Jessica Irvine 
Celebrating the cherry blossom is a centuries-old tradition in Japan. Social media contains enormous amounts of data about people, our everyday lives, and our interactions with our surroundings. As a byproduct, it also contains a vast trove of information about the natural world. In a new study published in Flora, we show how social media …
Graphical abstract. Credit: Remote Sensing of Environment (2023). DOI: 10.1016/j.rse.2023.113602 Why are cities usually warmer than rural areas? Scientist have long known that cities retain heat more than rural areas, a phenomenon known as urban heat island (UHI), which is largely due to the impact of anthropogenic heating, or human-caused heating. A research team led …
Sign up for a full digest of all the best opinions of the week in our Voices Dispatches email Sign up to our free weekly Voices newsletter A new study suggests that women taking hormone pills to alleviate menopause symptoms may be at an increased risk of high blood pressure. The research found that oral …
Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain Miami summers are hot and humid, but is climate change making them dangerous? A new study published by scientists at the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science and Florida International University found that Miami residents may experience temperatures 6°F higher on average than NOAA National Weather …
Sign up for a full digest of all the best opinions of the week in our Voices Dispatches email Sign up to our free weekly Voices newsletter Brisk walking, dancing, or gardening could reduce the risk of type 2 diabetes even in people with a high genetic risk of developing the condition, as per recent …
Researchers from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M) and Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM) have found a phase shift in chaotic states in swarms of insects. The discovery, which may have implications for the study of cell and tumour movement, is detailed in a paper published in Physical Review E. According to one of the …
American vaccine manufacturer Novavax has announced plans to share its vaccine technology with the Bill & Melinda Gates Medical Research Institute. Novavax has signed a three-year deal to share its vaccine adjuvant, Matrix-M, with the nonprofit biotech, which aims to develop vaccines for major health threats such as malaria, tuberculosis, and Shigella. Adjuvants are crucial …
The abundance of latent and established antibiotic-resistant genes (ARGs) was analyzed using principal component analysis in various environments including aquatic, plants, infants, wastewater, terrestrial, human, birds, and mammals. The study, published in Microbiome by Swedish researchers from Chalmers University of Technology and the University of Gothenburg, found that ARGs are more prevalent in bacteria in …
Tropical Storm Arlene (June 2023) NOAA/CIRA The 2023 Atlantic hurricane season officially began on June 1st. Over the course of any given season, a non-trivial portion of my writing is devoted to tropical systems. They are newsworthy, impact lives, and the impetus for some of my early interests in meteorology as a child. Only a …
Optical to X-ray light curve of OJ 287 from the Swift facility observation between 2005 to 2022. Credit: Kushwaha et al, 2023 Using NASA’s Neil Gherels Swift Observatory, Indian astronomers have observed a blazar known as OJ 287. Results of the observational campaign, published May 25 on the arXiv pre-print server, shed more light on …