A clever use of non-science engineering data from NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has let a team of researchers, including an Arizona State University graduate student, measure the density of rock layers in 96-mile-wide Gale Crater. | Continue reading
Disrupting two genes involved in the preservation of RNA molecules inhibits the ability of the male form of the malaria parasite to mature and be transmitted from human blood into mosquitoes, interrupting a key stage in the parasite's life-cycle and cutting off an important step … | Continue reading
A strategy inspired by the process responsible for muscle growth could lead to the development of stronger, longer-lasting materials. | Continue reading
European news media associations wrote to French President Emmanuel Macron and Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel on Thursday to push for action on online copyright reform. | Continue reading
A large volcanic event was detected on Jupiter's moon Io using Jovian sodium nebula brightness variation, a new paper in Astrophysical Journal Letters said. | Continue reading
Frozen water mains and strained natural gas supplies left the US Midwest struggling Thursday as a deadly Arctic air mass had tens of millions of Americans shivering for a second day. | Continue reading
A group caring for an injured South American hawk that turned up in a park in Maine says the bird had to be euthanized after its condition deteriorated. | Continue reading
After almost a decade, a team of international experts on Thursday revealed the results of their painstaking work to preserve the tomb of Egypt's legendary Pharaoh Tutankhamun. | Continue reading
A plan to test the use of a new technology to help endangered salmon in a Maine river that is critical to their existence has been abandoned, at least for now. | Continue reading
Ford Motor Co. and other manufacturers want to help their workers take a load off. Or at least make it easier to lift a load up. | Continue reading
A paternity test on a baby orangutan has come back with a surprising result. | Continue reading
Little life could endure the Earth-spanning cataclysm known as the Great Dying, but plants may have suffered its wrath long before many animal counterparts, says new research led by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. | Continue reading
New research from Cornell University shows zebra finches engage in socially-guided vocal learning, where they learn their songs by watching their mothers' reactions to their immature songs. | Continue reading
A University of Southampton study suggests that the membrane of salmon eggs may evolve to cope with reduced oxygen levels in rivers, thereby helping their embryos to incubate successfully. | Continue reading
A decade ago, scientists noticed something very strange happening when buckyballs—soccer ball shaped carbon molecules—were dumped onto a certain type of multilayer graphene, a flat carbon nanomaterial. Rather than rolling around randomly like marbles on a hardwood floor, the buck … | Continue reading
The first moments of life unfold with incredible precision. Now, using mathematical tools and the help of fruit flies, researchers at Princeton have uncovered new findings about the mechanisms behind this precision. | Continue reading
Membraneless assemblies of positively- and negatively-charged molecules can bring together RNA molecules in dense liquid droplets, allowing the RNAs to participate in fundamental chemical reactions. These assemblies, called "complex coacervates," also enhance the ability of some … | Continue reading
Astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to study some of the oldest and faintest stars in the globular cluster NGC 6752 have made an unexpected finding. They discovered a dwarf galaxy in our cosmic backyard, only 30 million light-years away. The finding is reported … | Continue reading
Scientists have been searching for "dark matter" – an unknown and invisible substance thought to make up the vast majority of matter in the universe – for nearly a century. The reason for this persistence is that dark matter is needed to account for the fact that galaxies don't s … | Continue reading
Offshore oil platforms have an immense presence, physically, financially and environmentally. Some 6,000 rigs pump petroleum and natural gas worldwide. But as they extract hydrocarbons from deep beneath the sea, these structures undergo a transformation invisible from above the w … | Continue reading
How many citizen scientists does it take to discover a new species? A recent expedition to the Ulu Temburong forest in Borneo proved that you only need 10 enthusiasts with no professional training, yet fueled with curiosity and passion for the outdoors, to find a new beetle the s … | Continue reading
In a paper recently published in the journal Frontiers in Veterinary Science, a team of researchers, animal care experts and veterinarians evaluate the balance between animal welfare and conservation needs for a number of rare species of native birds being raised in San Diego Zoo … | Continue reading
