Too much of a good thing can be a bad thing. That's certainly true for nitrogen fertilizers. | Continue reading
New research, led by the University of Bristol, has shed new light on the eating habits of Neolithic people living in southeastern Europe using food residues from pottery extracts dating back more than 8,000 years. | Continue reading
The cyanobacteria blooms that plague western Lake Erie each summer are both an unsightly nuisance and a potential public health hazard, producing liver toxins that can be harmful to humans and their pets. | Continue reading
Hundreds of meters deep in the dark of the ocean, a shark glides toward what seems like a meal. It's kind of ugly, eel-like and not particularly meaty, but still probably food. So the shark strikes. | Continue reading
Cancer first develops as a single cell going rogue, with mutations that trigger aggressive growth at all costs to the health of the organism. But if cancer cells were accumulating harmful mutations faster than they could be purged, wouldn't the population eventually die out? | Continue reading
In the 2019 Coulter Review, "Polyploidy, the Nucleotype, and Novelty: The Impact of Genome Doubling on the Biology of the Cell," published in the International Journal of Plant Sciences (180:1-52), Jeff J. Doyle and Jeremy E. Coate examine the effects of genome doubling on cell b … | Continue reading
Most of the native habitat in California's San Joaquin Desert has been converted to row crops and orchards, leaving 35 threatened or endangered species confined to isolated patches of habitat. A significant portion of that farmland, however, is likely to be retired in the coming … | Continue reading
Every summer, a "dead zone" forms in the Gulf of Mexico. Plumes of oxygen-robbing algae, fed by excess nitrogen coming in from the Mississippi River, kill off marine life and threaten the livelihoods of those who fish the Gulf. States bordering the Mississippi River are putting s … | Continue reading
Scientists at the University of Liverpool have taken another step forward in understanding the bacteria that are causing a devastating Salmonella epidemic currently killing around 400,000 people each year in sub-Saharan Africa. | Continue reading
Scientists behind the world's largest atom smasher have laid out their multibillion-euro vision to build an even bigger one, in hopes of unlocking even more secrets of matter and the universe in the coming decades. | Continue reading
French authorities on Tuesday banned the sale of a form of controversial weed-killer Roundup following a court ruling that regulators failed to take safety concerns into account when clearing the widely used herbicide. | Continue reading
Part-time working mothers who have the ability to control their own schedule often end up working an increased amount of unpaid overtime, new research from the University of Kent has found. | Continue reading
Large carnivore management in Alaska should be based on rigorous science and monitoring of the status and trends of carnivore populations, according to a Perspective article published January 15 in the open-access journal PLOS Biology by William Ripple of Oregon State University, … | Continue reading
Scientists have revealed a key mechanism in worms that is involved in controlling the cell's response to stress, a study in eLife reports. | Continue reading
Climate change has the potential to have affected ancient civilizations by spurring migrations and changes in cropping strategies, and the¬se questions are increasingly relevant as we look at how modern civilization is coping with climate change today. | Continue reading
Warmer temperatures are causing more tropical species to move northward. Among these are black mangroves, whose abundance is steadily increasing in the northern Gulf of Mexico. Black mangroves grow as short trees in a dwarf forest and displace many plants common to Gulf salt mars … | Continue reading
Keeping road pavement in good shape saves money and energy and reduces greenhouse gas emissions, more than offsetting pollution generated during road construction, according to a Rutgers-led study. | Continue reading
The European gypsy moth (EGM) is perhaps the country's most famous invasive insect—a nonnative species accidentally introduced to North America in the 1860s when a few escaped from a breeding experiment in suburban Boston. The caterpillars have been slowly eating their way across … | Continue reading
Our images of mushroom clouds came from its cameras. So did many shots of missile tests, space missions and the Korean and Vietnam wars. | Continue reading
Oil companies are missing out on vast sums of recoverable oil in unconventional reservoirs, according to Penn State experts. | Continue reading
Icy weather is blamed for multibillion dollar losses every year in the United States, including delays and damage related to air travel, infrastructure and power generation and transmission facilities. Finding effective, durable and environmentally stable de-icing materials has b … | Continue reading
Haida Gwaii's small population of northern goshawks—already of great concern to conservationists—are the last remnant of a highly distinct genetic cluster of the birds, according to a new genomic analysis by University of British Columbia researchers. | Continue reading
