ScienceDaily: Science & Society News

Airborne marine biologists were dazzled by the diversity and abundance of large, unusual and sometimes endangered marine wildlife on a recent trip to the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts National Marine Monument, about 150 miles southeast of Cape Cod.

A new global, satellite-based study of Earth's freshwater found that Earth's wet areas are getting wetter, while dry areas are getting drier. The data suggest this pattern is due to many factors, including human water management practices, human-caused climate change and natural climate cycles.

At a time when countries are pledging to restore millions of hectares of forest, new research argues that recent studies on forest regeneration techniques are flawed. Sites used to evaluate natural regeneration were secondary growth forests, whereas sites chosen to evaluate artificial regeneration ranged from abandoned coal mines to cattle-trampled fields. Authors of the new study suggest elements of both techniques should be considered, depending on the objectives for a site and its current state.

Bitcoin's burgeoning electricity demands have attracted almost as much attention as the cryptocurrency's fluctuating value. But estimating exactly how much electricity the Bitcoin network uses remains a challenge. A new methodology helps pinpoint where Bitcoin's electric energy consumption is headed and how soon it might get there.

Researchers often use hypothetical scenarios to understand how people grapple with moral quandaries, but experimental results suggest that these scenarios may not always reflect real-life behavior. The findings showed that people tend to focus more on the outcome of their decision and less on absolute moral principles when faced with a real-life scenario as opposed to a hypothetical scenario.

Health economists have long considered end-of-life spending to be one of the major contributors to the overall increase in health spending in the United States. That narrative has been supported by recent research findings that increased use of hospice care costs more than it saves, that end-of-life care intensity has been increasing, and end-of-life intensive care unit has accelerated.

A global expert on infrastructure says that China's plan to crisscross half of the Earth with massive transportation and energy projects is environmentally the riskiest venture ever undertaken.

Industrial fisheries that rely on bottom trawling wasted 437 million tonnes of fish and missed out on $560 billion in revenue over the past 65 years, new research has found.

A challenge in estimating the extent and cost of damages from climate change over the next 100 years is developing forecasts of long-run economic growth. In a new study, researchers present a systematic method of integrating current models to develop forecasts of uncertainty in global and regional per capita economic growth rates through the year 2100.

Researchers have published the first major results from the American Gut Project -- a crowdsourced, global citizen science effort. The project is the largest published study to date of the human microbiome -- the unique microbial communities that inhabit our bodies.

The spotlight on workplace sexual harassment since fall 2017 has led to high-profile resignations, terminations and lawsuits. And while the revelations and consequences have prompted ongoing, national conversations about appropriate behavior, only 32 percent of working Americans said that their employer has taken new steps to prevent and address sexual harassment in the workplace, according to a new survey.