Blue asteroids are rare, and blue comets are almost unheard of. An international team led by Teddy Kareta, a graduate student at the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, investigated (3200) Phaethon, a bizarre asteroid that sometimes behaves like a comet, and f … | Continue reading
Taxing San Francisco's wealthiest companies to rein in the city's homelessness problem makes sense to local campaigners—but the local tech giants aren't all so sure. | Continue reading
The Philippines' most famous resort island Boracay re-opens Friday after a six-month clean-up intended to fix the damage done by unrestrained mass tourism. | Continue reading
Tesla shares surged on Tuesday after a high-profile stock short-seller shifted gears to say the electric car maker is "destroying the competition." | Continue reading
NASA's famed Hubble Space Telescope is nearly back to normal after a failed orienting tool forced engineers to put it in safe mode earlier this month, the US space agency said. | Continue reading
The Philippines re-opens its crown jewel resort island Boracay to holidaymakers on Friday, after a six-month clean up aimed at repairing the damage inflicted by years of unrestrained mass tourism. | Continue reading
Test flights of a driverless hover-taxi will take place in Singapore next year, a German aviation firm said, the latest innovation to offer an escape from Asia's monster traffic jams. | Continue reading
Tropical Storm Vicente made landfall and weakened quickly to a tropical depression on Oct. 23. NOAA's GOES-West satellite captured a visible image of the fading, and now post-tropical storm raining on southwestern Mexico. | Continue reading
A University of Oklahoma sociologist, Meredith G. F. Worthen, examines how measures of social contact and social distancing relate to attitudes toward lesbian, gay and transgender individuals in a new study. Worthen uses a scale she developed and data from college students in the … | Continue reading
Operation IceBridge, NASA's longest-running aerial survey of polar ice, flew over the northern Antarctic Peninsula on Oct. 16, 2018. During the survey, designed to assess changes in the ice height of several glaciers draining into the Larsen A, B and C embayments, IceBridge senio … | Continue reading
An NJIT-led team of engineers, game designers, artists and clinicians won two major international awards for its vision therapy platform, including "most innovative breakthrough," at the 2018 Augmented World Expo Europe (AWE EU), the leading industry conference for augmented real … | Continue reading
Researchers at McMaster University have solved a vexing problem by engineering surface coatings that can repel everything, such as bacteria, viruses and living cells, but can be modified to permit beneficial exceptions. | Continue reading
Galaxy clusters are rare regions of the universe consisting of hundreds of galaxies containing trillions of stars, as well as hot gas and dark matter. | Continue reading
With its stock dropping and more lawsuits expected, Monsanto vowed Tuesday to press on with a nationwide legal defense of its best-selling weed killer Roundup after a San Francisco judge upheld a verdict alleging it causes cancer. | Continue reading
Chemical communication is widely used in the animal kingdom to convey social information. For example, animals use olfactory cues to recognize group or family members, or to choose genetically suitable mates. In contrast to most other mammals, however, primates have traditionally … | Continue reading
New research, published today in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, has found evidence for a large number of double supermassive black holes, likely precursors of gigantic black hole merging events. This confirms the current understanding of cosmologic … | Continue reading
Do animals—like humans—divide the world into things that move and things that don't? Are they surprised if an apparently inanimate object jumps to life? | Continue reading
When Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion in 2012, it seemed like a big gamble for an unproven little app. Six years later, that little app—along with Messenger and WhatsApp—are serving as Facebook's safety net for a future that could find its flagship service on the sideline … | Continue reading
Facebook on Tuesday released the first of what it promised will be routine reports showing who is behind US political ads seen at the social network or its Instagram service. | Continue reading
A new US "Space Force" will soon take shape but will at least initially be a step below the proposed sixth branch of the military envisioned by President Donald Trump, his vice president said Tuesday. | Continue reading
Scientists investigating how the human immune system defends against malaria have uncovered a rare phenomenon: antibodies working together to bind to a vulnerable spot on the parasite. | Continue reading
How well are immigrants integrating in the United States? Are they doing better or worse than in Germany or France? Under what conditions have immigrants most successfully integrated into their host societies? Despite great advances in social science, the answers to these importa … | Continue reading
In the last half-century, laser technology has grown into a multi-billion-dollar global industry and has been used in everything from optical-disk drives and barcode scanners to surgical and welding equipment. | Continue reading
Tiny robots no bigger than a cell could be mass-produced using a new method developed by researchers at MIT. The microscopic devices, which the team calls "syncells" (short for synthetic cells), might eventually be used to monitor conditions inside an oil or gas pipeline, or to s … | Continue reading
