Nest‑building chimpanzees seem to anticipate future weather

Fabiana Rizzi / Unsplash Hassan Al Razi, The University of Western Australia

Every evening, as they move from place to place through the forest, chimpanzees stop to build a nest – most often in a tree – to sleep in. Using a selection of branches, leaves and twigs, they create comfortable and safe spaces to get some shuteye.

Like human beds, these are places to rest – but they also help chimps stay warm or cool and protect themselves against the weather. As you might expect, how and where chimpanzees build their nests depends on things like temperature, humidity, wind and rainfall.

But how do they make these choices? Previous research has shown the construction is related to the conditions at the time when the creatures are building the nest.

In new research, published today in Current Biology, my colleagues and I show that chimps are a little bit cleverer than you might expect: they seem to build their nests in ways that anticipate what the overnight weather will be.

A year in Rwanda

We conducted a field study on eastern chimpanzees in Nyungwe National Park, Rwanda, a cool and humid mountain forest. Over a 12-month period, we collected detailed data on the structure of nests, the characteristics of their chosen sites, and the kinds of trees the chimps chose.

We also measured how well different kinds of nests insulate against cold and heat. At the same time, we made detailed records of weather conditions when the nests were being built and throughout the night.

This let us test whether chimpanzees respond primarily to immediate environmental conditions, or whether their nesting decisions are better explained by the conditions they experience later during the night.

Chimpanzees are always adjusting their behaviour

Our results show chimpanzees consistently adjust their nesting behaviour in relation to environmental conditions. They preferred to build nests in places that were warmer, more humid and less exposed to wind than surrounding areas.

Nest structure and insulation varied systematically with environmental conditions. In cooler and wetter conditions, nests were thicker and deeper – indicating the chimpanzees put more effort into insulation when conditions are tougher.

We also found that factors such as the width and depth of the nest influenced its insulating ability.

The chimpanzees tended to build more insulating nests when weather was colder and when it was more humid, both during nest-building and overnight.

In cooler and wetter conditions, the chimps also built their nests higher, in taller trees with denser leaf cover. This makes sense: it would be a more stable microclimate with more shelter from rain.

Are chimps thinking ahead?

Importantly, nesting decisions aligned more closely with overnight environmental conditions than with those at the time of construction. When we took overnight weather into account, we found we could explain the variation in nesting behaviour much better than if we used only the current conditions.

One possible explanation is that chimpanzees use environmental cues, such as shifts in temperature, humidity or atmospheric pressure, that are linked to upcoming weather.

These cues may allow them to adjust nest-building behaviour in advance. Does this mean they predict or forecast future weather? Not quite.

But it does show their behaviour is consistent with reacting to environmental signals that are associated with later conditions. Either way, the chimps display a remarkable sensitivity to their environment – and a grasp of how to live in it.

Hassan Al Razi, PhD Student, School of Human Sciences, The University of Western Australia

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Read More........→May 01, 2026

Birds and monkeys in the Amazon share information via ‘internet of the forest’: new research

Ettore Camerlenghi, Deakin University and Ari Martínez, University of California, Santa Cruz

You might go for a walk in the forest to disconnect from work and calm your nerves after a busy week. The chirping and calls of birds in the canopy above might be exactly what allows you to relax.

But what sounds soothing to humans may signal danger to other animals – and trigger fear across the forest.

In our research, published today in Current Biology, we show that when some animals spot a predator they issue a warning cry that is picked up by others and spread through the rainforest canopy. For a time, different species are linked into a shared information network, and parts of the forest briefly fall silent.

Birds and monkeys

During an expedition to a remote area of the Peruvian Amazon, working with a falconer, we used trained raptors to trigger warning calls from birds and primates. We recorded the calls then played them back into the forest and monitored how the community responded.

We already knew that birds sometimes repeat the warnings of others – occasionally even those of different species, or of primates. What we wanted to know was how widespread this behaviour is across the animal community.

Researchers released birds of prey in the Amazon rainforest to study how the alarm calls of other animals travel through the ‘internet of the forest’.

We discovered that alarm calls produced by small bird species – those weighing less than 100 grams – were most often passed on. Other small birds living in the canopy were the most likely to relay the call, but other animals joined in too.

Larger species, including capuchin and spider monkeys, sometimes responded as well. Two canopy species in particular – the black-fronted and the white-fronted nunbirds – stood out as especially likely to repeat and propagate the warnings of their neighbours throughout the forest.

Sounds and silence

Alarm calls from species living in the forest understorey were far less likely to spread and be propagated by other birds or primates.

However, even when these alarm calls were not repeated, they changed the forest’s soundscape. Small canopy birds almost completely stopped singing after hearing a predator alert. At the same time, animals in lower forest layers often continued to make sounds despite the perceived threat.

Together, these findings suggest that the Amazonian canopy is not only the rainforest’s most mysterious layer – largely unexplored and home to much of its biodiversity – but also functions as an information highway, like a fibre-optic network through which animals rapidly share signals of danger.

A new layer of the ‘internet of the forest’

In the past decade, the idea of an “internet of the forest” has become popular through the concept of the “wood wide web”, where plants exchange resources and information via root systems and fungal networks. Our work points to another communication system, one operating high above the ground.

Suspended above our heads is a vast ecosystem where animals constantly listen to one another, forming an eavesdropping network that spreads critical information within seconds.

The vocal activity of birds is usually associated with finding mates and defending territories. However, we now know that sometimes this activity, or lack of it, may represent pulses of a soundscape of fear.

Next time you walk through a rainforest, look up and listen to the birds. A sudden silence may mean a raptor is gliding somewhere above the canopy.

Ettore Camerlenghi, Associate Research Fellow, Avian Behaviour, Deakin University and Ari Martínez, Assistant Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of California, Santa Cruz

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Read More........→April 21, 2026

He Made a Battery Pack Using Disposable Vapes to Power His Electric Car (WATCH)

Chris Doel powers electric car with disposable vape batteries – SWNS

A man has powered an electric car using a homemade battery pack built out of discarded vapes, on a quest to show that so many valuable resources are being cast off every day.

