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A groundbreaking study by Harvard University’s Harvard Forest and the Smithsonian Institution reveals that, if left unchecked, recent trends in the loss of forests to development will undermine significant land conservation gains in Massachusetts, jeopardize water quality, and limit the natural landscape’s ability to protect against climate change.

The Turkestan cockroach, Blatta lateralis (Walker), has become an important invasive species throughout the southwestern United States and has been reported in the southern United States. It is rapidly replacing the oriental cockroach, Blatta orientalis (L.), in urban areas of the southwestern United States as the most important peri-domestic species.

(Phys.org) —Findings from Internet intelligence company Renesys sound an alert to a hijacking practice in the form of traffic misdirection on the Internet. A November 19 blog on the Renesys site has since caught the attention of a wider press: “Who is sending Internet traffic on long, strange trips?” asked a headline in The Christian Science Monitor earlier this month.

Small test strips made of silver or other metals, called “coupons,” are frequently used to assess and predict the speeds at which metals used in outdoor environments—pipelines, aircraft, bridges, as well as countless other types of infrastructure and machinery—will succumb to corrosion.

Recent studies from two research teams at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University (NYU-Poly) demonstrate how underwater robots can be used to understand and influence the complex swimming behaviors of schooling fish. The teams, led by Maurizio Porfiri, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at NYU-Poly, published two separate papers in the journal PLOS ONE.

(Phys.org) —Startup Play-i has created a crowd-sourcing campaign to gather funds for building and selling its pair of robots called Bo and Yana—both are part of an overall toy design to teach children as young as five years old, to program a computer. The idea, the team says, is to get children interested in programming by making it a part of storytelling.