Organisms are made of many types of cells arranged in a precise and reproducible spatial pattern that gives rise to properly formed and well-functioning tissues and organs. But how do genetically identical cells in an organism become differentiated? A team of researchers, includi … | Continue reading
The giant pandas we know and love today live only in the understory of particular mountains in southwestern China, where they subsist on bamboo alone. In support of their tough and fibrous bamboo diet, they've got distinctive teeth, skull, and muscle characteristics along with a … | Continue reading
The search for clues on how to live healthier, longer lives has led researchers at Baylor College of Medicine to look inside the cells of the worm Caenorhabditis elegans. The researchers report in the journal Developmental Cell the discovery of an intracellular pathway that media … | Continue reading
Studies of human monoclonal antibodies isolated from survivors of coronavirus-induced severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) or Middle-East respiratory syndrome (MERS) are unveiling surprising immune defense tactics against fatal viruses. Atomic and molecular information about … | Continue reading
Scientists at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) have developed a process that removes CO2 from coal-burning power plant emissions in a way that is similar to how soda lime works in scuba diving rebreathers. Their research, published January 31 in the … | Continue reading
Researchers from the group of Hans Clevers at the Hubrecht Institute (KNAW) in the Netherlands and their collaborators shed new light on the origin and function of hormone-producing cells in the intestine and open new avenues to tweak gut hormone production to treat human disease … | Continue reading
Polar vortexes. Hurricanes. Wildfires. | Continue reading
It is almost too easy to bash Facebook these days. Nearly a third of Americans feel the country's most popular social media platform is bad for society. As the company approaches its 15th birthday, Americans rate its social benefit as better than Marlboro cigarettes, but worse th … | Continue reading
A research group led by assistant Professor Taichi Goto at Toyohashi University of Technology has, for the first time, demonstrated stop bands that prevent propagation of specific frequency components of forward volume spin waves. These are transmitted through magnetic insulators … | Continue reading
A scavenger study that used fish carcasses as bait provides additional evidence that wildlife is abundant in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, University of Georgia researchers said. | Continue reading
In the summer of 2014, Matthew Cardona was standing in a shed near his father's childhood home in Guatemala. The walls were lined with boxes and buckets filled with recently unearthed Mayan artifacts. He was shown intricate pottery and obsidian masks and knives. The items were be … | Continue reading
Rising temperatures could make some species sterile and see them succumb to the effects of climate change earlier than currently thought, scientists at the University of Liverpool warn. | Continue reading
Ugandan authorities say they have seized 750 pieces of ivory and thousands of pangolin scales being transported through the East African country from neighboring South Sudan. | Continue reading
A United Nations University study compares for the first time the effectiveness and costs of many different technologies designed to remove arsenic from groundwater—a health threat to at least 140 million people in 50 countries. | Continue reading
Aspirin is not only an important drug, but also an interesting physics model system in which molecular vibrations and electrons are coupled in a particular way. For the first time, X-ray experiments in the ultrashort time domain make electron motions visible in real time. They de … | Continue reading
Is there a financial relationship to what or how people communicate? | Continue reading
One of the stark differences between neighbourhoods in the inner city and outer suburbs in Australia is the quality and type of retail offerings. Gentrifying inner-city suburbs – places like West End in Brisbane, Fitzroy in Melbourne and Newtown in Sydney – are characterised by i … | Continue reading
Researchers have developed a compact laser that emits light with extreme spectral purity that doesn't change in response to environmental conditions. The new potentially portable laser could benefit a host of scientific applications, improve clocks for global positioning (GPS) sy … | Continue reading
Environmental activists are teaming up with fresh faces in Congress to advocate for a Green New Deal, a bundle of policies that would fight climate change while creating new jobs and reducing inequality. Not all of the activists agree on what those policies ought to be. | Continue reading
Fear in the wake of violent conflicts causes people to take fewer risks, which may come at the expense of bettering their lives and the economy. | Continue reading