Last year, GNN reported that Chris Doel had stripped down the lithium batteries from 500 disposable vapes, power sources he describes as “fully rechargeable”, to create a power-bank big enough to run his home.

Not willing to stop there, the 27-year-old engineer then decided to reuse the battery pack to power a trip in an electric car.

He needed a vehicle with a small battery so bought a 2007 G-Wiz for £800—named the worst car that year by Top Gear—and spent five months working on the project. He finally took it out for a spin last month.

The young man from Warwickshire, England, who calls himself “the engineer equivalent of a mad scientist”, documented the process on his YouTube channel, which has 164,000 subscribers. (Watch his new car video below…)

He went to the local vape shop last May asking if they would donate their “returns” for his house-battery project. He walked away with bags containing 2,000 vapes.

It took him six months during his free time at home, outside Birmingham, to extract the rechargeable lithium batteries from the devices. He then used a 3D printed case to combine 500 cells wired in parallel into groups connected in series to make a massive battery pack.

27-year-old Chris Doel powers EV with disposable vape batteries – SWNS

The completed pack successfully powered his house for eight hours, before finally running out of juice. Immediately, he set his sights on his next project: the car.

“I was speaking with a colleague about how I wanted to power a vehicle, but because EVs have such enormous batteries, I thought it was never going to be possible,” Chris told SWNS news agency.

“My colleague came up with the genius idea of using the G-Wiz. It’s pretty much the only car out there with a 48v battery, (meaning) the power-wall would work with it.

The micro-car only requires a battery with a voltage of 48v—well below Tesla’s 400v. It has a max speed of just 50 mph, yet seats two adults and two small children.

It ran for two hours, covering a distance of 18 miles—entirely powered by vape batteries.

What about the flammability?

Chris bought insurance to cover liability, and was happy to pay around $700 for one year, saying, “Given the fact they’re taking the risk of it being a battery pack literally made of vape cells, it was incredibly cheap in the grand scheme of things.”

He spent five hours a day after work on weekdays, and 12 hours a day on weekends, for five months rewiring the car and sorting out the legal paperwork before he was finally able to take it out for a spin.

Credit: Pablo Merchán Montes for Unsplash+

“I stripped it all back to re-do all the wiring, making sure it was proper sturdy. I made a big enclosure—worst-case scenario—in case it were to go up in flames. I would want it to be at least somewhat contained and not be rattling all over the place.”

Now, Chris has taken the vape batteries out of the car and replaced them with two Tesla battery modules, but runs it with “special software to fool them into thinking they’re installed in a Tesla Model 3.”

Today, the car is his daily transportation.

“As soon as I get an idea in my head, I’m determined to get it done.”

As an environmentalist who is outraged by the “planned obsolescence”of these disposable vapes, he urges everyone to stop buying the wasteful product which ends up in the landfill within days of purchasing.Instead, he urges manufacturers to build rechargeable products with long lives that are recyclable to help create a circular economy. He Made a Battery Pack Using Disposable Vapes to Power His Electric Car (WATCH)

Read More........→March 21, 2026

Human vision: what we actually see – and don’t see – tells us a lot about consciousness

Henry Taylor, University of Birmingham

What can you see right now? This might seem like a silly question, but what enters your consciousness is not the whole story when it comes to vision. A great deal of visual processing in the brain goes on well below our conscious awareness.

Some studies have probed the unconscious depths of vision. One source of evidence comes from the neurological condition known as blindsight, which is caused by damage to areas of the brain involved in processing visual information. People with blindsight report that they are unable to see, either entirely or in a portion of their visual field. However, when asked to guess what is there, they can often do so with remarkable accuracy.

For example, in an experiment published in 2004 on someone with blindsight, a black bar was displayed in the portion of the visual field to which the person was blind. The person was asked to “guess” whether the bar was vertical or horizontal.

Despite denying any conscious awareness of the bar, the participant could answer correctly at a level well above chance. The participant even showed evidence of being able to pay attention to the bar – they were faster to respond when an arrow (placed in a healthy area of their visual field) correctly indicated the location of the bar.

The most popular interpretation (though not the only one) is that people with blindsight can see these objects, but not see them consciously. They see what is there, but it all goes on unconsciously, below their awareness.

The phenomenon of inattentional blindness seems to show you can see without the information crossing into your consciousness. Anyone can experience inattentional blindness. The phenomenon has been known about for a long time, but we can most easily get a handle on it by looking at a well-known experiment reported in 1999.

In this experiment, participants are shown a video of people playing basketball, and told to count the number of passes between the players wearing a white shirt. If you’ve never done this before, I urge to you stop reading now and watch the video.

In many cases, people are so busy counting the passes that they completely miss a large gorilla walking across the middle of the scene and beating its chest, then walking off. The gorilla’s right there, in the centre of your visual field. Light from the gorilla enters your eyes, and is processed in the visual system, but somehow you missed it, because you weren’t paying attention to it.

The gorilla has more to teach us. In another experiment reported in 2013, radiologists were given a series of lung scans. They were told to look for nodules (which show up as small light coloured circles) on each scan. In one of the scans, a large picture of a dancing gorilla was superimposed on top of the lung scan. In this study, 83% of the radiologists failed to spot it, even though it was 48 times bigger than the average nodule they were looking for. Some of them even looked directly at the gorilla and still didn’t notice it!

The interpretation of these experiments is controversial. Some scientists suggest that in these kinds of cases, you consciously see the gorilla, but immediately forget it (although a dancing gorilla in someone’s lung doesn’t seem like the kind of thing you’d forget). Others argue that you see the gorilla, but the information never made its way into consciousness. You saw the gorilla, but unconsciously.

