Courtesy of UC San Diego News The tail of a seahorse can be compressed to about half its size before permanent damage occurs, engineers at the University of California, San Diego, have found. The tail’s exceptional flexibility is due to its structure, made up of bony, armored plates, which slide past each other. Researchers are [...]

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University of Alberta biologist Stan Boutin uses a simple analogy to describe a breakthrough research paper on the behaviour of squirrels. “You try to prepare your kids for what they’ll face when they get out in the big, real world,” said Boutin. “Female squirrels in our study were doing that too for their offspring.” Boutin is the [...]

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Courtesy of Ohio State University An Ohio State University statistician says that the natural human difficulty with grasping probabilities is preventing Americans from dealing with climate change. The situation is not hopeless. Instead of taking an extreme all-or-nothing view about climate change, we can think of it as a spectrum of possible problems, and look [...]

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The University of Melbourne and the Lord Mayor of Melbourne today launched Australia’s largest green roof research and outreach project at the University’s Burnley Campus near Richmond. The Burnley Green Roofs Project will determine the best plant species and soils to use on city roofs, demonstrate how green roofs can use storm water and reduce [...]

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Courtesy of UBC University of British Columbia researchers have found that when the animals at the top of the food chain are removed, freshwater ecosystems emit a lot more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. “Predators are disappearing from our ecosystems at alarming rates because of hunting and fishing pressure and because of human induced changes [...]

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Courtesy of UBC – By Salina Marshall Katie O’Callaghan never imagined that her graduate studies in community and regional planning would involve police car chases. “It was exciting,” she says of riding in a squad car alongside officers. But the University of British Columbia student wasn’t in it for the action. Rather, she was interested [...]

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Courtesy of ASU News Scientists at ASU are celebrating their recent success on the path to understanding what makes the fiber that spiders spin – weight for weight – at least five times as strong as piano wire. They have found a way to obtain a wide variety of elastic properties of the silk of [...]

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Courtesy of The University of Sheffield News Extremes of temperature and rainfall are affecting the survival of elephants working in timber camps in Myanmar and can double the risk of death in calves aged up to five, new research from the University of Sheffield has found. With climate change models predicting higher temperatures and months [...]

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Courtesy Emory University, Woodruff Health Sciences Center Chimpanzees have a sense of fairness that was previously seen as uniquely human, finds a study by Emory’s Yerkes National Primate Research Center and Georgia State University. The researchers played the Ultimate Game with the chimpanzees to determine how sensitive the animals are to the reward distribution between two [...]

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Courtesy of Penn State University Live Turns out, watching ants is actually pretty entertaining, according to Spencer Malloy. Good thing for him, because it was one of the most important parts of his job last summer. The Penn State senior with a double major in agroecology and philosophy recently completed an internship at the University [...]

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