Some killer whales hunt in pairs to maximize their bounty - Science News

Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:Strong soil health is immensely important for agriculture, carbon sequestration, and providing a habitat for more than half the world’s wildlife, but roughly one third of the world’s soils are degraded. A new study used the rate of decomposition of cotton underpants as part of a citizen science project showing how land use impacts soil health. The study determined that underwear is a good tool for studying soil health and developed a tool known as the Underpants Index. Life begins with dirt. A vast majority of the food we eat originates with soil. Soil helps store carbon, acting as one of the largest carbon reservoirs on Earth. Soil is home to more than half of all species on the planet. To put it mildly, soil is a big deal. Sadly, soil rarely comes up in conversation when talking about the environmental damage brought on by global warming and industrialization, and like so many other facets of Earth’s natural systems today, soil is in crisis. “Soil is full of millions of living organisms that interact with one another,” says Silvia Pressel, a researcher with the Natural History Museum in the U. K.

They wanted our attention, and now they have it. Scientists have buried more than 2,000 pairs of underwear in gardens, meadows, fields, and lawns scattered across Switzerland. Sadly, this was not the start of some great, nationwide game of hide-and-seek. It was simply a way to air our dirty laundry. When researchers dug up the cotton undies two months later, some of the pairs had become mere skeletons of seams, while others just featured a hole or two. The findings of the project, called "Proof by Underpants", were published in the journal Plants, People, Planet. It was designed to show us that some soils are hanging on by little more than a G-string. A selection of the more than 2,000 cotton underwear items in various stages of decomposition that were buried in fields, meadows, and gardens. (Gabriela Brändle, Agroscope)"Overall," write the study authors, "this project demonstrates that underpants can serve as a simple and easy-to-interpret tool, providing informative insights into the state of soils. "Moreover, they are perfectly suited to raise attention in society for soil.

What’s the best way to test the quality and vitality of the soil we depend on to grow crops, grow the trees we need to filter impurities from the air and provide us with oxygen? Of course, it’s to get a bunch of people to bury their underwear in the dirt for two months. That’s called science, baby, and it’s an actual experiment, the details of which you can read about in a new paper published in Plants People Planet. Researchers recruited about 1,000 volunteers across Switzerland, who buried more than 2,000 pairs of organic cotton underwear at roughly 1,000 locations. After 30 days, and again after 60 days, the participants dug up the increasingly disgusting-looking underwear, took a picture of it, then sent it to researchers along with soil samples. In other words, people mailed out literally soiled underwear in the name of science.

The attacker moved $744,000 in ETH and BNB to Tornado Cash after exploiting Cysic’s bridge to mint 10 million tokens on BNB Smart Chain. The wallet linked to the Cysic bridge exploit sent about $744,000 in cryptocurrencies to Tornado Cash on Friday after the Cysic Foundation offered the attacker a 10% recovery bounty. The address transferred 300 Ether (ETH) and 30.4 BNB to the crypto mixer, according to blockchain security company PeckShield. The hacker exploited a bridge vulnerability to mint 10 million Cysic (CYS) tokens on BNB Smart Chain on Saturday. Cysic suspended the bridge and blacklisted the recipient address, freezing about 2.8 million of the newly minted tokens. The foundation said its mainnet and existing assets in user wallets were unaffected. The following Thursday, the Cysic Foundation offered the hacker a 10% bounty in exchange for returning 275.872 ETH, worth about $665,000, representing roughly 90% of the identified Ether proceeds. Tornado Cash pools deposits from multiple addresses, making the funds harder to trace. The attacker’s Ethereum wallet held just $45 in ETH at press time, according to Akham data.

The Greenland shark is one of the world’s largest sharks, but it grows slowly, at only a few centimetres over several years, hinting at a long lifespan. But until 2016 biologists could only guess at the life expectancy of these little-understood creatures.