Tropical Storm Rafael chugged toward the Cayman Islands on Tuesday and was forecast to strengthen into a hurricane en route to Cuba.

President-elect Donald Trump's victory in Tuesday's presidential contest sets in motion the selection of key officials for a forthcoming administration through a transition team headed by some of his family and key supporters, including selections for a number of key senior national security positions.

President-elect Donald Trump is expected to select South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem to lead the Department of Homeland Security, naming a loyal ally to carry out his border security and deportation plans.

General Motors is recalling nearly 462,000 pickup trucks and big SUVs with diesel engines because the rear wheels can lock up, increasing the risk of a crash.

Someone smashed the windows of a kosher restaurant in the District over the weekend in what the owner is calling an antisemitic attack, noting the vandalism occurred on the anniversary of Kristallnacht.

The Liberian government is mounting a sustained campaign against corruption to win trust and new international investments, whether they come from the U.S. or China, Liberian President Joseph Boakai said in an interview.

Maryland has been selected to finish in the middle of the new 18-team pack in this year's unofficial Big Ten men's basketball preseason poll.

President-elect Donald Trump says that Tom Homan, his former acting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement director, will serve as "border czar" in his incoming administration.

Effective Nov. 1, American taxpayers will begin paying routine medical bills for illegal aliens.

A detailed assessment of the hurricane damage to Tropicana Field concludes that the home of the Tampa Bay Rays is structurally sound and can be repaired for about $55.7 million in time for the 2026 season.

Anthropic's large language model Claude is preparing for work in the U.S. intelligence community.

The World Health Organization said mpox cases in the region of Congo where a new and more infectious variant was first detected appear to be "plateauing," even as the virus continues to increase in other regions of the country, as well as in Burundi and Uganda.

The curtain will come down on the Paris' feel-good summer with a grand parade of French athletes on the Champs Elysees on Saturday as the country throws one last party to celebrate the Olympic and Paralympic Games.

American gymnast Jordan Chiles is asking Switzerland's Supreme Court to overturn a ruling by the Court of Arbitration for Sport that stripped Chiles of a bronze medal in floor exercise at the 2024 Olympics.

In his first visit back to Utah since awarding Salt Lake City the 2034 Winter Games, the International Olympic Committee president sought to ease worries that the city could lose its second Olympics if organizers don't fulfill an agreement to play peacemaker between anti-doping authorities.

Nico Hischier and the New Jersey Devils open the season in Prague against the Buffalo Sabres, two more games will take place in Finland this fall and the 4 Nations Face-off is a four-team February appetizer to the main event as the league and players embrace hockey's international roots.

Simone Biles simply wanted to mix it up when the gymnastics superstar invited some of the top American men to join her post-Olympic Tour.

The president of the suspended Russian Olympic Committee said Tuesday he plans to step down after six years in charge.

Yannic Seidenberg, who won the silver medal with the German men's hockey team at the 2018 Olympics, has had his doping ban cut by 18 months.

French authorities said Friday they have charged seven individuals in connection with a cyberbullying campaign targeting Thomas Jolly, the artistic director behind the Paris Olympics' opening and closing ceremonies.

USA Track and Field is bringing the U.S. Paralympics Track & Field program in-house beginning Jan. 1 as part of a partnership that will unite all of its athletes under one roof.

Olympic silver medalist race walker Koki Ikeda of Japan has been provisionally banned for suspected blood doping, track and field's Athletics Integrity Unit said on Friday.

Paris's Notre Dame cathedral, whose historic bells were silenced following 2019's devastating fire, will soon echo again with fresh chimes.

The Canadian Soccer Association says an independent review confirmed the Paris Olympics drone-spying scandal was not an isolated misstep.

The two biggest events in world sports are coming to America. And if President-elect Donald Trump is not thinking about them yet, organizers of the 2026 World Cup and 2028 Los Angeles Olympics certainly are.

President-elect Donald Trump showed his intention to shake up the federal government Tuesday by naming former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe to lead the CIA, Elon Musk to head a new department to cut waste and regulations, and the unexpected choice of military reservist and Fox News figure Pete Hegseth to serve as Defense Secretary.

The final season is now streaming on Paramount+, reuniting the beloved cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation

The post Star Trek: Picard Celebrates The Next Generation With Its Final Season first appeared on SciFi Stream.

A new aticle published in Ecology Letters  looks into the indirect interactions among tropical tree species through shared rodent seed predators. The reasearch is part of the work of EU BON postdoc Carol X. Garzon-Lopez.

Abstract: The coexistence of numerous tree species in tropical forests is commonly explained by negative dependence of recruitment on the conspecific seed and tree density due to specialist natural enemies that attack seeds and seedlings (‘Janzen–Connell’ effects). Less known is whether guilds of shared seed predators can induce a negative dependence of recruitment on the density of different species of the same plant functional group. We studied 54 plots in tropical forest on Barro Colorado Island, Panama, with contrasting mature tree densities of three coexisting large seeded tree species with shared seed predators. Levels of seed predation were far better explained by incorporating seed densities of all three focal species than by conspecific seed density alone. Both positive and negative density dependencies were observed for different species combinations. Thus, indirect interactions via shared seed predators can either promote or reduce the coexistence of different plant functional groups in tropical forest.

