There's a new category of home gadgets best described as screens for making video calls, listening to music and responding to voice commands for tasks you can also do on your phone. | Continue reading
As a non-noble metal, copper oxidizes more easily to a positive valence (Cu+ or Cu2+) than same-family elements Au or Ag. In general, this chemical property is mainly determined by electron structure. Can we change the chemical properties of an element by regulating its electron … | Continue reading
Residents of a high-end neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro woke up to the unpleasant smell of 13 tons of rotting dead fish floating in the city's Rodrigo de Freitas lagoon. | Continue reading
Aviation chiefs are going to be on a steep learning curve to counter the security threat posed by drones after a costly and humiliating shutdown of London's Gatwick airport. | Continue reading
Ford is recalling 874,000 of its best-selling F-series pickup trucks due to fire risk from the engine block heater system, the company announced Friday. | Continue reading
Uranus is a lopsided oddity, the only planet to spin on its side. Scientists now think they know how it got that way: It was pushed over by a rock at least twice as big as Earth. | Continue reading
In a new nightmare for British holiday travel, flights were suspended again at London's Gatwick Airport late Friday afternoon after an unconfirmed report that another drone had been sighted, a spokeswoman said. | Continue reading
Fragmentation of wildlife populations is increasing on a global scale, and understanding current genetic structure, genetic diversity and genetic connectivity is key to informing future wildlife management and conservation. | Continue reading
Researchers placed 160 cameras on 19 of the 22 Apostle Islands in northern Wisconsin to see which carnivores were living there. After taking more than 200,000 photos over a period of three years, the team discovered that several mammalian predators are living on various islands i … | Continue reading
Tropical Cyclone Kenanga is now on a weakening trend and NASA's GPM core satellite provided a look at the rainfall and cloud heights within the storm. | Continue reading
Researchers from the University of Houston and the Toyota Research Institute of America have discovered a promising new version of high-energy magnesium batteries, with potential applications ranging from electric vehicles to battery storage for renewable energy systems. | Continue reading
Setting up a defensive wall in a soccer game is a primary sports challenge. No coach likes a gap between defensive players in the wall. Scientists are tackling a similar problem to improve the stability of perovskite solar cells (PSCs). | Continue reading
Researchers at Aalto University have developed metasurfaces with extreme angle-asymmetric response. The surface reflections depend on the angle at which light hits it. | Continue reading
This festive NASA Hubble Space Telescope image resembles a holiday wreath made of sparkling lights. The bright southern hemisphere star RS Puppis, at the center of the image, is swaddled in a gossamer cocoon of reflective dust illuminated by the glittering star. The super star is … | Continue reading
Scientists from the University of Plymouth have found that a lack of summertime iron could be having a major impact on the overall health of our coastal waters and shelf seas. | Continue reading
Eat your spinach in the form of a smoothie or juice – this is the best way to obtain the antioxidant lutein, according to research from Linköping University, Sweden. High levels of lutein are found in dark green vegetables, and researchers at the university have compared differen … | Continue reading
For the first time, researchers have used tiny gears made of germanium to generate a vortex of twisted light that turns around its axis of travel much like a corkscrew. Because germanium is compatible with the silicon used to make computer chips, the new light source could be use … | Continue reading
Bees can solve seemingly clever counting tasks with very small numbers of nerve cells in their brains, according to researchers at Queen Mary University of London. | Continue reading
Every relationship has a breaking point. Even yours with Facebook. | Continue reading
Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) has been framed as one of the biggest threats to humanity in the 21st century. By 2050, more humans could die because of AMR than cancer. But despite alarming concerns from the early 1960s and warnings that the issue of antimicrobial resistance coul … | Continue reading
Unconventional superconductors form one of the big mysteries in physics. Among them is strontium ruthenate, which stands out as a controversial superconductor. During his Ph.D., Leiden physicist Kaveh Lahabi has provided new insights into the nature of superconductivity in this m … | Continue reading
Vibrating carbon monoxide molecules adsorbed at the surface of a salt crystal stop moving after a few milliseconds. Scientists now discovered this is dominantly due to the emission of electromagnetic waves. The role of the chemical bond at the surface thereby appears to be less i … | Continue reading
Margarethe (Meta) Kuehn studies vesicles—little bubbles that bud off bacterial membranes. All sorts of things may be tightly packed into these bubbles: viruses, antigens, and information a bacterium will need to make cells vulnerable to infection. | Continue reading
Wind turbines are a leading source of green energy which could supply 12% of the world's energy by 2020. But their use is often criticised for its impact on wildlife, particularly birds. Larger birds can collide with turbines and some have even learned to avoid flying near them. | Continue reading
Electrons are not just little spheres, bouncing through a material like a rubber ball. The laws of quantum physics tell us that electrons behave like waves. In some materials, these electron waves can take on rather complicated shapes. The so-called "topological materials" produc … | Continue reading
