Both cats and dogs often enjoy playing fetch with their owners

A diverse and abundant flower planting that provides flowers in bloom all season may be more important to bees and other pollinators than whatever is surrounding the flower garden, according to a study published September 4, 2024 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Devon Eldridge from the University of Tennessee, US, and colleagues. As we learn more about how critical pollinators (native and non-native bees, butterflies, and other insects) are to our food supply and ecosystem, many people are planting pollinator-attractive ...

A study of more than 200,000 tweets from 2019 and 2020 finds that anti-immigration content spreads faster than pro-immigration tweets and that a few users disproportionally generated most of the UK-based anti-immigration content. Andrea Nasuto and Francisco Rowe of the Geographic Data Science Lab at the University of Liverpool, UK, present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on September 4, 2024. Online social media platforms are widely considered to contribute significantly to rising tensions in debates about immigration. Increased online polarization, the clout of key influencers, ...

Samples from bottled water, tap water and household-treated tap water in San Francisco Bay Area indicate that all sources may have potential health risks, largely from trihalomethanes. #### Article URL: https://journals.plos.org/water/article?id=10.1371/journal.pwat.0000272 Article Title: Bottled water, tap water and household-treated tap water–insight into potential health risks and aesthetic concerns in drinking water Author Countries: United States Funding: The authors received no specific funding for this work. END ...

Imagine your DNA as a set of instructions or a recipe book that tells your body how to make everything it needs to function, from proteins to cells. Every time the body needs to build something, it reads these instructions. But sometimes, the body can make small edits to these instructions—this is where RNA editing comes in. RNA editing is like a proofreading process that happens after your DNA’s instructions are copied. Instead of just following the recipe exactly, your cells can make tiny changes to the instructions. These changes can help the body adapt to different situations by creating new versions ...

LOS ANGELES — Oncology specialists at City of Hope®, one of the largest and most advanced cancer research and treatment organizations in the United States, can now provide leading-edge clinical guidance to patients living in Southeast Asia through a second opinion collaboration agreement with the Healthway Cancer Care Hospital, the first comprehensive cancer hospital in the Philippines. This strategic integration of services will enhance Southeast Asia’s access to world-class cancer care by leveraging the strengths of both institutions.   “With ...

Charging stations for electric vehicles are essential for cleaning up the transportation sector. A new study by MIT researchers suggests they’re good for business, too. The study found that, in California, opening a charging station boosted annual spending at each nearby business by an average of about $1,500 in 2019 and about $400 between January 2021 and June 2023. The spending bump amounts to thousands of extra dollars annually for nearby businesses, with the increase particularly pronounced for businesses in underresourced areas. The study’s authors hope the research paints a more holistic picture of the benefits ...

LAWRENCE — A new book of natural history essays co-written by a University of Kansas paleontologist has been published by Columbia University Press. Bruce Lieberman, Dean’s Professor of Evolutionary Biology and senior curator of invertebrate paleontology at KU, co-wrote “Macroevolutionaries” with fellow paleontologist Niles Eldredge in the tradition of their late Harvard mentor and famed science popularizer, Stephen Jay Gould. “Gould inspired me and my collaborator on the book, Niles Eldredge,” Lieberman said. “He’s a well-known evolutionary ...

Summer 2024 is on track to be the hottest on record for hundreds of cities across the U.S. and globe. Even in Antarctica, during the peak of its winter, extreme heat pushed temperatures in parts of the continent more than 50°F above the July normal. In a study published on July 31 in the journal Earth’s Future, scientists, including researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder, revealed how heat waves, especially those occurring in Antarctica’s cold seasons, may impact the animals living there. The research illustrates how extreme weather events intensified by climate change could have profound implications for the ...

Injury-related mortality rates, including firearm-related deaths, among children and adolescents increased in almost every state between 2018-2022, according to findings from the University of Michigan.   Researchers from the U-M Institute for Firearm Injury Prevention analyzed mortality data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Wide-ranging Outline Data for Epidemiologic Research and found that nearly 90% of states saw an increase in mortality rates among children and adolescents overall during the study period.   North Dakota's numbers show the largest increase among states at 65% and Rhode Island saw the largest decrease ...

It’s 7 billion years ago, and the universe’s heyday of star formation is beginning to slow. What might our Milky Way galaxy have looked like at that time? Astronomers using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have found clues in the form of a cosmic question mark, the result of a rare alignment across light-years of space. “We know of only three or four occurrences of similar gravitational lens configurations in the observable universe, which makes this find exciting, as it demonstrates the power of Webb and suggests maybe now we will find ...