On April 1, the dome of the Mayall Telescope near Tucson, Arizona, opened to the night sky, and starlight poured through the assembly of six large lenses that were carefully packaged and aligned for a new instrument that will launch later this year. | Continue reading
There have been no major ground rupturing earthquakes along California's three highest slip rate faults in the past 100 years. A new study published in Seismological Research Letters concludes that this current "hiatus" has no precedent in the past 1000 years. | Continue reading
With the growing popularity of social media, Twitter has become a prominent place to voice opinions on both ends of the political spectrum. With the ability to follow those who only argue one side, voices of people who are in the middle, disinterested in politics or use social me … | Continue reading
Distributing iron particles produced by bacteria could "fertilize" microscopic ocean plants and ultimately lower atmospheric carbon levels, according to a new paper in Frontiers. | Continue reading
Probing unsolved crimes from years or decades ago is a challenge for any police officer. But the task is made even more difficult because the very term "cold case" puts a dampener on expectations of success, according to a university criminologist whose latest book calls for a ne … | Continue reading
Boeing's new space capsule for astronauts faces more launch delays. | Continue reading
In the summer of 1973, Joe Hage was in the seventh grade. Together with his peers, he boarded the old Boston Whaler from Project Oceanology just as dawn began to shimmer from behind the trees of Bluff Point. He remembers how instructors led the crowd into knee-deep waters, the ve … | Continue reading
Anyone who has ever spent time observing wild animals in nature will know that silence is golden. Wildlife tours recommend that people stay quiet in order to see more, but research on Tibetan macaques suggests that high levels of noise from tourists can also lead to more aggressi … | Continue reading
Extreme weather events, such as Cyclone Idai that has recently devastated Beira, Mozambique, and Hurricane Harvey that hit Houston, USA, in 2017are the types of climate extremes that cities increasingly have to prepare for. | Continue reading
Have you ever been running on a sidewalk making pretty good time, then hit a hill and slowed way down? If so, you've experienced how slope affects travel rates. For most of us, understanding how slope steepness impacts our speed is a matter of fitness. For others, such as wildlan … | Continue reading
Researchers of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) have developed a novel, even more economical LED street light. They replaced conventional high-performance diodes by a special array of weaker LEDs and, thus, succeeded in reducing power consumption by another 20%. As a resul … | Continue reading
The University of Huddersfield's combined electron microscope and ion beam accelerator is a world-class facility responsible for a large and growing global network of research collaborations. One of the latest is a partnership with Brazil's leading university and the scientific … | Continue reading
The tsetse fly, also known as the "fly of death" and the "poverty fly," is the primary means of transmission for the parasite that causes trypanosomosis. | Continue reading
A new method for reconstructing changes in nitrogen sources over time has enabled scientists to connect excess nutrients in the coastal waters of West Maui, Hawaii, to a sewage treatment facility that injects treated wastewater into the ground. | Continue reading
Austria on Wednesday proposed taxing internet giants such as Google and Facebook five percent of their digital advertising revenue, a higher rate than France and other EU countries are seeking. | Continue reading
Philippine authorities said Wednesday they cracked open a gift-wrapped package shipped from Poland to discover 757 tarantulas crammed into plastic containers. | Continue reading
Mountain Gorilla conservation in Rwanda is a great success story. A number of extreme conservation measures – like daily monitoring and protection, veterinary interventions and controlled ecotourism – have enabled the population to bounce back after a precarious low in the 1960s … | Continue reading
Climate change is underway, and human activities such as urbanisation, industrialisation and food production are key contributors. Food production alone accounts for around 25% of global carbon emissions. Ironically, the changing weather patterns and more frequent extreme weather … | Continue reading
Many invasive species are found along U.S. coasts, including fishes, crabs, mollusks and marsh grasses. Since the general opinion is that invasives are harmful, land managers and communities spend a lot of time and resources attempting to remove them. Often this happens before m … | Continue reading
Computing with words is a computational method where the objects of computation are words and propositions drawn from a natural language rather than the ones and zeroes of binary. Computing with words is perhaps what makes humanity a unique animals species in many regards allowin … | Continue reading
