Well-meaning celebrities and MPs recently published a letter in the Guardian, calling for a ban on trophy hunting imports into the UK. To the novice conservationist, this surely sounds like a good thing, right? After all, trophy hunting kills animals so how could it possibly be g … | Continue reading
Windows are something that many of us take for granted – they're just part of the houses we live in or the buildings we work in. And yet for older people, windows can be vital as a way to access the world, especially for those who spend a lot of time indoors. | Continue reading
Between 2015 and 2017 South Africa's South Western Cape region experienced three of its lowest rainfall years on record. This led to the progressive depletion of water supply reservoirs and by the summer of 2017/18 there was a real danger that – without drastic reductions in wate … | Continue reading
A new study by a team of geologists that includes Kansas State University's Matthew Brueseke has found that the Wrangell volcanic belt in Alaska's Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve is older than previously recognized and determined why its volcanic field has been pers … | Continue reading
The winter holidays are a busy time for many businesses, including retail stores, grocers, liquor stores – and dry cleaners. People pull out special-occasion clothes made of silk, satin or other fabrics that don't launder well in soap and water. Then there are all those specialty … | Continue reading
Scientific discovery can be achingly slow, but it was moving swiftly in the 1890s. X-rays had been discovered in Germany just a few days before Christmas in 1895. Several months later, while researching these new X-rays, the French physicist Henri Becquerel accidentally discovere … | Continue reading
There are more and more big canals and pipelines transporting fresh water from places where it is abundant to places where it is needed for drinking—or for industry and agriculture. Thirty-four such mega-systems are already in place and 76 are planned or are under construction; b … | Continue reading
Cover crops grown in fields during winter may be warming temperatures in the northern United States and southern Canada, according to a new study by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. The crops, a land management strategy farmers use between growing seaso … | Continue reading
Facebook offered a renewed defense Wednesday of its data sharing practices after a report revealing that certain partners of the social network had access to a range of personal information about users and their friends. | Continue reading
In speech and music, words and notes depend on each other. Humans are highly sensitive to such dependencies, but the evolutionary origins of this capacity are poorly understood. Cognitive biologists at the University of Vienna conducted playback experiments with common marmoset m … | Continue reading
Mass development of water plants in river and lakes causes headache for researchers and water managers all over the world. New research aims to reveal the causes of the explosive development and identify ecosystem effects of removing the water plants. | Continue reading
Using uranium-lead dating, Senckenberg scientists, in cooperation with an international team, were able to date the onset of the "Cambrian explosion" to precisely 538.8 million years ago. During the "Cambrian explosion," all currently known "blueprints" in the animal kingdom appe … | Continue reading
The earthquakes and tsunami in Central Sulawesi that killed more than 2,000 people in September 2018 did not only leave a deep sorrow. It made us rethink the relationship between humans, technology and nature in Indonesia. | Continue reading
Elon Musk on Tuesday took a break from futuristic electric cars and private space travel to unveil a low-cost tunnel he sees as a godsend for city traffic. | Continue reading
A pioneering Finnish nanosatellite has now reached space equipped with the world's smallest infrared hyperspectral camera. The photos with infrared data taken from the satellite provide new solutions for monitoring and managing the effects of climate change. The hyperspectral cam … | Continue reading
A KAIST team developed technology that allows the mass production of two-dimensional (2-D) nanomaterial dispersion by utilizing the characteristic shearing force of hydraulic power. | Continue reading
In a recent study, materials scientists Guojin Liang and his coworkers at the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, City University of Hong Kong, have developed a self-healing, electroluminescent (EL) device that can repair or heal itself after damage. Inspired by the … | Continue reading
In cell biology, men and women are unequal: men have an X chromosome, while women have two. How can we get around this difference? Geneticists from the University of Geneva (UNIGE), Switzerland, turned to some historic research dating from the 1960s to sequence skin and blood cel … | Continue reading
In 1967 one gigabyte of hard drive storage space cost US$ 1m. Today it's around two US cents. Computer processing power has also increased exponentially: it doubles every two years. This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to technological progress in the 21st century. | Continue reading
Physicists have proposed an entirely new way to test the quantum superposition principle—the idea that a quantum object can exist in multiple states at the same time. The new test is based on examining the quantum rotation of a macroscopic object—specifically, a nanoscale rotor, … | Continue reading
ANYmal, a robot developed at ETH, can see and hear, and even open doors. An international research team is now working to ensure the robot can function in extreme conditions – a mission that takes them to the labyrinth of drains and tunnels below Zurich. | Continue reading
