cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/8811078

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A new study led by UBC [University of British Columbia] researchers has found that lands managed by Indigenous Peoples consistently protect forests, biodiversity and carbon stores at levels equal to or greater than government-designated protected areas—yet most of these lands remain inadequately recognized or resourced.

The paper, published recently in People and Nature, is the largest study of its kind to date. It analyzed 111 peer-reviewed papers examining forest cover, biodiversity, carbon storage, wildfire activity and other conservation outcomes across the Amazon, Asia-Pacific, Africa, Canada and other regions. Three-quarters of those studies found a positive relationship between Indigenous lands and conservation.

“Indigenous Peoples are among the world’s most effective land stewards, yet many are still fighting for basic recognition of their rights to lands they have protected for generations. The science is clear—we need to catch up,” said Dr. William Nikolakis, lead author of the study and assistant professor of Indigenous land and natural resources governance at UBC.

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Evidence across continents and ecosystems

In the Brazilian Amazon, one study found that between 2005 and 2012, native vegetation loss was 17 times lower on Indigenous lands than on similar unprotected areas. Indigenous lands also consistently had greater biodiversity: in Australia alone, 60 per cent of the country’s 1,574 threatened species were found on Indigenous lands. Carbon storage on Indigenous lands was also strong, with research from the Amazon and Panama finding that these lands preserved carbon stocks at levels equal to or greater than protected areas.

Despite this evidence, serious gaps persist. The authors note that 60 per cent of Indigenous lands worldwide face threats from industrial development and climate change. Many remain legally unrecognized by governments, leaving them vulnerable to encroachment by logging, agriculture and extractive industries. Where legal protections were weak or absent, conservation outcomes declined.

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The review comes as countries work toward protecting 30 per cent of lands and waters by 2030. Three policy priorities emerged consistently from the literature: securing formal land rights for Indigenous Peoples, funding and resourcing Indigenous stewardship and supporting Indigenous-led governance. Researchers said these approaches work best together—land rights without resources, or resources without governance authority are insufficient on their own.

“If we are serious about conservation in Canada, we need to support Indigenous governance,” said Dr. Nikolakis. “That means secure land tenure, stable funding for stewardship, and enabling Indigenous Peoples to make decisions about their lands without external pressure.”

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Composable Neural Emulators for Thermoelectric Generator Design

A team led by Takao Mori at Japan's National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS) published this work in Nature (vol. 652, pages 643–649, 2026). The paper introduces TEGNet, a neural network that predicts thermoelectric generator performance with greater than 99% accuracy while using only 0.01% of the compute time of commercial finite-element solvers.

Image: LI, Airan | SAMURAI - National Institute for Materials Science - LI, Airan

What TEGNet does

According to the Nature abstract via RePEc, TEGNet is architecturally general across material systems and supports flexible combinations of material-specific emulators. That modularity lets researchers mix and match components to explore diverse device architectures quickly, rather than re-running expensive simulations for each configuration.

The team validated the approach experimentally, optimising two device types:

• MgAgSb/Bi₀.₄Sb₁.₆Te₃ segmented generators — 9.3% conversion efficiency
• Mg₃Bi₁.₄Sb₀.₆–MgAgSb n–p paired generators — 8.7% efficiency

Both rank competitively against previously reported devices.

Why it matters

Thermoelectric generators turn waste heat into electricity, but designing them means searching a large space of materials and geometries. In an accompanying Nature News & Views piece titled "AI speeds up design of heat-driven power generators," Ady Suwardi described TEGNet on LinkedIn as a physics-informed neural network with a "plug-and-play" design that cuts computation by thousands of times versus finite-element methods.

Authors and access

Authors include Airan Li, Xinzhi Wu, Longquan Wang, Gang Wu, Jiankang Li, Zhao Hu, Xinyuan Wang and Takao Mori. The paper is open access via NIMS SAMURAI (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-026-10223-1).

Sources: RePEc/Nature abstract, NIMS SAMURAI, LinkedIn — Ady Suwardi

cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1089756/tiktoks-algorithm-favored-republican-content-in-2024-us-elections

Social media platforms increasingly mediate political information exposure, yet the role of algorithmic curation in shaping political exposure remains contested. This question is difficult to resolve on platforms in which users retain substantial control over their feeds. The ‘For You’ feed of TikTok, which delivers content almost entirely through algorithmic recommendation, offers a setting in which user agency is sharply constrained. Here we show, through 323 audit experiments with controlled ‘sock puppet’ accounts seeded with Democratic or Republican content across three US states, that accounts seeded with partisan content exhibited systematic, asymmetric differences in partisan exposure. Across more than 280,000 recommendations collected over 27 weeks during the 2024 US presidential election campaign, Republican-seeded accounts received about 11.5% more co-partisan content than Democratic-seeded accounts, whereas Democratic-seeded accounts were exposed to about 7.5% more cross-partisan content—largely anti-Democratic material—even after adjusting for engagement metrics. These asymmetries are concentrated among high-reach Republican channels and in specific policy domains, including immigration, crime and foreign policy for Democrats, and abortion for Republicans. Our findings show partisan imbalances in political information exposure on a platform dominated by algorithmic recommendations, with implications for platform governance and democratic discourse.

