Aurelia Butler

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    in Heart

    Climate stress may undermine male spiders’ romantic gift giving

    Courtship dazzle in spiders can lose some zing in uncertain climates. Males in places with hard-to-predict rain and temperatures devolve into suitors who woo mostly with cheap, useless gifts.

    Researchers have described gift giving in courtship in only 15 or 20 of the world’s more than 50,000 known species of spiders, says evolutionary biologist Maria José Albo of Universidad La República in Montevideo, Uruguay (SN: 7/26/16). Since 2015, she and her lab have focused on spiders that flirt mostly in evenings and nights among the rocks and pebbles of rivers of Uruguay and southern Brazil. More

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    in Heart

    New videos reveal the hidden lives of Andean bears

    Camera collar footage is unveiling the secret lives of Andean bears (Tremarctos ornatus), South America’s only surviving ursid. A wild Andean bear in Peru was caught eating soil or clay, courting females and even cannibalizing a dead bear cub.

    “It’s so hard to see an Andean bear,” says Ruthmery Pillco Huarcaya, a wildlife biologist at Amazon Conservation, a nongovernmental organization in Cusco, Peru. Scientists estimate there are fewer than 20,000 left in the wild. “And it’s even harder to see what they are doing.” Even though the bears are deep brown or black with bright spectacled faces and can weigh up to 340 pounds, they’re tricky to spot in the dense, steep forests of the Andes. More

  • 113 Shares179 Views

    in Physics

    Starchy nanofibers shatter the record for world’s thinnest pasta

    The world record for the thinnest pasta has been shattered, though the new, narrow noodles are better suited to wound dressings than the dinner table.

    From white flour, researchers made starch-rich nanofibers that are about 370 nanometers thick, on average — or about two hundredths the thickness of a human hair. The nano-noodles could be used in biodegradable bandages, chemist Adam Clancy and colleagues reported October 30 in Nanoscale Advances.

    To make the noodle “dough,” the scientists mixed the flour with formic acid, a liquid that helps uncoil the long starch molecules in the flour. “Normally, if you want to cook starch, then you use water and heat to break up the tight packing of starch,” says Clancy, of University College London. “We do that chemically with formic acid. So we effectively pickle it instead of cooking it.” More

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    in Heart

    From electric cars to wildfires, how Trump may affect climate actions

    If we learned anything from 2024, it’s that climate change is rapidly reshaping our world. We’re on course to set the hottest year on record. In just the past few months, supercharged hurricanes, 1-in-1,000-year floods and drought-fueled wildfires have devastated parts of the United States.

    It’s a very bad time to put the brakes on the aggressive actions — including slashing U.S. carbon emissions and transitioning to greener, lower-carbon sources of energy — that scientists have repeatedly said are necessary to help keep the planet’s warming in check. There is simply no more time for denial or delay, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned back in 2021 (SN: 8/9/21). More

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    in Heart

    Satellite space junk might wreak havoc on the stratosphere

    Earth’s space junk may be wreaking havoc on the stratosphere.

    The rapid surge in satellite megaconstellations is connecting much of the world to broadband internet. But each year, hundreds of those satellites die, burning up in the atmosphere as they fall. And each year, more and more satellites are being launched to replace them.

    The dying satellites, it turns out, don’t just wink out into the ether. Each one leaves a bit of itself behind. More

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    in Heart

    Climate change has amped up hurricane wind speeds by 30 kph on average

    As if hurricanes needed any more kick.

    Human-caused climate change is boosting the intensity of Atlantic hurricanes by a whole category on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale, which rates hurricanes based on their peak sustained wind speed, researchers report November 20 in two new studies.

    From 2019 to 2023, climate change enhanced the maximum wind speeds of hurricanes by an average of about 29 kilometers per hour (18 miles per hour), or roughly the breadth of a Saffir-Simpson category, researchers report in Environmental Research: Climate. Climate change similarly increased the intensities of all hurricanes in 2024 by an average of about 29 kph (18 mph), escalating the risk of wind damage, a companion analysis from Climate Central shows. More

  • 100 Shares99 Views

    in Space & Astronomy

    Einstein’s gravity endures despite a dark energy puzzle 

    Scientists could be wrong about dark energy. But they’re right about gravity, a new study suggests.

    Dark energy, the mysterious phenomenon that causes the expansion of the cosmos to accelerate, is widely thought to have had a constant density throughout the history of the universe. But dark energy may instead be waning, researchers from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, or DESI, collaboration report November 19 in a batch of papers posted to the project’s website and arXiv.org. 

    The finding reaffirms an April report from the same team that had come to a similar conclusion (SN: 4/4/24). Simultaneously, the new analysis — a more thorough look at the same data used in the earlier report — confirms that the DESI data agree with general relativity, Albert Einstein’s theory of gravity, with no evidence for alternative, “modified gravity” theories.  More

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    in Heart

    The world’s largest coral was discovered in the South Pacific

    Off the coast of the Solomon Islands lurks a centuries-old being that is so immense, it can be seen from space.

    Discovered in October by the National Geographic Society’s Pristine Seas team, it is the world’s largest standalone coral. Coming in at roughly 34 meters wide, 32 meters long and 6 meters tall, the behemoth coral is longer than the average blue whale. It also dwarfs the world’s next largest-known coral, a 22-meter-wide coral in American Samoa known as Big Momma. More