The tsetse fly—an insect that transmits trypanosomiasis or sleeping sickness—could soon die out in Zimbabwe's Zambezi Valley due to rising temperatures, a study said Tuesday. | Continue reading
Strong monsoons in the Indian Ocean can induce easterly winds that push Atlantic Ocean hurricanes westward, increasing the likelihood they'll make landfall in the Americas, according to new research. | Continue reading
Yahoo has agreed to pay $50 million in damages and provide two years of free credit-monitoring services to about 200 million people in the U.S. and Israel whose email addresses and other personal information were stolen as part of the biggest security breach in history. | Continue reading
Jupiter's icy moon Europa has a chaotic surface terrain that is fractured and cracked, suggesting a long-standing history of geologic activity. | Continue reading
Hansen Creek, a small stream in southwest Alaska, is hard to pick out on a map. It's just over a mile long and about 4 inches deep. Crossing from one bank to the other takes about five big steps. | Continue reading
NASA's Aqua satellite provided an infrared view of Hurricane Willa as it continued moving toward landfall in western Mexico on Oct. 23. NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite provided a visible look at the extent and structure of the storm. Willa is expected to bring life-threatening st … | Continue reading
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Tuesday his government will impose a federal carbon tax on four out of 10 Canadian provinces that have failed to plan to curb climate pollution. | Continue reading
Walmart says it will work with third-party sellers to make millions of items available for free two-day shipping on orders over $35. | Continue reading
Sea creatures need to go to the bathroom, too, and in aquariums, that creates the task of cleaning the water of waste like ammonia, nitrites and nitrates. Good bacteria break down nitrogen compounds at Georgia Aquarium, and in a new study, some bacterial communities there emulate … | Continue reading
Tropical Storm Yutu continued strengthening as NASA-NOAA's Suomi NPP satellite passed overhead. On Oct. 23, Yutu was a strengthening typhoon east of Guam. | Continue reading
Wide variations among the 50 states when it comes to the ease of casting a ballot are impacting the quality of democracy in the United States, a new study shows. | Continue reading
Movement is one of the most common processes in all biology—mice forage for food and geese migrate with the seasons. While plants may be rooted in one spot for most of their lives, movement also plays a key role in their ecology—especially when it comes to seeds. | Continue reading
Rising sea levels driven by climate change make for salty soil, and that is likely to force about 200,000 coastal farmers in Bangladesh inland as glaciers melt into the world's oceans, according to estimates from a new study. | Continue reading
A lack of affordable housing is linked with many health problems, including asthma, stress and alcoholism. Penn State researchers found that while some Americans may be less aware of this link, there may be ways to communicate this connection in a way that resonates with those gr … | Continue reading
From "Fantastic Voyage" to "Despicable Me," shrink rays have been a science-fiction staple on screen. Now chemists at The University of Texas at Austin have developed a real shrink ray that can change the size and shape of a block of gel-like material while human or bacterial cel … | Continue reading
The presence of an invasive species in an ecosystem makes native organisms more susceptible to pollutants and may encourage the spread of additional invasive species, according to new research from Binghamton University, State University at New York. | Continue reading
For a number of innovative and life-saving medical treatments, from organ replacements and skin grafts to cancer therapy and surgery, success often depends on slipping past or fending off the body's immune system. In a recent development, aimed at aiding cancer detection and trea … | Continue reading
Breakthroughs in the field of nanophotonics—how light behaves on the nanometer scale—have paved the way for the invention of "metamaterials," man-made materials that have enormous applications, from remote nanoscale sensing to energy harvesting and medical diagnostics. But their … | Continue reading
Scientists expect climate change influences the geographical distribution of microbes in the soil, but few studies have dug deeply into that relationship. A study published this week in mSystems suggests the connection can drag across decades. After sequencing soil samples from N … | Continue reading
Imagine the politician who gets caught in a scandal, breaching the public's trust, whether that be of a sexual nature, misspending taxpayer money or just doing something dumb. | Continue reading
French President Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday urged Apple's chief executive Tim Cook to invest more in his country, even as Paris pursues a new EU tax on the revenues of technology giants. | Continue reading
MoviePass, the struggling discount movie ticket subscription service, is being spun off by the company that owns it. | Continue reading
Having systematically monitored wild animals killed on the Brazilian federal highway BR-262, which passes through the Pantanal region, a research team from the Federal University of Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil, published their data concerning birds and reptiles in the open access … | Continue reading
Learning about someone's political beliefs interferes with a person's ability to assess expertise, as people judge like-minded peers as being more expert in fields completely unrelated to politics, finds a new UCL-led study. | Continue reading