Living systems—unlike non-living or inanimate objects—use information about their surrounding environment to survive. But not all information from the environment is meaningful or relevant for survival. The subset of information that is meaningful, and perhaps necessary for being … | Continue reading
Sometimes it doesn't pay to advertise. | Continue reading
Streaming giants are making TV production worse for the environment than ever before according to new research into the environmental impact of film and television production from the University of Warwick and the University of Cambridge. One Hollywood film creates around 3,000 t … | Continue reading
The pervasiveness of social media has transformed how teens communicate and connect with their peers. Research suggests that it can be harmful to teen girls, in particular, exposing them to unrealistic beauty standards, eating disorders, and cyberbullying. | Continue reading
Planting flowers beside food crops on farms in India attracts bees, boosts pollination and improves crop yield and quality, researchers have found. | Continue reading
A research team from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and the University of Almeria discovered in the latest excavations carried out at the site of El Trigal III, in the archaeological area of La Puntilla (Nasca, Ica, Peru), a new type of settlement. It is an architectural c … | Continue reading
Astronauts often react with awe when they see the curvature of Earth below the International Space Station. Now Mars scientists are getting a taste of what that's like, thanks to NASA's 2001 Mars Odyssey orbiter, which completed its 22nd year at the Red Planet last month. | Continue reading
In research, sometimes the bumpy path proves to be the best one. By creating tiny, periodic bumps in a miniature racetrack for light, researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and their colleagues at the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI), a research par … | Continue reading
Concerted efforts and commitments are needed to solve the complex trade-offs involved in reducing the impact of aviation on the climate, according to new research. | Continue reading
A collaborative study led by Dr. Christopher Gisriel at Yale University and Dr. Tanai Cardona at Queen Mary University of London, published in Frontiers in Plant Science, offers new insight on the origin and evolution of a unique type of photosynthesis that enables some bacteria, … | Continue reading
Today, petrochemical compounds and rare metals such as platinum and iridium are used to produce semiconductors for optoelectronics, such as organic LEDs for super-thin TV and mobile phone screens. Physicists at Umeå University in collaboration with researchers in Denmark and Chin … | Continue reading
The domesticated apple (Malus ×domestica) is an economically valuable crop and an important source of nutrients and calories throughout temperate regions of the world. Fruit production is directly influenced by bloom time, which is a highly heritable trait greatly affected by the … | Continue reading
The link between human rights and climate change adaptation policy has not been a major source of discussion in national policies, according to a new Concordia-led study. Moreover, the researchers say the topic should play a bigger role in the upcoming COP28 conference, which ope … | Continue reading
If you added up all the microbes living deep below Earth's surface, the amount of biomass would outweigh all life within our oceans. | Continue reading
Surface functionalization via micro/nano structuring is not only a thriving research area inspired by bionics but also of great importance for various practical applications. The key to achieving various surface functions is the fabrication of surface micro/nano structures with c … | Continue reading
Researchers at the Center of Excellence in Space Sciences India at IISER Kolkata have discovered a new relationship between the sun's magnetic field and its sunspot cycle, that can help predict when the peak in solar activity will occur. Their work indicates that the maximum inte … | Continue reading
Allison Pease grew up fascinated by river fish, spending countless summers in a mask beneath the surface of Texas creeks. Now a fish ecologist in the College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources at the University of Missouri, Pease studies the common snook—an iconic game fi … | Continue reading
An interdisciplinary collaboration used 600 years' worth of tree rings from the San Joaquin Valley to reconstruct plausible daily records of weather and streamflow scenarios during that period. Modeling based on those scenarios revealed the region has experienced vast variability … | Continue reading
When entering public restrooms, it's hard not to dwell on what germs previous users have left behind in the toilet bowl. Imagine, instead, a self-cleaning system that doesn't require a brightly colored gel. Researchers reporting in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces have develope … | Continue reading
An analysis combining the results of 14 studies from around the globe has uncovered some common patterns in how the piglet microbiome, specifically the gut bacteria, changes over time. | Continue reading
Global healthcare has a significant impact on the environment but there are ways it could slash its greenhouse gas emissions without increasing production costs, the international health agency Unitaid said Tuesday. | Continue reading
SpaceX chalked up another Starlink mission from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station to mark the Space Coast's 66th launch of the year. | Continue reading
We've all experienced dreams that have left us feeling a little anxious—like writing a test we're not prepared for, losing a loved one, or being chased by something threatening. | Continue reading
Corporate America has heard the warnings: Generation Z is going to turn workplaces upside down with their competitive nature and demand for remote work. While the oldest Gen Zers have been in the workforce for less than a decade, there are dozens of books geared toward helping le … | Continue reading
