More than half of the Ecuadorian Amazon has been marked for oil drilling, overlapping with Indigenous territories and areas of high biodiversity. The ecological and cultural impacts of oil extraction are well documented and have fueled some of Latin America's most prominent environmental movements.…
Isaac Larsen, an associate professor in the College of Natural Sciences' Department of Earth, Geographic, and Climate Sciences, is a lead author of "Status of the World's Soil Resources 2026," a new report produced by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) that draws on…
Why does the expansion of wind energy sometimes meet with local resistance, even though renewable energy generally enjoys broad support? RIFS researcher Jörg Radtke used a representative survey of 6,284 people in North Rhine-Westphalia to investigate which social characteristics are linked to the…
In "Bloons Tower Defense," the goal is to stop balloons from reaching the end of a track by strategically placing towers along the route. These towers vary in cost, range and attack power, and they also take up valuable space. The game becomes increasingly difficult with each round. Where you place…
In China, young people are encountering a myriad of challenges, from societal pressures around success to life in a highly surveilled society, that have led them to turn to the internet in search of a balm to soothe their pain. What has emerged is a host of content called "digital ibuprofen"—viewed…
The funniest post you saw this week may not have come from a friend; it may have come from a brand. Whether it is Kohl's, Wendy's, or Netflix, brands are behaving more like internet users than traditional advertisers.
The Surinam toad is one of the strangest frogs on Earth. Flat-bodied, tiny-eyed and adapted to the murky waters of the Amazon basin, it hunts well despite having very poor vision. When a fish swims close, the frog suddenly opens its mouth and sucks the prey inside in a fraction of a second.
When you walk into a bakery and smell fresh cookies, the enticing smell draws you in. After you eat a handful of cookies, though, the same smell likely doesn't send you back for more. Researchers in the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis sought to determine the…
Moving large animals around is a seductive idea in conservation. If there are plenty of animals in one place and too few in another, moving some between the two seems an obvious solution. Sometimes it is. But with animals as large, mobile and socially complicated as elephants and rhinos, the move…
The universe may be trapped in its own comfort zone, and a researcher in the College of Engineering and Computer Science has helped explain why it cannot seem to leave. A new study suggests the universe could be locked into its current state by the same kinds of quantum effects that scientists…