When Chinese police found them in the trunk of a smuggler's car, 33 of the trafficked pangolins—endangered scaly mammals from southern China—were still alive, wrapped in plastic bags soaked with their own urine. | Continue reading
An article published today in the Open-Access journal GigaScience provides data that effectively triples the number of plant species with available genome data. This mammoth amount of work comes on the back of the growing efforts of the scientific community to sequence more plant … | Continue reading
Solar rays are a plentiful, clean source of energy that is becoming increasingly important as the world works to shift away from power sources that contribute to global warming. But current methods of harvesting solar charges are expensive and inefficient—with a theoretical effic … | Continue reading
Scientists seeking to capture and control on Earth fusion energy, the process that powers the sun and stars, face the risk of disruptions—sudden events that can halt fusion reactions and damage facilities called tokamaks that house them. Researchers at the U.S. Department of Ener … | Continue reading
Collaborative research led by the University of East Anglia has identified one of the causes of recent deaths in UK European brown hare populations.Working together with diagnostic laboratories in England, Scotland and Germany, the first UK cases of rabbit haemorrhagic disease vi … | Continue reading
Commercial octopus farming, currently in developmental stages on multiple continents, would have a negative ripple effect on sustainability and animal welfare, concludes a team of researchers in a newly published analysis. | Continue reading
Fans of a Korean pop star have raised more than $2,000 to name a baby deer at the Los Angeles Zoo after their favorite doe-eyed singer. | Continue reading
A new study throws into question the notion that today's crocodiles and alligators have a simple evolutionary past. | Continue reading
A new study led by Yale University astronomers tells the story of a galaxy that ran out of gas. | Continue reading
One of the most cataclysmic events to occur in the cosmos involves the collision of two black holes. Formed from the deathly collapse of massive stars, black holes are incredibly compact—a person standing near a stellar-mass black hole would feel gravity about a trillion times mo … | Continue reading
A new analysis shows that while Earth was a tad cooler last year than the last couple of years, it was still the fourth warmest year on record. | Continue reading
Ecuador used drones to scatter rat poison on one of the Galapagos Islands in a bid to protect species including the world's only nocturnal seagull from the pests, the archipelago's national parks authority, PNG, said Thursday. | Continue reading
Data recorded by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory of a neutron star as it passed through a dense patch of stellar wind emanating from its massive companion star provide valuable insight about the structure and composition of stellar winds and about the environment of the neutron … | Continue reading
A tiny fraction of Twitter users spread the vast majority of fake news in 2016, with conservatives and older people sharing misinformation more, a new study finds. | Continue reading
Teaser: A Columbia-led team has discovered a new method to manipulate the electrical conductivity of this game-changing material, the strongest known to man with applications ranging from nano-electronic devices to clean energy. | Continue reading
Information warfare is amplifying major worldwide threats like climate change and nuclear warfare, endangering the future of civilization, US experts said Thursday as the symbolic Doomsday Clock stayed at two minutes to midnight. | Continue reading
Kyoto University researchers have designed a temperature-controllable, copper-based material for sieving or storing gases. The principle used to design the material, described in the journal Science, could act as a blueprint for developing nanoporous materials with a wide variety … | Continue reading
The annual business rendezvous in Davos is a hothouse of insider tech jargon, but this year's buzzword of "digital transformation" could translate into profound and painful changes for companies and workers. | Continue reading
Using the ALMA observatory in Chile, a group of astronomers led by MPIA's Henrik Beuther has made the most detailed observation yet of the way that a giant gas cloud fragments into dense cores, which then act as the birthplaces of stars. The astronomers found that the mechanisms … | Continue reading
General Motors says it plans to invest another $22 million in its Tennessee manufacturing facility to build more engines. | Continue reading
NASA's Opportunity rover is silently marking the 15th anniversary of its touchdown on Mars. | Continue reading
OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurria said Thursday he hopes to lay the foundations this year for an international tax on digital giants that could come into force in 2020. | Continue reading
Apple acknowledged Thursday that it has trimmed its team devoted to self-driving car technology but stressed that its still in the race. | Continue reading
Black holes are known for their voracious appetites, binging on matter with such ferocity that not even light can escape once it's swallowed up. | Continue reading
Popular music has changed over the years, and the music of 2019 is noticeably different from the music of the 1960s or 1970s. But it is not just the music that changed, but also the lyrics. Data scientists at Lawrence Technological University in Michigan used quantitative analyti … | Continue reading