A mass of charred seeds found while clearing a home construction site in Brantford, Ontario, has been identified as ancient, domesticated goosefoot (C. berlandieri spp. jonesianum), a form of quinoa native to Eastern North America. The seeds date back to 900 B.C., and have never … | Continue reading
The Mojave rattlesnake, living in the deserts of the southwestern United States and central Mexico, is characterized by its lethal venom that can either shut down your body or tenderize your insides. Clemson University researchers say which one depends on where you're located. | Continue reading
Building at the nanoscale is not like building a house. Scientists often start with two-dimensional molecular layers and combine them to form complex three-dimensional architectures. And instead of nails and screws, these structures are joined together by the attractive van der W … | Continue reading
A new study in Conservation Physiology shows that over time, bears get used to drones. Previous work indicated that animals behave fearfully or show a stress response near drone flights. Using heart monitors to gauge stress, however, researchers here found that bears habituated t … | Continue reading
US authorities on Tuesday charged eight people in a scheme to trade on and profit from stolen corporate information hacked from a government database, court papers showed. | Continue reading
Netflix is raising its U.S. prices by 13 percent to 18 percent, its biggest increase since the company launched its streaming service 12 years ago. | Continue reading
A new study is shedding light on the importance of one critical resource for Andean bears living in the dry mountain forests of Peru: water. The study—a collaboration between the Norwegian University of Life Sciences and San Diego Zoo Global, with assistance from the Spectacled B … | Continue reading
While easily seen by people, the cotton-ball clouds (called shallow cumulus clouds) that drift overhead on partly cloudy days are hard for radars and many other instruments to observe and, therefore, hard to model and predict. Scientists situated six digital cameras in pairs at a … | Continue reading
To better understand how aerosols affect the atmosphere and Earth system processes, historical emissions data are a key input for modeling and analyses. A research team produced a new, robust data set covering the years 1750–2014 for carbonaceous aerosols, and chemically reactive … | Continue reading
More challenging than birdwatching and not nearly as popular, insect-watching—noting and sharing exactly what one sees and where—is nevertheless on the rise. | Continue reading
Two Ukrainian men have been charged with hacking into computers of the Securities and Exchange Commission to steal quarterly and annual reports of publicly traded companies before their public release. | Continue reading
A few years ago, virtual reality was all the rage in Hollywood, helping to fuel the rise of Silicon Beach with the promise of reinventing the entertainment business. | Continue reading
William Langland likely wouldn't know what to make of the latest way people are reading his poetry. In part, that's because Langland died in 1386. But it's also because his most famous work, Piers Plowman, is the subject of an expansive digital humanities project – allowing schol … | Continue reading
A June 2018 decision rendered by the Supreme Court of the United States established an interesting principle on digital privacy in a case related to a criminal proceeding. | Continue reading
In recent years, the number of extra-solar planets discovered around nearby M-type (red dwarf stars) has grown considerably. In many cases, these confirmed planets have been "Earth-like," meaning that they are terrestrial (aka. rocky) and comparable in size to Earth. These finds … | Continue reading
When you're lost, Siri can be your best friend. But if she can't retrieve the right address from your contacts, she can drive you crazy. | Continue reading
Facebook announced Tuesday that it will invest $300 million over three years in various projects related to journalism, especially to promote local news, which has been hit hard in the digital age. | Continue reading
Microbial communities residing within the gut have been implicated in several aspects of health and disease. The mammalian gut microbiome, for example, not only influences metabolic functions and immune responses, but has also been found to affect mood, cognition, pain and anxiet … | Continue reading
There's a juicy psychological, even romantic, angle underlying his mathematical analysis of an important Johannes Brahms composition in the new book co-written and edited by Scott Murphy, University of Kansas professor of music theory. | Continue reading
A new study by the Leibniz-Institute for Food Systems Biology at the Technical University of Munich (Leibniz-LSB@TUM) shows that craft beer should be kept cool and consumed as fresh as possible. After three months, cold stored beer loses more than one third of an important hop od … | Continue reading
What if you never had to return to work? Never had to return to work at the office, that is. | Continue reading
It has long been known that a quarry near the Dutch town of Winterswijk is an Eldorado for fossil lovers. But even connoisseurs will be surprised just how outstanding the site actually is. A student at the University of Bonn, himself a Dutchman and passionate fossil collector, ha … | Continue reading