Britons are up in arms over new environmentally-friendly teabags that leave a bitter taste in the mouth as they split open, spilling their contents into teacups across the land. | Continue reading
Ryanair has filed for the collective dismissal of all Dutch-based staff at its now shuttered base at Eindhoven airport, a union representing pilots said Wednesday. | Continue reading
Jamming and astrophysics go hand-in-hand for Queen lead guitarist Brian May, who announced Wednesday he is releasing a musical tribute to a far-flung NASA spacecraft that is about to make history. | Continue reading
Uber pledged Wednesday to challenge a U.K. Court of Appeal decision that drivers should be classed as workers rather than self-employed employees, a verdict that has potentially wide-ranging implications for the rapidly growing gig economy and the rules that govern it. | Continue reading
The top legal officer in the US capital city has sued Facebook over privacy violations related to personal data leaked to the Cambridge Analytica consultancy working on Donald Trump's 2016 campaign. | Continue reading
NASA found very cold cloud top temperatures within the Southern Indian Ocean's Tropical Cyclone Kenanga that indicate powerful thunderstorms reaching high into the troposphere. Those storms were generating very heavy rainfall as confirmed by the Global Precipitation Measurement m … | Continue reading
Sea levels are rising globally from ocean warming and melting of land ice, but the seas aren't rising at the same rate everywhere. Sea levels have risen significantly faster in some U.S. East Coast regions compared to others. A new study led by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Instit … | Continue reading
A team of scientists has for the first time measured the elusive weak interaction between protons and neutrons in the nucleus of an atom. They had chosen the simplest nucleus consisting of one neutron and one proton for the study. | Continue reading
Once upon a time, people thought that electrons and ions always stuck together, living happily ever after. However, under low density of matter or high temperatures, the components of matter are no longer bound together. Instead, they form plasma, a state of matter naturally occu … | Continue reading
Extremes of temperature, rain, exposure to corrosive substances—all of these environmental factors contribute to the degradation of concrete. Specifically, a gas present in our environment, called hydrogen sulphide, turns into sulphuric acid, a corrosive substance, when combined … | Continue reading
A newly discovered protein could help detect, target, and collect from the environment the rare-earth metals used in smartphones. Two new studies by researchers at Penn State describe the protein, which is 100 million times better at binding to lanthanides—the rare-earth metals u … | Continue reading
The late Stephen Hawking famously didn't believe in God. Neither does the renowned Richard Dawkins. But is that typical for U.K. scientists? | Continue reading
Animals living in large groups tend to have more parasites than less social animals do, but according to a new study in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, they may also be better protected from the negative effects of those parasites. | Continue reading
The beloved peanut usually grows in sandy soil where there might not be much moisture. But some varieties of peanut perform better in drought than others. They use less water when there isn't much to go around, and remain productive as drought deepens. Crop scientists are trying … | Continue reading
Wolves travel shorter distances and move slower during snowfall events, according to new research by University of Alberta biologists. The effects were most pronounced at night, when wolves hunt, and behaviour returned to normal within a day. Wolf tracks across snow in northeaste … | Continue reading
In humans, different social groups, cities, or regions often have distinct accents and dialects. Those vocal traits are not unique to us, however. A new study from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) has found that short-finned pilot whales living off the coast of Haw … | Continue reading
The consequence of austerity in the social security system—severe cuts to benefits and the 'ratcheting up' of conditions attached to benefits—is 'social murder', according to new research by Lancaster University. | Continue reading
Unlike today's zebras, prehistoric horses in parts of North America did not make epic migrations to find food or fresh water, according to a new study by the University of Cincinnati. | Continue reading
LSU Boyd Professor of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences R. Eugene Turner has determined a cost-effective way to prevent coastal erosion and protect Louisiana's wetlands. Along with LSU alumna and now University of Central Florida Postdoctoral Fellow Giovanna McClenachan, Turner p … | Continue reading
Skin has a remarkable ability to heal itself. But in some cases, wounds heal very slowly or not at all, putting a person at risk for chronic pain, infection and scarring. Now, researchers have developed a self-powered bandage that generates an electric field over an injury, drama … | Continue reading
The world's forests are on a fast food diet of carbon dioxide, which is currently causing them to grow faster. But a researcher at West Virginia University, along with an international team of scientists, finds evidence suggesting that forest growth may soon peak as the trees dep … | Continue reading
A research study on low noise and high-performance transistors led by Suprem Das, assistant professor of industrial and manufacturing systems engineering, in collaboration with researchers at Purdue University, was recently published by Physical Review Applied. | Continue reading
The holiday season can be a time of excess, but low- or no-calorie sweeteners could help merry-makers stay trim. Stevia is a zero-calorie sweetener that is sometimes called "natural" because it is extracted from the leaves of a South American plant. Now, a report in ACS Synthetic … | Continue reading
