Europe's largest tech event, the Web Summit, gets underway in Lisbon on Monday amid a backlash over internet firms' role in spreading "fake news" and how they use consumer data. | Continue reading
The inventor of the worldwide web, Tim Berners-Lee, on Monday announced plans for a "contract" to ensure the internet remains "safe and accessible" for all. | Continue reading
Many farms have areas where the ground either floods or does not retain enough water or fertilizer for crops to thrive. Such marginal lands could become useful and potentially profitable if they are planted with perennial bioenergy crops such as shrub willow and switchgrass, repo … | Continue reading
Think of it as mathematics with a bite: Researchers at CU Boulder have uncovered the statistical rules that govern how gigantic colonies of fire ants form bridges, ladders and floating rafts. | Continue reading
Water researchers have found a way to fight the "king of poisons" that accounts for one of every 20 deaths in Bangladesh. | Continue reading
Astronomers have found what could be one of the universe's oldest stars, a body almost entirely made of materials spewed from the Big Bang. | Continue reading
Finding a fast and inexpensive way to detect specific strains of bacteria and viruses is critical to food safety, water quality, environmental protection and human health. However, current methods for detecting illness-causing strains of bacteria such as E. coli require either ti … | Continue reading
Contrary to what many people believe, outer space is not empty. In addition to an electrically charged soup of ions and electrons known as plasma, space is permeated by magnetic fields with a wide range of strengths. Astrophysicists have long wondered how those fields are produce … | Continue reading
The past 70 years have been good for corn production in the midwestern United States, with yields increasing fivefold since the 1940s. Much of this improvement has been credited to advances in farming technology but researchers at Harvard University are asking if changes in clima … | Continue reading
Although dairy pastoralism once made Mongolian steppe herders successful enough to conquer most of Asia and Europe, the origins of this way of life on the East Asian steppe are still unclear. Now an international team of researchers led by the Max Planck Institute for the Science … | Continue reading
For sweeping drama, it's hard to beat hydropower from dams—a renewable source of electricity that helped build much of the developed world. Yet five scientists from Michigan State University (MSU) say that behind roaring cascades is a legacy of underestimated costs and overestima … | Continue reading
Bacteria and fungi might conjure up images of diseases and spoiled food, but they also do a lot of good. The billions of microbes in a handful of dead leaves, for example, act as nature's recyclers and regenerate nutrients needed for the next generation of plants to grow. | Continue reading
Decisions about whether to build, remove or modify dams involve complex trade-offs that are often accompanied by social and political conflict. A group of researchers from the natural and social sciences, engineering, arts and humanities has joined forces to show how, where and w … | Continue reading
The stress of hotter temperatures may trigger a response in a plant's RNA, or ribonucleic acid—part of a cell's genetic messaging system—to help manage this change in its environment, according to a team of Penn State researchers. | Continue reading
There is a problem with the set of tools social scientists use to study human behavior. | Continue reading
Visible from NASA's Aqua satellite revealed the extent of Tropical Storm Xavier into western Mexico from its position just off-shore from Mexico's Jalisco state. | Continue reading
Our team at IBM Research developed a new technique to control the magnetism of a single copper atom, a technology that could one day allow individual atomic nuclei to store and process information. | Continue reading
Physicists at the University of Alberta in Canada have developed a new way to build quantum memories, a method for storing delicate quantum information encoded into pulses of light. | Continue reading
When two atomically thin two-dimensional layers are stacked on top of each other and one layer is made to rotate against the second layer, they begin to produce patterns—the familiar moiré patterns—that neither layer can generate on its own and that facilitate the passage of ligh … | Continue reading
Ride-share companies are capitalizing on voter enthusiasm ahead of Tuesday's midterm elections by offering free or discounted rides to the polls in shared cars, bikes and scooters. | Continue reading
Washington State University researchers for the first time have shown that they can use electrical fields to gain valuable information about the tiny, floating vesicles that move around in animals and plants and are critically important to many biological functions. | Continue reading
As our planet warms, what life will survive and thrive? If the coal fire-fueled soils around Centralia, Pennsylvania, are any indication, organisms with smaller genomes and cells may do well in the future. | Continue reading
With drug-resistant infections on the rise and the development of new antibiotics on the decline, the world could use a new strategy in the fight against increasingly wily bacteria. Now, Stanford chemists report November 2 in the Journal of the American Chemical Society a possibl … | Continue reading
Lasers have a unique ability to precisely drive, manipulate, control, and probe matter utilizing an incredible variety of methods. While they often operate behind the scenes, lasers are the backbone of revolutionary science and technology—including research advances that were the … | Continue reading
The growing mistrust and hostility towards global intuitions must be overcome if the world is to successfully tackle the environmental challenges it faces, the head of the University of Sussex's global sustainability research centre has warned. | Continue reading
