A lifetime of noise: what are the costs?

The visible cringe. The reflex to cover your ears. A constant piercing noise can be a horrific experience for a person. Research has shown that noise pollution can negatively impact the health of humans, animals and possibly entire ecosystems. What are the consequences of a lifetime surrounded by noise? Two scientists aim to characterize the costs of chronic noise pollution on the survival, growth and reproductive success of animals over their entire lifetime.

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Can you figure out what species this is? Computers can

Protecting wild animals requires far more data than scientists could collect alone, so researchers often enlist the help of amateur “citizen scientists” to help identify animals in photos. However, with more and more large scale projects that need help from citizen scientists, it is taking an increasingly long time to process all of the photos from any individual study. Marco Willi from the University of Minnesota and his colleagues thought there might be a way to speed things up: by getting computers to identify most of the easy animals, and leaving humans to figure out the extra hard ones. 

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We need to talk about the elephant in the carbon budget

In order to create a carbon budget, we need to identify everything that is taking carbon in and out of the atmosphere. While we have a pretty good idea of the important processes, could we be missing another “big” piece of the puzzle? In this study, scientists try to figure out if elephants are having an impact on the carbon cycle where they live.

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