Using lasers rather than scalpels and saws has many benefits in surgery. Yet they are only used in isolated cases. But that could be about to change: laser systems are getting smarter and better all the time, as a research team from the University of Basel demonstrates. | Continue reading
A new study from researchers at UC San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography and UC San Francisco estimates 152,753 excess infant deaths were attributable to living in flood-prone areas in Bangladesh over the past 30 years. Additionally, across the study period, children bo … | Continue reading
Newfoundland and Labrador recently announced plans to introduce a basic income for people aged 60-64 receiving social assistance. It is slated to roll out in April 2024 and will match existing federal seniors' benefits. | Continue reading
It's a fact that many of us have churned out during public engagement events that at least 50% of all stars are part of binary star systems. Some of them are simply stunning to look at; others present headaches with complex orbits in multiple star systems. Now, it seems wide bina … | Continue reading
The floods that killed 20 people in Waverly, Tennessee, and the surrounding area came with little warning. | Continue reading
Planet Earth is full of some truly awe-inspiring spectacles, but few are as intriguing as sprites, which are officially known as a transient luminous event (TLE) and consist of large-scale electric discharges that shoot upward while occurring above the cloud tops in the Earth's m … | Continue reading
The last two summers have been swarming with mosquitoes thanks to near constant rain and flooding brought on by La Niña. | Continue reading
According to an essay published in Educational Researcher, a decade of colorblind school discipline policy reforms have not disproportionally benefited Black students who remain the most often disciplined in schools and miss valuable classroom learning time. Given that fact, the … | Continue reading
Recent research conducted at Georgia State University shows that native language affects how people convey information from a young age and hints at the presence of a universal system of communication. | Continue reading
Rats have a somewhat unfortunate tendency to enjoy living where people live. That's how a biologist tried to explain people's hatred for the rodents in a television news feature about rats gnawing electrical cables in parked cars in the southern Swedish town of Malmö. | Continue reading
Bill Schreckhise and Eric Button, professors of political science at the University of Arkansas, recently published a study with three co-authors showing that the extent to which state legislators behave in a civil manner among themselves is related to how effective they are at p … | Continue reading
Research involving Cranfield University's Dr. Natalia Falagan is proposing a measure to significantly reduce carbon emissions across the frozen food industry. | Continue reading
Tiny fossils in marine sediments verify that climate models provide accurate calculations of average ocean temperatures during the last glacial maximum around 20,000 years ago, but that the spatial distribution of simulated temperatures is too uniform and thus only partially vali … | Continue reading
A malaria-carrying mosquito that thrives in urban environments is moving into Africa where a construction boom may be one factor helping the newcomer feel at home. | Continue reading
Australians love their coffee, and many can barely live without it. According to Statista, we consumed an average of about 2kg of coffee per person in 2022. Yet it's estimated less than 1% of this coffee is grown in Australia. | Continue reading
In 2019, the GLOBE Land Cover project began asking volunteers to help map planet Earth by taking photos of their surroundings facing multiple directions, including north, south, east and west. Now, a new paper published in the International Journal of Applied Earth Observation an … | Continue reading
This Hubble image features a massive cluster of brightly glowing galaxies, first identified as Abell 3192. Like all galaxy clusters, this one is suffused with hot gas that emits powerful X-rays, and it is enveloped in a halo of invisible dark matter. All this unseen material—not … | Continue reading
Humanity's emissions of greenhouse gases have caused rapid global warming at a rate unprecedented in at least the past 2,000 years. Rapid global warming has been accompanied by increases in the frequency and intensity of heat extremes over most land regions in the past 70 years. | Continue reading
Lawyers progress through four distinct emotional stages in their fight to get to the top and secure a coveted partnership role, according to new research from the University of Bath's School of Management. | Continue reading
Activity from the sun, such as solar flares, can cause fluctuations in Earth's geomagnetic field that send electrical currents flowing through power grids. These geomagnetically induced currents (GICs) can cause problems ranging from temporary voltage instability to widespread bl … | Continue reading
It has taken decades, but the complex and increasingly urgent issue of "climate mobility" has gradually become central to international climate negotiations. | Continue reading
Takahē are a striking bird and a national treasure in Aotearoa New Zealand. But the history and origin story of this flightless swamp hen have become a point of scientific debate. | Continue reading
The approaching holiday season will be the first post-split for Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Sophie Grégoire, who separated in summer 2023. It may also be the first for you. | Continue reading
A one-off experience of poverty is enough to impact on a child's development, according to a new study conducted by sociologists in Trinity College Dublin. | Continue reading
The Indian River Lagoon was considered one of the last "unpolluted coastal lagoons" in Florida in the 1970s. Fast forward to today and most of the 156-mile lagoon is now considered impaired because of external sources of nutrients, including human waste, fertilizers, stormwater r … | Continue reading
