Wildfires can transform a benign metal in soils and plants into toxic particles that easily become airborne, according to a new study from Stanford University. | Continue reading
China's drive to expand its influence through soft power mechanisms like censorship is coming into sharper focus, especially under Xi Jinping's leadership. Recently, the social media app TikTok has become a prominent symbol of this global strategy. | Continue reading
If you, like me, grew up in the 1980s and 1990s, you may have come across the classic refrigerator magnet, "Teenagers, leave home now while you still know everything." | Continue reading
A horse walks into a bar and the bartender asks, "why the long face"? It's one of the oldest puns in the book, and there's no shortage of entertaining answers. | Continue reading
In eastern Australia, the arrival of the summer holidays has traditionally been heralded by big iridescent beetles known as Christmas beetles due to their appearance during the Christmas season. | Continue reading
As we brace for an unusually hot summer, spare a thought for koalas. They will be out and about in search of love, food and water in the searing heat. | Continue reading
You leave your car at the mechanic for a routine service. When your mobile rings, you are stricken by unwelcome news: The mechanic goes through a list of parts that urgently need replacing to avoid a breakdown in the middle of the freeway. After accepting your fate, you never lea … | Continue reading
The Australian government has launched a campaign asking people to "switch off light pollution" to protect wildlife. So, what does the science say? Should we rethink Christmas lights? | Continue reading
A school science experiment is answering questions that are out of this world. While there had been concerns that any evidence of organic matter on Mars might be obscured by the planet's geology, new research suggests this might not be the case. | Continue reading
The increasing use of carbon nanotubes (CNTs)—and a proposal in the European Union to ban the entire class of materials—highlights the need for an updated and standardized approach to assess human and environmental impacts of CNTs and products that contain them, according to a ne … | Continue reading
When a hurricane approaches and crosses land, severe damage can occur—often leaving an obvious trail of physical destruction. What's less obvious to the naked eye is how these storms can carry harmful microplastics across the world. | Continue reading
A French-led consortium said Tuesday it has received funding for its project to develop an innovative low-cost small rocket called "Baguette One" and launch it into space. | Continue reading
A team of behavioral scientists at Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte, in Brazil, has found via survey results that people view men who drive luxurious cars as having a higher mating value and other positive attributes. In their study, reported in the journal Personality a … | Continue reading
Most people can relate to having a laptop charger break right where the flexible cable meets the solid adapter. This is just one example of how difficult it is to effectively interface hard and soft materials. Using a unique 3D printing process, TU Delft researchers produced hybr … | Continue reading
There are many open questions about the Standard Model of particle physics (SM), which is currently the best description we have of the world of particle physics. Experimental and theoretical physicists vie with each other in a healthy competition to scrutinize the SM and identif … | Continue reading
Today, medicines based on antibodies—proteins that fight infection and disease—are prescribed for everything from cancer to COVID-19 to high cholesterol. The antibody drugs are supplied by genetically-engineered cells that function as tiny protein-producing factories in the labor … | Continue reading
Protein-splitting enzymes play an important role in many physiological processes. Such proteases are generally present in an inactive state, only becoming activated under certain conditions. Some are linked to diseases like infections or cancer, making it important to have method … | Continue reading
A team of geologists, mineralogists and Earth and ocean scientists affiliated with institutions in Canada, the U.S. and France has discovered a 72-kilometer fault line on Canada's Vancouver Island. In their project, reported in the journal Tectonics, the group discovered the faul … | Continue reading
In our everyday classical world, what you see is what you get. A ball is just a ball, and when lobbed through the air, its trajectory is straightforward and clear. But if that ball were shrunk to the size of an atom or smaller, its behavior would shift into a quantum, fuzzy reali … | Continue reading
Pipistrelle bats have a magnetic compass and calibrate it at sunset, according to a new study. An international team of researchers led by the University of Oldenburg has used behavioral experiments to show that two different components of the Earth's magnetic field influence the … | Continue reading
Many reports from antiquity about outbreaks of plague mention Egypt as the source of pestilences that reached the Mediterranean. But was this really the case? Researchers from the University of Basel are conducting a critical analysis of the ancient written and documentary eviden … | Continue reading
Researchers from the University of Science and Technology of China of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and collaborators, have developed an innovative chiral boryl radical catalysis method, enabling asymmetric catalytic radical cycloisomerization reactions. The study was publishe … | Continue reading
From melting glaciers to rising sea levels, from raging wildfires to devastating floods, society has grown increasingly aware of the increasingly frequent climate crises. But what about its subterranean flow? A research group led by Li Dongfeng at the College of Environmental Sci … | Continue reading
Sharks in nature swim at high speeds in a deep ocean due to their high drag reduction ability. Water flows around the sharkskin become disrupted by staggered and overlapping microscale structures named denticles. In addition to this surface roughness, water slips at a fluid-solid … | Continue reading
