 years ago) to a period when they were in decline (30,000 to 40,000 years ago) by studying their fossil teeth. The analysis suggests that climate change had a significant impact on their diets and may well have been a primary factor in their extinction.

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Deceived by Orchids

The Institute for Historical Research recently selected ten of the “most interesting articles and books” of 2016 and I was delighted to find my BJHS paper Deceived by Orchids: Sex, Science, Fiction and Darwin among them.…

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Two glaciers collapse in western Tibet

A glacier near Lake Aru in western Tibet collapsed on 17 July 2016. Now the Journal of Glaciology publishes the first scientific account of this cryospheric disaster in which nine local yak herders were killed. Eyewitnesses reported that the episode lasted only four to five minutes. More than 70 million cubic metres of ice tumbled down a mountain valley, spreading over a distance of 6 kilometres onto the lowland below.

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