A new study highlights specific dog behaviors that dog owners perceive as important for bonding with their pets. Katie Riddoch of the University of Glasgow, Scotland, and colleagues present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on September 28.

In two surveys of nearly 20,000 high schoolers, students who reported using at least one self-control strategy—such as turning off their phone—tended to spend more time practicing for the SAT and had higher SAT scores than students who relied purely on willpower. Chayce Baldwin of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Angela Duckworth of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, and co-authors present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on September 28, 2022.

With a new NSF grant, a paleontologist at the University of Kansas Biodiversity Institute and Natural History Museum will see if a 3-million-year-old fossil record can predict the fate of mollusks in the Western Atlantic as climate change intensifies.

According to the article, Brazil has had more success than any other country with the use of biofertilizer to provide nitrogen for soybeans. The inoculation of microorganisms into the soil boosts yields, reduces greenhouse gas emissions and saves some USD 10 billion per year in imports of synthetic fertilizer.

Peace and environmental sustainability — two lofty but vital goals for all countries — are known to be intrinsically related, according to Dahlia Simangan, associate professor at the Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Hiroshima University. However, researchers still tend to investigate them separately, and, when they are viewed together, it is often with broad strokes, with little examination into the nuances of either peace or environmental sustainability. A team of researchers from Hiroshima University that includes Simangan has explored the nuances and found that elements of environmental performance are more strongly associated with positive peace, which involves equitable resource distribution, than with negative peace, which is the absence of military violence.

A UAB study using a Big Data approach to analyse settlement dynamics reveals that communities of the central-eastern Iberian Peninsula existing 4,000 years ago deployed «escape economies», using enrockment and segmentation tactics to protect themselves from the exploitation and conflicts arising from the expansion of the El Argar society, one of the first state societies in Europe.