Carol X. Garzon-Lopez et. al. (2015) Indirect interactions among tropical tree species through shared rodent seed predators: a novel mechanism of tree species coexistence. Ecology Letters. doi: 10.1111/ele.12452

The Tropical Ecology Assessment and Monitoring (TEAM) network has the aim to measure and compare plants, terrestrial mammals, ground-dwelling birds and climate using a standard methodology in a range of tropical forests, from relatively pristine places to those most affected by people. TEAM currently operates in sixteen tropical forest sites across Africa, Asia and Latin America supporting a network of scientists committed to standardized methods of data collection to quantify how plants and animals respond to pressures such as climate change and human encroachment.

A recent TEAM network paper published in PLOS Biology deals with the standartization of methods in assessing biodiversity trends in tropical forest protected areas.

Abstract: 

Open access to biodiversity is key for addressing pertinent ecological issues such as biodiversity loss and impacts of climate change. On 22 & 23 March 2016, experts from EU BON met with scientists, policy makers and practitioners from across Europe to discuss issues of biodiversity data sharing, curation and publishing.

The workshop, which took place in Sofia, Bulgaria, introduced participants to key concepts, demonstration and practical exercise in biodiversity data sharing using the GBIF Integrated Publishing Toolkit (IPT). Practical training sessions led by Larissa Smirnova from the Royal Museum for Central Africa (Belgium) and Kyle Braak from GBIF demonstrated the integration and management of datasets in GBIF. A step-by-step demo and practical session on how to publish a data was also featured in the workshop.

Participants at the EU BON data sharing & data publishing workshop in Sofia; Credit: Pensoft

Special attention was paid to innovative data publishing practices in a session led by the local hosts Pensoft Publishers who introduced their ARPHA publishing platform, as well as its new journal Research Ideas & Outcomes (RIO), which publishes unconventional output types across the research cycle, including data and software descriptions, workflows, methods and many more.

PlutoF demonstrated its citizen science gateway and  demonstrated how the citizen science data can be managed using the CS module. Plazi also presented their GoldenGate Imagine tool, optimized for marking up, enhancing, and extracting text and data from PDF files.

    
Sessions at the at the EU BON data sharing & data publishing workshop in Sofia; Credit: Pensoft

In 2013, the University of Vienna will host the Annual Conference of the Society for Tropical Ecology (Gesellschaft für Tropenökologie, gtö), focusing on Tropical Ecology in a Changing World. The conference will run from April 02 to 05, 2013 in Vienna, Austria. The conference aims at maximizing interactions among scientists of all disciplines and backgrounds who are interested in tropical ecology and biodiversity.
Ongoing global change processes along the inter-twined dimensions of climate and land-use pose tremendous challenges for maintaining ecosystem functions. Traditionally, ecological research on climate change had its focus on high altitude and latitude biomes that severely and rapidly suffer from warming. Yet, effects of climate change on tropical ecosystems and organisms can be equally strong. In addition, changes in land-use exert ever increasing pressures especially on tropical biota. Understanding these processes is crucial to allow for predicting and mitigating adverse effects of forthcoming changes on tropical biodiversity and its role in ecosystem functioning. The annual conference of the Society for Tropical Ecology (gtö) will provide an interdisciplinary platform for discussion, particularly on the following topics:
- Climate change effects on tropical biota
- Influence of land-use changes on tropical biota
- Tropical biodiversity and ecosystem functioning under Global Change

Further Information: http://www.gtoe-conference.de/

A conference marking the start of the Natural History Museum’s Biodiversity Initiative has been announced to take place on 3-4 June, 2013 in the NHM, London.  A workshop of the Genomic Observatories Network will be also hosted during the conference

The conference will focus on how inter-disciplinary, genomic approaches can be developed to accelerate the study of biodiversity and function of tropical ecosystems.

More information on the conference can be found here.

The "European Conference of Tropical Ecology" - the annual scientific meeting of the Society for Tropical Ecology (Gesellschaft für Tropenökologie, gtö) - will be organized in 2017 in Brussels, Belgium, by three Universities and three research-museum institutions. It will take place from Monday 6 to Friday 10 February 2017, on the campus "Etterbeek" from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, a location easily reached from the city centre by public transport. 

The overarching topic will be "(re)connecting tropical biodiversity in space and time". It highlights both the importance of integrating fundamental sciences inferring past processes (e.g. paleoecology, evolution, social history…) to understand current patterns of biodiversity, and the urgent need to reconnect patches of fragmented landscapes if we wish to conserve tropical biodiversity and ecological services of tropical ecosystems for future generations.

For more information and to register, please visit the official event's page: http://www.soctropecol-2017.eu/  

"It feels like you are actually in a fairy tale."

The post What it’s like to go apple picking at the top-ranked Honey Pot Hill Orchards in Stow appeared first on Boston.com.

The former New England wedding singer won her “Battle” on Monday night’s episode — and will now also get help from Sting.

The post Snoop Dogg picks Mass. native Mary McAvoy to advance on ‘The Voice’ appeared first on Boston.com.