TO KEEP EARTH SAFE FROM ASTEROIDS
Aiming to keep Earth safe from incoming asteroids, MIT researchers have developed a toolkit to be called Asteroid Interior Mapping from Encounters that can help scientists take a better aim at the space rocks to deflect them from their Earth-bound course and keep our planet safe. In late September, NASA scored a bulls-eye, striking an asteroid while conducting the Double Asteroid Redirection Test. The MIT team’s toolkit can map an asteroid’s interior structure.
DOGS KNOW WHEN YOU’RE STRESSED
It is not for any paltry reason that canines are known to be humans’ best friends. Researchers have now found out that dogs can actually smell out if you are stressed or not with an accuracy of 93.75 per cent. Researchers from Queen’s University Belfast, UK, found that dogs are sensitive to the odours emitted by the human body constituting chemical signals evolved for communication, primarily within species. Given the remarkable capability of smell among the canines, besides their history of proximity with humans who are given to anxiety, and panic attacks, the researchers wondered whether dogs could sense chemical signals to respond to their owners’ psychological conditions. The research team found that the dogs could smell odours released due to changes in the volatile organic compounds that occur during stress.
‘REWILDING AGRI LANDS WITH HUMAN INTERVENTION CAN RESTORE ECOSYSTEM’
Rewilding agricultural landscapes using farming practices, instead of without it, can help restore ecosystems and produce high-welfare, high-quality food, researchers say. Rewilding is a process of ecological restoration with an emphasis on recreating an area’s natural uncultivated state. But in this case, it is done with active human intervention as against the conventional rewilding in which human intervention is reduced or completely eliminated.
A study by researchers from the University of Exeter, UK, and the French National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food, and the Environment, found that rewilding can help overcome concerns about the impact of rewilding on livelihoods and produce a win-win environmental and human benefits, according to the researchers.
They found that extensive farming, while pursuing rewilding part of agricultural landscapes, offered an advantage as livestock could be kept in their naturalistic conditions. This, they found, restored biodiversity and regenerated the ecosystem function, while still contributing to agricultural and higher meat production.