Sugar has been called "evil," "toxic," and "poison." But the body needs sugars, too. Sugar molecules help cells recognize and fight viruses and bacteria, shuttle proteins from cell to cell, and make sure those proteins function. Too much or too little can contribute to a range of … | Continue reading
Crabs are living the meme life on social media lately. The memes joke that everything will eventually look like a crab. But it's actually based in some truth. | Continue reading
As gatherings to observe whooping cranes join the ranks of online-only events this year, a new study offers insight into how the endangered bird is faring on a landscape increasingly dotted with wind turbines. The paper, published this week in Ecological Applications, reports tha … | Continue reading
The universe is filled with magnetic fields. Understanding how magnetic fields are generated and amplified in plasmas is essential to studying how large structures in the universe were formed and how energy is divided throughout the cosmos. | Continue reading
Optical-resolution photoacoustic microscopy (OR-PAM), a new hybrid imaging technique, allows us to listen to the sound of light and see the color of biological tissue itself. It can be used for live, multicontrast functional imaging, but the limited wavelength choice of most comm … | Continue reading
People in Oregon will be better prepared for earthquakes—particularly important in the Pacific Northwest because experts say "the big one" is coming—as an early warning system launched Thursday, the 10th anniversary of a devastating quake and tsunami in Japan. | Continue reading
The idea was so far-fetched it seemed like science fiction: create an observatory out of a one cubic kilometer block of ice in Antarctica to track ghostly particles called neutrinos that pass through the Earth. But speaking to Benedickt Riedel, global computing manager at the Ice … | Continue reading
Using the same principles that make polarized sunglasses possible, a team of researchers at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico have developed a technique that will help better defend against asteroids on a collision course with Earth. | Continue reading
Climate change is affecting the water balance of our planet: depending on the region and the time of year, this can influence the amount of water in rivers potentially resulting in more flooding or drought. River flow is an important indicator of water resources available to huma … | Continue reading
A team led by Christoph Utschick and Prof. Rudolf Gross, physicists at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), has developed a coil with superconducting wires capable of transmitting power in the range of more than five kilowatts contactless and with only small losses. The wide … | Continue reading
For the first time ever, a Northwestern University-led research team has peered inside a human cell to view a multi-subunit machine responsible for regulating gene expression. | Continue reading
Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is already widely used in medicine for diagnostic purposes. Hyperpolarized MRI is a more recent development and its research and application potential has yet to be fully explored. Researchers at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) and the H … | Continue reading
As part of a marathon research effort to lower the cost of carbon capture, chemists have now demonstrated a method to seize carbon dioxide (CO2) that reduces costs by 19 percent compared to current commercial technology. The new technology requires 17 percent less energy to accom … | Continue reading
Catastrophic collapse of materials and structures is the inevitable consequence of a chain reaction of locally confined damage—from solid ceramics that snap after the development of a small crack to metal space trusses that give way after the warping of a single strut. | Continue reading
Charitable donations account for about 2% of gross domestic product in the U.S., but it's not well-understood whether an event such as a deadly storm inspires increases in charitable giving or simply reallocates a fixed supply of donation dollars that would have otherwise gone to … | Continue reading
Mexican wolves in the American Southwest disappeared more quickly during periods of relaxed legal protections, almost certainly succumbing to poaching, according to new research published Wednesday. | Continue reading
Fossil sites sometimes resemble a living room table on which half a dozen different jigsaw puzzles have been dumped: It is often difficult to say which bone belongs to which animal. Together with colleagues from Switzerland, researchers from the University of Bonn have now presen … | Continue reading
Millions of people die prematurely every year from diseases and cancer caused by air pollution. The first line of defense against this carnage is ambient air quality standards. Yet, according to researchers from McGill University, over half of the world's population lives without … | Continue reading
An enzyme called MARK2 has been identified as a key stress-response switch in cells in a study by researchers at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Overactivation of this type of stress response is a possible cause of injury to brain cells in neurodegenerative disea … | Continue reading
Does a warmer climate mean more dry land? For years, researchers projected that drylands—including deserts, savannas and shrublands—will expand as the planet warms, but new research from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) challenges thos … | Continue reading
What do you do after solving the answer to life, the universe, and everything? If you're mathematicians Drew Sutherland and Andy Booker, you go for the harder problem. | Continue reading
Parents would never give their children the keys to the car without supervised training and driver's education. An Iowa State University researcher says parents and educators need to take a similar approach before handing children a keyboard to access the digital world. | Continue reading
Geologists have long thought tectonic plates move because they are pulled by the weight of their sinking portions and that an underlying, hot, softer layer called asthenosphere serves as a passive lubricant. But a team of geologists at the University of Houston has found that lay … | Continue reading
