Does the mother or father have a stronger influence on their children's language? The mother tongue hypothesis suggests that language usage follows matrilineal inheritance. The father tongue hypothesis holds that paternal lines dominate the local language in an already populated … | Continue reading
Fireflies flash not just for sex, but survival, a new study suggests. | Continue reading
A trio of researchers with the National Oceanography Centre in the U.K. has found depression marks on the sea floor in a very deep part of the ocean—they suggest the marks may have been made by deep-diving whales. In their paper published in the journal Royal Society Open Science … | Continue reading
If you've got an unemployed, 30-year-old adult child still living in the basement, fear not. | Continue reading
More than an eon ago, the sun shone dimmer than it does today, but the Earth stayed warm due to a strong greenhouse gas effect, geoscience theory holds. Astronomer Carl Sagan coined this "the Faint Young Sun Paradox," and for decades, researchers have searched for the right balan … | Continue reading
In January, raging storms caused medical emergencies along the U.S. East Coast, prompting the Red Cross to issue an urgent call for blood donations. The nation's blood supply was especially in need of O-type blood that can be universally administered in an emergency. Now, scienti … | Continue reading
In the darkest and coldest parts of its polar regions, a team of scientists has directly observed definitive evidence of water ice on the Moon's surface. These ice deposits are patchily distributed and could possibly be ancient. At the southern pole, most of the ice is concentrat … | Continue reading
In the darkest and coldest parts of its polar regions, a team of scientists has directly observed definitive evidence of water ice on the Moon's surface. These ice deposits are patchily distributed and could possibly be ancient. At the southern pole, most of the ice is concentrat … | Continue reading
A new study led by scientists from the University of Bristol has used a combination of genomic and fossil data to explain the history of life on Earth, from its origin to the present day. | Continue reading
Factoring very large numbers into their prime "building blocks" is extremely difficult for classical computers, and this difficulty underlies the security of many cryptographic algorithms. While it's easy to factor the number 20 as the product of the primes 2 x 2 x 5, for example … | Continue reading
Quantum technology is a growing field of physics and engineering which utilizes properties of quantum mechanics as a basis for advanced practical applications such as quantum computing, sensors, information, communication and medicine. This promises to lead to a new era of techno … | Continue reading
Last year, physicists at MIT, the University of Vienna, and elsewhere provided strong support for quantum entanglement, the seemingly far-out idea that two particles, no matter how distant from each other in space and time, can be inextricably linked, in a way that defies the rul … | Continue reading
Maple trees are best known for their maple syrup and lovely fall foliage. But it turns out that the beauty of those leaves could be skin-deep—and that's a good thing. Today, scientists report that an extract from the leaves may prevent wrinkles. | Continue reading
A massive cylindrical habitat may one day house up to four astronauts as they make the trek to deep space. | Continue reading
Even as the White House began cracking down on U.S. work visas, major Silicon Valley technology firms last year dramatically ramped up hiring of workers under the controversial H-1B visa program, according to newly released data. | Continue reading
Are magnetic fields an important guiding force for gas accreting to a supermassive black hole (SMBH) like the one that our Milky Way galaxy hosts? The role of magnetic fields in gas accretion is little understood, and trying to observe it has been challenging to astronomers. Rese … | Continue reading
Scientists have shown that water is likely to be a major component of those exoplanets (planets orbiting other stars) which are between two to four times the size of Earth. It will have implications for the search of life in our Galaxy. The work is presented at the Goldschmidt Co … | Continue reading
How Einstein's equivalence principle extends to the quantum world has been puzzling physicists for decades, but a team including a University of Queensland researcher has found the key to this question. | Continue reading
Astronomers have identified some of the earliest galaxies in the Universe. | Continue reading
Scientists at Tsinghua University and Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, have demonstrated the ability to control the states of matter, thus controlling internal resistance, within multilayered, magnetically doped semiconductors using the quantum anomal … | Continue reading
The way research in quantum technology will be taken forward has been laid out in a revised roadmap for the field. | Continue reading
Scientists have found a rapid way of producing magnesite, a mineral which stores carbon dioxide. If this can be developed to an industrial scale, it opens the door to removing CO2 from the atmosphere for long-term storage, thus countering the global warming effect of atmospheric … | Continue reading
Tech magnate Elon Musk's SpaceX vowed Monday to send its first astronauts into orbit on schedule next year—part of a drive to restore America's dominance of the space race. | Continue reading
Exoplanets, planets in other solar systems, can orbit very close to their host stars. When the host star is much hotter than the sun, the exoplanet becomes as hot as a star. The hottest "ultra-hot" planet was discovered last year by American astronomers. Today, an international t … | Continue reading