Let’s assume that in the case of blindsight, and inattentional blindness, the information is seen, but didn’t make it all the way to consciousness. Then, the question is: what makes some information conscious, rather than the information that stays unconscious? This is one of the central questions for consciousness studies in philosophy, psychology and neuroscience.

The brain’s loudspeaker

There’s no agreement on which is the best theory of consciousness, but in my opinion, the strongest contender is the global neuronal workspace theory.

According to this theory, consciousness is all to do with a particular area of the brain which is the seat of the “workspace”. The workspace is a system with a small capacity, so it can’t hold a lot of information at any one time. The job of the workspace is to take unconscious information and broadcast it to lots of different networks all across the brain. Global neuronal workspace theorists say that broadcasting the information in this way is what makes it conscious.

The job of the workspace is to act like the brain’s loudspeaker, and consciousness is the information that gets broadcast. The workspace takes unconscious information and boosts it so that many of the different systems in the brain hear about it and can use that information in their own processes. The late philosopher Daniel Dennett used to call consciousness “fame in the brain”. The workspace idea is similar.

One of the most striking implications of the global neuronal workspace theory is how little information makes it to consciousness. Since the workspace has quite a small capacity, it follows that we can only ever be conscious of a little at a time. We might think there’s a rich visual world in front of us, full of details, all of which we’re conscious of, but really – according to the theory – we’re only ever conscious of a small portion of that.

Some philosophers and scientists have objected to the theory on these grounds. They suggest that consciousness “overflows” the workspace: we are conscious of more information than can “fit” into the workspace at any one time. Even with these debates still ongoing, I think the global neuronal workspace theory gives us a reasonably clear answer to the question of what consciousness is for, and how it interacts with other systems in the brain.

In our brains, consciousness is only the tip of a very large iceberg. But the global neuronal workspace theory might give us insight into what makes that tip so special.

Henry Taylor, Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of Birmingham

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Read More........→March 18, 2026

Animals can talk over huge distances – but humans might be changing their range

 

Ben JJ Walker / UNSW Sydney, CC BY-NC-ND Ben JJ Walker, UNSW Sydney

Animals are noisy. And their noises can travel a long way.

But making sounds can be a double-edged sword: it can help them communicate, sometimes over long distances, but it can also reveal them to predators.

In new research published in the Journal of Mammalian Evolution, my colleague and I studied how far the sounds of 103 different mammal species travel, and discovered some surprising patterns.

What’s more, these patterns hint at an overlooked impact humans may be having on our fellow creatures: not only changing their sonic landscapes through our own noise, but also changing the world their sounds are travelling through, with unknown effects.

What’s happening in the water?

In aquatic mammals, the relationship between the size of an animal and the farthest distance its call travels is simple. Bigger animals can be heard farther away.

On a perfect day in perfect conditions, the call of a blue whale (the largest animal in history) can travel up to 1,600 kilometres. Its (slightly smaller) cousin the fin whale can be heard over a similar distance.

These are the longest-travelling animal sounds ever reported.

What’s happening on land?

On land, the story is very different. Environmental factors are crucial to how far the sound of a terrestrial mammal travels.

Things that matter include the size of an animal’s home range (the area in which it lives and defends resources), whether a call is territorial (to defend against other animals), whether the environment is open versus densely vegetated, and if the animal is very social or solitary.

On a good day in the savannah, lions and elephants have sounds that travel 8km and 10km, respectively.

Lions call to announce their presence in the landscape and to defend territories. Ben JJ Walker / UNSW Sydney, CC BY-NC-ND

Lions Chorusing. Ben J.J. Walker, CC BY-SA422 KB (download)

How does this work?

Our research is centred around the idea that your sound reveals you to predators, and that revelation leads to a higher risk of injury and death (potentially before you pass on your genes, and hence reducing what evolutionary biologists call “fitness”). This would be because the predator can more quickly locate its calling prey.

There is a delicate balance between using sounds to communicate and using sounds in the wrong place and at the wrong time.

If sound is revealed at the wrong distance, it may mess up the reason an animal uses the sound in the first place.

Animals that cannot adapt to changes in the sound environment may reveal themselves and be eaten, or may be unable to find their friends.

Where does this fit?

In the midst of human-induced environmental and species change, understanding how animals use sounds to communicate and find each other has become valuable to conservation. Many ecosystems are being cleared on land to make way for development and agriculture.

Our finding that land mammals in closed habitats have evolved to have relatively farther sound distances is important because of what happens when the environment changes.

If a possum has evolved in a eucalyptus forest, for example, and the forest is cleared, its sounds will travel farther (because there are fewer trees to muffle it). As a result, the possum may reveal itself to a predator when it doesn’t mean to.

This in turn means the animal’s call leaves it more exposed than it “should” in evolutionary terms. The animal may not have the same tools to escape predators that animals evolved for open environments do, and so may be more easily eaten.

What are humans doing?

Many species have reduced in body size due to things like harvesting activities and climate change.

It’s a well documented fact that many whale species have been getting smaller as a result of human whaling activities and environmental impacts.

Since 1981, for example, the length of northern right whales has become about 7% smaller. Among gray whales, animals born in 2020 are estimated to be 1.65 metres shorter than animals born in the 1980s.

Given our finding that larger body sizes mean farther-travelling sounds in aquatic mammals, smaller whales may not be able to be heard as far away.

This means that when smaller whales call to their friends or family members, their calls may not reach these individuals over the enormous distances the species travel.

What can humans change?

Our findings add a new dimension to our understanding of how humans are affecting animals, and may help inform future conservation decisions.

Do they mean anything in our everyday lives?

For one thing, they remind us to take a moment to listen to the world around us.

Leopards’ sawing call. Ben J.J. Walker, CC BY-SA303 KB (download)

We might find out where an animal is. We might observe a new species.

We might even find a quiet space in the landscapes around us to sit and connect again with the world and ourselves.