Physicists from Skoltech have invented a new method for calculating the dynamics of large quantum systems. Underpinned by a combination of quantum and classical modeling, the method has been successfully applied to nuclear magnetic resonance in solids. The results of the study we … | Continue reading
A team of researchers at NASA's Ames Research Center has found some evidence that adds credence to the theory that the basic ingredients for life came to Earth from asteroids. In their paper published in the journal Nature Communications, the group describes the experiments they … | Continue reading
While volcanoes and forest fires release mercury, they are relatively small sources compared to the combustion of coal, oil, and other fuels. Mercury is toxic. Microbes turn mercury into a neurotoxin called methylmercury. They also turn the neurotoxin back into inorganic mercury. … | Continue reading
Food banks have become the subject of heated debate in the UK. For some they are an indictment of 'austerity Britain' and reflect an increase in the numbers living in extreme poverty, while others see them as little more than a 'free lunch for scroungers', but findings from a new … | Continue reading
On Monday this week, BepiColombo began its very first routine electric propulsion firing. | Continue reading
Lessons learnt from a NSW parliamentary inquiry into hate crimes against Australia's LGBTIQ community could change the way police and communities respond to complaints, and acknowledge the continued impact of past injustices. | Continue reading
Off southern Tasmania, at depths between 700 and 1,500 metres, more than 100 undersea mountains provide rocky pedestals for deep-sea coral reefs. | Continue reading
A team of astronomers from Chile has detected nine new variable stars in the globular cluster NGC 6652 and its background stream. Six of the newly found stars were classified as eclipsing binaries, one as an SX Phoenicis star, and two remain unclassified. The finding is detailed … | Continue reading
A team of researchers from Canada and the U.S. has found that a giant fungus covering many acres has a stable mutation rate. In their paper published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the group describes their study of the extremely old fungus and what they found. | Continue reading
A regular pattern of unusual meteorological events at Jupiter's equator has been identified by planetary scientists at the University of Leicester. | Continue reading
"Coal is dead." | Continue reading
A new Simon Fraser University report calls for governments to combine emission reduction and climate adaptation strategies and outlines best practices to reduce the severity of extreme climate impacts. | Continue reading
A sonic boom and a thunderclap may seem like different phenomena, but their behavior is the same, according to SDState Physics Instructor W. Robert Matson. This is one of the ways he explains shock waves in "Sonic Thunder," his latest book. | Continue reading
German carmakers Daimler and BMW said Wednesday they had won final approval to merge their car-sharing services Car2Go and DriveNow, paving the way for the creation of a European giant to challenge the likes of Uber. | Continue reading
Consumers equate gold with status and luxury—and it turns out seeing the color makes them more generous tippers, according to new research from University of Dayton Assistant Professor of Marketing Na Young Lee. | Continue reading
A team of researchers with members from the U.K., Poland and Germany has found that women tend to lower their voices when competing sexually for a man. In their paper published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the group describes their study involving participants in a spee … | Continue reading
The biodiversity catalogue of Iberian Peninsula spiders now includes a dozen new species from seven newly discovered families mainly found in soil, according to an article led by Professor Miquel Àngel Arnedo from the Faculty of Biology and the Biodiversity Research Institute (IR … | Continue reading
Hackers have spent years eavesdropping on the diplomatic communications of European Union officials, a U.S. cybersecurity firm said Wednesday, an operation disrupted only after researchers discovered hundreds of intercepted documents lying around on the internet. | Continue reading
European Union member states and the European Parliament agreed Wednesday to reform the bloc's electricity market, including a call to end coal subsidies by 2025. | Continue reading
New research published in the European Journal of Politics and Gender claims that the Brexit referendum campaigns in 2016 did not produce high quality political engagement for women. | Continue reading
High levels of the carcinogenic chemical cadmium can still be found in everyday household products like second-hand plastic toys, drinking glasses, alcoholic beverage bottles, ceramics and artists' paints, according to new research by the University of Plymouth. | Continue reading
It was a prehistoric clash of the ages that didn't end pretty when a monster in the sky clashed with a beast of the deep. | Continue reading
NUS chemists have discovered new reaction pathways to synthesise medium-sized heterocyclic compounds for the development of therapeutic drug molecules. | Continue reading
On December 14, 2018, IBM released NeuNetS, a fundamentally new capability that addresses the skills gap for development of latest AI models for a wide range of business domains. NeuNetS uses AI to automatically synthesize deep neural network models faster and easier than ever be … | Continue reading
Scientists can now measure ice flow in Antarctica in far more detail, thanks to the help of a new satellite technology. | Continue reading
A new model of the moon's rotational dynamics—the first that takes into account the moon's solid inner core—helps explain why it appears to wobble on its axis. | Continue reading