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Using technology to find hidden graves

DISCOVER MAGAZINE — Forensic anthropologist Amy Mundorff wants to make the search for the missing safer and more successful.

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Cities Beat the Heat

Nature Rising temperatures are threatening urban areas, but efforts to cool them may not work as planned. The greenhouses that sprawl across the coastline of southeastern Spain are so bright that they gleam in satellite photos. Since the 1970s, farmers have been expanding this patchwork of buildings in Almería province to grow produce such as tomatoes, peppers and watermelons for export. To keep the plants from overheating in the summer, they paint the roofs with white lime to reflect the sunlight. That does more than just cool the crops. Over the past 30 years, the surrounding region has warmed by … Read more…

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Being Prepared

Nature When a key member of a team is lost, the work does not have to come to an end. When Michael Pisaric was two years into his PhD, he travelled to Watson Lake in Canada with his supervisor, Julian Szeicz, and graduate student Tammy Karst-Riddoch, to collect sediment from several lakes in Yukon and in northern British Columbia. Szeicz was a geographer at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada, who worked on reconstructing ancient climates. The trio hoped that the samples would reveal how climate had influenced tree-line dynamics in the region over the past 10,000 years. As they trudged … Read more…

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The New Lice Wars

Maclean’s Despite evidence that it’s time to abandon the no-nit rule requiring kids be sent home, schools have yet to get the message. When her three-year-old daughter was in daycare, Lisa got her first lice-alert telephone call. There were a slew of calls during senior kindergarten and more in Grade 1. The message was the same each time: Her daughter had nits in her hair and needed to be picked up. Lisa, who lives in Toronto, would postpone client meetings and collect her. “Thank God I work for myself. I have great clients,” says Lisa, who asked that her full … Read more…