The difference in height between female and male individuals in northern Europe during the Early Neolithic (8,000–6,000 years before present, bp) may have been influenced by cultural factors, a paper published in Nature Human Behaviour suggests. The findings indicate that height … | Continue reading
A striking and extremely rare half female, half male bird has been spotted by a University of Otago zoologist. | Continue reading
The exchange of energy and environment is inevitable in any physical system, so non-Hermitian systems that can be described by non-Hermitian Hamiltonians are ubiquitous. There are two kinds of non-Hermitian Hamiltonians, describing nonreciprocal systems with anisotropic coupling, … | Continue reading
Two years after the scientists in Finland successfully made coffee in a laboratory, VTT Technical Research Center of Finland Ltd has released detailed information on the process. Published in the Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry, the scientific paper describes the exact … | Continue reading
Silicate glass is a commonly-used glass found in most households, in drinking glasses or windowpanes for example. The integration of gold nanoparticles (NPs) in silicate glass has been used in art and decoration for centuries. These NPs impact the way the silicate glass interacts … | Continue reading
A team of geographers, Earth scientists and environmental scientists affiliated with several institutions in New Zealand, working with that country's National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research, has found that it is possible to model the number and type of tsunamis that … | Continue reading
When you look up at the sky and see clouds of wondrous shapes, or struggle to peer through dense, hazy fog, you're seeing the results of "Mie scattering," which is what happens with light interacts with particles of a certain size. There is a growing body of research that aims to … | Continue reading
A research group from the Institute for Future Materials and Systems at Nagoya University in Japan has developed a new 'one-pot' method to make nanosheets using less rare metals. Their discovery should allow for the energy-making process to be more eco-friendly. The journal ACS N … | Continue reading
The reaction kinetics of energetic materials is a key factor in determining the detonation characteristics and safety. The complexity of the reaction process and the lack of experimental means remain a notable challenge in experimental research and fine modeling. To accurately pr … | Continue reading
When it comes to greenhouse gases, methane is one the biggest contributors. Not only is it massively abundant—it's about 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere. | Continue reading
Field-induced superconductivity occurs when an applied magnetic field increases or induces superconductivity. In a new report published in Science Advances, Joshua J. Sanchez and a team of scientists applied stress as a switch between a field tunable superconducting state and a r … | Continue reading
Scientists from the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP) have discovered a new plasma instability that promises to revolutionize our understanding of the origin of cosmic rays and their dynamic impact on galaxies. | Continue reading
Every year in the Christmas season it becomes clear again that some people are amazingly skilled singers, like Mariah Carey and George Michael. Their singing can stir strong emotions. | Continue reading
Every morning, Jordanian farmer Ali Saleh Atta swallows two cloves of garlic with a cup of olive oil before heading out to check on his ancient olive trees. | Continue reading
A Japanese zoo has launched a probe after apparently massacring 31 of its 40 squirrels by mistake with treatments meant to kill parasites, officials said. | Continue reading
The world's climate negotiators on Tuesday haggled beyond a host-imposed deadline for a deal as at-risk nations voiced fury over a proposed compromise that stops short of phasing out fossil fuels. | Continue reading
Until the early morning of February 24, 2022, Ukrainian scientist Olena Iarmosh did not believe there would be a Russian invasion of Ukraine. Iarmosh grew up and had settled in Kharkiv, her beloved city in Eastern Ukraine and only 40 km away from the Russian border, where she wor … | Continue reading
A rare roofed theater, markets, warehouses, a river port and other startling discoveries made by a Cambridge-led team of archaeologists challenge major assumptions about the decline of Roman Italy. | Continue reading
A spacecraft the size of a cereal box has collected precise measurements of the atmospheres of large and puffy planets called "hot Jupiters." The findings, led by a team from the University of Colorado Boulder, could help reveal how the atmospheres around these and a host of othe … | Continue reading
The American Southwest has always been a dry place—cue romantic visions of hot, rugged, sun-bleached, seemingly infinite landscapes and star-filled night skies. And yet, the plants, animals and people of the Four Corners region (Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona) have manage … | Continue reading
In a study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, researchers examined neutron star mergers using THC_M1, a computer code that simulates neutron star mergers and accounts for the bending of spacetimes, due to the strong gravitational field of the stars, and of neutrino p … | Continue reading
In December 2022, NASA's MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN) mission observed the dramatic and unexpected "disappearance" of a stream of charged particles constantly emanating off the sun, known as the solar wind. This was caused by a special type of solar event that w … | Continue reading
What happens to bee populations in areas of massive human population growth like Wake County, North Carolina, where the population is more than 16 times greater than it was at the turn of the 20th century? | Continue reading
Consuming soy foods is often said to be good for women's health, and much research has been conducted in recent decades to find out whether it can explain why Asian women, whose diet contains plenty of soy foods, have few or none of the usual symptoms of menopause reported by wom … | Continue reading