How do you pronounce your "r"s towards the ends of words like Shearer, purr, nerd and pore? And what about those in car, bird and her? | Continue reading
Occam's razor—the principle that when faced with competing explanations, we should choose the simplest that fits the facts—is not just a tool of science. Occam's razor is science, insists a renowned molecular geneticist from the University of Surrey. | Continue reading
Blue Origin said it would try again on Tuesday to launch a rocket and return to space for the first time in more than a year, after scrubbing a mission for last-minute technical reasons. | Continue reading
Rescue teams on Tuesday evacuated a flood-ravaged town in northeastern Australia, racing to airlift hundreds of people to safety before they run out of food and water. | Continue reading
When news broke about a bedbug outbreak in his native South Korea, 29-year-old blockchain engineer and self-professed insectophobe Kang Jae-gu got straight to work—on the data. | Continue reading
NASA on Monday announced it had used a state-of-the-art laser communication system on a spaceship 19 million miles (31 million kilometers) away from Earth—to send a high-definition cat video. | Continue reading
A volcano erupted Monday night on Iceland's Reykjanes Peninsula, turning the sky orange and putting the country's civil defense on high alert. | Continue reading
The relative underperformance of disadvantaged students at school has little do with them lacking the "character," attitude, or mindset of their wealthier peers, despite widespread claims to the contrary, new research indicates. | Continue reading
Barbie should consider expanding her medical and scientific careers into areas where women and other under-represented groups remain a minority, suggests a study published in the Christmas issue of The BMJ. | Continue reading
Antibiotic-resistant "superbugs" that can defeat efforts to kill them are an urgent public health crisis, and according to the Centers for Disease Control, more than 2.8 million antibiotic-resistant infections occur each year. Researchers across the world are scrambling to meet t … | Continue reading
Carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), the process of capturing and storing atmospheric carbon dioxide, is one method of reducing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in efforts to reduce the impacts of climate change. While CCS is an essential tool in decarbonizing th … | Continue reading
New research from the University of Nottingham has found that national education policies can make special schools feel like a 'bookend." | Continue reading
Anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies are widely known to have harmful impacts on mental health, but a new policy brief from the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research has revealed large disparities in rates of serious psychological distress across immigrant subgroups in Californi … | Continue reading
From space to the sea floor, an Australian and international research voyage has mapped a highly energetic "hotspot" in the world's strongest current simultaneously by ship and satellite, and uncovered an underwater mountain range. | Continue reading
Libya's various governments in the past decade have played a crucial role in the shaping the course of the conflict in the country, a new study shows. | Continue reading
Public opinion polls are often considered "the will of the people" but a new study on the role of polls in South Korea shows that they may not always be that transparent. | Continue reading
Seabirds in the Pacific Ocean are eating plastic and feeding it to their chicks. But we know precious little about why the birds are doing this. | Continue reading
A warmer environment could mean more mosquitos as it becomes harder for their predators to control the population, according to a recent study led by Virginia Commonwealth University researchers. | Continue reading
Insect species which are closely related and eat a similar balance of nutrients in their diet live longer than those that don't, according to new research from the University of Aberdeen. | Continue reading
The IceCube Neutrino Observatory, operated by the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-M), located at the Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica, is one of the most ambitious neutrino observatories in the world. Behind this observatory is the IceCube Collaboration, an int … | Continue reading
Not all bacteria are created equal. Most are single-celled and tiny, a few ten-thousandths of a centimeter long. But bacteria of the Epulopiscium family are large enough to be seen with the naked eye and 1 million times the volume of their better-known cousins, E. coli. | Continue reading
Becoming more dog-friendly could be a gold mine for the hospitality and tourism industry, according to new research from the University of Surrey. The research team has urged tourism providers to seize the opportunities offered by a thriving market, reflecting the substantial imp … | Continue reading
In the last article of his prolific career, the late Marvin Goodfriend, who held the Allan H. Meltzer Professorship of Political Economy at Carnegie Mellon's Tepper School of Business and was a lifelong student of inflation and central bank policy, identified a subtle yet signifi … | Continue reading
Humans and other animals with brains perhaps aren't the only beings on the planet to experience consciousness, says a study in the journal EMBO Reports. | Continue reading
Fruit trees are pruned to maintain a desired tree shape and size to increase light penetration into the canopy, thereby enhancing fruit quality and flower bud development. Most modern apple orchards consist of high-density plantings, and they must be managed to maximize light int … | Continue reading
Citrus packed and marketed in the United States is generally washed and sanitized on a commercial packing line for decay control, food safety, and appearance reasons. The purpose of a new study was to evaluate the use of different coating protocols and storage temperatures suitab … | Continue reading
