SpaceX has confirmed that its crew capsule was destroyed in ground testing two weeks ago. | Continue reading
New Oregon State University research shows that juvenile northern red-legged frogs that have experienced climate-related stress as tadpoles are less likely to move on land, putting their survival at risk. | Continue reading
The last place most people would expect to find fresh groundwater is tens to hundreds of kilometers offshore in the ocean. Yet not only is that exactly where freshwater can be found, in the ground of the continental shelf beneath the ocean, but simulations have shown that it coul … | Continue reading
Astronauts on future long-duration spaceflight missions to the Moon and Mars could rely on microalgae to supply essentials including food, water and oxygen. A new investigation aboard the International Space Station tests using the microalgae Chlorella vulgaris as a biological co … | Continue reading
The Democratic-controlled House has approved legislation that would prevent President Donald Trump from following through on his pledge to withdraw the United States from a landmark global climate agreement. | Continue reading
The grounding of Boeing 737 Max jets likely means that fare increases this summer will be larger than already expected and airlines will struggle to handle disruptions such as storms that shut down hub airports. | Continue reading
Lithium, the light silvery metal used in everything from pharmaceutical applications to batteries that power your smart phone or electric car, could also help harness on Earth the fusion energy that lights the sun and stars. Lithium can maintain the heat and protect the walls ins … | Continue reading
A University of Oklahoma-led study recently found that explosive volcanic eruptions were at least 3-8 times more frequent during the peak of the Late Paleozoic Ice Age (~360 to 260 million years ago). Aerosols produced by explosive volcanism helped keep large ice sheets stable, e … | Continue reading
Giant pandas are extremely specialised herbivores that feed almost exclusively on highly fibrous bamboo, despite descending from primarily flesh-eating carnivores. | Continue reading
The federal government is creating a new vessel speed restriction zone off Massachusetts to try to protect rare whales. | Continue reading
Acorn Woodpeckers live in close-knit family groups and have one of the most complex breeding systems of any bird in the world. In about 20 percent of family groups, up to 3 related females may lay eggs in the same nest. They raise the chicks cooperatively with one or more related … | Continue reading
The ability to anticipate the future is key to the survival of all living things. Like humans, worms are capable of forming associative memories—that is, memories that associate a certain sound or smell or tone of voice with a particular outcome. | Continue reading
Riders in Denver will soon be able to buy tickets for public transportation using the Uber app, the latest step on the ride-hailing company's mission to become a one-stop shop for transportation. | Continue reading
Whether it's walking down a dark street at night or fighting off grizzly bears on the trail, pepper spray is an effective tool to fend off an attacker and get safely away. But have you ever thought about what gives this personal-defense-in-a-can its bite—is it just weaponized hot … | Continue reading
Researchers have discovered that honey bees are able to share immunity with other bees and to their offspring in a hive by transmitting RNA 'vaccines' through royal jelly and worker jelly. The jelly is the bee equivalent of mother's milk: a secretion used to provide nutrition to … | Continue reading
A British cybersecurity researcher credited with stopping a worldwide computer virus in 2017 is scheduled in Wisconsin federal court to plead guilty to developing malware to steal banking information. | Continue reading
A lock of what some historians think is Leonardo da Vinci's hair went on display Thursday at a museum in his Tuscan birthplace as they seek to prove it contains his DNA 500 years after the genius died. | Continue reading
If you're not a plasma physicist, exploding electrical wires underwater may sound like a bad idea. But it's actually a way to study shock waves, the propagating disturbances that move faster than the speed of sound. | Continue reading
Raising tenants' share in crop-sharing contracts between landlords and tenants in developing countries can boost agricultural output, by providing tenants with the right incentive to raise agriculture productivity. Bocconi University's Selim Gulesci and colleagues came to this co … | Continue reading
Each year on the first Saturday in May, Thoroughbred horses reach speeds of over 40 miles per hour as they compete to win the Kentucky Derby. But the domestic horse wasn't always bred for speed. In fact, an international team now has evidence to suggest that the modern horse is g … | Continue reading
If plants are injured, cells adjacent to the wound fill the gaps with their daughter cells. However, which cells divide to do the healing and how they manage to produce cells that match the cell type of the missing tissue has been unclear. Scientists from the Institute of Science … | Continue reading
Red-shouldered hawks (Buteo lineatus) feed primarily on mammals, amphibians, reptiles, and invertebrates, the majority of which are insects and crustaceans, with the latter represented to date only by crayfish. | Continue reading
Conflicts between humans and wildlife are escalating worldwide due to human population growth, urbanization, growth of agricultural and industrial activities, and, in certain areas, increasing wildlife populations. | Continue reading
Scientists documented the effects of invasive North American beavers (Castor canadensis) on carbon sequestration of a riparian forest in Tierra del Fuego. | Continue reading