Teachers felt immense pressure from school leaders and families to respond in a certain way—or not at all—in their classrooms following the 2016 presidential election, according to new research from Michigan State University. | Continue reading
Wind farms act as a top "predator" in some ecosystems, harming birds at the top of the food chain and triggering a knock-on effect overlooked by green energy advocates, scientists said Monday. | Continue reading
Shares in Icelandair shot up more than 40 percent on Monday after it announced it had acquired its fellow Iceland-based low-cost rival WOW Air. | Continue reading
New research reveals that Aspergillus flavus, a fungus that produces carcinogenic aflatoxins that can contaminate seeds and nuts, has a multilegged partner in crime: the navel orangeworm caterpillar, which targets some of the same nut and fruit orchards afflicted by the fungus. S … | Continue reading
The western Canadian Arctic's natural underwater soundscape has been shielded from the din of commercial shipping by the sea ice that covers the area, rendering it mostly inaccessible to shipping vessels. But with large amounts of ice shrinking in the Arctic Ocean, a growing numb … | Continue reading
Research carried out at the University of Adelaide and the University of Bristol has examined long-held beliefs that success in school and careers is due to more than just high intelligence. Non-cognitive skills are also important. | Continue reading
No one had reported seeing the strange creature—a cross between a bear and a monkey—since before the Great Depression. Then, this past summer, an amateur biologist stumbled upon the presumed-extinct Wondiwoi tree kangaroo while trekking through Papua New Guinea. The revelation un … | Continue reading
Researchers have set a new efficiency record for LEDs based on perovskite semiconductors, rivalling that of the best organic LEDs (OLEDs). | Continue reading
Using a novel type of chemical reaction, MIT researchers have shown that they can modify antibiotics in a way that could potentially make them more effective against drug-resistant infections. | Continue reading
A recent report by the Government of Indonesia claiming an increase in orangutan populations of more than 10 percent from 2015 to 2017 is at odds with many recently published and peer-reviewed scientific studies on the subject, according to a letter in Current Biology on November … | Continue reading
A genetic scan of a massive number of samples taken from tuberculosis patients across China has shown a surprising genetic uniformity: just two "strains" of the tuberculosis bacterium account for 99.4 percent of all cases. | Continue reading
Griffith University researchers have demonstrated a procedure for making precise measurements of speed, acceleration, material properties and even gravity waves possible, approaching the ultimate sensitivity allowed by laws of quantum physics. | Continue reading
People are more prejudiced against women leaders than the statistics might indicate. This could be because participants in surveys investigating attitudes towards men and women in leadership positions may not answer honestly unless they are guaranteed confidentiality of their ans … | Continue reading
For a fundamentally nerdy subject, net neutrality is pushing a lot of political buttons. | Continue reading
As you walk away from a campfire on a cool autumn night, you quickly feel colder. The same thing happens in outer space. As it spins, the sun continuously flings hot material into space, out to the furthest reaches of our solar system. This material, called the solar wind, is ver … | Continue reading
Imagine looking under your couch and instead of finding fluffy dust bunnies, you see the dust is arranged in straight lines—you might wonder what caused this order. Scientists are experiencing that same feeling, not with dust under a couch, but with electrically charged dust in t … | Continue reading
Scientists have produced an extremely bright spot of light that can travel at any speed—including faster than the speed of light. Researchers have found a way to use this concept, called "flying focus," to move an intense laser focal point over long distances at any speed. Their … | Continue reading
We all know microwaves are good for cooking popcorn, but scientists have recently shown they can also prevent dangerous waves in plasmas and help produce clean, nearly limitless energy with fusion. Fusion takes place when fast moving atomic particles slam into each other and stic … | Continue reading
Antimatter is an exotic material that vaporizes when it contacts regular matter. If you hit an antimatter baseball with a bat made of regular matter, it would explode in a burst of light. It is rare to find antimatter on Earth, but it is believed to exist in the furthest reaches … | Continue reading
Fusion offers the potential of near limitless energy by heating a gas trapped in a magnetic field to incredibly high temperatures where atoms are so energetic that they fuse together when they collide. But if that hot gas, called a plasma, breaks free from the magnetic field, it … | Continue reading
Imagine building a machine so advanced and precise you need a supercomputer to help design it. That's exactly what scientists and engineers in Germany did when building the Wendelstein 7-X experiment. The device, funded by the German federal and state governments and the European … | Continue reading
The cosmos is a void dotted with stars and an ever-increasing number of newly-observed planets beyond our solar system. Yet, how these stars and planets formed out of clouds of interstellar dust and gas remains mysterious. | Continue reading
Scientists are working to dramatically speed up the development of fusion energy in an effort to deliver power to the electric grid soon enough to help mitigate impacts of climate change. The arrival of a breakthrough technology—high-temperature superconductors, which can be used … | Continue reading