English as a medium of instruction in higher education across the globe

When investigators in the UK recorded the calls of migratory birds called thrushes at night, they found that call rates were up to five times higher over the brightest urban areas compared with darker villages. The findings, which are published in END ...

To improve our own health and the health of our planet, dietary habits will need to change. Because the composition of an optimal diet changes depending on the combination of location, season, and personalized dietary needs, investigators have built a tool that uses an extensive database of food items, nutrients, and environmental-impacts to develop optimized diets specific to an individual in a given country and month. As described in an article published in the END ...

The population growth of an endangered butterfly species is greatest in habitats with microclimatic variability, demonstrates a study carried out collaboratively by the Faculty of Biological and Environmental Sciences and the Helsinki Institute of Life Science of the University of Helsinki as well as the Finnish Environment Institute. Insects are often very restricted in their capacity for movement. In many species, specific stages of life are spent entirely immobile, making them dependent on the temperature and moisture conditions of their immediate surroundings. In the Åland Islands on the southwest coast of Finland, Glanville fritillary butterflies (Melitaea cinxia) spend roughly 10 months of the year in the larval stage. In the middle of summer, the newly hatched ...

Researchers from University of Texas-Austin and Copenhagen Business School published a new paper in the Journal of Marketing that offers actionable guidance to managers on the deployment of algorithms in marketing contexts. The study, forthcoming in the Journal of Marketing, is titled "When Algorithms Fail: Consumers' Responses to Brand Harm Crises Caused by Algorithm Errors" and is authored by Raji Srinivasan and Gulen Sarial-Abi. Marketers increasingly rely on algorithms to make important decisions. A perfect example is the Facebook News Feed. You do not know why some of your posts show up on some people's News Feeds or not, but Facebook does. Or how about Amazon recommending books and products for you? All of these are driven by algorithms. Algorithms are software ...

BATON ROUGE, Louisiana - Stress levels of moms with preschoolers soared during the pandemic, with twice as many of the mothers reporting they lost sleep during the COVID-19 outbreak than before it. "Moms of young children are already less likely to get the recommended amount of sleep and physical activity than women who don't have children. These shortfalls could raise the risk for obesity and poor health, and the lockdown worsened the situation by increasing the levels of stress and household chaos," said Chelsea Kracht, Ph.D., a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Pediatric Obesity and Health Behavior Laboratory at Pennington Biomedical Research Center. The bottom line? "Mothers, especially ...

Joyce WG, Rollot Y, Evers SW, Lyson TR, Rahantarisoa LJ, Krause DW. 2021. A new pelomedusoid turtle, Sahonachelys mailakavava, from the Late Cretaceous of Madagascar provides evidence for convergent evolution of specialized suction feeding among pleurodires. Royal Society Open Science 8:210098. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.210098 First author: Prof. Dr. Walter Joyce (walter.joyce@unifr.ch), Professor of Paleontology, University of Fribourg, Switzerland Co-authors: - Yann Rollot (yann.rollot@unifr.ch), PhD student, University of Fribourg, Switzerland - Serjsocha Evers (serjoscha.evers@unifr.ch; preferred: serjoscha.evers@googlemail.com), ...

Researchers have discovered the most precise way to control individual ions using holographic optical engineering technology. The new technology uses the first known holographic optical engineering device to control trapped ion qubits. This technology promises to help create more precise controls of qubits that will aid the development of quantum industry-specific hardware to further new quantum simulation experiments and potentially quantum error correction processes for trapped ion qubits. "Our algorithm calculates the hologram's profile and removes any aberrations from the light, which lets us develop a highly precise technique for programming ...

A computer science engineer at Michigan State University has a word of advice for the millions of bitcoin owners who use smartphone apps to manage their cryptocurrency: don't. Or at least, be careful. Researchers from MSU are developing a mobile app to act as a safeguard for popular but vulnerable "wallet" applications used to manage cryptocurrency. "More and more people are using bitcoin wallet apps on their smartphones," said Guan-Hua Tu, an assistant professor in MSU's College of Engineering who works in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. "But these applications have vulnerabilities." ...

A new USC study suggests that certain neighborhoods - particularly those characterized by poverty and unemployment - may pose an environmental risk to the developing brains of children, impacting neurocognitive performance and even brain size. The research was published May 3 in the journal JAMA Pediatrics. These findings highlight the importance of neighborhood environments for child and adolescent brain development, the researchers said, and suggest that policies, programs and investments that help improve local neighborhood conditions and empower communities could support children's neurodevelopment and long-term health. "This is the first large, national study ...

Using a bit of machine learning magic, astrophysicists can now simulate vast, complex universes in a thousandth of the time it takes with conventional methods. The new approach will help usher in a new era in high-resolution cosmological simulations, its creators report in a study END ...