Imagine a micron-sized ball of fluid enclosed in a thin film, similar to the film in soap bubbles, but made up of molecules resembling liquid crystal. These molecules can lower their overall energy by aligning their directions with their ever-changing neighbours—a state referred … | Continue reading
For decades, chemists have aspired to do carefully controlled chemistry on carbon-hydrogen bonds. The challenge is staggering. It requires the power of a miniature wrecking ball to break these extremely strong bonds, combined with the finesse of microscopic tweezers to single out … | Continue reading
Researchers from the University of Maryland have for the first time measured an effect that was predicted more than 40 years ago, called the Casimir torque. | Continue reading
Graphene, in its regular form, does not offer an alternative to silicon chips for applications in nanoelectronics. It is known for its energy band structure, which leaves no energy gap and no magnetic effects. Graphene antidot lattices, however, are a new type of graphene device … | Continue reading
Proteins have now been designed in the lab to zip together in much the same way that DNA molecules zip up to form a double helix. The technique, whose development was led by University of Washington School of Medicine scientists, could enable the design of protein nanomachines th … | Continue reading
The breeding seasons of wild house finches are shifting due to climate change, a Washington State University researcher has found. | Continue reading
Since the success of the Jurassic Park film series, it is widely known that insects from the Age of the Dinosaurs can be found exceptionally well preserved in amber, which is in fact fossilised tree resin. | Continue reading
From boat enthusiasts to anglers, researchers at the University of New Hampshire have found surprisingly widespread support for offshore wind energy development (OWD) among outdoor recreationists. Also unanticipated was the strong support across the entire political spectrum, fro … | Continue reading
Not only is air pollution bad for our lungs and heart, it turns out it could actually be making us less intelligent, too. A recent study found that in elderly people living in China, long-term exposure to air pollution may hinder cognitive performance (things like our ability to … | Continue reading
The famous Christmas Market in Strasbourg, France, became the latest place to be struck by terrorists. | Continue reading
Well-meaning celebrities and MPs recently published a letter in the Guardian, calling for a ban on trophy hunting imports into the UK. To the novice conservationist, this surely sounds like a good thing, right? After all, trophy hunting kills animals so how could it possibly be g … | Continue reading
Windows are something that many of us take for granted – they're just part of the houses we live in or the buildings we work in. And yet for older people, windows can be vital as a way to access the world, especially for those who spend a lot of time indoors. | Continue reading
Between 2015 and 2017 South Africa's South Western Cape region experienced three of its lowest rainfall years on record. This led to the progressive depletion of water supply reservoirs and by the summer of 2017/18 there was a real danger that – without drastic reductions in wate … | Continue reading
A new study by a team of geologists that includes Kansas State University's Matthew Brueseke has found that the Wrangell volcanic belt in Alaska's Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve is older than previously recognized and determined why its volcanic field has been pers … | Continue reading
The winter holidays are a busy time for many businesses, including retail stores, grocers, liquor stores – and dry cleaners. People pull out special-occasion clothes made of silk, satin or other fabrics that don't launder well in soap and water. Then there are all those specialty … | Continue reading
Scientific discovery can be achingly slow, but it was moving swiftly in the 1890s. X-rays had been discovered in Germany just a few days before Christmas in 1895. Several months later, while researching these new X-rays, the French physicist Henri Becquerel accidentally discovere … | Continue reading
There are more and more big canals and pipelines transporting fresh water from places where it is abundant to places where it is needed for drinking—or for industry and agriculture. Thirty-four such mega-systems are already in place and 76 are planned or are under construction; b … | Continue reading
Cover crops grown in fields during winter may be warming temperatures in the northern United States and southern Canada, according to a new study by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. The crops, a land management strategy farmers use between growing seaso … | Continue reading
Facebook offered a renewed defense Wednesday of its data sharing practices after a report revealing that certain partners of the social network had access to a range of personal information about users and their friends. | Continue reading
In speech and music, words and notes depend on each other. Humans are highly sensitive to such dependencies, but the evolutionary origins of this capacity are poorly understood. Cognitive biologists at the University of Vienna conducted playback experiments with common marmoset m … | Continue reading
Mass development of water plants in river and lakes causes headache for researchers and water managers all over the world. New research aims to reveal the causes of the explosive development and identify ecosystem effects of removing the water plants. | Continue reading
Using uranium-lead dating, Senckenberg scientists, in cooperation with an international team, were able to date the onset of the "Cambrian explosion" to precisely 538.8 million years ago. During the "Cambrian explosion," all currently known "blueprints" in the animal kingdom appe … | Continue reading
The earthquakes and tsunami in Central Sulawesi that killed more than 2,000 people in September 2018 did not only leave a deep sorrow. It made us rethink the relationship between humans, technology and nature in Indonesia. | Continue reading