Nature

Photo: Sean Gallup (Getty Images)A California judge ruled this week that bees can now be legally defined as “fish” under a state conservation law, but they’re still biologically bees (obviously).The decision comes from California’s Third District Court of Appeal, whichruled on Tuesday that the California Endangered Species Act can protect bees. In 2020, the Sacramento County Superior Court ruled that the California Fish and Game Commission could not list invertebrates (like bees) under the California Endangered Species…

A hot cup of coffee is the perfect start to the day for millions of people around the world. But when taking that first sip, it's easy to forget how much work goes into bringing it to the table.From the farmers cultivating and harvesting coffee plants, to milling and roasting, many crucial and labor-intensive steps are involved in coffee production. Like all industrial processes, it often uses a lot of land, water and energy.This means there's an increasing amount of scrutiny surrounding the sustainability of the journey…

Sound is a great connector among animals. A song or call links one creature to another almost instantaneously, like a telepathic signal that passes through dense vegetation and the darkest night. Sound also discloses the state of the non-animal world: the sonic textures of wind in trees, flowing water and geologic rumblings all unite attentive ears to the energies and stories unfolding around us. Yet we live in a world of acoustic overstimulation that often requires that we shut down our hearing in order to focus or block…

When a donor organ becomes available to someone in need of a transplant, medical personnel need to act quickly. It only takes a few hours for expanding ice crystals to damage delicate tissue, leaving a window of less than 12 hours to assess, transport, and implant the new organ.  This not only creates a tremendous time crunch to perform a delicate procedure, but leaves many organs unviable for transplantation.But a new breakthrough could vastly improve the landscape of liver transplantation: Scientists kept a liver…

Once hailed as a source of electricity that would be too cheap to meter, atomic power has come a long way since the 1950s – mostly downhill. Far from being cost-free, nuclear-generated electricity is today more expensive than power produced by coal, gas, wind or solar plants while sites storing spent uranium and irradiated equipment litter the globe, a deadly radioactive legacy that will endure for hundreds of thousands of years. For good measure, most analysts now accept that the spread of atomic energy played a crucial…

Nature: Experts say that governments should create bespoke IP law and an international treaty to protect AI-generated inventions, rather than rework old patent laws — The patent system assumes that inventors are human. Inventions devised by machines require their own intellectual property law and an international treaty. Nature: Experts say that governments should create bespoke IP law and an international treaty to protect AI-generated inventions, rather than rework old patent laws …

You’d have to be living under a rock not to know we are in the midst of one of the most devastating pandemics in history. Just how devastating became clear earlier this month when the World Health Organization released a report estimating the global excess death toll due to the pandemic as 15 million – nearly three times the official Covid death count. Other authorities think global excess deaths may be closer to 18 million. These are awfully big numbers, but they pale in comparison with the 1918-1919 Spanish influenza…

Credit: Shutterstock Like in many aspects of life, there remains an undercurrent of sex bias against women in the STEM fields. And this bias has a negative impact on not only women, but men too—and those who don't fit within a binary category. …

From the moment the first Tyrannosaurus swam onto the screen in Prehistoric Planet I was a lost cause — I giggled in delight. My thoughts instantly devolved from “I’m a science editor taking a serious look at this nature show” to “Holy crap, that’s a dinosaur.” Prehistoric Planet is Apple’s attempt at answering the question: what if we made Planet Earth but 66 million years ago? The result is shockingly good-looking, especially since the producers have not, in fact, managed to invent time travel, nor have they pulled…

Then there was a 2018 study that analyzed data from more than 500 publications and estimated that biocrusts “will decrease by about 25–40 percent within 65 years, due to anthropogenically caused climate change and land-use intensification.”Finger-Higgens’s “paper offers a little more realism” than these experimental studies, says Bowker. It shows “something that unfolded over an extended period of time in a natural ecosystem.”So is stripping the desert of its crusty skin really a big deal? If you have spent time in the…