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Requests for information from local public services, like sheriffs’ offices, school districts and libraries, across the United States are less likely to receive a reply if signed by ‘black-sounding’ names, according to new research conducted by economists at IZA and the University of Southampton.

It is cold, dark, dry and isolated with very little oxygen to breathe in the air, but the unique location makes Concordia station in Antarctica an attractive place for scientists to conduct research. The aurora australis that adds colour to this picture is a well-deserved bonus for the crew of 13 who are spending the winter months cut off from friends and family.

Organisms differ in their morphology between species, within species and even within individuals at different stages of development. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research in Cologne, Germany, studied how different leaf forms arise within a single plant species, hairy bittercress, and discovered that varying development rates play a key role in the process

More than 20 million years ago, a short struggle took place in what is now the Dominican Republic, resulting in one animal getting its leg bitten off by a predator just before it escaped. But in the confusion, it fell into a gooey resin deposit, to be fossilized and entombed forever in amber.

(Phys.org)—The discovery of 51 Eridani b, a Jupiter-like exoplanet, made headlines last week as it is the lowest-mass planet ever directly imaged around another star. Significantly, the planet resembles Jupiter in its infancy and shows the strongest methane signature ever detected on an alien planet.

Native North Americans have long adorned themselves and their homes with fragrant sweetgrass (Hierochloe odorata), a native plant used in traditional medicine, to repel biting insects, and mosquitoes in particular. Now, researchers report that they have identified the compounds in sweetgrass that keep these bugs at bay.

Under a decades-old program with the government, telecom giant AT&T in 2003 led the way on a new collection capability that the National Security Agency said amounted to a “‘live’ presence on the global net” and would forward 400 billion Internet metadata records in one of its first months of operation, The New York Times reported.

Americans favor diplomatic and economic strategies over military involvement in foreign policy, according to a new national survey conducted by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Americans also question whether or not the United States should be the world’s chief problem solver, even as a myriad of issues across the globe are identified as important for the next president to address.

Eastern North America is home to a small population of Golden Eagles (Aquila chrysaetos), but despite their potential vulnerability to habitat loss and other threats, little information has been available on the patterns of their annual migration. One big question is whether or not they exhibit “migratory connectivity,” where individuals from the same breeding area also migrate to the same wintering area; strong connectivity means that a population is divided into small subpopulations that are especially vulnerable to environmental changes.

Hawai’i has been called the “extinction capital of the world.” But, with the exception of the islands’ birds, there has until now been no accurate assessment of the true level of this catastrophic loss. Invertebrates (insects, snails, spiders, etc.) constitute the vast majority of the species that make up Hawai’i’s formerly spectacularly diverse and unique biota