Science & Technology

People often visit U.S. national parks to catch a glimpse of wildlife. But how does our presence impact the animals we hope to see? National park traffic has grown steadily over the past decade, and popular parks like Yosemite and Yellowstone can easily see over a million visitors a year. In these heavily used areas,...

Amid much speculation and research about how our genetics affect the way we age, a University of California, Berkeley, study now shows that individual differences in our DNA matter less as we get older and become prone to diseases of aging, such as diabetes and cancer. In a study of the relative effects of genetics,...

Taken as a share of the market price, the climate change impacts of mining the digital cryptocurrency Bitcoin is more comparable to the impacts of extracting and refining crude oil than mining gold, according to an analysis published in Scientific Reports by researchers at The University of New Mexico. The authors suggest that rather than being considered...

“Detecting hate tweets in more than four billion tweets from U.S. users with our AI-algorithm and combining them with weather data, we found that both the absolute number and the share of hate tweets rise outside a climate comfort zone: People tend to show a more aggressive online behaviour when it’s either too cold or...

Gregor Mendel, the Moravian monk, was indeed “decades ahead of his time and truly deserves the title of ‘founder of genetics.’” So concludes an international team of scientists as the 200th birthday of Mendel approaches on 20 July. The team, from KeyGene in the Netherlands and the John Innes Centre in the UK, draw on newly-discovered historical...

As meetings shifted online during the COVID-19 lockdown, many people found that chattering roommates, garbage trucks and other loud sounds disrupted important conversations.  This experience inspired three University of Washington researchers, who were roommates during the pandemic, to develop better earbuds. To enhance the speaker’s voice and reduce background noise, “ClearBuds” use a novel microphone...

Researchers at UC Santa Cruz have identified specific elements of tone and style in online speech that are linked to hyperpartisan echo chambers. The findings are now published in the journal Discourse & Society.  Online echo chambers are virtual spaces that gather like-minded individuals. Prior research has shown that people are more likely to believe and...

Malicious agents can use machine learning to launch powerful attacks that steal information in ways that are tough to prevent and often even more difficult to study. Attackers can capture data that “leaks” between software programs running on the same computer. They then use machine-learning algorithms to decode those signals, which enables them to obtain...