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
For months, a major recycling facility for the greater Baltimore-Washington area has been facing a big problem: it has to pay to get rid of huge amounts of paper and plastic it would normally sell to China. | Continue reading
Students perform less well in end-of-term exams if they are allowed access to an electronic device, such as a phone or tablet, for non-academic purposes in lectures, a new study in Educational Psychology finds. | Continue reading
Scientists at the Florida State University-headquartered National High Magnetic Field Laboratory have discovered a behavior in materials called cuprates that suggests they carry current in a way entirely different from conventional metals such as copper. | Continue reading
Experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's largest particle accelerator at the European particle physics lab CERN, produce about a million gigabytes of data every second. Even after reduction and compression, the data amassed in just one hour is similar to the da … | Continue reading
A team of researchers with members from Wuhan University and the University of Texas has created an artificial material that offers both negative refraction and no reflection. In their paper published in the journal Nature, the group describes their material, how it was made, and … | Continue reading
An international research group has applied methods of theoretical physics to investigate the electromagnetic response of the Great Pyramid to radio waves. Scientists predicted that under resonance conditions, the pyramid can concentrate electromagnetic energy in its internal cha … | Continue reading
Physicists have developed a quantum machine learning algorithm that can handle infinite dimensions—that is, it works with continuous variables (which have an infinite number of possible values on a closed interval) instead of the typically used discrete variables (which have only … | Continue reading
Planet-warming greenhouse gases surged to new highs as abnormally hot temperatures swept the globe and ice melted at record levels in the Arctic last year due to climate change, a major US report said Wednesday. | Continue reading
Earthbound detectives rely on fingerprints to solve their cases; now astronomers can do the same, using "light-fingerprints" instead of skin grooves to uncover the mysteries of exoplanets. | Continue reading
A team of researchers at Aalto University in Finland has found a way to use nanowires to build all-optical logic gates—a major step toward building a light-based computer. In their paper published in the journal Science Advances, the group describes their new approach, how well i … | Continue reading
There may be more habitable planets in the universe than we previously thought, according to Penn State geoscientists, who suggest that plate tectonics—long assumed to be a requirement for suitable conditions for life—are in fact not necessary. | Continue reading
Protons might be the Large Hadron Collider's bread and butter, but that doesn't mean it can't crave more exotic tastes from time to time. On Wednesday, 25 July, for the very first time, operators injected not just atomic nuclei but lead "atoms" containing a single electron into t … | Continue reading
In an international collaboration between Japan and Sweden, scientists clarified how gravity affects the shape of matter near the black hole in binary system Cygnus X-1. Their findings, which were published in Nature Astronomy this month, may help scientists further understand th … | Continue reading
For thousands of years, people have been puzzling over the milky strip that extends across the entire firmament. In the modern era, Galileo Galilei discovered that this Milky Way consists of countless stars. However, it was not until the 20th century that astronomers succeeded in … | Continue reading
A plant's defense systems are cooperative—when one system fails, another one can take over, at least in part. Researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology 's (NTNU) Department of Biology have been collaborating with colleagues from Imperial College London and … | Continue reading
Physicists have theoretically shown that, by applying a magnetic field to a small, irregularly shaped graphene flake, the flake becomes a quantum hologram of a black hole. This means that the graphene flake recreates the spatial structure and characteristic properties of a black … | Continue reading
Researchers at IIT-Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia developed, assembled and tested a new disaster response robot called the Centauro, a Centaur-like robot consisting of a four-legged base and an anthropomorphic upper body. The robot is capable of robust locomotion, high strength … | Continue reading
A team of astronomers has discovered a new way to unlock the mysteries of how the first galaxies formed and evolved. | Continue reading
The dust that coats much of the surface of Mars originates largely from a single thousand-kilometer-long geological formation near the Red Planet's equator, scientists have found. | Continue reading
A new approach could help materials scientists identify the appropriate molecules to use in order to synthesize target nanomaterials. The method was developed by Daniel Packwood of Kyoto University's Institute for Integrated Cell-Material Sciences (iCeMS) and Taro Hitosugi of the … | Continue reading
While the Moon is uninhabitable today, there could have been life on its surface in the distant past. | Continue reading
While the Moon is uninhabitable today, there could have been life on its surface in the distant past. | Continue reading
The Casimir force and superconductivity are two well-known quantum effects. These phenomena have been thoroughly studied separately, but what happens when these effects are combined in a single experiment? Now, Delft University of Technology have created a microchip on which two … | Continue reading
The elements that make up the ink in tattoos travel inside the body in micro and nanoparticle forms and reach the lymph nodes, according to a study published in Scientific Reports on 12 September by scientists from Germany and the ESRF, the European Synchrotron, Grenoble (France) … | Continue reading
Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Twitter unveiled plans Friday to make it easier for users to take their personal data and leave one online service for another. | Continue reading