Featured Posts

To top

October 2022

11 Oct

Professors call for more research into climate-change related threats to civilization

by TMR Desk
Climate Change
An opinion piece published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a peer-reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences, urgently calls for more research into the specific pathways by which civilization could potentially collapse due to climate change. "Scientists have warned that climate change threatens the habitability of large regions of the Earth and even civilization itself, but surprisingly little research exists about how collapse could happen and what can be done to prevent it," says Dr. Daniel Steel of the School of Population and Public Health at the University of British Columbia. "A better understanding of the risks of collapse is essential for climate ethics and policy." In the article, Dr. Steel and his colleagues, Dr. C. Tyler DesRoches...
Continue reading
0 Comments
11 Oct

What drives ecosystems to instability?

by TMR Desk
Environment
With only a little information, researchers can predict the circumstances under which an ecosystem will be stable or unstable Trying to decipher all of the factors that influence the behavior of complex ecological communities can be a daunting task. However, MIT researchers have now shown that the behavior of these ecosystems can be predicted based on just two pieces of information: the number of species in the community and how strongly they interact with each other. In studies of bacteria grown in the lab, the researchers were able to define three states of ecological communities, and calculated the conditions necessary for them to move from one state to another. These findings allowed the researchers to create a "phase diagram" for ecosystems, similar...
Continue reading
0 Comments