A team of researchers from the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory and Washington University has learned more about possible ways to store modern nuclear waste by studying an ancient natural fission reactor. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, … | Continue reading
The release of the "Paradise Papers" and "Panama Papers" exposed how multinationals, politicians and the wealthy use offshore tax havens to conceal their wealth and money flows, and reduce their exposure to tax. Now, a team of researchers from the Stockholm Resilience Centre (SRC … | Continue reading
Scientists have found a rapid way of producing magnesite, a mineral which stores carbon dioxide. If this can be developed to an industrial scale, it opens the door to removing CO2 from the atmosphere for long-term storage, thus countering the global warming effect of atmospheric … | Continue reading
When you purchase anything from makeup to paint to sunscreen, chances are it contains engineered nanoparticles. These nanoscale materials have properties that are revolutionizing products—from medicine to agriculture to electronics. But eventually, those nanoparticles will reach … | Continue reading
If you happen to have a box of spaghetti in your pantry, try this experiment: Pull out a single spaghetti stick and hold it at both ends. Now bend it until it breaks. How many fragments did you make? If the answer is three or more, pull out another stick and try again. Can you br … | Continue reading
A new uncertainty relation, linking the precision with which temperature can be measured and quantum mechanics, has been discovered at the University of Exeter. | Continue reading
You probably know Easter Island as "the place with the giant stone heads." This remote island 2,300 miles off the coast of Chile has long been seen as mysterious—a place where Polynesian seafarers set up camp, built giant statues, and then destroyed their own society through in-f … | Continue reading
Scientists from Australia and the United States have helped to solve the mystery underlying Jupiter's coloured bands in a new study on the interaction between atmospheres and magnetic fields. | Continue reading
When did animals originate? In research published in the journal Palaeontology, we show that this question is answered by Cambrian period fossils of a frond-like sea creature called Stromatoveris psygmoglena. | Continue reading
In recent years, some physicists have been investigating the possibility that gravity is not actually a fundamental force, but rather an emergent phenomenon that arises from the collective motion of small bits of information encoded on spacetime surfaces called holographic screen … | Continue reading
The Centre for Advanced Two-Dimensional Materials (CA2DM) at the National University of Singapore (NUS) has teamed up with US-based aerospace company Boreal Space to test the properties of graphene after it has been launched into the stratosphere. The results could provide insigh … | Continue reading
Recent observations by NASA's Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes of ultrahot Jupiter-like planets have perplexed theorists. The spectra of these planets have suggested they have exotic—and improbable—compositions. | Continue reading
Searching for life in the vast universe is an overwhelming task, but scientists can cross one place off their list. | Continue reading
Blue light from digital devices and the sun transforms vital molecules in the eye's retina into cell killers, according to optical chemistry research at The University of Toledo. | Continue reading
After nearly 20 years, the record of the most distant radio galaxy ever discovered has been broken. A team led by Ph.D. student Aayush Saxena (Leiden Observatory, the Netherlands) has found a radio galaxy from a time when the universe was only 7 percent of its current age, at a d … | Continue reading
Next time you eat a blueberry (or chocolate chip) muffin consider what happened to the blueberries in the batter as it was baked. The blueberries started off all squished together, but as the muffin expanded they started to move away from each other. If you could sit on one blueb … | Continue reading
The compounds behind the perfumes and colognes you enjoy have been eliciting olfactory excitement since dinosaurs walked the Earth amid the first appearance of flowering plants, new research reveals. | Continue reading
Through innovative use of a neural network that mimics image processing by the human brain, a research team reports accurate reconstruction of images transmitted over optical fibers for distances of up to a kilometer. | Continue reading
On August 11, NASA plans to launch Earth's first spacecraft to venture inside the orbits of Venus and Mercury to touch the very edge of the sun's fiery corona. | Continue reading
Imaging tools like X-rays and MRI have revolutionized medicine by giving doctors a close up view of the brain and other vital organs in living, breathing people. Now, Columbia University researchers report a new way to zoom in at the tiniest scales to track changes within individ … | Continue reading
Deep beneath a mountain in the Apennine range in Italy, an intricate apparatus searches for the dark matter of the universe. University of Massachusetts physics students played a crucial part of the DarkSide-50 detector's latest discoveries—and, in fact, have been part of this pr … | Continue reading
The largest field-based study of genetically modified forest trees ever conducted has demonstrated that genetic engineering can prevent new seedlings from establishing. | Continue reading
A Kurdish refugee whose top mathematics prize was stolen minutes after he received the honor this week in Rio de Janeiro will get a replacement medal Saturday, organizers said. | Continue reading
State-of-the-art quantum devices are not yet large enough to be called full-scale computers. The biggest comprise just a few dozen qubits—a meager count compared to the billions of bits in an ordinary computer's memory. But steady progress means that these machines now routinely … | Continue reading