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Scientists say surge of radiation led to lightning causing forest fires, making adaptation vital.

Okay, this is pretty impressive.

A new theoretical model may help explain the shocking onset of superconductivity in stacked, twisted carbon sheets.

An exoplanet smaller than Neptune with its own atmosphere has been discovered in the Neptunian Desert around its star by an international collaboration of astronomers, with the University of Warwick taking a leading role.

The rogue planet was identified in the new research, led by Dr Richard West including Professor Peter Wheatley, Dr Daniel Bayliss and Dr James McCormac from the Astronomy and Astrophysics Group at the University of Warwick.

NGTS is situated at the European Southern Observatory’s Paranal Observatory in the heart of the Atacama Desert, Chile. It is a collaboration between UK Universities Warwick, Leicester, Cambridge, and Queen’s University Belfast, together with Observatoire de Genève, DLR Berlin and Universidad de Chile.

Continue reading “Astronomers find ‘Forbidden’ planet in ‘Neptunian Desert’ around its star” »

Men should favour weight lifting and running over cycling in order to preserve their bones, scientists have said after a study suggested brittle bone disorders are more common than previously thought.

Scientists measuring the bone density of men and women between the ages of 35 and 50 found 28 per cent of men showed precursor signs of osteoporosis, compared to 26 per cent of women.

The results are surprising because the debilitating condition, which affects around three million people in the UK, is more commonly associated with women than men.

Continue reading “Go running over cycling to avoid brittle bones, men told” »

Our civilization is made up of countless individuals and pieces of material technology, which come together to form institutions and interdependent systems of logistics, development and production. These institutions and systems then store the knowledge required for their own renewal and growth.

We pin the hopes of our common human project on this renewal and growth of the whole civilization. Whether this project is going well is a challenging but vital question to answer.

Continue reading “Civilization: Institutions, Knowledge and the Future — Samo Burja” »

For decades, physicists, engineers and mathematicians have failed to explain a remarkable phenomenon in fluid mechanics: the natural tendency of turbulence in fluids to move from disordered chaos to perfectly parallel patterns of oblique turbulent bands. This transition from a state of chaotic turbulence to a highly structured pattern was observed by many scientists, but never understood.

At EPFL’s Emerging Complexity in Physical Systems Laboratory, Tobias Schneider and his team have identified the mechanism that explains this phenomenon. Their findings have been published in Nature Communications.

Practice results in better learning. Consider learning a musical instrument, for example: the more one practices, the better one will be able to learn to play. The same holds true for cognition and visual perception: with practice, a person can learn to see better—and this is the case for both healthy adults and patients who experience vision loss because of a traumatic brain injury or stroke.

The problem with learning, however, is that it often takes a lot of training. Finding the time can be especially difficult for patients with brain injuries who may, for instance, need to re-train their brains to learn to process visual cues.

And other biomaterials such as bacteria and biosynthetic spider silk.

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