Ben JJ Walker, Researcher, UNSW Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Read More........→March 14, 2026

Dogs can detect trafficked wildlife hidden in shipping containers from tiny air samples

Georgia Moloney, Adelaide University and Anne-Lise Chaber, Adelaide University

Wildlife trafficking is a global crisis impacting at least 4,000 species of plants and animals, including mammals, reptiles, birds, corals and rare plants.

A shocking case from 2025 involved the seizure of 3.7 tonnes of pangolin scales in Nigeria. These scales were believed to be sourced from more than 1,900 individual pangolins.

While this case was uncovered, many more remain undetected. These crimes aren’t just pushing species toward extinction, they’re also putting people at risk. Hunting, trafficking and handling wild animals creates opportunities for diseases to jump from animals to humans. Wildlife trafficking is therefore not just a conservation crisis, but a serious threat to public health.

In our recent paper published in Conservation Biology, we present a new method for tackling this global crime. It uses a tiny sample of air extracted from a shipping container – and the incredible power of a dogs’ nose.

Traffickers exploit shipping routes

People buy and sell a wide range of wild animals and their parts for many reasons, such as pangolin scales for traditional medicines, monkeys for exotic pets, or even porcupines for bushmeat.

Traffickers exploit global transport routes to move their products, with shipping containers in particular being ideal targets.

Containers carry up to 90% of the world’s cargo, meaning products can be easily concealed and blend into the high volume of container traffic moving through ports.

Despite this, on average only about 2% of containers are physically inspected due to resource limitations.

There are few wildlife specific detection tools, and wildlife crime is often considered a low priority. Combined, this means most trafficking slips through undetected.

Bringing the scent to the dog

To bridge this gap, we investigated air sampling as a way to screen containers for wildlife without opening them, damaging cargo, or disrupting port operations.

This work was part of a four-year project, undertaken in collaboration with the world’s third largest shipping company CMA CGM.

We designed a portable air extraction device that fits onto a standard container vent and draws air through a filter to collect a sample. The sample is then presented to a trained detection dog which can indicate whether the scent of specific wildlife products is present.

In our study, we concealed pelts from five big cat species – lion, tiger, leopard, snow leopard and cheetah – inside standard-sized shipping containers. The pelts were arranged to simulate smuggling scenarios, including being hidden inside cardboard boxes to increase concealment.

Our detection dog successfully detected the pelts with almost 98% accuracy when air was extracted from the shipping container. They did so even when the pelts were concealed, demonstrating that the scent can escape into the container airspace and be reliably captured.

Detection dogs are already widely used by customs and border agencies around the world, but their ability to screen sealed containers at scale is limited. Containers are often inaccessible, stacked high, or in environments that are unsafe for dogs.

Our approach brings the scent to the dog, allowing many more containers to be screened efficiently and safely.

While the study was conducted under controlled conditions, these early results are encouraging. Pairing detection dogs with air-sampling could dramatically improve the detection of illegally trafficked wildlife hidden inside shipping containers.

The air extraction device is low cost, portable and scalable, making it well suited for use in high-risk ports and border crossings worldwide. The method could also be readily adapted for detecting other forms of trafficking, such as drugs, increasing its appeal to border agencies.

Disrupting criminal networks

Further trials are planned to validate the effectiveness of this approach in operational port environments across a broader range of wildlife products.

We are also exploring machine-based detectors to analyse samples and support the future development of this project.

However, initial findings show the dogs still outperform these technologies, which currently remain our most effective approach.

Our goal is to give frontline agencies practical tools to fight wildlife trafficking.

Through applying science-based research in the field, we can bridge enforcement gaps and detect trafficked wildlife faster, allowing us to better protect threatened species and disrupt the criminal networks behind this devastating trade.

Georgia Moloney, Researcher, School of Animal and Veterinary Sciences, Adelaide University and Anne-Lise Chaber, One Health Lecturer, School of Animal and Veterinary Science, Adelaide University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Read More........→March 03, 2026

Why your brain has to work harder in an open-plan office than private offices: study

Arlington Research/Unsplash, CC BY Libby (Elizabeth) Sander, Bond University

Since the pandemic, offices around the world have quietly shrunk. Many organisations don’t need as much floor space or as many desks, given many staff now do a mix of hybrid work from home and the office.

But on days when more staff are required to be in, office spaces can feel noticeably busier and noisier. Despite so much focus on getting workers back into offices, there has been far less focus on the impacts of returning to open-plan workspaces.

Now, more research confirms what many suspected: our brains have to work harder in open-plan spaces than in private offices.

What the latest study tested

In a recently published study, researchers at a Spanish university fitted 26 people, aged in their mid-20s to mid-60s, with wireless electroencephalogram (EEG) headsets. EEG testing can measure how hard the brain is working by tracking electrical activity through sensors on the scalp.

Participants completed simulated office tasks, such as monitoring notifications, reading and responding to emails, and memorising and recalling lists of words.

Each participant was monitored while completing the tasks in two different settings: an open-plan workspace with colleagues nearby, and a small enclosed work “pod” with clear glazed panels on one side.

The researchers focused on the frontal regions of the brain, responsible for attention, concentration, and filtering out distractions. They measured different types of brain waves.

As neuroscientist Susan Hillier explains in more detail, different brain waves reveal distinct mental states:

• “gamma” is linked with states or tasks that require more focused concentration
• “beta” is linked with higher anxiety and more active states, with attention often directed externally
• “alpha” is linked with being very relaxed, and passive attention (such as listening quietly but not engaging)
• “theta” is linked with deep relaxation and inward focus
• and “delta” is linked with deep sleep.

The Spanish study found that the same tasks done inside the enclosed pod vs the open-plan workspace produced completely opposite patterns.

It takes effort to filter out distractions

In the work pod, the study found beta waves – associated with active mental processing – dropped significantly over the experiment, as did alpha waves linked to passive attention and overall activity in the frontal brain regions.

This meant people’s brains needed progressively less effort to sustain the same work.

The open-plan office testing showed the reverse.

