NASA has confirmed that Voyager 2 has joined its twin to become only the second spacecraft to enter interstellar space – where the sun's flow of material and magnetic field no longer affect its surroundings. The slightly faster Voyager 1 entered interstellar space in August 2012. | Continue reading
Researchers report that they can efficiently produce antifungal proteins in plants based on a modified tobacco mosaic virus. The results of this research, which could have a major impact in the agri-food industry, have been published in the Plant Biotechnology Journal. | Continue reading
Red wolves, once nearly extinct, again teeter on the abyss. New research finds red wolf ancestry on Galveston Island—providing opportunities for additional conservation action and difficult policy challenges. | Continue reading
Throughout Earth's long geologic history, the magnetic pole has not remained stable. | Continue reading
Researchers have long studied magnetotactic bacteria (MTB), aquatic microbes that have the ability to orientate themselves to magnetic fields. This unusual behaviour makes them a subject of interest for improving our understanding of biomagnetism, and potentially harnessing their … | Continue reading
A new study of modern sea sponges is beginning to tell us how early life forms such as sea sponges found ways to survive in extreme environments prior to the evolution of modern life and the oxygenation of Earth's oceans between a billion and 541 million years ago. | Continue reading
A team of researchers from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, and Aarhus University in Denmark has developed an algorithm for predicting the effect of an external electromagnetic field on the state of complex molecules. The algorithm, which is based on a theory devel … | Continue reading
The Geminids meteor shower peaks on the mornings of December 13 and 14, 2018 – but if you look up any time there's a clear night sky up until December 17, you might just catch a glimpse of a Geminid meteor. | Continue reading
Something peculiar is happening in the azure waters off the rocky cliffs of Ischia, Italy. There, streams of gas-filled volcanic bubbles rising up to the surface are radically changing life around them by making seawater acidic. Stanford researchers studying species living near t … | Continue reading
The names may vary—medicine man, witch doctor, holy man, prophet—but the notion of the shaman, someone who uses trance to commune with the supernatural and effect real-world change, is one that crosses virtually all cultural boundaries. | Continue reading
Lyft, Uber and companies like them have rewritten what transportation looks like in the 21st century. They've been living in a four-wheeled wild west, though, without many restrictions on what they do and how they do it. | Continue reading
Assigning chores to children equally, giving them unsupervised freedom outdoors, and providing good career role models would help address workplace gender inequality, according to University of Queensland research. | Continue reading
Now convening in Katowice, Poland, amid dire warnings from the IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius and the National Climate Assessment about the pace of climate change and severity of its impacts, the 24th Conference of the Parties (COP24) to the United N … | Continue reading
Electricity market regulation must be redesigned to offer the best value for consumers, according to a new report published today. | Continue reading
Artificial neurons for deeply intelligent machines – this is the new artificial intelligence (AI) revolution, led by Geoffrey Hinton and his team since 2012. That year, Hinton, an expert in cognitive science at the University of Toronto and a researcher at Google Brain, demonstra … | Continue reading
"What happens if the water temperature rises by a few degrees?" is the 2018 International Year of the Reef leading question. While the ocean is the focus, urbanisation is the main reason for the rising temperatures and water pollution. Yet it receives little attention in this dis … | Continue reading
Researchers at The Australian National University (ANU) have made a discovery that has the potential to save lives when treating bacterial infections, especially serious food poisoning. | Continue reading
Everyone's trying to get ready for roads that will be filled with more and more self-driving cars. But just as the first cars were imagined to be like horse-drawn carriages without the horses, it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking that a future with self-driving cars won't … | Continue reading
In recent years, the observation of single protein molecules has made a phenomenal development, and it has become possible to observe molecular dynamics in vivo at high-speed and with high accuracy. In conventional DXT (Diffracted X-ray Tracking), by labeling with a gold nanocrys … | Continue reading
A successful development of a microfluidic platform capable of sorting individual carbon nanotubes in new dissertation in physics could possible lead to a revolution in the technology of electronic devices. | Continue reading
Evolution is a fascinating field but can be rife with misunderstanding. One misconception is that evolution has some innate sense of direction or purpose. In reality, evolution is a mindless, plan-free phenomenon, driven into endless possibilities by random mutations, the most su … | Continue reading
In a recent study published in Science Advances, materials scientists Julie A. Jackson and colleagues presented a new class of materials architecture called field-responsive mechanical metamaterials (FRMM). The FRMMs exhibit dynamic control and on-the-fly tunability for designing … | Continue reading
For centuries, people have conveyed feelings of happiness and love with flowers. Now an EU research team has found that plants flower more when surrounded by relatives compared to when growing with strangers or alone. | Continue reading