While wind power is an important part of the green transition, its downsides include the disturbances caused by wind turbines in animal habitats. According to the international review of the Natural Resources Institute Finland (Luke), many bird and mammal groups avoid wind power. … | Continue reading
For more than 50 years, dental anthropologists have studied variation in the shape of human teeth to study the patterns of migration that people took as they populated the world. The last major continental migration event took place about 16,000 years ago, when humans first moved … | Continue reading
New research from Monash University examines the practical, ethical and political challenges of using smart home technologies to protect women from intimate partner violence in their own homes. | Continue reading
People who live in São Paulo city in Brazil certainly recall an event that occurred on August 19, 2019, when dark clouds covered the sky and day turned into night. The phenomenon was not caused by local pollution or emissions produced in São Paulo state but by a massive influx of … | Continue reading
Light sail technology is a fascinating concept and a step change in rocket propulsion. It may not be big and impressive like the Saturn V, the Space Shuttle or the new Starship rocket but when it comes to traveling among the stars, light sails could just be the answer. And what b … | Continue reading
The James Webb Space Telescope recently trained its sights on unusual and enigmatic Uranus, an ice giant that spins on its side. Webb captured this dynamic world with rings, moons, storms, and other atmospheric features—including a seasonal polar cap. The image expands upon a two … | Continue reading
A new study conducted by pre-Ph.D. researcher Pablo S. Valera demonstrates the potential of surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) to explore metabolites secreted by cancer cells in cancer research. | Continue reading
Plants have evolved fiendishly complicated metabolic networks. For years, scientists focused on how plants make secondary metabolites, the compounds that plants produce to enhance their defense and survival mechanisms. | Continue reading
Scientists and engineers at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, have completed testing for BurstCube, a shoebox-sized spacecraft designed to study the universe's most powerful explosions. Members of the team have also delivered the satellite to their partne … | Continue reading
A new method could be used by biologists to estimate the prevalence of disease in free-ranging wildlife and help determine how many samples are needed to detect a disease. | Continue reading
The construction of the European Southern Observatory's Extremely Large Telescope (ESO's ELT) has reached an important milestone with the delivery to ESO and shipment to Chile of the first 18 segments of the telescope's main mirror (M1). Once they arrive in Chile, the segments wi … | Continue reading
A new study answers a timely question: What is the hardest part of waiting? Consumers do plenty of it—online, in line, in traffic, or for deliveries. And now we know it's the final phase that's most problematic for them. | Continue reading
About a day later than planned, the 28th Conference of the Parties (COP28) to the United Nations Framework on Climate Change (UNFCCC) closed on 13 December 2023. After much contestation, the conference adopted a decision that effectively signals the beginning of the end for fossi … | Continue reading
Researchers led by a University of California, Berkeley, comparative psychologist have found that great apes and chimpanzees, our closest living relatives, can recognize groupmates they haven't seen in over two decades—evidence of what's believed to be the longest-lasting nonhuma … | Continue reading
A collaborative team of experimental and computational physical chemists from South Korea and the United States has made an important discovery in the field of electrochemistry, shedding light on the movement of water molecules near metal electrodes. | Continue reading
As the world heats up, and the climate shifts, life will migrate, adapt or go extinct. For decades, scientists have deployed a specific method to predict how a species will fare during this time of great change. But according to new research, that method might be producing result … | Continue reading
Ancient bricks inscribed with the names of Mesopotamian kings have yielded important insights into a mysterious anomaly in Earth's magnetic field 3,000 years ago, according to a new study involving University College London researchers. | Continue reading
In response to increasing global food demands, improving crop yields through efficient phenotyping is imperative. Optical imaging-based phenotyping has markedly progressed plant breeding and crop management, yet encounters limitations in spatial resolution and accuracy due to its … | Continue reading
Crowdsourcing has become pivotal in scientific research, particularly in data-intensive fields like plant phenotyping, leveraging platforms like Kaggle for data analysis and machine learning challenges. | Continue reading
Leaf color patterns, influenced by factors such as leaf age and environmental stress, serve as indicators of plant health in agriculture. The VIS-NIR-SWIR sensor, though effective in measuring these patterns with high resolution, has been limited to assessing general plant health … | Continue reading
An entrepreneur's challenge is to find a gap in the market, or challenge norms to create a new one. Without broad appeal or specialist knowledge among consumers, this can often become a losing battle even if a new invention or product is highly practical or serves a market need. | Continue reading
The potential role of innovative technologies that remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in combating climate change has an understandable popular appeal. | Continue reading