Tuesday 18 June 2019

Study reveals key locations for declining songbird

Many of North America's migratory songbirds, which undertake awe-inspiring journeys twice a year, are declining at alarming rates. For conservation efforts to succeed, wildlife managers need to know where they go and what challenges they face during their annual migration to Latin America and back. For a new study published by The Condor: Ornithological Applications, researchers in six states assembled an unprecedented effort to track where Prothonotary Warblers that breed across the eastern U.S. go in winter—their "migratory connectivity"—and found that nearly the entire species depends on a relatively small area in Colombia threatened by deforestation and sociopolitical changes.

* This article was originally published here

Scientists studying how large-scale environmental disruptions affected ancient societies

John Day, Distinguished Professor Emeritus in LSU's College of the Coast & Environment, has collaborated on a new analysis of societal development with Joel Gunn of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, William Folan of the Universidad Autonoma de Campeche in Mexico, and Matthew Moerschbaecher of the Louisiana Oil Spill Coordinators Office. Gunn and Folan are Mayan archaeologists and Moerschbaecher is a graduate of LSU's oceanography program. They report that over the past 10,000 years humanity has experienced a number of foundational transitions, or "bottlenecks." During these periods of transition, the advance or decline of societies was related to energy availability in the form of a benign climate and other factors.

* This article was originally published here

Google pledges $1 bn for housing crisis in Bay Area

Google on Tuesday pledged to commit more than $1 billion to help address the severe housing crisis in the region that includes its headquarters and Silicon Valley.

* This article was originally published here

Researchers explore RAMBleed attack in pilfering data

Do you remember Rowhammer, where an attacker could flip bits in the memory space of other processes?

* This article was originally published here

Microfluidics device captures circulating cancer cell clusters

Cancer touches nearly everyone in one way or another, and regrettably, it will claim another 600,000 lives in the U.S. in 2019, according to the American Cancer Society. Researchers from San Diego State University, TumorGen MDx Inc., and Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute set out to explore a seemingly basic question: What is it about cancer that kills?

* This article was originally published here

Food neophobia may increase the risk of lifestyle diseases

Food neophobia, or fear of new foods, may lead to poorer dietary quality, increase the risk factors associated with chronic diseases, and thus increase the risk of developing lifestyle diseases, including cardiovascular diseases and type 2 diabetes.

* This article was originally published here

Women's awareness of alcohol's role in breast cancer risk is poor

Women's awareness of alcohol's role in boosting breast cancer risk is poor, indicates research published in the online journal BMJ Open.

* This article was originally published here

To improve drones, researchers study flying insects

The unmanned aircraft known as drones, used by hobbyists, researchers and industry to take aerial images and perform other tasks, are growing ever more popular—and smaller. But that miniaturization, which has produced drones that fit in a person's palm, has started to bump into the laws of physics.

* This article was originally published here

Collegiate affirmative action bans tied to rise in smoking among minority high schoolers

College affirmative action bans may adversely affect the health of underrepresented minority high school students, according to the results of a new study from researchers at Penn Medicine. Between 1996 and 2013, nine U.S. states banned consideration of race and ethnicity in college admissions. A new study in PLOS Medicine shows that the action bans had unanticipated effects, specifically resulting in increased rates of smoking among minority high school students. The researchers also found evidence to suggest these effects could persist, as these students were also more likely to smoke into young adulthood compared to those who lived in states where an affirmative action ban was not enacted.

* This article was originally published here

Applying active inference body perception to a humanoid robot

A key challenge for robotics researchers is developing systems that can interact with humans and their surrounding environment in situations that involve varying degrees of uncertainty. In fact, while humans can continuously learn from their experiences and perceive their body as a whole as they interact with the world, robots do not yet have these capabilities.

* This article was originally published here