Author: Ranveer Kumar

Researchers from North Carolina State University and Virginia Commonwealth University say they found that having a high level of national nostalgia predicted both positive attitudes toward former President Donald Trump and racial prejudice.  In previous studies, nostalgia, or feeling a fondness and longing for the past, has been shown to increase feelings of social connectedness, personal meaning, and self-continuity. However, in this recent study published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology, researchers say these same feelings of sentimentality may have negative consequences on the perception and acceptance of others.  While results showed national nostalgia to be a significant predictor for positive…

A new study by Simon Fraser University historical ecologists finds that Indigenous-managed forests—cared for as “forest gardens”—contain more biologically and functionally diverse species than surrounding conifer-dominated forests and create important habitat for animals and pollinators. The findings are published today in Ecology and Society. According to researchers, ancient forests were once tended by Ts’msyen and Coast Salish peoples living along the north and south Pacific coast. These forest gardens continue to grow at remote archaeological villages on Canada’s northwest coast and are composed of native fruit and nut trees and shrubs such as crabapple, hazelnut, cranberry, wild plum, and wild cherries.…

UCI environmental engineers analyzed a century’s worth of the Golden State’s blazes Irvine, Calif., April 22, 2021 — California’s wildfire problem, fueled by a concurrence of climate change and a heightened risk of human-caused ignitions in once uninhabited areas, has been getting worse with each passing year of the 21st century. Researchers in the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering at the University of California, Irvine have conducted a thorough analysis of California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection wildfire statistics from 2000 to 2019, comparing them with data from 1920 to 1999. They learned that the annual burn season has lengthened…

Living in an area with a television news station owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group, the U.S.’s second-largest local TV company, makes viewers less likely to vote for Democratic presidential candidates and lowers their approval of Democratic presidents, according to new research. The paper, published April 14 in Political Communication, adds to researchers’ understanding of how the insertion of partisan national political coverage into local TV news broadcasts can influence viewers. “When Sinclair buys a station, they substitute local news for national news and unbiased coverage for more pro- Republican coverage,” said author Matthew Levendusky, a professor of political science and…

A new study published today in Science finds that children whose parents were exposed to radiation from the Chernobyl accident in 1986 had no more germline mutations than the general population. Effects of radiation exposure from the Chernobyl nuclear accident, which occurred at a power plant in Ukraine in April 1986, remain a topic of interest. The Chernobyl accident exposed millions of people in the surrounding region to radioactive contaminants. The study investigated the long-standing question of whether radiation exposure results in genetic changes that can be passed from parent to offspring. This effect has been suggested by some studies in animals. But to date, no major…

FAU Harbor branch study shows 95 percent success rate with amoxicillin FLORIDA ATLANTIC UNIVERSITY CREDIT: JOSHUA VOSS, PH.D., FAU HARBOR BRANCH, CORAL REEF AND HEALTH ECOLOGY LAB Diseases continue to be a major threat to coral reef health. For example, a relatively recent outbreak termed stony coral tissue loss disease is an apparently infectious waterborne disease known to affect at least 20 stony coral species. First discovered in 2014 in Miami-Dade County, the disease has since spread throughout the majority of the Florida’s Coral Reef and into multiple countries and territories in the Caribbean. Some reefs of the northern section…

MicroPlastics : The concern of plastic waste has been so severe that now microplastics circulate across the world like oxygen and water in the daily cycles of the atmosphere, according to a recent analysis. According to a mixture of experts sample and modelling, plastic particles transmitted into the air through ocean and road surfaces migrate across continents to the farthest places on earth. Most of this waste seems to have been floating in our ecosystems for a long time – showing how much we have to stop the plastic tide by doing a huge clean-up. “Everywhere we were looking at,…

As the climate crisis causes havoc in temperature and rainfall patterns around the world, one of the many crops under threat is humanity’s precious coffee. Now scientists have identified a coffee-making plant that could be more robust against the rigors of the shifting seasons. The plant is stenophylla coffee or Coffea stenophylla, a wild and relatively rare species found in Upper West Africa. Compared with the more commonly used coffee plants, it’s better equipped to handle climate shifts. What’s more, it has a similar flavor to high-quality Arabica coffee made from the arabica (C. arabica) plant, so it should keep connoisseurs of the hot…

Epidemiologist Shanna Swan studied chemical exposure’s impact on health for two decades. Her book “Count Down” uses research to explain how plastics and other substances mess with fertility. If we don’t do something about chemical exposure, it could endanger human life, Swan writes. Shanna Swan is obsessed with studying the length between babies’ genitals and their anuses. That’s because Swan is an epidemiologist who’s spent two decades researching how our lifestyles and the environments in which we live mess with our hormones and reproductive abilities. The distance between a person’s genitals and their butthole, also called anogenital distance or AGD,…

A new study finds that overconsumption, overpopulation and uncertainty about the future are among the top concerns of those who say climate change is affecting their reproductive decision-making. When deciding whether to have children, there are many factors to consider: finances, support systems, personal values. For a growing number of people, climate change is also being added to the list of considerations, says a University of Arizona researcher. Sabrina Helm, an associate professor in the Norton School of Family and Consumer Sciences in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, is lead author of a new peer-reviewed study that looks at how climate…