In the depths of the long night that cloaks the Arctic in frigid darkness for three months each winter, a surprising patch of open water appeared, just to the north of Greenland. | Continue reading
If you have a smartphone, it probably is a significant part of your life, storing appointments and destinations as well as being central to your communications with friends, loved ones and co-workers. Research and investigative reporting continue to reveal the degree to which you … | Continue reading
A team of engineers at the University of Delaware has developed a method to use CRISPR/Cas9 technology to set off a cascade of activities in cells, a phenomenon known as conditional gene regulation. Their method, described in the journal Nature Chemical Biology, introduces a new … | Continue reading
Cement manufacture accounts for as much as seven percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. A new hybrid technology makes it easier and less expensive to capture and purify CO2 produced by the industry. And the technology can be retrofitted to existing plant. | Continue reading
One of the challenges with solar and wind power is that, on any given day, the sun isn't always shining, and the wind isn't always blowing when we want it to. Now, zooming out, researchers at Columbia's Earth Institute have found that the same could be true on the scale of years … | Continue reading
About 150 years after grapes were first cultivated on a small strip of Pelee Island, vineyards now cover two-thirds of the island and have become its major agricultural enterprise. | Continue reading
East Antarctica has the potential to reshape coastlines around the world through sea level rise, but scientists have long considered it more stable than its neighbor, West Antarctica. Now, new detailed NASA maps of ice velocity and elevation show that a group of glaciers spanning … | Continue reading
The Earth has already warmed approximately 1.7 degrees since 1901, the Fourth National Climate Assessment (NCA) reports, and projected warming between 2.7 degrees and 3.6 degrees by 2100 will bring even more record-breaking storms, rising sea levels and spread of disease-carrying … | Continue reading
A UConn plant science professor working with hemp plants has developed a way to maximize the production of female flowers, which produce significantly higher quantities of cannabinoids than male flowers. | Continue reading
Flexible skin for soft robots, embedded with electrical nanowires, combines conductivity with sensitivity within the same material. | Continue reading
Changing language in job advertisements and de-identifying CVs during recruitment can significantly boost a person's prospects of landing a job by overcoming unconscious bias, new University of Melbourne research shows. | Continue reading
A team of researchers with members affiliated with several institutions in Germany has found evidence that suggests two species of hominins from the Early Pleistocene ate a generalized diet. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the group de … | Continue reading
Flowers are the reproductive organs of a plant. Their formation depends on strict nuclear events that, if compromised, can leave the plant sterile. A new study by researchers at the Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST) shows how two transcription factors, AGAMOUS and … | Continue reading
Home energy storage systems might save you money, but under current policies, they would also often increase carbon emissions. That is the conclusion reached by a team of researchers at the University of California San Diego in a study published recently in the journal Environmen … | Continue reading
How atoms arrange themselves at the smallest scale was thought to follow a 'drum-skin' rule, but mathematicians have now found a simpler solution. | Continue reading
A terahertz laser designed by MIT researchers is the first to reach three key performance goals at once—high constant power, tight beam pattern, and broad electric frequency tuning—and could thus be valuable for a wide range of applications in chemical sensing and imaging. | Continue reading
Providing water for drinking, irrigation and power, glaciers in the world's highest mountains are a lifeline for more than a billion people. As climate change takes a grip and glaciers lose mass, one might think that, lubricated by more meltwater, they flow more quickly. However, … | Continue reading
A team of scientists from NASA and British Antarctic Survey (BAS), describes how analysis of 53 ice cores collected from across Antarctica reveals snowfall increased during the 20th century and mitigated sea-level rise by 10 mm. However, Antarctica's additional ice mass gained f … | Continue reading
Antarctic fauna could be in danger due to pathogens humans spread in the southern ocean, according to a study led by Jacob González-Solís from the Faculty of Biology and the Biodiversity Research Institute (IRBio) of the University of Barcelona, and Marta Cerdà-Cuéllas from the I … | Continue reading
Neurons are brain cells that communicate with each other by sending electrochemical signals along axons. When a neuron is about to release a signal in the form of an electric charge, it allows ions to pass through its membrane via ion channels. This ion transfer creates an electr … | Continue reading
Most lasers emit photons of exactly the same wavelength, producing a single color. However, there are also lasers that consist of many frequencies, with equal intervals in between, as in the teeth of a comb; thus, they are referred to as "frequency combs." Frequency combs are per … | Continue reading
Apple stores in China continued with business as usual Tuesday despite a court-ordered ban on iPhone sales, but the US tech giant faces a growing nationalist backlash over the US-sought arrest of a Huawei executive. | Continue reading