January 29, 2021 – As public health experts feared, COVID-19 cases and deaths surged in the US following the Thanksgiving holiday, when millions of Americans ignored pleas to forego traditional gatherings. In a new Essay published 28th January in the open-access journal PLOS Biology, “Anti-science kills: from Soviet embrace of pseudoscience to accelerated attacks on US […]
PLOS
Posted inSci/Tech
A Novel Strategy for Quickly Identifying Twitter Trolls
August 12, 2020 – Two algorithms that account for distinctive use of repeated words and word pairs require as few as 50 tweets to accurately distinguish deceptive “troll” messages from those posted by public figures. Sergei Monakhov of Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, Germany, presents these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on August […]
Posted inLife
Squirrels listen in to birds’ conversations as signal of safety
Sept. 5, 2019 – Grey squirrel eavesdrop on the chatter between nearby songbirds as a sign of safety. Birds chatter when they feel safe to communicate the absence of danger or share their location. This “chatter” from multiple bird species could therefore be a useful cue to other creatures that there is no imminent threat. […]
Posted inEnviro
Predicted deforestation in Brazil could lead to local temperature increase up to 1.45°C
March 22, 2019 – A new model quantifies how forest change affects local surface temperatures by altering sunlight-reflection and evapotranspiration properties, and predicts that Brazilian deforestation could result in a 1.45°C increase by 2050, in a study published March 20, 2019 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Jayme A. Prevedello from the Rio de […]
Posted inSci/Tech
Zika virus could cost United States billions of dollars
May 4, 2017 – As United States policymakers debate how to devote money and resources to the Zika virus outbreak, understanding the potential economic impact of the virus in the US is key. Now, using a new computational model described in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases, researchers have calculated that Zika, depending on the rate at […]
Posted inEnviro
Rising CO2 levels may affect most coral reefs and their populations by 2050
Nov. 10, 2016 – Rising CO2 levels may affect most of the world’s coral reefs and the populations which depend on them by 2050, according to a study published November 9, 2016 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Linwood Pendleton and Adrien Comte from the Université de Bretagne Occidentale, France, and colleagues. The effects […]
Posted inSci/Tech
New Evidence Shifts the Timeline Back for Human Arrival in the Americas
October 3, 2016 – Ancient artifacts found at an archeological site in Argentina suggest that humans occupied South America earlier than previously thought. Approximately 13,000 years ago, a prehistoric group of hunter-gathers known as the Clovis people lived in Northern America. Previous research suggests that the Clovis culture was one of the earliest cultures in […]