The discovery of the first small-molecule inhibitors of the Streptococcus pyogenes Cas9 (SpCas9) protein could enable more precise control over CRISPR-Cas9-based genome editing, researchers report May 2nd in the journal Cell. | Continue reading
From a hill surrounded by the thawing mud of empty cornfields, farmer Chris Gamer leaned over a 1-year-old hazelnut bush. | Continue reading
Astrophysicists Szabolcs Marka at Columbia University and Imre Bartos at the University of Florida, have identified a violent collision of two neutron stars 4.6 billion years ago as the likely source of some of the most coveted matter on Earth. | Continue reading
With human and sample-return missions to Mars still on the drawing board, geologists wishing to study the red planet rely on robotic helpers to collect and analyse samples. Earlier this year we said goodbye to NASA's Opportunity rover, but Insight landed in November 2018, and sev … | Continue reading
Astronomers have assembled a mosaic of nearly 7,500 images of one part of the sky, creating the largest and most comprehensive history book of the universe. | Continue reading
The International Space Station is back up at full power, after the successful replacement of a failed electrical box. | Continue reading
When Chris Williamson was in the market for a new family car, a timely ad and conversations with a co-worker convinced him to try something out of the ordinary. He bought a BMW 3 Series convertible and covers the payments by renting it to strangers on a peer-to-peer car sharing a … | Continue reading
Gaia, operated by the European Space Agency (ESA, surveys the sky from orbit to create the largest, most precise, three-dimensional map of our Galaxy. One year ago, the Gaia mission produced its much-awaited second data release, which included high-precision measurements—position … | Continue reading
With as many as a million species threatened with extinction due to mankind's destruction of the planet, there have been scant conservation successes in recent years. | Continue reading
Researchers at the University of Bristol have successfully demonstrated the high thermal conductivity of a new material, paving the way for safer and more efficient electronic devices – including mobile phones, radars and even electric cars. | Continue reading
Apple's removal of nearly a dozen apps that help users manage screen time raises questions about the company's dominance and its commitment to helping people stay off their iPhones amid concerns about the negative effects of smartphones, including on children, according to a new … | Continue reading
Google employees staged a sit-in Wednesday to protest what they call a "culture of retaliation" at the company—the latest in a series of demonstrations by tech industry workers. | Continue reading
Even though we are led to believe that during the Cretaceous the Earth used to be an exclusive home for fearsome giants, including carnivorous velociraptors and arthropods larger than a modern adult human, it turns out that there was still room for harmless minute invertebrates m … | Continue reading
The future of medicine is biological – and scientists hope we will soon be using 3-D-printed biologically functional tissue to replace irreparably damaged tissue in the body. A team of researchers from the Fraunhofer Institute for Interfacial Engineering and Biotechnology IGB has … | Continue reading
Hundreds of thousands of people were evacuated along India's eastern coast on Thursday as authorities braced for a cyclone moving through the Bay of Bengal that was forecast to bring extremely severe wind and rain. | Continue reading
To conserve and manage fresh water, particularly in arid regions such as Saudi Arabia, it is important to understand how the water is used each day. KAUST scientists are using data gathered by shoebox-sized satellites, or CubeSats, to learn more about daily agricultural water use … | Continue reading
On April 25, 2019, the National Science Foundation's Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and the European-based Virgo detector registered gravitational waves from what appears likely to be a crash between two neutron stars—the dense remnants of massive star … | Continue reading
Spinning polymer filaments, for example for personal care articles, is highly complex: simulating the processes involved is too much for currently available computing power to handle. Fraunhofer researchers have successfully applied new approaches to simplify the calculations nec … | Continue reading
Six months on from the UN's landmark 1.5°C report, which urged immediate global action to prevent global warming from rising beyond this dangerous level, the Committee on Climate Change (CCC) has advised the UK government to go zero-carbon by 2050. The committee's report asserts … | Continue reading
There is an increasing demand for green products, but for them to be genuinely sustainable, manufacturers must also use adhesives and paints that are made of bio-based feedstocks. Advanced materials developed in Fraunhofer labs point the way forward. | Continue reading
Homo sapiens means wise human, but the name no longer suits us. As an evolutionary biologist who writes about Darwinian interpretations of human motivations and cultures, I propose that at some point we became what we are today: Homo absurdus, a human that spends its whole life t … | Continue reading
There's a good chance the device on which you are reading this contains cobalt. It's an essential metal for batteries in phones and laptops. There's also a chance the cobalt was mined by slaves. | Continue reading
Most of the knowledge that indigenous communities in South America have about plants is not written down. Now, ecologists at the University of Zurich have analyzed comprehensive information about the services provided by palm trees from multiple regions and made it accessible via … | Continue reading
Air pollution kills. In the United States, 1 of every 25 deaths occurs prematurely because of exposure to outdoor air pollution. | Continue reading