Some animals, like elephants, use infrasound to communicate over long distances, while certain fish species actively avoid it. How humans respond to infrasound has been less clear. In this study, researchers played infrasound alongside music and found that although listeners couldn’t accurately detect the infrasound, their irritability and salivary cortisol levels rose — suggesting that our bodies may react to infrasound even when we can’t consciously hear it. That invisible reaction might even help explain why people report unusual experiences in places like supposedly haunted buildings.

Study

Researchers have discovered the fossil of a new hamster-sized mammal that lived alongside dinosaurs on the Pacific Coast.

A major analysis led has found that many REDD(Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation)+ projects achieved meaningful reductions in forest loss - offering real environmental benefits.

This is despite the study confirming that almost eleven times more carbon credits were issued from the REDD+ (Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation) voluntary carbon market than was justified.

Tropical forests are an invaluable global asset under increasing threat, and carbon markets have the potential to contribute substantial funds to their protection.

The researchers say future projects must ensure the claimed impacts reflect real reductions in deforestation: the REDD+ carbon credit market should not be abandoned, but far fewer credits should be issued, at a higher price.

A magnet that barely magnetises

An international team led by DTU Chemistry has made Cr(pyrazine)₃, a molecular framework that holds a strongly ordered internal magnetic structure while leaking almost no external field, and keeps that balance from cryogenic temperatures to well above room temperature. The work appears in Nature Chemistry (DOI: 10.1038/s41557-026-02131-8).

Image: nature.com - Persistent compensated ferrimagnetism in the molecular framework ...

What they built

The material is a three-dimensional metal–organic network in a cubic ReO₃-type topology: Cr³⁺ ions sit at the nodes, bridged by pyrazine molecules that carry an unpaired electron (a radical anion). According to EurekAlert, the pyrazine radicals contribute directly to the magnetism rather than acting as passive linkers, letting the chemists couple metal spins through an organic pathway.

That coupling is strong. The Bioengineer write-up of the paper reports antiferromagnetic exchange between Cr³⁺ and the pyrazine radicals on a scale comparable to transition-metal oxide magnets, producing a ferrimagnetic ground state in which the two sublattices nearly cancel.

Why "persistent compensated" matters

In most compensated ferrimagnets, the two opposing magnetisations only match at a single compensation temperature. Move off that point and a net field reappears. In Cr(pyrazine)₃ the bipartite lattice is symmetric enough that near-zero net magnetisation holds across a wide temperature window, and the long-range order survives above ambient temperature. That is the "persistent" part of the title.

Image: BIOENGINEER.ORG - Stable Ferrimagnetism in Cr(pyrazine)3 Framework

Why anyone cares

Conventional magnets make lousy neighbours in dense electronics: their stray fields interfere with nearby components. A material with strong internal spin order but almost no external field sidesteps that problem, which is useful for spintronics, where information rides on electron spin instead of charge.

"We now have a material with a very well-ordered magnetic structure, but without the magnetic field that usually causes problems in electronics," Kasper Steen Pedersen of DTU Chemistry told EurekAlert. He adds that embedding magnetism in a molecular framework lets chemists tune both magnetic and electronic properties synthetically, unlike the alloys and oxides that dominate magnetic electronics today.

What it is not

This is fundamental chemistry, not a device. Pedersen is explicit that nothing has been tested in a working component. The next questions, per EurekAlert, are whether the framework can be pushed toward electrical conductivity and whether it can be grown as thin films for integration.

The collaboration

The paper lists authors from DTU, the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (Grenoble), Institut Laue-Langevin, the University of Copenhagen, Jagiellonian University and Universidad Andrés Bello, reflecting the synchrotron X-ray and neutron work needed to pin down the magnetic structure (Crossref record).

Most of the detail here comes from DTU's press release via EurekAlert; the secondary summary at Bioengineer adds technical context on the exchange coupling and lattice symmetry.

Sources: EurekAlert, Bioengineer.org, Nature Chemistry via Crossref

The speed of light in a vacuum has been known as both a universal constant and a hard speed limit for all matter in the universe ever since Albert Einstein published his special theory of relativity in 1905. Rules, however, are made to be broken. And an international team of physicists appears to have found just such a loophole: the only thing that goes faster than light, it turns out, is darkness.

More specifically, individual dark spots known as optical vortices, or phase singularities, do so. As a light wave travels through space, it oscillates and twists—at the center of that twist, the peaks and troughs of the light wave cancel each other out, creating dark spots that—under certain conditions—outrun the light wave itself. The research was conducted by Technion–Israel Institute of Technology physicist Ido Kaminer and his colleagues.

• Brazilian researchers found that extract from used brewing hops more than tripled a sunscreen’s measured SPF in lab tests, jumping from about 54 to 178 when mixed with water.
• Discarded hop material from a technique called dry-hopping retains an estimated 85% of the plant’s beneficial compounds, and was the only source to contain a xanthohumol-related compound linked to antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties.
• Hop extracts boosted UVB protection significantly but did not improve UVA protection, meaning they work as a helper ingredient rather than a replacement for standard UV filters.
• All results came from lab testing on plastic plates, not human skin, and the researchers say further studies are needed before this approach could reach consumers.