mi shares a report from ScienceAlert: The marshmallow test, or Stanford marshmallow experiment, is pretty straightforward. A child is placed in a room with a marshmallow. They are told, if they can manage not to eat the marshmallow for 15 minutes, they’ll get a second marshmallow, and be allowed to eat both. This ability to delay gratification demonstrates cognitive abilities such…
Tag: Royal Society
A surprising find of fast-moving gas from a young star
Fast-moving gas from a young star – located in a star-forming region 400 light-years away – is giving astronomers insight into how planets form. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/no-lup-surprising-find-outflowing-gas-young-star…
Growing interest in Moon resources could cause tension, scientists find
An international team of scientists led by the Center for Astrophysics / Harvard & Smithsonian, has identified a problem with the growing interest in extractable resources on the moon: there aren’t enough of them to go around. With no international policies or agreements to decide “who gets what from where,” scientists believe tensions, overcrowding, and quick exhaustion of resources to be…
Dinosaurs Were Not on the Way Out Before Asteroid Hit, Study Claims
New analysis has refuted the claim that dinosaurs were in decline at the time of their extinction. If an asteroid had not hit Earth 66m years ago, dinosaurs might have continued to dominate the planet, according to new research. From a report: A team from the University of Bath and the UK National History Museum has published a study to Royal…
The Great Barrier Reef Has Lost Half Its Corals
The Great Barrier Reef, one of the earth’s most precious habitats, lost half of its coral populations in the last quarter-century, a decline that researchers in Australia said would continue unless drastic action is taken to mitigate the effects of climate change. From a report: Researchers studied coral colonies along the length of the reef between 1995 and 2017 and found…
Inside the secret lives of synchronous fireflies
In the Smoky Mountains, thousands of fireflies flash in unison. Researchers want to know how. Source: https://earthsky.org/earth/inside-secret-lives-synchronous-fireflies-video…
A Plunge In Incoming Sunlight May Have Triggered ‘Snowball Earths’
Jennifer Chu writes via Phys.Org: At least twice in Earth’s history, nearly the entire planet was encased in a sheet of snow and ice. These dramatic “Snowball Earth” events occurred in quick succession, somewhere around 700 million years ago, and evidence suggests that the consecutive global ice ages set the stage for the subsequent explosion of complex, multicellular life on Earth….
Covid-19 news: Everyone should wear face coverings, says Royal Society
The latest coronavirus news updated every day including coronavirus cases, the latest news, features and interviews from New Scientist and essential information about the covid-19 pandemic Source: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2237475-covid-19-news-everyone-should-wear-face-coverings-says-royal-society/?utm_campaign=RSS%7CNSNS&utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=RSS&utm_content=home…
Study: 100% Face Mask Use Could Crush Second, Third COVID-19 Wave
“A new modeling study out of Cambridge and Greenwich universities suggests that face masks may be even more important than originally thought in preventing future outbreaks of the new coronavirus,” reports SFGate: To ward off resurgences, the reproduction number for the virus (the average number of people who will contract it from one infected person) needs to drop below 1.0. Researchers…
Cold War Satellites Inadvertently Tracked Species Declines
sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: When the Soviet Union launched Sputnik into orbit in 1957, the United States responded with its own spy satellites. The espionage program, known as Corona, sought to locate Soviet missile sites, but its Google Earth-like photography captured something unintended: snapshots of animals and their habitats frozen in time. Now, by comparing these images with…