Australian conservationists are testing a wild idea to train native lizards there: They plan to release eggs, tadpoles and youngsters of invasive toxic cane toads into areas where endangered yellow-spotted monitors (big lizards) live and where the adult toads are about to invade. Monitor lizard populations have declined by more than 90 percent in most areas where cane toads have already invaded, leading to a cascade of negative impacts on the local ecosystems. How it works: To test the idea, researchers identified seven areas in Australia’s tropical Kimberly region that would soon be overrun by cane toads. They released a total of about 200,000 eggs, tadpoles and young cane toads across three of the seven sites during two years’ wet seasons. Monitor populations survived better when exposed to cane toad young–likely because they get sick, but don't die, when they consume eggs or tadpole toads, and not adults. Along the way, the lizards learn to avoid the amphibians.
What the experts say: “This research provides much hope in reducing the impacts of invasive species on native biodiversity,” says Jodi Rowley, a conservation biologist at the Australian Museum in Sydney. But because each invasive species impacts each ecosystem differently, applications in other cases would need to be tailored to specific locations. |
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• Small-scale societies that rely less on money (or not at all) report higher rates of happiness than industrialized societies, anthropologists have found. | 6 min read |
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• Cities around the world are starting new systems of ranking heat waves according to their severity (in some cases naming them like hurricanes), in efforts to communicate the dangers of extreme heat to the public. | 4 min read |
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• A Florida family has filed a claim requesting NASA compensate them after space debris crashed through their home in March. | 2 min read |
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• According to a June Reuters exposé, the Pentagon ran a secret antivaccine campaign in several developing countries at the height of the pandemic in 2020 to discredit vaccines and other life-saving aid that was being supplied by China. The fallout from this military psyops will reverberate on multiple levels by contributing to the spread of misinformation and the public's distrust in institutions, writes Keith Kloor, a professor of journalism at New York University. "Antivaccine rhetoric proved deadly during the coronavirus pandemic and that, in the U.S., politicized misinformation led to COVID deaths in the hundreds of thousands," he says. | 4 min read |
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SPONSORED CONTENT BY THE PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES |
Can ChatGPT help researchers decode how the human brain processes language? |
Discover how generative AI models like ChatGPT mirror human brain language processing in a News Feature from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). MIT's Evelina Fedorenko highlights this convergence and invites neuroscientists to explore this transformative research. |
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A recent report from the Climate and Development Lab at Brown University revealed a tangled web of dark money (mainly from fossil fuel interests) fueling a misinformation campaign behind anti-wind power movements. Identifying the source of information and any related conflicts of interest is becoming harder and harder. But we shouldn't stop trying to question what we're being told, even if it means letting go of our emotions and ego. |
Thank you for being an open-minded circle of science-loving readers! Email me anytime: newsletters@sciam.com. I read all your notes and respond to as many as I can. See you tomorrow. |
—Andrea Gawrylewski, Chief Newsletter Editor |
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