Drugs can only work if they stick to their target proteins in the body. Assessing that stickiness is a key hurdle in the drug discovery and screening process. New research combining chemistry and machine learning could lower that hurdle. | Continue reading
For a bacterium, the world can be a tough place to survive, a constant competition for food and space. Some bacteria, like Pseudomonas aeruginosa, secrete toxic molecules that act as a defense mechanism against nearby competitor bacteria. This natural antibiotic, pyocyanin, is al … | Continue reading
During COVID-19 lockdowns, a major concern for LGBTIQ+ communities, mental health professionals and academics was that young lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer and questioning, intersex and asexual+ people may suffer from being stuck in transphobic, biphobic or homophobic house … | Continue reading
A digital tool that uses barcodes to routinely track the banana breeding process is helping scientists identify suitable varieties, with the hope of improving cultivation programs. | Continue reading
Copper nanomaterials with a cubic shape so perfect that they form neatly aligned stacks when brought together have been created by researchers at KAUST. The cuboid copper nanoclusters, developed by rational design, are a new member of an exotic nanomaterial family that has shown … | Continue reading
Life is full of small decisions: Should I pick up that sock on the floor? Should I do the dishes before bed? What about fixing the leaky faucet in the bathroom? | Continue reading
Parents fear children stuck at home for almost a year during the coronavirus pandemic, will lose critical social skills. And children with selective mutism, a severe form of anxiety, will lose even more. | Continue reading
Red giant stars are, well, red and giant. But astronomers have always had difficulty estimating their temperatures due to their complex and turbulent atmospheres. Without an accurate gauge of their temperatures, it's difficult to tell when they will end their lives in gigantic su … | Continue reading
In October 19th, 2017, the first interstellar object ever detected flew past Earth on its way out of the solar system. Less than two years later, a second object was detected, an easily identified interstellar comet designated as 2I/Borisov. The appearance of these two objects ve … | Continue reading
In a recent study, an international team of astronomers presents the discovery of PSO J172.3556+18.7734—a highly accreting radio-loud quasar at a redshift of approximately 6.82. This is the most distant radio-loud quasar known to date. The finding is detailed in a paper published … | Continue reading
The beginning of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic presented significant challenges for educators and families as communities across the country adjusted to school closures and transitioned to online learning environments. | Continue reading
It's hard to imagine a world without electricity. It powers elevators that allow us to build up, rather than out. Electricity keeps our homes at the right temperature. It helps to purify the water that we drink, and sometimes the air that we breathe. We use electricity for our ph … | Continue reading
Nepal media reported on March 5, 2020 that the country experienced severe drought in the past winter. The total rainfall dropped by 75% as compared with the normal average for the season. Shortage of rain had a major impact on irrigation, ruining vast rice crops and leaving thous … | Continue reading
Prof. Huang Weixin and Zhang Qun from University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), together with domestic collaborators, probed into the photocatalytic oxidation of methanol on various anatase TiO2 nanocrystals. The results were p … | Continue reading
A research group led by Prof. Zhu Jin at the Ningbo Institute of Materials Technology and Engineering (NIMTE) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), has synthesized a high-efficiency carbon nanotube (CNT) modified lignin-based polyurethane adsorbent for crude oil spill remedia … | Continue reading
Nanozymes, a group of inorganic catalysis-efficient particles, have been proposed as promising antimicrobials against bacteria. They are efficient in killing bacteria, thanks to their production of reactive oxygen species (ROS). | Continue reading
Researchers from the Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics (SIOM) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) have developed a simple device called frequency-resolved optical gating and self-referenced spectral interferometry (FASI), which combines the frequency-resolved o … | Continue reading
February 2021 was the planet's coolest February in seven years due to La Niña in the tropical Pacific Ocean and unusually brisk temperatures that enveloped much of North America and northern Asia. | Continue reading
Encrypting data in a way that ensures secure communication is an ever-growing challenge because crucial components of today's encryption systems cannot withstand future quantum computers. Researchers around the world are therefore working on technologies for novel encryption meth … | Continue reading
Oregon State University researchers analyzed more than 17,000 public comments focused on orca conservation in the state of Washington and found that the most common emotional sentiments were trust, anticipation and fear. | Continue reading
Scientists from ICFO, Princeton and NIMS have discovered a full sequence of symmetry-broken Chern insulators that are induced by strong correlations in magic angle graphene. The study has been published in Nature Physics. | Continue reading
Superconductivity is current flow without electrical resistance. Theoretical and experimental physicists are working to discover and explain the underlying fundamental mechanisms of superconductivity. Intensive research on superconductivity is driven by the possibility of new app … | Continue reading
This unusual lenticular galaxy, which is between a spiral and elliptical shape, has lost almost all the gas and dust from its signature spiral arms, which used to orbit around its center. Known as NGC 1947, this galaxy was discovered almost 200 years ago by James Dunlop, a Scotti … | Continue reading
The Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) instrument on NASA's Hubble Space Telescope was brought back online on Saturday, March 13th at approximately 7:00 p.m. EST. The instrument was shut down as part of the normal observatory safe mode activities that occurred on Sunday, March 7, in res … | Continue reading