Gamma waves, linked to complex mental processing, climbed steadily. Theta waves, which track both working memory and mental fatigue, increased. Two key measures also rose significantly: arousal (how alert and activated the brain is) and engagement (how much mental effort is being applied).

In other words, in the open-plan office participants’ brains had to work harder to maintain performance.

Even when we try to ignore distractions, our brain has to expend mental effort to filter them out.

In contrast, the pod eliminated most background noise and visual disruptions, allowing participant’s brains to work more efficiently.

Researchers also found much wider variability in the open office. Some people’s brain activity increased dramatically, while others showed modest changes. This suggests individual differences in how distracting we find open-plan spaces.

With only 26 participants, this was a relatively small study. But its findings echo a significant body of research from the past decade.

What past research has shown

In our 2021 study, my colleagues and I found a significant causal relationship between open-plan office noise and physiological stress. Studying 43 participants in controlled conditions – using heart rate, skin conductivity and AI facial emotion recognition – we found negative mood in open plan offices increased by 25% and physiological stress by 34%.

Another study showed background conversations and noisy environments can degrade cognitive task performance and increase distraction for workers.

And a 2013 analysis of more than 42,000 office workers in the United States, Finland, Canada and Australia found those in open-plan offices were less satisfied with their work environment than those in private offices. This was largely due to increased, uncontrollable noise and lack of privacy.

Just as we now recognise poorly designed chairs cause physical strain, years of research has shown how workspace design can result in cognitive strain.

What to do about it

The ability to focus and concentrate without interruption and distraction is a fundamental requirement for modern knowledge work.

Yet the value of uninterrupted work continues to be undervalued in workplace design.

Creating zones where workers can match their workplace environment to the task is essential.

Responding to having more staff doing hybrid work post-pandemic, LinkedIn redesigned its flagship San Francisco office. LinkedIn halved the number of workstations in open plan areas, instead experimenting with 75 types of work settings, including work areas for quiet focus.

For organisations looking to look after their workers’ brains, there are practical measures to consider. These include setting up different work zones, acoustic treatments and sound-masking technologies, and thoughtfully placed partitions to reduce visual and auditory distractions.

While adding those extra features in may cost more upfront than an open plan office, they can be worth it. Research has shown the significant hidden toll of poor office design on productivity, health and employee retention.

Providing workers with more choice in how much they’re exposed to noise and other interruptions is not a luxury. To get more done, with less strain on our brains, better design at work should be seen as a necessity.

Libby (Elizabeth) Sander, MBA Director & Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour, Bond Business School, Bond University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Read More........→February 16, 2026

2025 Was 'Year of the Octopus' Says UK Wildlife Trust, Amid Record Cephalopod Sightings

Pia

It was 75 years ago the last time there were as many octopus in British waters as there are now, with the UK’s Wildlife Trusts declaring that 2025 was the ‘Year of the Octopus.’

These eight-legged spineless creatures, one of the most fascinating to inhabit our planet, have been seen in record numbers by divers, and caught in record amounts by commercial fishermen.

Scientists suggest it could be milder winters leading to the “bloom,” which is the term for octopus birthing seasons.

“It really has been exceptional,” says Matt Slater from the Cornwall Wildlife Trust. “We’ve seen octopuses jet-propelling themselves along. We’ve seen octopuses camouflaging themselves, they look just like seaweeds,” he told the BBC.

“We’ve seen them cleaning themselves. And we’ve even seen them walking, using two legs just to nonchalantly cruise away from the diver underwater.”

Regarding the fisheries, it’s been a banner year for the industry. 2021 and 2023 have seen the highest yearly catches recently, when around 200 metric tons were landed. This year it was 12-times that amount.

Interestingly, their chief prey species, lobsters, crayfish, and scallops, have maintained year-over-year populations, with only crab falling.

It’s up to scientists now to figure out whether this octopu-nanza is part of a one-off event, or something that will be a more permanent feature of British seas. If the suggestion that warmer winters may be behind the massive bloom, future hatching seasons could be similarly large.While it may be premature to celebrate an unusual effect that seems tied to climate change, it’s hard to argue with the smiles on the faces of the divers, the diners, and the fishermen. 2025 Was 'Year of the Octopus' Says UK Wildlife Trust, Amid Record Cephalopod Sightings

Read More........→January 06, 2026

New Underwater Tool Lets Ecologists ID Fish From Their Sounds–46 Species So Far (LISTEN to 5 of Them)

The FishEye Collaborative / Cornell Lab of Ornithology

Underwater coral reefs are filled with thumps, pops, and snaps from shrimp and fish, and ecologists often use underwater microphones to monitor the health of marine environments.

But until now, ecologists have largely been unable to interpret these sounds because reefs are crowded with hundreds of different species—very few of which have had sounds accurately attributed to them.

A new tool from the FishEye Collaborative combines underwater sound recordings and a camera equipped with a 360° view to pinpoint the sounds made by individual fish.

The collaboration between bioacoustic researchers at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Aalto University have already identified 46 fish species from the coral reefs of Curaçao in the Caribbean—more than half of them were never known to make sound.

The findings culled from their eavesdropping along with a description of their invention, the Omnidirectional Underwater Passive Acoustic Camera (UPAC-360), were published recently in the journal Methods in Ecology and Evolution.

“The diversity of fish sounds on a coral reef rivals that of birds in a rainforest,” explained Marc Dantzker, lead author and the Director of FishEye Collaborative. “In the Caribbean alone we estimate that over 700 fish species produce sounds. The same biodiversity we aim to protect is also our greatest challenge, when it comes to identifying sounds.”

The FishEye Collaborative / Cornell Lab of Ornithology

“Spatial Audio lets you hear the direction from which sounds arrive at the camera,” explained Dantzker. “When we visualize that sound and lay the picture on top of the 360° image, the result is a video that can reveal which sound came from which fish.”

Now the most extensive collection of fish sounds ever published—and the growing library—is available to everyone at fisheyecollaborative.org/library.