About 1.8 million envenoming snakebites occur around the world annually, killing about 94,000 people. In tropical areas, especially in Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, snakebites are considered a major cause of death, especially among farmers who encounter snakes in their f … | Continue reading
Northwestern University researchers have, for the first time, created borophane—atomically thin boron that is stable at standard temperatures and air pressures. | Continue reading
Insights into how bacterial proteins work as a network to take control of our cells could help predict infection outcomes and develop new treatments. | Continue reading
Plasmodium is the parasite causing malaria, one of the deadliest parasitic diseases. The parasite requires two hosts —the Anopheles mosquito and the human— to complete its life cycle and goes through different forms at each stage of its life cycle. Transitioning from one form to … | Continue reading
CABI scientist Dr. Arne Witt has shared his expertise on invasive alien plant species as part of a new paper which argues that healthy ecosystems are vital in reducing the risk of future pandemics—such as coronaviruses (including COVID-19) - that threaten human health. | Continue reading
Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are a kind of mysterious radio flash lasting only a few thousandths of a second. Confirmed to be of cosmological origin in 2016, FRBs have the potential to provide insights into a wide range of astrophysical problems. | Continue reading
To highlight tumors in the body for cancer diagnosis, doctors can use tiny optical probes (nanoprobes) that light up when they attach to tumors. These nanoprobes allow doctors to detect the location, shape and size of cancers in the body. | Continue reading
Conservationists who apply wing tags for identifying Cape Vultures—a species of African vulture that is vulnerable to extinction—are putting the birds' lives further at risk, a new movement ecology study has shown. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in G … | Continue reading
Rare earth elements are the gold of the 21st century: rare and highly prized all over the world. Most known and economically viable sources of rare earths are located in China, where more than 80 percent of them are refined. This has resulted in a near monopoly situation, with Ch … | Continue reading
In snowy plovers, females have overcome traditional family stereotypes. They often abandon the family to begin a clutch with a new partner whereas the males continue to care for their young until they are independent. An international team led by scientists from the Max Planck In … | Continue reading
Two-dimensional (2D) semiconductors can host a rich set of excitonic species because of the greatly enhanced Coulomb interactions. The excitonic states can exhibit large oscillator strengths and strong light-matter interactions, and dominate the optical properties of 2D semicondu … | Continue reading
Spatiotemporal metasurfaces are analyzed from an information perspective, in which two information transition mechanisms on group extension and independent control of multiple harmonics are revealed and characterized. The information transition efficiencies of these mechanisms ar … | Continue reading
Recently, a research group led by Prof. Wan Yinhua from the Institute of Process Engineering (IPE) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences developed a novel targeted modification strategy to improve the separation selectivity of polyamide NF membranes. The study was published in Journ … | Continue reading
Looking at the night sky, one's thoughts might be drawn to astrochemistry. What molecules are found in the vast spaces between the stars? Would we see the same molecules that surround us here on Earth? Or would some of them be more exotic—something rarely observed or even unknown … | Continue reading
Until now, it was only possible to optimize an acoustic cloaking structure for the air environment. However, with this latest research, "Acoustic cloak designed by topology optimization for acoustic-elastic coupled systems," published in the latest Applied Physics Letters, it is … | Continue reading
Bloch oscillations (BOs) were initially predicted for electrons in a solid lattice as a static electric field is applied. Scientists in China created a synthetic frequency lattice in a fiber loop under detuned phase modulation and directly observed the frequency BOs in real time. … | Continue reading
A team of researchers from the Agency for Science, Technology and Research's (A*STAR) Genome Institute of Singapore (GIS) have developed a CRISPR-based gene editor, C-to-G Base Editor (CGBE), to correct mutations that cause genetic disorders. Their research was published in Natur … | Continue reading
Polarization control is essential for tailoring light-matter interactions and is the foundation for many applications such as polarization imaging, nonlinear optics, data storage, and information multiplexing. A linear polarizer, which is a polarization optical element that filte … | Continue reading
Only one red wolf female experienced at having puppies remains in the wild—and she's been canoodling with a coyote. | Continue reading
When Californians learned in October that the waters off Santa Catalina Island once served as a dumping ground for thousands of barrels of DDT waste, the ocean science community jumped into action. | Continue reading
Researchers have developed a sustainable and economical way to recover oil from ultra-cold industrial wastewater and oil spills. | Continue reading
S-acylation is the process of chemically linking a lipid to protein via a thioester bond. It is an important process of the cell that regulates the localization and function of numerous proteins. It promotes lipid membrane association of the protein, for instance to the plasma me … | Continue reading
Volcanologists do what they can to provide the public enough warning about impending eruptions, but volcanoes are notoriously unpredictable. Alerts are sometimes given with little time for people to react. | Continue reading
For decades, researchers assumed the cosmic rays that regularly bombard Earth from the far reaches of the galaxy are born when stars go supernova—when they grow too massive to support the fusion occurring at their cores and explode. | Continue reading
Researchers at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) have identified genes responsible for hematopoietic stem cell (HSC) regeneration via the assembly of the ribosome, the protein factories in cells that translate mRNA sequences into amino acid sequences. The findings, which … | Continue reading