The habitats of freshwater fish species are threatened by global warming, mainly due to rising water temperatures. A 3.2-degree Celsius increase in global mean temperature would threaten more than half of the habitat for one third of all freshwater fish species. The number of spe … | Continue reading
Researchers at the University of Adelaide have tested claims of water hoarding and speculative behavior in Murray-Darling Basin water markets and found no evidence of hoarding, or a clear source of speculative behavior, driving water price rises. | Continue reading
Quantum dots are manmade nanoparticles of semiconducting material comprising only a few thousand atoms. Because of the small number of atoms, a quantum dot's properties lie between those of single atoms or molecules and bulk material with a huge number of atoms. By changing the n … | Continue reading
As the driver of global atmospheric and ocean circulation, the tropics play a central role in understanding past and future climate change. Both global climate simulations and worldwide ocean temperature reconstructions indicate that the cooling in the tropics during the last col … | Continue reading
Scientists from Tokyo Metropolitan University have developed a new method for making ordered arrays of nanoholes in metallic oxide thin films using a range of transition metals. The team used a template to pre-pattern metallic surfaces with an ordered array of dimples before appl … | Continue reading
The search for life outside of Earth has taken many forms. Mars, our neighbouring world, looks like it was once habitable. Perhaps too Venus, despite its current hellish conditions. But in recent years, scientists' gazes have been drawn elsewhere. What about the moons of Jupiter? | Continue reading
When rain began falling in northern Georgia on Sept. 15, 2009, little did Atlantans know that they would bear witness to epic flooding throughout the city. Neighborhoods, like Peachtree Hills, were submerged; Georgia's busiest expressway was underwater, as were roads and bridges; … | Continue reading
Andrix Serrano studies alone inside a Manila slum shack he shares with his street-sweeper grandmother. Like many in his fourth-grade class, he has no internet for his shuttered school's online lessons. | Continue reading
Famed as a spa town where the Romans soaked in the waters, the British city of Bath has long been a magnet for the health-conscious visitor. | Continue reading
It's an environmental policy embraced by heads of state, multinational businesses and even leading climate sceptic Donald Trump: plant more trees to help the planet and slow global warming. | Continue reading
China's capital and a wide swath of the country's north were enveloped Monday in the worst sandstorm in a decade, leading to the cancelation of hundreds of flights. | Continue reading
A fear of poor SATs results is driving headteachers to separate pupils by ability despite the impact on children's self-esteem and confidence, according to a study by researchers from UCL published in the peer-reviewed British Journal of Sociology of Education. | Continue reading
Russian scientists on Saturday launched one of the world's biggest underwater space telescopes to peer deep into the universe from the pristine waters of Lake Baikal. | Continue reading
Spacewalking astronauts had to take extra safety precautions Saturday after possibly getting toxic ammonia on their suits from the International Space Station's external cooling system. | Continue reading
A new study lead by scientists at the University of Miami (UM) Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science demonstrates that under realistic environmental conditions oil drifting in the ocean after the DWH oil spill photooxidized into persistent compounds within hours to … | Continue reading
Those who see Earth from the International Space Station often say it provides a new appreciation of our planet. The Avian Migration Aerial Surface Space project, or AMASS, takes advantage of thousands of images captured by astronauts to give people an appreciation of the migrati … | Continue reading
Astronomers have painted their best picture yet of an RV Tauri variable, a rare type of stellar binary where two stars—one approaching the end of its life—orbit within a sprawling disk of dust. Their 130-year dataset spans the widest range of light yet collected for one of these … | Continue reading
A study of the relationship between temperature and yields of various rice varieties, based on 50 years of weather and rice-yield data from farms in the Philippines, suggests that warming temperatures negatively affect rice yields. | Continue reading
The origins of ice age climate changes may lie in the Southern Hemisphere, where interactions among the westerly wind system, the Southern Ocean and the tropical Pacific can trigger rapid, global changes in atmospheric temperature, according to an international research team led … | Continue reading
If you binged on high-calorie snacks and then spent the winter crashed on the couch in a months-long food coma, you'd likely wake up worse for wear. Unless you happen to be a fat-tailed dwarf lemur. | Continue reading
Decades of feminist gains in the workforce have been undermined by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has upended public education across the United States, a critical infrastructure of care that parents—especially mothers—depend on to work, according to new research from Washington Un … | Continue reading
How much did SARS-CoV-2 need to change in order to adapt to its new human host? In a research article published in the open access journal PLOS Biology Oscar MacLean, Spyros Lytras at the University of Glasgow, and colleagues, show that since December 2019 and for the first 11 mo … | Continue reading
New research led by the University of Cambridge has found rare evidence—preserved in the chemistry of ancient rocks from Greenland—which tells of a time when Earth was almost entirely molten. | Continue reading
If you were given "ultrasound" in a word association game, "sound wave" might easily come to mind. But in recent years, a new term has surfaced: bubbles. Those ephemeral, globular shapes are proving useful in improving medical imaging, disease detection and targeted drug delivery … | Continue reading