White math teachers in predominantly black middle schools are more likely to respond negatively to students' behavioral or academic issues—and this may have long-term negative consequences for student performance, according to a Rutgers-led study that highlights the need to recru … | Continue reading
Thousands of people—many of them children—are hurt or killed by land mines each year, so finding these devices before they explode is critical. | Continue reading
Even though climate change is expected to reduce the total amount of U.S. snowfall this century, it's unlikely to significantly rein in the most powerful nor'easters that pummel the East Coast, new research indicates. | Continue reading
In recent years, policymakers across the world have launched initiatives to increase the amount of "soil organic matter," or SOM, as a way to improve soil health and boost agricultural production. Surprisingly, however, there is limited evidence that this strategy will actually i … | Continue reading
The rainwater collection system is broken at the environmental research station on a remote, rocky Pacific island off the California coast. So is a crane used to hoist small boats in and out of the water. A two-year supply of diesel fuel for the power generators is almost gone. | Continue reading
Fitness goals are typically at the forefront of new year's resolutions for many Americans, and a recent study from ASU provides a new way to understand diet and exercise in a more holistic way, and may help us reach those goals. | Continue reading
Trillions of cells—all different shapes and sizes—form a human body's structure. Surrounding each cell is a membrane, jointly acting as hostess and security—welcoming certain information into the cell while making sure its components don't spill out into the body's void. Much is … | Continue reading
A significant advance in the photocatalytic activity of conventional materials is demonstrated by a two-dimensional heterostructure comprising nanolayers of two semiconductors: black phosphorus and bismuth tungstate. As researchers have reported in the journal Angewandte Chemie, … | Continue reading
Regeneration is one of the most enticing areas of biological research. How are some animals able to regrow body parts? Is it possible that humans could do the same? If scientists could unlock the secrets that confer those animals with this remarkable ability, the knowledge could … | Continue reading
A new gas detector, developed by researchers at UBC's Okanagan campus, enables highly accurate odour analysis for so many different applications it has been nicknamed the 'artificial nose.' | Continue reading
Weighing more than all commercial airliners ever built and worth more than most countries' GDP, electronic waste poses a growing economic and environmental threat, experts said Thursday, as they launched a global initiative to clean it up. | Continue reading
It is amazing to think that everything around us is made up from just 90 building blocks – the naturally occurring chemical elements. Dmitri Mendeleev put the 63 of these known at the time into order and published his first version of what we now recognise as the periodic table i … | Continue reading
Researchers at the University of Liverpool have collaborated with teachers and pupils to develop practical strategies for the teaching and learning of evolution. | Continue reading
How close is human civilization to destroying the planet? The symbolic Doomsday Clock is still two minutes to midnight, as close as it has ever been, said the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists on Thursday. | Continue reading
IAG, the owner of British Airways and Spanish carrier Iberia, said Thursday that it has decided not to make a formal bid for low-cost airline Norwegian Air Shuttle. | Continue reading
Hitachi's frozen nuclear power project in Britain can only be revived if it is nationalised, the Nikkei business paper reported the company's chairman as saying on Wednesday. | Continue reading
American Airlines executives warned of significant travel delays if the US government shutdown goes on much longer, but said Thursday that customer demand has not been significantly affected thus far. | Continue reading
Developing the most efficient and safest way to return to the Moon starts on Earth. European astronauts and spacewalk experts are getting ready for the future of Moon exploration with electronic aids, upgraded geological tools from the Apollo era and improved scientific protocols … | Continue reading
Europe is preparing to go forward to the moon, but how will astronauts move once they get there? Despite the Apollo missions, little is known about what lunar gravity may mean for our bodies. ESA's space medicine team is working to find out through a series of studies. | Continue reading
An international team of researchers has reported a breakthrough in fabricating atom-thin processors—a discovery that could have far-reaching impacts on nanoscale chip production and in labs across the globe where scientists are exploring 2-D materials for ever-smaller and -faste … | Continue reading
Ever since companies began developing self-driving cars, people have asked how designers will address the moral question of who a self-driving car should kill if a fatal crash is unavoidable. Recent research suggests this question may be even more difficult for car makers to answ … | Continue reading
Shaming perpetrators of human-rights abuse and shocking audiences with visceral imagery can be an ineffective—and counterproductive—approach to improving humanitarian conditions, according to new research from Case Western Reserve University. | Continue reading