Identifying and counting fish species in murky water filled with deadly predators is a difficult job. But fisheries scientists in the Northern Territory are working on an artificial intelligence project with Microsoft that has incredible potential for marine science around the world. (more…)
Thinking small has enabled an international team of scientists to gain new insight into the evolution of planetary building blocks in the early solar system.
The researchers compared the results of small-scale numerical simulations of colliding rock and dust particles to the composition of meteorites. They found that collisions helped transform initially porous materials into the more highly solidified asteroids and meteorites observed today. The team of seven scientists published their evidence last month in Nature Communications. (more…)
Geologists are letting the air out of a nagging mystery about the development of animal life on Earth.
Scientists have long speculated as to why animal species didn’t flourish sooner, once sufficient oxygen covered the Earth’s surface. Animals began to prosper at the end of the Proterozoic period, about 800 million years ago — but what about the billion-year stretch before that, when most researchers think there also was plenty of oxygen? (more…)
ANN ARBOR — On opposite sides of the globe over millions of years, the snakes of North America and Australia independently evolved similar body types that helped them move and capture prey more efficiently.
Snakes on both continents include stout-bodied, highly camouflaged ambush predators, such as rattlesnakes in North America and death adders in Australia. There are slender, fast-moving foragers on both continents, as well as small burrowing snakes. (more…)
Distinguished statistician discusses probability and statistics in health care
William H. Woodall, a distinguished professor and statistician at Virginia Tech, spoke to a large audience on “Monitoring and Improving Surgical Quality” at the fourth annual W.L. Gore Lecture Series in Management Science last week on the University of Delaware’s Laird Campus.
The series, hosted by the Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics and sponsored by an endowment from the Gore family, annually recognizes the role that probability, statistics and experimental design have played in the success of W.L. Gore and Associates Inc. (more…)
A Yale-led research team has developed a new approach to species conservation that prioritizes genetic and geographic rarity and applies it to all 9,993 known bird species.
“To date, conservation has emphasized the number of species, treating all species as equal,” said Walter Jetz, the Yale evolutionary biologist who is lead author of a paper published April 10 in Current Biology. “But not all species are equal in their genetic or geographic rarity. We provide a framework for how such species information could be used for prioritizing conservation.” (more…)
FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. — Researchers at the U.S. Geological Survey, the University of Michigan, the University of Arizona, and the University of Technology, Sydney (Australia) are collaborating with scientists in Brazil on a three-year research project that investigates a basic yet unanswered question in Earth-system and global carbon-cycle science: What controls the response of photosynthesis in Amazon tropical forests to seasonal variations in climate?
Results of the study will help improve the reliability of global climate forecasts by guiding improvements in the treatment of tropical forest photosynthesis and related water-cycle processes in Earth-system models. (more…)
The Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale has announced the winners of the Windham Campbell Literature Prizes. This year’s recipients illustrate the global scale of the prizes, with the eight winning writers hailing from seven countries. The winners in the three categories — fiction, non-fiction, and drama — will receive $150,000 each in recognition of their achievements and to support their ongoing work. (more…)
