One out of three rivers in the Iberian Peninsula are highly salinized mainly due the impact of agricultural activity and urbanization. This environmental problem will affect hydric ecosystems due global warming, the growing use of water and the exploitation of soil natural resour … | Continue reading
EU ministers raised concerns Friday about whether citizens' rights are protected in a bill aimed at speeding up investigators' access to email and other digital evidence in cross-border terrorism cases. | Continue reading
For more than a decade, the latest Apple products have been the annual must-have holiday gift for the tech-savvy. That raises the question: Is the newest Apple Watch on your list—either to give or receive—this year? | Continue reading
The jury is still out as to whether climate change will lead to stronger El Niño events, but while representatives from around 200 countries at the COP24 conference are working to breathe life into the 2105 Paris Agreement, there is a 75–80 percent chance that a fully-fledged eve … | Continue reading
Italy's competition authority has fined Facebook 10 million euros ($11.3 million) for selling users' data without informing them and "aggressively" discouraging users from trying to limit how the company shares their data. | Continue reading
The Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission takes us over the Chachani mountain in Peru. Standing at over 6000 m, Chachani is the tallest of the mountains near the Peruvian city of Arequipa. The outskirts of the city and part of the airport runway are just visible in the centre bottom of t … | Continue reading
In a 5,000 year old grave outside Falköping, scientists have found the oldest traces of the plague bacterium's DNA in the world. An international research team including archaeologists from the University of Gothenburg made the discovery using advanced DNA techniques. According t … | Continue reading
Internal emails at Facebook Inc., including those involving Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg, were published online by a committee of U.K. lawmakers investigating social media's role in the spread of fake news. | Continue reading
As a birder, I had heard that if you paid careful attention to the head feathers on the downy woodpeckers that visited your bird feeders, you could begin to recognize individual birds. This intrigued me. I even went so far as to try sketching birds at my own feeders and had found … | Continue reading
Some 12m hectares of the UK is currently covered by agricultural grasslands which support a national lamb and beef industry worth approximately £3.7 billion. However, proposals have been made that this landscape should undergo radical changes to aid the country's climate change c … | Continue reading
Qualcomm said Tuesday that another milestone has been hit in efforts to bring ultra-fast 5G wireless devices to consumers next year when a smartphone using its latest modem chip operated on a 5G network at an event in Hawaii. | Continue reading
Spider silk is one of the toughest fibres in nature and has astounding properties. Scientists from the University of Würzburg discovered new molecular details of self-assembly of a spider silk fibre protein. | Continue reading
Every few hours observing the moon, ESA's 'NELIOTA' project discovers a brilliant flash of light across its surface – the result of an object hurtling through space and striking our unprotected rocky neighbour at vast speed. Based at the Kryoneri telescope of the National Observa … | Continue reading
Quora, a question-and-answer website, has reported a data breach affecting about 100 million users. | Continue reading
On a recent weekday morning, hundreds of passengers lined up at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport to board Japan Airlines Flight 11 to Tokyo. | Continue reading
Holography is a powerful tool that can reconstruct wavefronts of light and combine the fundamental wave properties of amplitude, phase, polarization, wave vector and frequency. Smart multiplexing techniques (multiple signal integration) together with metasurface designs are curre … | Continue reading
As flies increasingly make the buzz, a consortium of EU researchers studied their biology and ecological features to improve artificial and mass rearing practices. | Continue reading
Charles Piller, an investigative reporter for the journal Science, has published a News Feature piece in the latest issue of the journal outlining his findings surrounding the practice by philanthropic foundations of putting money in offshore investment accounts. | Continue reading
Micro cracks in solar cells are a frequent challenge for manufacturers of solar photovoltaic modules. EU-funded researchers introduced an innovative pre-stressing technique to retard the growth of cracks and make durable solar cells. | Continue reading
Current adaptable systems that enable people with physical disabilities to drive compare poorly with conventional vehicle controls like steering wheels. An EU initiative has addressed this challenge. | Continue reading
Diversity, be it genetic, morphological, behavioural or ecological, is at the heart of many controversies. It fascinates us or worries us, depending on the context. But what is biological diversity? How useful is it, how is it generated and what are the foreseeable consequences o … | Continue reading
NUS scientists have discovered that the light emission properties of molecularly thin two-dimensional (2-D) hybrid perovskite can be tuned in a highly reversible way for ultrathin optoelectronic applications. A highly efficient photodetector has been fabricated using hybrid perov … | Continue reading
