A team of researchers from Osaka University, Osaka Prefecture University, Osaka City University, and The University of Shiga Prefecture have found excitonic radiative decay faster than thermal dephasing at room temperature in zinc oxide (ZnO) thin films. These results, published … | Continue reading
Plants have larger and more complex genomes than all animals, be they mammals, birds, reptiles or amphibians. Fish are the exception to the rule. | Continue reading
A ban on facial recognition for law enforcement in San Francisco highlights growing public concerns about technology which is seeing stunning growth for an array of applications while provoking worries over privacy. | Continue reading
Russia is set to free controversially captured killer whales over the next month, but not return the animals to their original habitat despite expert advice, a scientist said Wednesday. | Continue reading
Kochia is a highly invasive weed that is common in the Great Plains, where it has developed resistance to multiple herbicides. Now new dicamba-resistant strains are adding to grower worries. | Continue reading
Since the end of the Second World War, along with the growing prosperity and the associated changes in lifestyle, numerous new and civilisation-related disease patterns have developed in today's industrialised nations. Examples of the so-called "environmental diseases" are differ … | Continue reading
Reggaeton has traditionally been considered as a sexist music genre and the lyrics and choreographies usually associated with it are seen as a way of promoting the objectification of women. This trend is losing popularity due to the recent appearance of young women who have chang … | Continue reading
Rainfall from the Asian summer monsoon has been decreasing over the past 80 years, a decline unprecedented in the last 448 years, according to a new study. | Continue reading
A research group led by Prof. Liu Shengzhong from the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics (DICP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Dr. Xu Zhuo at Shaanxi Normal University (SNNU) developed a technique to prepare large 2-D perovskite single crystals to achieve the highest p … | Continue reading
As spring arrives in the northern hemisphere, many people are cursing ragweed, a primary culprit in seasonal allergies. But scientists might have discovered a promising new use for some substances produced by the pesky weed. In ACS' Journal of Natural Products, researchers have i … | Continue reading
Unlike water, liquid refrigerants and other fluids that have a low surface tension tend to spread quickly into a sheet when they come into contact with a surface. But for many industrial process it would be better if the fluids formed droplets, which could roll or fall off the su … | Continue reading
Machine learning can be used to predict the properties of a group of materials which, according to some, could be as important to the 21st century as plastics were to the 20th. | Continue reading
Dr. Moriaki Yasuhara, Dr. Hisayo Okahashi, and Dr. Huai-Hsuan May Huang from School of Biological Sciences and Swire Institute of Marine Science of the University of Hong Kong (HKU), in collaboration with scientists from the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University … | Continue reading
U.S. regulators are proposing new tools to counter the unrelenting waves of robocalls received each year in America. | Continue reading
Chinese internet giant Tencent said Wednesday net profit soared nearly 17 percent in the first quarter as the company appeared set to emerge from the battering it received from Beijing's crackdown on gaming. | Continue reading
Chinese e-commerce leader Alibaba on Wednesday announced revenue for the latest quarter that beat analyst estimates, indicating that the Sino-US trade tiff and a slowing domestic economy were having little impact on the bottom line. | Continue reading
Forty-five tech giants committed Wednesday to doubling the number of women on their management boards to 30 percent by 2022, the French presidency said. | Continue reading
By using marine sediment cores from northwestern Australia, a Japanese team led by National Institute of Polar Research (NIPR) and the University of Tokyo revealed that the global ice sheet during the last ice age had changed in a shorter time scale than previously thought. This … | Continue reading
As the number of electronics devices increases around the world, finding effective methods of recycling electronic waste (e-waste) is a growing concern. About 50 million tons of e-waste is generated each year and only 20% of that is recycled. Most of the remaining 80% ends up in … | Continue reading
Facebook's advertising platform was not built to help social media users understand who was targeting them with messages, or why. It is an extremely powerful system, which lets advertisers target specific users according to a detailed range of attributes. For example, in 2017, th … | Continue reading
Many eloquent commentators have waxed lyrical about their first encounter with mountain gorillas—most notably Sir David Attenborough, vice-president of Fauna & Flora International (FFI) since 1979, the same year that those iconic scenes from Life on Earth were first broadcast. | Continue reading