Twenty five years ago, Los Angeles experienced a massive power blackout due to an earthquake. The entire city was thrust into darkness. The emergency call service, 911, was inundated with panicked residents reporting "a giant silvery cloud," was engulfing the sky. Unknown to the … | Continue reading
In mathematics, no researcher works in true isolation. Even those who work alone use the theorems and methods of their colleagues and predecessors to develop new ideas. | Continue reading
Why would male and female animals choose different reproductive strategies? For golden lion tamarins in the Brazilian rain forest, the answer may offer clues to help save this neotropical primate. | Continue reading
A pair of researchers with Dartmouth College has found that Pacific hermit crabs use vibration to ward off other crabs trying to steal their shells. In their paper published in the journal Biology Letters, Louise Roberts and Mark Laidre describe their study of hermit crabs attemp … | Continue reading
It is a figure that has been thrown around quite a bit lately in the energy debate – the United States has enough energy in shale to provide all of the nation's transportation fuels for 100 years. But two challenges remain – how to tap into that supply and how to process it into … | Continue reading
The periodic table of chemical elements turns 150 this year. The anniversary is a chance to shine a light on particular elements – some of which seem ubiquitous but which ordinary people beyond the world of chemistry probably don't know much about. | Continue reading
Scientists have recently developed a light controlled nano-switch to lay groundwork for atomic device development in nanotechnology. They engineered the switches at the nanoscale in a first step toward fully integrated electronic device miniaturization. The multidisciplinary rese … | Continue reading
Researchers at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and the University of Cambridge have detected lithium in a primitive star in our galaxy. The observations were made at the VLT, at the Paranal Observatory of ESO in Chile. | Continue reading
Imagine you are standing in a beautiful mosaic of meadow and forest habitats – buzzing bees flying from flower to flower. You are in the Zarand landscape corridor in Romania. As well as having rich floral diversity, this landscape corridor provides an element of wilderness throug … | Continue reading
Liquids, with their flowing dynamics, are often far from equilibrium. This makes it particularly hard to model processes in soft matter or living tissue, which contain liquids. New research from the University of Tokyo's Institute of Industrial Science (IIS) offers an elegant app … | Continue reading
Loss and fragmentation of habitat are among the main reasons why biodiversity is decreasing in many places worldwide. Now, a research team with participation of the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) and Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) has … | Continue reading
Access to broadband internet has a positive effect on fertility, overall life satisfaction and time spent with children. Since this effect is largely driven by higher-educated women, though, it risks creating another digital divide, according to a study by Francesco Billari and L … | Continue reading
A smart liquid that darkens dramatically in response to rising temperature has been developed by researchers at A*STAR. The nanowire-based thermochromic liquid's tunable color-changing behavior was retained even after hundreds of heat-cool cycles. This liquid could have applicati … | Continue reading
metabolically engineered organisms could sustainably produce ingredients for natural foods, flavors and fragrances | Continue reading
Women represent just 22% of board chairs and 13% of CEOs across more than 60 Australian sporting organisations. | Continue reading
Eric DeGiuli, a physicist at École Normale Supérieure, has proposed that a human language grammar can be viewed as if it were a physical object, allowing theories such as those in statistical mechanics to explain how a child learns a language. In his paper published in the journa … | Continue reading
A study led by ICFO researchers reports on a highly sensitive CMOS-compatible broadband photodetector by tailoring material defects. | Continue reading
Have you ever entered a fitting room and discovered that the clothes did not fit well at all? A new doctoral thesis at the Swedish School of Textiles at the University of Borås shows that there are tools for both the product developer and the consumer that can help in the process … | Continue reading
Look again at that space station. That's there. That's home for a crew of six astronauts. That's us, too. On board, astronauts perform science and maintain the spacecraft with the support of a whole team on Earth. | Continue reading
Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, astronomers have detected a galaxy-wide molecular outflow from the quasar PDS 456. The findings are presented in a paper published March 25 on arXiv.org, in which the authors investigate the properties of thi … | Continue reading