Borneo is one of the world's most biodiversity-rich regions, home to ancient rainforests and an immense variety of wildlife. | Continue reading
In 2019, a travel insurance company held a secret contest in which they included a line in the fine print of their policy promising $10,000 to the first person who spotted it. | Continue reading
The Southern Ocean is "the engine room" for the world's climate and weather system. Across its large expanses of uninterrupted water, winds pick up speed and waves gather energy. | Continue reading
Kenyan photojournalist Mohamed Amin (1943-1996) rose to fame for documenting the 1984 famine in neighboring Ethiopia with powerful images of the tragedy. He also captured the Ethiopian people's suffering during the brutal reign of Mengistu Haile Mariam. These images, broadcast by … | Continue reading
Bees help pollinate over a third of the world's crops, contributing an estimated US$235 billion to $577 billion in value to global agriculture. They also face a myriad of stresses, including pathogens and parasites, loss of suitable food sources and habitat, air pollution, and cl … | Continue reading
A new report outlines the dismal state of England's physical and "social" infrastructure—from public services in health and education to the parks, cinemas and train stations that prop up communities—when compared to similar regions in what was once East Germany. | Continue reading
Through analysis of high-resolution data from a 10-meter telescope in Hawaii, researchers at Lund University in Sweden have succeeded in generating new knowledge about three stars at the very heart of the Milky Way. The stars proved to be unusually young with a puzzling chemical … | Continue reading
For about 20 years, Caltech Professor of Applied Physics Paul Bellan and his group have been creating magnetically accelerated jets of plasma, an electrically conducting gas composed of ions and electrons, in a vacuum chamber big enough to hold a person. (Neon signs and lightning … | Continue reading
EU researchers expect unprecedented insights into galaxies from the study of a mysterious energy force. | Continue reading
Is there life beyond Earth? The question has turned out to be one of the hardest to answer in science. Despite the seemingly boundless expanse of the universe, which implies there's potential for abundant life, the vast distances between stars render the search akin to locating a … | Continue reading
In 1963, six years after the first satellite was launched, editors from the Encyclopedia Britannica posed a question to five eminent thinkers of the day: "Has man's conquest of space increased or diminished his stature?" The respondents were philosopher Hannah Arendt, writer Aldo … | Continue reading
Researchers at the University of Bayreuth have compiled information to help political decision-makers better understand the individual options for a new EU-wide regulation of breeding technologies. The aim is to ensure the success of food producers in the EU on the global market. … | Continue reading
A team of archaeologists, geologists and historians affiliated with several institutions in Spain has found that the Menga dolmen represents one of the greatest engineering feats of the Neolithic. In their study, published in Scientific Reports, the group used new technology to l … | Continue reading
An ancient kola tree has been cut down in southern Ghana. Local tradition held that the tree had grown on the spot where spiritual leader Komfo Anokye had spat a kola nut onto the ground three centuries previously. | Continue reading
2023 has shattered climate records, accompanied by extreme weather that has left a trail of devastation and despair, according to the World Meteorological Organization at COP 28. Some of the most significant extreme heat events were in southern Europe and North Africa, especially … | Continue reading
Global warming can still be limited to 1.5°C by 2100 while ensuring that the poor are not hit hardest by climate policies and climate impacts. This is achieved by immediately introducing broad carbon pricing together with re-distributive policies using carbon pricing revenues and … | Continue reading
Conflict-ridden and fragile countries are among the most vulnerable to climate change and least prepared to deal with it. They are largely excluded from climate adaptation programs and funding. | Continue reading
Days into COP28 in Dubai, one little-known archipelago has come into sharp relief: Socotra. Composed of four small Yemeni islands, Socotra has been in the sights of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) ever since the civil war in Yemen erupted in September 2014. | Continue reading
Every year, Americans buy somewhere between 35 million and 50 million Christmas trees, and many more pull an artificial tree out of storage for the season. In all, about three-quarters of U.S. households typically have some kind of Christmas tree, surveys show. | Continue reading
Dec. 10 marks the anniversary of the 1948 signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Though contested, imperfect and unfulfilled, the declaration remains a milestone in human civilization as one of the ea … | Continue reading
With hate crimes, context is everything, and events outside of the United States—like the war between Israel and Hamas—can have far-reaching and potentially tragic consequences. | Continue reading
New findings by biological sciences researchers at the University of Arkansas indicate that males play an outsized role in both the infection rate and spread of the avian bacterial pathogen Mycoplasma gallisepticum, a common cause of conjunctivitis in songbirds, particularly thos … | Continue reading
Nine years ago, I stood on the muddy banks of the Great Marsh, a salt marsh an hour north of Boston, and pulled a thumb-sized crab with an absurdly large claw out of a burrow. I was looking at a fiddler crab—a species that wasn't supposed to be north of Cape Cod, let alone north … | Continue reading