American Express is buying the online reservation startup Resy, the companies announced Wednesday, the latest move by AmEx to establish and maintain a foothold for its card members in some of the world's most desired restaurants. | Continue reading
Wind turbines are a critical component in the strategy for energy independence, but these massive structures are also killing bats. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that the more than 52,000 wind turbines operating in the United States kill tens of thousands to hundreds of th … | Continue reading
India's rapid economic growth has been accompanied by falling fertility rates and higher educational attainment among women. These advances often lead to an increase in women entering the labour force, but there has been a surprising decline on this front in India. Less than 30% … | Continue reading
Researchers at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory flew a fleet of 30 miniature autonomous blimps in unison to test the swarming behavior of autonomous systems. The blimps responded to each other while in flight and responded to changing conditions. | Continue reading
Astronomers using the combined power of two Hawaii telescopes have taken groundbreaking, sharp new images of a distant planetary system that likely resembles a baby version of our solar system. | Continue reading
Quantum optics, where light and matter interactions are examined at the microscopic level, has earned Nobel prizes—including three awarded since 2001—for some of science's biggest names. However, even in this mature field, some interesting physics remains largely unexplored. An i … | Continue reading
More than a million species are at risk of extinction according to a new report on biodiversity. But even some species that aren't considered endangered may be less safe than people think. A new study published in the Journal of Applied Ecology found that some methods for measuri … | Continue reading
Offshore oil and gas drilling has been a contentious issue in California for 50 years, ever since a rig ruptured and spilled 80,000 to 100,000 barrels of crude oil off Santa Barbara in 1969. Today it's spurring a new debate: whether to completely dismantle 27 oil and gas platform … | Continue reading
Many MySpace users were dismayed to discover earlier this year that the social media platform lost 50 million files uploaded between 2003 and 2015. | Continue reading
Wearable electronic components incorporated directly into fabrics have been developed by researchers at the University of Cambridge. The devices could be used for flexible circuits, healthcare monitoring, energy conversion, and other applications. | Continue reading
As our climate changes, the availability of freshwater is a growing issue for many people around the world. Understanding the water cycle and how the climate and human usage is causing shifts in natural cycling processes is vital to safeguarding supplies. While numerous satellite … | Continue reading
The Indian Ocean has made its mark on the global news cycle this year. In March, tropical cyclone Idai made headlines as one of the most severe storms to have made landfall in Mozambique. Current estimates indicate that more than 1,000 people died. This makes it the most deadly t … | Continue reading
A team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in China has developed a hydrogel that can stop bleeding from a punctured artery. In their paper published in the journal Nature Communications, the group describes how the hydrogel was made and how well it worked on test … | Continue reading
Recent protests by animal welfare activists on Australian abattoirs and farms and city streets triggered a backlash from meat-lovers and MPs. The activists were labelled "un-Australian" by the Prime Minister and others, and the protests prompted calls for tougher trespass laws an … | Continue reading
Researchers at Ruhr-Universität Bochum and the Fritz Haber Institute Berlin have developed a new method of to conserve rare and expensive catalysts and use them sparingly. They enclosed a precious metal salt in tiny micelles, and struck them against a carbon electrode, thus coati … | Continue reading
Dan Lewis, Staffordshire University; Claude C. Chibelushi, Staffordshire University, and Debi Roberts, Staffordshire University | Continue reading
One of the ocean's most feared predators – the tiger shark—has been revealed as a relaxed and sometimes lazy hunter by scientists studying their behaviour. | Continue reading
The new First Home Loan Deposit Scheme announced the Coalition, and instantly backed by Labor, is likely to be popular among those on the cusp of buying their first home. | Continue reading
Based on new data from ESA's Gaia satellite, astronomers have provided more insights into properties of the nearby open cluster NGC 2682, revealing that its size is at least two times greater than previously believed. The findings are detailed in a paper published May 6 on the ar … | Continue reading
After months of helping rehabilitate a group of lesser flamingo chicks abandoned in South Africa, the Dallas Zoo has released dozens of the birds back into the wild. | Continue reading
In solving quantum-physical problems in many-body systems, such as predicting material properties, conventional computers rapidly reach the limits of their capacity. Digital quantum simulators might help, but until now they are drastically limited to small systems with few partic … | Continue reading