On Dec. 3, after traveling billions of kilometers from Earth, NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft reached its target, Bennu, and kicked off a nearly two-year, up-close investigation of the asteroid. It will inspect nearly every square inch of this ancient clump of rubble left over from … | Continue reading
Purdue University researchers have devised a method of 3-D printing that can produce energetic materials with fine geometric features faster and with less expense than traditional methods, while also being safer and more environmentally friendly. | Continue reading
Biologists in Japan have identified four distinct zones in the otolith, a calcium carbonate structure in the inner ear, which can be used to determine age in fish. | Continue reading
New images from NASA's Mars InSight lander show its robotic arm is ready to do some lifting. | Continue reading
Starting on December 8, recreational abalone fishing will be allowed in Perth. Fishing will be limited to one hour on four Saturday mornings between December and February. The maximum catch is still 15 per person per day. A complete ban on abalone fishing between Geraldton and th … | Continue reading
Computer simulations of the plumes of liquid water that stream out of Jupiter's moon Europa show that the forthcoming space mission JUICE may offer an answer to the question as to whether the Jovian moon's subsurface ocean could harbour life. Hans Huybrighs comes to this conclusi … | Continue reading
New research from scientists at Imperial College London unravels how so-called bacterial persister cells manipulate our immune cells. | Continue reading
The production of chlorofluorocarbons, which damage the ozone layer, has been banned as far as possible. However, other substances can also tear holes in the ozone layer in combination with ice particles, such as those found in clouds. Researchers at Ruhr-Universität Bochum, the … | Continue reading
Reading these words, your eyes let you see each letter and the spaces between them. But if you need reading glasses, the letters may be fuzzy or incomprehensible. Scientists face a similar challenge. Gathering the right data depends on having tools that can provide accurate, comp … | Continue reading
Lanthanide elements are essential parts of today's high-tech commodities including flat-screen TVs, cell phones, electric cars, and satellites. While the demand for these elements is high, separating lanthanides from impurities (other lanthanides) is extremely difficult. Industry … | Continue reading
A microbiological detection device will help speed up the measurement of contamination in raw meat, thus minimising costs and food waste. | Continue reading
Today, the scientific community is aghast at the prospect of gene editing to create "designer" humans. Gene editing may be of greater consequence than climate change, or even the consequences of unleashing the energy of the atom. | Continue reading
As of Dec. 17, Tumblr will no longer allow "adult content," defined as that which shows "real-life human genitals or female-presenting nipples, and any content —including photos, videos, GIFs and illustrations —that depicts sex acts." | Continue reading
A simple online game can teach people to more accurately sort waste—with lasting results, a new UBC study has found. | Continue reading
Children in Alaska whose diet includes a lot of fish from rivers fed by the Eastern Alaska Mountain Range may have a long-term elevated risk for cancer because of insecticides—including DDT—in the meltwater. | Continue reading
From kryptonite for Superman to plant toxins for poison ivy, chemical reactions within the body's cells can be transformative. And, when it comes to transmuting cells, UC San Diego researchers are becoming superhero-like copycats. | Continue reading
The main trend in the development of hardware components for digital and analog electronic equipment is to reduce the size of the active regions of diode and transistor structures. This can be achieved by improving the performance characteristics of micro- and nanoelectronics dev … | Continue reading
Iran has a water problem. The reserves in many groundwater basins there have been severely depleted. For the last 40 years, the country has invested a lot in the agricultural sector, and has been striving to be independent in its food supply. In order to cover the increased water … | Continue reading
Scientists long believed that Earth's lower mantle was composed of Bridgmanite (Mg,Fe)SiO3 and magnesiowüstite (Mg,Fe)O, in which Fe2+ dwells. This view changed when experiments showed that Fe2+ simply can't exist at the pressure and temperature of the lower mantle. What is prese … | Continue reading
How many nanometers should catalyst nanoparticles be to optimize the course of the reaction? Researchers usually look for the answer through laborious, repetitive tests. At the Institute of Physical Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, a qualitatively new techni … | Continue reading
Paleontologists from Russia have described a new dinosaur, the Volgatitan. Seven of its fossilized vertebrae, buried in the ground for about 130 million years, were found on the banks of the Volga, not far from the village of Slantsevy Rudnik, five kilometers from Ulyanovsk. The … | Continue reading
When bacteria or viruses enter the body, proteins on their surfaces are recognized and processed to activate T cells, white blood cells with critical roles in fighting infections. During T-cell activation, a molecular complex known as the microtubule-organizing center (MTOC) move … | Continue reading
In a recent study published in Nature Communications, an international team of researchers from Tampere University of Technology (TUT), Finland, and the Institut FEMTO-ST at the Université Bourgogne-Franche Comté, France, take a significant step toward the analysis and predictabi … | Continue reading