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https://m.kekenet.com/broadcast/201904/583867.shtml

This is Scientific American — 60-Second Science. I'm Christopher Intagliata.

You've probably heard the financial advice that a diversified portfolio is better in turbulent times? Well that same wisdom may hold true for our stocks of trees. Because ecologists say forests with a diversity of trees are better at weathering drought. The reason:
"There's a huge difference and a huge diversity of water transport strategies in trees." William Anderegg is an ecologist at the University of Utah. "It's everything from having deeper roots or shallower roots, to having these pipes that are incredibly well armored to withstand drought or incredibly weak in the face of drought."
Anderegg and his team studied droughts in 40 forests around the world. And the forests with diverse tree populations, with a mix of water-management strategies, did better than forests made up of just one or a few species. Could be a couple reasons for that.

"One is that there are other forces that are acting on the ecosystem at the same time. Other stressors like insect attack, or other things they're competing for, competing for light and for nutrients, and this is why a more diverse forest is going to be more functional. It'll be more resilient to drought but maybe also have higher carbon uptake rates over the long term."
The second possibility, he says, is that a monoculture of drought-ready trees may look really resilient to drought. "Up until the drought is severe enough that a whole bunch of the trees shut down or even die. And so that really threshold cliff response you would get in a one species forest and you may not get in a diverse forest." The full report is in the journal Nature.
The lesson for land managers, he says, is that forest restoration efforts following wildfires and disease outbreaks might want to focus on planting a diverse portfolio of tree species. So that even if water plummets, tree stocks will, hopefully, remain stable.
Thanks for listening for Scientific American — 60-Second Science. I'm Christopher Intagliata.

 

https://m.kekenet.com/broadcast/201903/579418.shtml

This is Scientific American — 60-Second Science. I'm Christopher Intagliata.
Dating apps like Bumble and Tinder can help singles couple up. But online dating is also great for scientists.
"There's so much folk wisdom about dating and very little hard evidence." Elizabeth Bruch is a computational social scientist at the University of Michigan. She recently used online dating data to answer this question: "What does it mean for someone to be out of your league, and is there a way that we can study that using the techniques of network science?"
Bruch and her colleague Mark Newman studied who swapped messages with whom on a popular online dating platform in the month of January 2014. They categorized users by desirability using PageRank, one of the algorithms behind search technology. Essentially, if you receive a dozen messages from desirable users, you must be more desirable than someone who receives the same number of messages from average users.
Then they asked: How far "out of their league" do online daters tend to go when pursuing a partner? "I think people are optimistic realists."

In other words, they found that both men and women tended to pursue mates just 25 percent more desirable than themselves. "So they're being optimistic, but they're also taking into account their own relative position within this overall desirability hierarchy."
All the graphs and charts are in the journal Science Advances.
And the study did have a few more lessons for people on the market: "I think one of the take-home messages from this study is that women could probably afford to be more aspirational in their mate pursuit."
They also found that both men and women—but especially women—write longer messages to more desirable partners. So are those wasted words? "What was interesting is it doesn't seem to pay off for women. The only group for whom this pays off is men in Seattle."
And for everyone else, the big picture is this: "We don't have to sort of stab around in the dark, or behave based on some beliefs or norms about what is appropriate. We can actually know if our strategies are working and adjust our behavior accordingly."
In other words, better data could mean better dating.
Thanks for listening for Scientific American — 60-Second Science. I'm Christopher Intagliata.

 

https://m.kekenet.com/broadcast/201903/580177.shtml

Hi, I'm Scientific American podcast editor Steve Mirsky. And here's a short piece from the August 2018 issue of the magazine, in the section called Advances: Dispatches from the Frontiers of Science, Technology and Medicine.
Taking Stock of Life by Andrea Thompson
Plants rule the planet—at least in terms of sheer mass. Many tallies of Earth's life use biodiversity as a measurement and simply count the number of species. A new census, based on biomass, compiled data from hundreds of studies to determine which kingdoms, classes and species carry the most global heft. The results show that plants (primarily those on land) account for 80 percent of the total biomass, with bacteria across all ecosystems a distant second at 15 percent. The findings were published in May in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Higher-resolution satellite data and improvements in genomic sequencing have made such measurements possible by yielding more accurate estimates, but the uncertainty is still high for hard-to-count life-forms such as microbes and insects. Antarctic krill, a type of small crustacean, have a total biomass comparable to that of humans. We makes up only a 100th of a percent of the total, but it still dwarfs that of all wild mammals. Livestock also dominate: chickens, for example, account for three times the biomass of wild birds. The study estimates that humans have decreased the biomass of wild mammals sixfold and plants twofold through actions such as hunting and deforestation.
That was Taking Stock of Life by Andrea Thompson.

转载于:https://www.cnblogs.com/techyu/p/10864607.html