The sun defies conventional scientific understanding. Its upper atmosphere, known as the corona, is many millions of degrees hotter than its surface. Astrophysicists are keen to learn why the corona is so hot, and scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Princeton Plas … | Continue reading
Weather forecasters may be looking in the wrong place when working to issue tornado warnings, new research led by Ohio University has demonstrated. | Continue reading
Have you ever worried that people would judge you for buying a certain brand or frequenting a certain store, and tried to keep this information secret? | Continue reading
Scientists of the Far Eastern Federal University (FEFU) and the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS) have designed a new, high-strength ceramic material that can withstand prolonged exposure to supersonic airflow at temperatures above 2600°C. | Continue reading
Light and high-frequency acoustic sound waves in a tiny glass structure can strongly couple to one another and perform a dance in step. | Continue reading
Utah's Wasatch Mountains are famous for having "The Greatest Snow on Earth." Snow-seekers in pursuit of world-class skiing and snowboarding contribute over a billion dollars annually to the economy. Snowmelt also provides the majority of water to rapidly growing populations along … | Continue reading
NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is bearing down on Ultima Thule, its New Year's flyby target in the far away Kuiper Belt. Among its approach observations over the past three months, the spacecraft has been taking hundreds of images to measure Ultima's brightness and how it varies … | Continue reading
Climate scientists insist in a recent report that fundamental changes in how energy is consumed and supplied are urgently required to avoid serious damage to life and property from rising temperatures, rising sea levels and greater frequency of extreme weather events (hurricanes, … | Continue reading
December 24 is the 50th anniversary of Earthrise, arguably one of the most profound images in the history of human culture. When astronaut William Anders photographed a fragile blue sphere set in dark space peeking over the moon, it changed our perception of our place in space an … | Continue reading
Why are there not more mass demonstrations across the United States with a president as controversial as Donald Trump? The President's thoughts, tariffs, and tweets affect global economies, societies, and sensibilities. Amid all the anger, frustration, and unfairness felt by larg … | Continue reading
A new report on the development of fusion as an energy source, written at the request of the U.S. Secretary of Energy, proposes adoption of a national fusion strategy that closely aligns with the course charted in recent years by MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC) and … | Continue reading
'Tis the season to eat chocolate. And for the chocolate industry, there's nothing sweeter, since this is the time of year when it enjoys a spike in sales and, at least for some, rising profits. | Continue reading
Researchers at Stockholm University have developed a method to multiply the lifespan of nickel-metal hydride batteries. This means that the batteries can handle a great many more charging cycles without losing capacity. The new method also means that the batteries can easily be r … | Continue reading
A team of researchers from Russia, Great Britain, Japan and Italy has created a graphene-based terahertz detector. The study was published in Nature Communications. | Continue reading
In order to analyse climate change or provide information on natural hazards, for example, it is important for researchers to gather knowledge about rain. Better knowledge of precipitation and its distribution could, for example, help protect against river flooding. On land, moni … | Continue reading
In cloud computing, there is still a pressing issue of data security. Scientists from the Laboratory of Problem-Oriented Cloud Computing at South Ural State University have developed an algorithm of improving information security, which allows to avoid providers' conspiracy. | Continue reading
Bicycle cemeteries, blocked pavements and angry users: the bike-sharing craze is beginning to look like an economic disaster in China, where fierce competition appears set to drive a pioneer of the sector into the ditch. | Continue reading
In science fiction, explorers can hop in futuristic spaceships and traverse half the galaxy in the blink of a plot hole. However, this sidelines the navigational acrobatics required in order to guarantee real-life mission success. | Continue reading
The last missing particle of the Standard Model, the Higgs boson, was discovered in 2012 in experiments at the Large Hadron Collider. Since then, searching for new, related particles has been underway. Predicted by various theories that go beyond known physics, Higgs bosons with … | Continue reading
The Siamese fighting fish, a popular beauty in home aquariums and a popular bet for gamblers for their violent territoriality, is set to become Thailand's national aquatic animal. | Continue reading
Barely visible to the naked eye, Comet 46P/Wirtanen keeps some secrets so close that only radar can uncover them. | Continue reading
Physical systems with discrete energy levels are ubiquitous in nature and form fundamental building blocks of quantum technology. Artificial atom-like and molecule-like systems were previously demonstrated to regulate light for coherent and dynamic control of the frequency, ampli … | Continue reading
Peter Kelemen is a geologist and the Arthur D. Storke Memorial Professor at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. A member of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and an expert in carbonation of rock from Earth's mantle, Kelemen wrote a chapter on carbon mineralization for a new NA … | Continue reading