The researchers say that identified sounds from the library can be used to automatically train machine learning systems to detect fish species in underwater recordings.

The technology is similar to smartphone apps like the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Merlin Bird ID that automatically identifies bird species by song or call, but no one needs to be on site. The UPAC-360 can be placed in reefs and left to collect data without the need for a diver or boat to be present.

The FishEye Collaborative / Cornell Lab of Ornithology

“We are a long way from being able to build ‘Merlin’ for the oceans, but the sounds are useful for scientists and conservationists right away,” says Aaron Rice, a senior author of the study and principal ecologist at the Cornell Lab.

Dantzker adds, “We’re making it possible to decode reef soundscapes, transforming acoustic monitoring into a powerful tool for ocean conservation.”

“By discovering the identity of these hidden voices, acoustics will become a powerful indicator of reef health and a strategy to monitor wider and deeper,” said Matt Duggan, co-author and PhD candidate at Cornell.

“The fact that our recording system is put out in nature and can record for long periods of time means that we’re able to capture species’ behaviors and sounds that have never before been witnessed,” said Rice.

The researchers are expanding the research, growing the library for the Caribbean, and broadening their efforts to other reefs around the world, including Hawai’i and Indonesia, in the coming months.

LISTEN to 5 fish sounds below… [NOTES: It’s loud at first. Also, be sure to read the text.]

New Underwater Tool Lets Ecologists ID Fish From Their Sounds–46 Species So Far (LISTEN to 5 of Them)

Read More........→December 19, 2025

Engineer Powers Entire Home Using 500 Discarded Vapes–Documented in Fascinating Viral Video

Chris Doel with his home battery – credit, Anita Maric / SWNS

A man has built a rechargeable battery pack big enough to power his whole home using just the batteries from discarded vapes.

British engineer Chris Doel thinks it’s “absolutely insane” that people use disposable vaping pens, as they come with a lithium-ion battery that can be recharged again and again; they’re literally powered with a technology that’s advertised as the alternative to disposable batteries.

The 26-year-old ended up stripping the lithium batteries from 500 thrown away vapes, some of which he collected, and some of which were given to him by a local shop, to create a single battery bank large enough to run his entire house for 8 hours, or his workshop for multiple days.

He kept wiring the batteries together until they totaled 2.5 kWh of capacity, before a test saw him run all electrical components entirely off-grid for eight hours, including the microwave, kettle, and all the lighting.

Doel, who works for Jaguar Land Rover, got the idea after watching friends just toss out the depleted vapes despite them all containing rechargeable batteries.

“Some of my mates were puffing on them. But as soon as they were empty, they’d have a little blinking light, and they’d throw it straight in the bin,” he told SWNS. “The engineer in me was thinking ‘that is just absolutely ridiculous.'”

“None of these components are disposable. They should never really be thrown just straight in the bin, so them being marketed as ‘disposable’ just seemed insane to me.”

Chris picked up several discarded vapes while volunteering at a festival in the city of Leeds, and opened them up. Inside, rather than a disposable battery, they all had fully rechargeable batteries, despite them being marketed as a single-use product.

Doel set up a YouTube channel and began building power banks with these vape cells.

In September 2024, he turned 35 recovered batteries into a portable charger capable of charging up phones and laptops. He then built a battery pack for his electric bike.

“People just wanted to see bigger and better stuff, so I thought ‘surely as big as I can physically get is powering my entire house?’ There’s no argument we are throwing away super valuable stuff if I can literally power my entire house for eight hours with it.”

Doel went to his local vape shop in May 2025 and asked if they would donate some of their returns for his project and walked away with bags containing 2,000 vapes.

Doel explained it was really awkward for them—they still have to pay for them to be recycled, “they were extremely happy for me to just load up thousands of them in a big bag and walk away with them.”

In order to quickly sort them, he used a pump from a C-PAC machine to mechanically vape the vapes and determine whether their batteries were damaged or not.

Chris Doel with his battery inventions – credit, Anita Maric / SWNS

It took him 6 months to extract the rechargeable lithium batteries from the devices before he used a 3D printed case to combine 500 cells wired in parallel into groups, connected in series, to make a massive battery pack.

He soldered a fuse between each of the former vape batteries to prevent his creation from short circuiting, and is now working on converting it to solar power so he can recharge and run it constantly, or recharge overnight when electricity is cheaper.

His YouTube video documenting the process from creation to powering his house has already racked up over 4 million views.

Fortunately, it became illegal for businesses in the UK to sell or supply single-use vapes In June.

“I think the ban on disposable vapes, even though it’s not the best implementation, has definitely made an impact. There has certainly been a reduction in the waste. But I still think the devices themselves are built to be mass-consumed, and they’re still incredibly cheap,” Doel explained.“These things last for years and years,” he said, suggesting that refillable vapes just seem to make so much more sense. Engineer Powers Entire Home Using 500 Discarded Vapes–Documented in Fascinating Viral Video

Read More........→December 18, 2025

What our missing ocean float revealed about Antarctica’s melting glaciers

Pete Harmsen, CC BY-ND

Steve Rintoul, CSIRO; Esmee van Wijk, CSIRO; Laura Herraiz Borreguero, CSIRO, and Madelaine Gamble Rosevear, University of Tasmania

Sometimes, we get lucky in science. In this case, an oceanographic float we deployed to do one job ended up drifting away and doing something else entirely.

Equipped with temperature and salinity sensors, our Argo ocean float was supposed to be surveying the ocean around the Totten Glacier, in eastern Antarctica. To our initial disappointment, it rapidly drifted away from this region. But it soon reappeared further west, near ice shelves where no ocean measurements had ever been made.

Drifting in remote and wild seas for two-and-a-half years, the float spent about nine months beneath the massive Denman and Shackleton ice shelves. It survived to send back new data from parts of the ocean that are usually difficult to sample.

Measurements of the ocean beneath ice shelves are crucial to determine how much, and how quickly, Antarctica will contribute to sea-level rise.

