For home gardeners and farmers, herbivorous insects present a major threat to their hard work and crop yields. The predator insects that feed on these bugs emit odors that pests can sense, which changes the pests’ behavior and even their physiology to avoid being eaten. With bugs becoming more resistant to traditional pesticides, researchers now […]

A new study out today provides the most compelling evidence to-date that China is deliberately reducing its population of Uyghurs – a Muslim minority ethnic group – through enforced birth control, forced displacement of citizens and internment in sinister ‘re-education camps’ . World-leading expert on the topic and lead author of the new paper, Dr […]

Within the next few years, as the SARS-CoV-2 virus becomes endemic in the global population, COVID-19 may behave like other common-cold coronaviruses, affecting mostly young children who have not yet been vaccinated or exposed to the virus, according to new modeling results. Because COVID-19 severity is generally lower among children, the overall burden from this […]

The UK’s medicines and healthcare products regulation agency (MHRA) is poised to make 300 members of staff redundant in the face of budget cuts that have raised questions over the agency’s future as a credible regulator. The job cuts amount to 20% of the MHRA’s total workforce and are part of a transformation programme that […]

Last year, a team of scientists suggested that phosphine in Venus’s clouds could be a sign of life – a study that has now been contested by scientists proposing how volcanoes and atmospheric chemistry could have produced the compound.1 At the same time, a different study has discovered that there’s too much methane on Saturn’s […]

Routing is one of the most studied problems in operations research; even small improvements in routing efficiency can save companies money and result in energy savings and reduced environmental impacts. Now, three teams of researchers from universities around the world have received prize money totaling $175,000 for their innovative route optimization models. The three teams […]

Tyrannosaurus rex was not just a huge beast with a big bite, it had nerve sensors in the very tips of its jaw enabling it to better detect – and eat – its prey, a new study published in the peer-reviewed journal Historical Biology today finds. “T. rex was an even more fearsome predator than previously believed,” explains lead […]

The COVID-19 pandemic may be the deadliest viral outbreak the world has seen in more than a century. But statistically, such extreme events aren’t as rare as we may think, asserts a new analysis of novel disease outbreaks over the past 400 years. The study, appearing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences […]

Extreme-event attribution (EEA)—a branch of climate science that has emerged over the past 20 years—asks the question: How much more or less likely has an extreme event become as a result of climate change? On a global scale, the mean temperature of the Earth has increased about one degree Celsius in the past 50 years. […]

Picture an anthill. What do you see? A small mound of sand and crumbly dirt poking up through the lawn? A tiny hole disappearing into the ground? A few ants scrambling around busily. Not very impressive, right? But slip beneath the surface and the above-ground simplicity gives way to subterranean complexity. Tunnels dive downward, branching […]