Restoring the Chesapeake Bay, the nation’s largest estuary, has for decades proven to be a fraught enterprise, beset by the interests of researchers, farmers, anglers, multiple governments, and a host of others. A new approach, recently reported in Remote … Continue reading
Journal Club
Highlighting recently published papers selected by Academy members
Satellite monitoring may help preserve the Chesapeake Bay by improving farming practices
Categories: Agriculture | Ecology | Environmental Sciences | Journal Club | Sustainability Science
Tagged adaptive management, Chesapeake Bay, cover crops, estuary, farming, pollution, satellite, watershed
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Deep-sea mussels still show biological rhythms tracking sunlight, tides
Like many land animals, marine organisms follow daily and seasonal clocks—in the water, those clocks are set by the cadence of the sun and the moon. But researchers hadn’t known if deep-sea creatures also exhibit biological rhythms, tucked away in … Continue reading
Categories: Ecology | Genetics | Journal Club
Tagged chronobiology, circadian rhythms, deep sea, marine ecosystem, tides
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Future choices may be guided by our memories of past ones
When it comes to making choices, past decisions may play a surprisingly large role. The traditional view of decision-making is that our choices are guided by what we remember about the outcomes of previous choices we’ve made. But in recent … Continue reading
Categories: Economic sciences | Journal Club | Neuroscience | Political Science | Psychological and Cognitive Sciences
Tagged choice, decision-making, fMRI, hippocampus, learning
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People who are likely to dismiss journalism as “fake news” tend to believe the world is predictable
The notion of “fake news” spread like wildfire in the United States after the 2016 election. Recent research in Psychological Science tried to determine what psychological factors drove this concept—generally defined as the suspicion that politically-biased news outlets produce deliberately … Continue reading
Categories: Journal Club | Psychological and Cognitive Sciences
Tagged fake news, need for structure, psychology, social psychology
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PREVIEW Editorial: Scientific versus Public Debates: A PNAS Case Study
Douglas S. Massey1 and Mary C. Waters2,3 1. Office of Population Research, Princeton University, Wallace Hall, Princeton, NJ 08544 USA 2. To whom correspondence may be addressed. Email: mcw@wjh.harvard.edu 3. Department of Sociology, Harvard University, 540 William James Hall, 33 … Continue reading
Categories: Editorial | Social Sciences | Statistics
Tagged gun violence, peer review, racial bias, racial profiling, science communication, significance statement
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Seasonality shapes coevolution of parasites and hosts
Parasites and their hosts coevolve in an arms race influenced by environmental conditions. Seasonal change, for example, can shape the course of evolution, but precisely how has been something of a mystery. A recent study used lab experiments and mathematical … Continue reading
Categories: Ecology | Evolution | Journal Club | Mathematics
Tagged bacteriophage, coevolution, host, parasite, phage, pseudomonas
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Country-level assessment hides big variations in soy’s carbon footprint
Analysts usually estimate a crop’s carbon footprint based on country-level factors. But that formulation isn’t adequate, according to a new analysis of soy exports from Brazil. Published in Global Environmental Change, the study tracked soy from specific production sites in … Continue reading
Categories: Agriculture | Climate science | Economic sciences | Environmental Sciences | Journal Club
Tagged Amazon rainforest, carbon emissions, carbon footprint, Cerrado, soybeans
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Snake venom evolved in fits and spurts
The cocktail of toxins in snake venom experienced constant change with pulses of rapid evolution over the last 60 million years, according to a recent study in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Venom, the researchers report, has changed … Continue reading
Categories: Evolution | Genetics | Journal Club
Tagged diversification, phylogenetics, RNA expression, snake, speciation, toxin, venom
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Trends in conservation funding track popular narratives about the illegal wildlife trade
Trends in conservation funding are changing, according to a recent study in World Development. “We see a shift toward funding conservation work that’s increasingly about combatting wildlife trafficking,” says coauthor Jared Margulies, a human-environment geographer at the University of Alabama … Continue reading
Categories: Ecology | Journal Club | Political Science | Social Sciences
Tagged conservation, COVID-19, illegal wildlife trade, novel coronavirus, wildlife
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In plea for face masks, researchers visualize how speech sends fluid droplets flying
As COVID-19 ravaged Wuhan, China, in January, scientists remained unsure how the virus was spreading so rapidly. Biophysicist Adriaan Bax, chatting over dinner with his linguist wife Ingrid Pufahl, started to suspect that the saliva we project as we speak … Continue reading