Argo floats are autonomous floats used in an international program to measure ocean conditions like temperature and salinity. Peter Harmsen, CC BY-ND

What are Argo ocean floats?

Argo floats are free-floating robotic oceanographic instruments. As they drift, they rise and fall through the ocean to depths of up to 2 kilometres, collecting profiles of temperature and salinity. Every ten days or so they rise to the surface to transmit data to satellites.

These floats have become a mainstay of our global ocean observing system. Given that 90% of the extra heat stored by the planet over the past 50 years is found in the ocean, these measurements provide the best thermometer we have to track Earth’s warming.

Little buoy lost

We deployed the float to measure how much ocean heat was reaching the rapidly changing Totten Glacier, which holds a volume of ice equivalent to 3.5 metres of global sea-level rise. Our previous work had shown enough warm water was reaching the base of the ice shelf to drive the rapid melting.

To our disappointment, the float soon drifted away from Totten. But it reappeared near another ice shelf also currently losing ice mass and potentially at risk of melting further: the Denman Glacier. This holds ice equivalent to 1.5m of global sea-level rise.

The configuration of the Denman Glacier means it could be potentially unstable. But its vulnerability was difficult to assess because few ocean measurements had been made. The data from the float showed that, like Totten Glacier, warm water could reach the cavity beneath the Denman ice shelf.

Our float then disappeared under ice and we feared the worst. But nine months later it surfaced again, having spent that time drifting in the freezing ocean beneath the Denman and Shackleton ice shelves. And it had collected data from places never measured before.

The Denman Glacier in east Antarctica. Pete Harmsen, CC BY-ND

Why measure under ice?

As glaciers flow from the Antarctic continent to the sea, they start to float and form ice shelves. These shelves act like buttresses, resisting the flow of ice from Antarctica to the ocean. But if the giant ice shelves weaken or collapse, more grounded ice flows into the ocean. This causes sea level to rise.

What controls the fate of the Antarctic ice sheet – and therefore the rate of sea-level rise – is how much ocean heat reaches the base of the floating ice shelves. But the processes that cause melting in ice-shelf cavities are very challenging to observe.

Ice shelves can be hundreds or thousands of metres thick. We can drill a hole through the ice and lower oceanographic sensors. But this is expensive and rarely done, so few measurements have been made in ice-shelf cavities.

The Denman and Shackleton glaciers. NASA, CC BY-ND

What the float found

During its nine-month drift beneath the ice shelves, the float collected profiles of temperature and salinity from the seafloor to the base of the shelf every five days. This is the first line of oceanographic measurements beneath an ice shelf in East Antarctica.

There was only one problem: because the float was unable to surface and communicate with the satellite for a GPS fix, we didn’t know where the measurements were made. However, it returned data that provided an important clue. Each time it bumped its head on the ice, we got a measurement of the depth of the ice shelf base. We could compare the float data to satellite measurements to work out the likely path of the float beneath the ice.

These measurements showed the Shackleton ice shelf (the most northerly in East Antarctica) is, for now, not exposed to warm water capable of melting it from below, and therefore less vulnerable.

However, the Denman Glacier is exposed to warm water flowing in beneath the ice shelf and causing the ice to melt. The float showed the Denman is delicately poised: a small increase in the thickness of the layer of warm water would cause even greater melting.

What does this mean?

These new observations confirm the two most significant glaciers (Denman and Totten) draining ice from this part of East Antarctica are both vulnerable to melt caused by warm water reaching the base of the ice shelves.

Between them, these two glaciers hold a huge volume of ice, equivalent to five metres of global sea level rise. The West Antarctic ice sheet is at greater risk of imminent melting, but East Antarctica holds a much larger volume of ice. This means the loss of ice from East Antarctica is crucial to estimating sea level rise.

Both the Denman and Totten glaciers are stabilised in their present position by the slope of the bedrock on which they sit. But if the ice retreated further, they would be in an unstable configuration where further melt was irreversible. Once this process of unstable retreat begins, we are committed. It may take centuries for the full sea-level rise to be realised, but there’s no going back.

In the future, we need an array of floats spanning the entire Antarctic continental shelf to transform our understanding of how ice shelves react to changes in the ocean. This would give us greater certainty in estimating future sea-level rise.

Steve Rintoul, CSIRO Fellow, CSIRO; Esmee van Wijk, Vanwijk, CSIRO; Laura Herraiz Borreguero, Physical oceanographer, CSIRO, and Madelaine Gamble Rosevear, Postdoctoral Fellow in Physical Oceanography, University of Tasmania

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Read More........→December 16, 2025

COVID-19 mRNA vaccines could unlock the next revolution in cancer treatment – new research

Adam Grippin, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and Christiano Marconi, University of Florida

The COVID-19 mRNA-based vaccines that saved 2.5 million lives globally during the pandemic could help spark the immune system to fight cancer. This is the surprising takeaway of a new study that we and our colleagues published in the journal Nature.

While developing mRNA vaccines for patients with brain tumors in 2016, our team, led by pediatric oncologist Elias Sayour, discovered that mRNA can train immune systems to kill tumors – even if the mRNA is not related to cancer.

Based on this finding, we hypothesized that mRNA vaccines designed to target the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 might also have antitumor effects.

So we looked at clinical outcomes for more than 1,000 late-stage melanoma and lung cancer patients treated with a type of immunotherapy called immune checkpoint inhibitors. This treatment is a common approach doctors use to train the immune system to kill cancer. It does this by blocking a protein that tumor cells make to turn off immune cells, enabling the immune system to continue killing cancer.

Remarkably, patients who received either the Pfizer or Moderna mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccine within 100 days of starting immunotherapy were more than twice as likely to be alive after three years compared with those who didn’t receive either vaccine. Surprisingly, patients with tumors that don’t typically respond well to immunotherapy also saw very strong benefits, with nearly fivefold improvement in three-year overall survival. This link between improved survival and receiving a COVID-19 mRNA vaccine remained strong even after we controlled for factors like disease severity and co-occurring conditions.

