news 2020

Latest Stanford Health Alerts on COVID-19 COVID-19 Info for Stanford Earth Losing species Image credit: Shutterstock A collection of research and insights from Stanford experts who are deciphering the mysteries and mechanisms of extinction and survival in Earth's deep past and painting an increasingly detailed picture of life now at the brink.

Students of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Stuttgart have developed and built the unmanned testing platform Aircraft for Research and Applied Science (ARAS). In the process, they designed the components for it to be able to withstand high loads. After the mechanical and electronic integration was finished, the "UAStudents Gruppe" (a compound made up of Unmanned Aerial System, another word for drone, and students) carried out extensive ground testing before the aircraft successfully took off for the first time in October.

The weathering of rocks at the Earth's surface may remove less greenhouse gases from the atmosphere than previous estimates, says new research from the University of Cambridge.

The weathering of rocks at the Earth's surface may remove less greenhouse gases from the atmosphere than previous estimates, says new research from the University of Cambridge.

The threshold for dangerous global warming will likely be crossed between 2027 and 2042 - a much narrower window than the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's estimate of between now and 2052. In a study published in Climate Dynamics , researchers from McGill University introduce a new and more precise way to project the Earth's temperature.

Using the highest resolution satellite imagery currently available - Worldview 3 - from Maxar Technologies and deep learning, (TensorFlow API, Google Brain) researchers at the University of Oxford Wildlife Conservation Research Unit and Machine Learning Research Group have detected elephants from space with comparable accuracy to human detection capabilities.

Coral reefs serve important ecological functions, from providing habitat for countless species to protecting shorelines from erosion. Reef-dependent fisheries are also a vital source of food and income for hundreds of millions of people in tropical island nations where coral reefs are valued at $6.8 billion annually.

Europe still has barely any downstream passage facilities that guide fish past the turbines of run-of-river power stations unharmed. Now, an interdisciplinary team of engineers from ETH Zurich and fish biologists from Eawag have developed a rack that uses pressure and flow differences to guide fish out of the main flow and into the safe fish passage.

When it gets warmer, organisms rise higher from the lowlands. Researchers from ETH and WSL investigated what could happen to plant communities on alpine grasslands if grasshoppers from lower elevations settled there. The world is getting warmer and warmer - and many organisms native to lower latitudes or elevations are moving higher.

India will need to make the switch from coal to renewable energy to meet its ambitious decarbonization goals. Batteries could be key to meeting these targets and represent an opportunity to develop the country's battery manufacturing industry. India is one of only a few countries whose national emissions reduction target is in line with the Paris Agreement's goal of reducing global warming before Earth's temperature reaches a dangerous threshold.

Most comprehensive evaluation of the occurrence of vascular plants in Germany to date Life Germany's plant diversity is on the decline: in the last 60 years, decreases by an average of 15 percent have been observed across Germany in over 70 percent of the more than 2,000 species examined. These are the findings of the most comprehensive analysis of plant data from Germany ever conducted, recently published in "Global Change Biology".

Prolonged exposure to environmentally relevant concentrations of the weedkiller Roundup causes significant harm to keystone species according to new research at the University of Birmingham. A team in the University's School of Biosciences used waterfleas, or Daphnia, to test the effects prolonged exposure to concentrations of Roundup deemed safe by regulatory agencies.

An international research team led by the University of Bern has discovered an exotic binary system composed of two young planet-like objects, orbiting around each other from a very large distance. Although these objects look like giant exoplanets, they formed in the same way as stars, proving that the mechanisms driving star formation can produce rogue worlds in unusual systems deprived of a Sun.

A new study published today highlights the importance of overcoming gender inequality for climate change adaptation and explores future pathways of gender equality for sustainable development Vulnerability to the impacts of climate change differs on a wide range of factors including socio-economic status, education, ethnicity and gender.

High levels of cadmium, a chemical found in cigarettes and in contaminated vegetables, are associated with higher death rates in patients with influenza or pneumonia-and may increase the severity of COVID-19 and other respiratory viruses, according to a new study. "Our study suggests the public in general, both smokers and nonsmokers, could benefit from reduced exposure to cadmium,” said lead author Sung Kyun Park, associate professor of epidemiology and environmental health sciences at the University of Michigan School of Public Health.

The research study was carried out in two different habitats: in the Cíes Islands (Vigo), a protected marine area where recreational fishing is not allowed, and in contiguous areas open to fishing. Photo: Lluís Cardona. Recerca Not all specimens of the same species are the same: there is a marked variability within the same population and sometimes these morphological differences are translated into a different behaviour.

Diverting urine away from municipal wastewater treatment plants and recycling the nutrient-rich liquid to make crop fertilizer would result in multiple environmental benefits when used at city scale, according to a new University of Michigan-led study. The study, published online Dec. 15 in the journal Environmental Science & Technology, modeled large-scale, centralized urine-diversion and fertilizer-processing systems-none of which currently exist-and compared their expected environmental impacts to conventional wastewater treatment and fertilizer production methods.

Programmes such as the BBC's Blue Planet and Hugh's War on Plastic , have drawn attention to the threat plastics pose to sea-life. But little is known about the impacts on Britain's land-based species, such as hedgehogs, rabbits and voles. Now, a new research project from the University of Sussex and the Mammal Society, aims to assess the exposure of wild mammals to waste plastics across Britain.

Rice, Baylor work with city to find disease in Houston four times greater than testing showed A monthslong study to determine the number of Houstonians carrying COVID-19 antibodies revealed infections may have been four times greater than viral tests showed, according to collaborators at the Houston Health Department, Rice University and Baylor College of Medicine.

New research has shown just how picky the iconic superb parrot is about the types of tree hollows they nest in, with the discovery potentially key to protecting the threatened species.