When new financial auditing regulations went into effect in 2019, there were concerns the rules would affect publicly traded companies and, by extension, investors. A new study finds there was an effect—but it was a small one. | Continue reading
Air quality in the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area continues to miss safety levels set by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and is unlikely to meet EPA goals anytime soon, according to new research from The University of Texas at Arlington. | Continue reading
Unrelenting wildfires in Canada and Hawaii. Catastrophic floods in Libya. Sweltering temperatures across the globe. These climate disasters, which once would have happened every decade or longer, all took place in 2023. As the planet warms, extreme weather events like heat waves, … | Continue reading
I'm sure many readers of Universe Today are, like me, fans of the science fiction genre. From the light sabers of "Star Wars" to the neuralyzer of "Men in Black," science fiction has crazy inventions aplenty and once science fiction writers dream it, scientists and engineers try … | Continue reading
Ripples in a pond can be captivating on a nice sunny day as can ripples in the very fabric of space, although the latter are a little harder to observe. Using the highly tuned Gaia probe, a team of astronomers proposes in a paper posted to arXiv preprint server that it might just … | Continue reading
When spacecraft return to Earth, they don't need to shed all their velocity by firing retro-rockets. Instead, they use the atmosphere as a brake to slow down for a soft landing. Every planet in the solar system except Mercury has enough of an atmosphere to allow aerobraking maneu … | Continue reading
Seychelles is a special place for whales and dolphins. And yet, while its corals, turtles and sharks are relatively well studied, little is known about its cetaceans. Now scientists from the University of Seychelles, Florida International University and Oregon State University ar … | Continue reading
The Earth's magnetic field plays a big role in protecting people from hazardous radiation and geomagnetic activity that could affect satellite communication and the operation of power grids. And it moves. | Continue reading
A geoscience knowledge graph (GKG) is an effective way of organizing various geoscience knowledge into a machine-understandable and computable semantic network. However, existing knowledge graph representation models leverage fixed tuples that are limited in fully representing co … | Continue reading
In Australia we have a long history of taking children outdoors to learn about the natural environment. But thanks to computer games, tablets, and busy lifestyles, children aren't getting as much exposure to nature as they used to. | Continue reading
When Merriam-Webster announced that its word of the year for 2023 was "authentic," it did so with over a month to go in the calendar year. | Continue reading
On a crisp, sunny day high in the Peruvian Andes, two German judges gaze across a mountain lake to the towering white glaciers in the distance. Dark spots are visible on the pristine ice and, in quiet moments, the cold wind carries the sounds of creaking and cracking. | Continue reading
Researchers have concluded that Saudi Arabia is likely no longer home to sustainable populations of Arabian leopards, as detailed in the journal Oryx. | Continue reading
Single-cell multi-omics technologies allow a profound system-level biology understanding of cells and tissues. However, an integrative and possibly systems-based analysis capturing the different modalities is challenging. In response, bioinformatics and machine learning methodolo … | Continue reading
Our park ponds typically hold good numbers of mallards, and urban grassy areas often hold concentrations of geese. In the UK, Canada Geese are an abundant and widespread alien species, well known for fouling parks with their feces. | Continue reading
Diverse ecosystems support the web of life and in the process, provide food, water, medicine and materials for humanity. But the butterfly effect tells us all things are connected. So, when biodiversity loss threatens the foundation upon which we live, what does that mean for the … | Continue reading
Researchers have provided new insights into how ancestral elephants developed their dextrous trunks. | Continue reading
A pair of environmental and life scientists, one with the University of Newcastle, in Australia, the other the German Center for Integrative Biodiversity Research, has found that one species of mosquito native to Australia targets only the noses of frogs for feeding. In their pap … | Continue reading
Australia should join 65 other nations that have passed laws against corporal punishment of children in all settings to advance its goal of reducing all forms of violence against children, QUT researchers say. | Continue reading
Applying simple, ancient weaving techniques to newly recognized properties of organic crystals, researchers with the Smart Materials Lab (SML) and the Center for Smart Engineering Materials (CSEM) at NYU Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) have, for the first time, developed a unique form of woven … | Continue reading
If you run a large polluting facility and can't work out how to actually cut emissions, you might buy carbon credits to offset your emissions from the Australian Carbon Credit Unit Scheme. These credits are meant to represent carbon taken back out of the atmosphere and stored in … | Continue reading
On 21 March 1960 at 1.40 in the afternoon, apartheid South Africa's police opened fire on a peaceful crowd of about 4,000 residents of Sharpeville, who were protesting against carrying identity documents that restricted black people's movement. The police minimized the number of … | Continue reading
A group of U.S. senators recently called on tech giant Meta—which owns Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger—to hand over documents related to the mental and physical harms its products cause to young people. The demand follows a lawsuit filed by 33 states in Octob … | Continue reading
Uranus, the seventh planet from the sun, orbits in the outer solar system, about two billion miles (3.2 billion kilometers) from Earth. It is an enormous world—quadruple the diameter of Earth, with 15 times the mass and 63 times the volume. | Continue reading