Several years ago, in the subtropical waters of southern Japan, divers spotted large geometric shapes sculpted in the sandy seabed. The circles were roughly two metres (6ft) across and formed of two concentric rings with spokes radiating from the centre. They were an aquatic version of unexplained crop circles. No one could work out what,…

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Christmas at Kew opened this week and — as has been the case every winter since its launch in 2013 — its light-and-nature show is the best spectacle in town. Lamps cascade from trees, candles flicker in mid-air, abstract neon flowers sprout, the Temperate House is a fiery cathedral, LED lights skim the lake and…

Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a surge in video content consumption, but measuring viewers’ empathy towards the content has been limited to subjective evaluations or attached physiological apparatus. In this study, we introduced a novel non-contact physiological method for measuring empathy towards video content by assessing the synchronization of facial micromovements between the…

Abstract Abiotic stress of plants has serious consequences on the development of the apple industry. Nuclear pore complexes (NPCs) control nucleoplasmic transport and play an important role in the regulation of plant abiotic stress response. However, the effects of NPCs on apple salt and osmotic stress responses have not been reported yet. In this study,…

Abstract In this study, a versatile model, called (alpha)-monotone inverse Weibull distribution ((alpha)IW), for lifetime of a component under stress is introduced by using the (alpha)-monotone concept. The (alpha)IW distribution is also expressed as a scale-mixture between the inverse Weibull distribution and uniform distribution on (0, 1). The (alpha)IW distribution includes (alpha)-monotone inverse exponential and (alpha)-monotone…

In a recent article published in Science, Dart and colleagues reported that colonic T cells expressing the Vγ4 T-cell receptor (TCR) interact with epithelial butyrophilin-like (BTNL) proteins BTNL3 and BTNL8 in healthy individuals, and they observed a depletion of Vγ4 T cells in inflammatory bowel diseases with renormalization associated with disease remission.1 This paper identifies…

Abstract Drainage for forestry has created ~ 1 million km of artificial waterways in Sweden, making it one of the largest human-induced environmental disturbances in the country. These extensive modifications of both peatland and mineral soil dominated landscapes still carry largely unknown, but potentially enormous environmental legacy effects. However, the consequences of contemporary ditch management strategies,…

Credit: CC0 Public Domain New research published in Science Advances paints an uncharacteristically upbeat picture for the planet. This is because more realistic ecological modeling suggests the world’s plants may be able to take up more atmospheric CO2 from human activities than previously predicted. Despite this headline finding, the environmental scientists behind the research are…