To understand the underlying mechanism, we turned to animal models. We found that COVID-19 mRNA vaccines act like an alarm, triggering the body’s immune system to recognize and kill tumor cells and overcome the cancer’s ability to turn off immune cells. When combined, vaccines and immune checkpoint inhibitors coordinate to unleash the full power of the immune system to kill cancer cells.

University of Florida Health pediatric oncologist Elias Sayour, who led the research, explains that mRNA vaccines that are not specific to a patient’s cancer can ‘wake up the sleeping giant that is the immune system to fight cancer.’

Why it matters

Immunotherapy with immune checkpoint inhibitors has revolutionized cancer treatment over the past decade by producing cures in many patients who were previously considered incurable. However, these therapies are ineffective in patients with “cold” tumors that successfully evade immune detection.

Our findings suggest that mRNA vaccines may provide just the spark the immune system needs to turn these “cold” tumors “hot.” If validated in our upcoming clinical trial, our hope is that this widely available, low-cost intervention could extend the benefits of immunotherapy to millions of patients who otherwise would not benefit from this therapy.

What other research is being done

Unlike vaccines for infectious diseases, which are used to prevent an infection, therapeutic cancer vaccines are used to help train the immune systems of cancer patients to better fight tumors.

We and many others are currently working hard to make personalized mRNA vaccines for patients with cancer. This involves taking a small sample of a patient’s tumor and using machine learning algorithms to predict which proteins in the tumor would be the best targets for a vaccine. However, this approach can be costly and difficult to manufacture.

In contrast, COVID-19 mRNA vaccines do not need to be personalized, are already widely available at low or no cost around the globe, and could be administered at any time during a patient’s treatment. Our findings that COVID-19 mRNA vaccines have substantial antitumor effects bring hope that they could help extend the anti-cancer benefits of mRNA vaccines to all.

What’s next

In pursuit of this goal, we are preparing to test this treatment strategy in patients with a nationwide clinical trial in people with lung cancer. People receiving an immune checkpoint inhibitor will be randomized to either receive a COVID-19 mRNA vaccine during treatment or not.

This study will tell us whether COVID-19 mRNA vaccines should be included as part of the standard of care for patients receiving an immune checkpoint inhibitor. Ultimately, we hope that this approach will help many patients who are treated with immune therapy, and especially those who currently lack effective treatment options.

This work exemplifies how a tool born from a global pandemic may provide a new weapon against cancer and rapidly extend the benefits of existing treatments to millions of patients. By harnessing a familiar vaccine in a new way, we hope to extend the lifesaving benefits of immunotherapy to cancer patients who were previously left behind.

The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work.

Adam Grippin, Physician Scientist in Cancer Immunotherapy, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and Christiano Marconi, Ph.D. Candidate in Immunotherapy, University of Florida

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Read More........→December 10, 2025

Recyclers Switch from Smelting to Solvents, Recovering Precious Metals from E-waste with Fewer Emissions

– credit Unsplash Vlad

A startup in the UK is recovering important manufacturing metals without energy-hungry smelting methods.

Using an intense solvent at room temperature, shredded circuit boards can have plastic retaining components left behind, while metals like gold, cobalt, and copper are selectively dissolved and made available for recovery with simple magnets.

It’s one part recycling research, one part national security, as governments around the world attempt to secure long-term supplies of these metals for tech and defense sectors.

Look across the hard news sections from around the world, from the financial pages to politics, conflict, and international development, and these days you’ll inevitably find two alternating terms that stand out for their relative novelty and repetition: ‘critical’ or ‘rare earth’ minerals.

These terms refer to what many Americans and Brits have taken for granted over the years: copper, lithium, nickel; which have now become key components in geopolitical strategies worldwide.

Yet one of the richest sources of these minerals in the West could be the circuit boards embedded in the millions of broken and discarded devices that pile up higher and higher every year.

“What you see with this pile of electricals is actually central to geopolitics at the moment,” Executive Director of nonprofit Material Focus in the UK, Scott Butler, told Reuters in front of a giant mound of discarded electronics, which his organization helps collect and ‘mine.’

“All the shenanigans of 2025 with calls on taking over [Greenland], disputes over land in Ukraine, big mines coming in Latin America, and geopolitical relations with China, this is all about the materials that’s inside this urban mine of tech. It’s lithium, it’s cobalt, it’s nickel, it’s gold, it’s aluminum, and steel. And this is why it’s really, really important. This isn’t just a pile of old tech, a pile of mess, this is the future.”

DEScycle uses deep eutectic solvents to extract metals from the UK’s electronic waste that would normally have been sent to Japan. Once there, the plastic components would be incinerated, and the metals recovered in a molten soup. Not only is there a large emissions impact from shipping it to Japan in the first place, but running the furnace as well.

But this is in a case where the E-waste was recycled, which is hardly the norm. In 2024 alone, the UN estimated that some three-fourths of all electronic waste wasn’t accounted for in recycling streams, leaving an estimated $62 billion worth of natural resources buried or sitting idly in landfills.

According to Reuters, DEScycle is set to incorporate its solvent-based method into the waste processing stream of a leading UK recycler, promising progress where little has been made.

Aware of the E-waste problem in its country, however, the Royal Mint has also been investing and sponsoring ways of extracting gold from discarded circuit boards in the UK, and in 2024 they opened a large processing plant for recovering this gold that boasts the capacity to break down 4,000 metric tons of circuit boards every year, amounting to hundreds of kilograms of the yellow metal.

But the really cool thing about the process is that the British government isn’t pocketing the gold, but rather minting standardized gold coins to back the shares of an electronically traded physical gold fund that allows investors to diversify into gold without any environmentally damaging mining activities taking place. Recyclers Switch from Smelting to Solvents, Recovering Precious Metals from E-waste with Fewer Emissions

Read More........→November 19, 2025