According to data from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), groundwater supplies half of the world's population with fresh water and makes up 43% of the water used in irrigation. Despite its importance, it is calculated that about a third of the worl … | Continue reading
In an international collaboration between the University of South Australia Business School, the Hunter Foundation Research Centre at the University of Newcastle and George Mason University in Washington, D.C., researchers have pinpointed which Australian cities are most vulnerab … | Continue reading
Instead of looking up to the sky for bright bursts of fiery color, a research team spent Fourth of July 2018 peering down at fiery globs of molten lava from a sky-diving airplane. Bolted to their plane was a new NASA instrument designed to detect each time the volcano took a brea … | Continue reading
At several points in the history of our planet, increasing amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have caused extreme global warming, prompting the majority of species on Earth to die out. | Continue reading
A research team in the Department of Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge U.S., explored a synthetic pathway to generate a phosphatetrahedrane framework. During the synthetic route, the team replaced a single carbon vertex with another p-block e … | Continue reading
A Nordic study sheds new light on the role of northern peatlands in regulating the regional climate. According to the researchers, peatlands will remain carbon sinks until the end of this century, but their sink capacity will be substantially reduced after 2050, if the climate wa … | Continue reading
The tiny hairs found on plant roots play a pivotal role in helping reduce soil erosion, a new study has found. The research, led by the University of Bristol and published in Communications Biology, provides compelling evidence that when root hairs interact with the surrounding s … | Continue reading
Melatonin controls the body clock—high melatonin levels make us feel tired in the evening. However, the hormone also plays an important role in animals' biological rhythms. Artificial light at night—light pollution—can suppress the production of melatonin in fish, even at very lo … | Continue reading
Economic activity is slowing rapidly, both in the United States and around the world. | Continue reading
The COVID-19 outbreak caused by the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO) on 12 March 2020. It is thought to have been transmitted from wild animals to humans in the Chinese province of Hubei already in November 2019. More than 180 … | Continue reading
John Furlow has spent more than a decade working with developing countries on the frontlines of climate change, helping them to adapt to changing conditions. | Continue reading
The world has moved online, seemingly overnight. Are we using social media more, and what does that mean? | Continue reading
A team of researchers from Germany, the Netherlands and Italy has developed a way to use scattered light to map nerve fiber pathway crossing points in the brain. In their paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters, the group describes their work with light scattering … | Continue reading
Modern scientific research on materials relies heavily on exploring their behavior at the atomic and molecular scales. For that reason, scientists are constantly on the hunt for new and improved methods for data gathering and analysis of materials at those scales. | Continue reading
We promised you further fascinating footage from one of Africa's most neglected wildlife hotspots, and here it is. One of the continent's rarest and most elusive carnivores has been captured on camera in South Sudan. | Continue reading
On Thursday, March 26, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced a temporary policy on environmental enforcement during the COVID-19 pandemic. The policy declares that EPA will "exercise enforcement discretion" (code for "take no action") in relation to certain civil vi … | Continue reading
While the coronavirus consumes our attention, a small revolution is underway in energy policy: Texas officials are discussing whether to join hands with OPEC. | Continue reading
A fossilised seal tooth found on a Victorian beach could hold the key to uncovering the history and geography of earless seals that graced Australia's shores three million years ago. | Continue reading
A hospitable star that doesn't kill you with deadly flares. A rocky planet with liquid water and an agreeable climate. Absence of apocalyptic asteroid storms. No pantheon of angry, vengeful and capricious gods. These are the things that define a habitable planet. | Continue reading
Researchers at the University of Southampton have transformed optical fibers into photocatalytic microreactors that convert water into hydrogen fuel using solar energy. | Continue reading
All emergency financial actions the federal government takes during the pandemic crisis should be temporary and targeted, said two Rice University Baker Institute for Public Policy experts. | Continue reading
Dibakar Bhattacharyya has been a fixture in the University of Kentucky's College of Engineering for more than 50 years and is renowned for his research, which focuses on incorporating life sciences materials with synthetic membranes for filtering and producing clean water. | Continue reading
CBD hemp, a new crop in Connecticut, could earn farmers between $5,000 and nearly $12,000 per acre, according to a report from UConn's Zwick Center for Food and Resource Policy and Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics. | Continue reading
When it comes to fighting a fast-spreading pandemic, speed is critical. | Continue reading
As the COVID-19 crisis unfolds, Americans have been hearing a lot about an obscure but vast federal trove of emergency supplies, the Strategic National Stockpile. | Continue reading
When Italians self-isolating during the COVID-19 outbreak were presented with a hypothetical situation in which orders to remain at home would be for shorter periods than they had expected, they were pleasantly surprised and said they would be more willing to stay in isolation. | Continue reading
What's driving violent anti-Chinese discrimination in Nairobi, Kenya, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, and what can be done to quell it? How are part-time student workers in central Florida handling massive furloughs, and what could their employers be doing better? What kind of messag … | Continue reading
As SARS-CoV-2 has spread around the world, its transmission rate has varied alongside variations in its genome, according to researchers at the University of California, Davis. Surveillance of the virus genome may help public authorities target areas about to experience an upsurg … | Continue reading
The economy could be suffering the effects of the coronavirus for decades, suggest economists at the University of California, Davis, who researched the financial effects of pandemics dating back to the 14th century. | Continue reading
Physical barriers are an obvious barrier to gene flow and to diversity within species—when populations can't get to each other to mix, their genes can't mix either. | Continue reading
Macquarie University researchers have developed an improved laser system that will help large optical telescopes to gather more accurate data. | Continue reading
Municipalities don't need to unleash a tweet storm to keep their citizens informed on the social network Twitter. In fact, according to Penn State researchers, municipalities that tweeted less-frequent, but more focused, messages tend to have higher engagement with the citizens w … | Continue reading
As an economist and director of the California Policy Lab, Till von Wachter is continually spearheading research projects and policy recommendations related to labor and employment as well as homelessness, education and crime. | Continue reading
The coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic has virtually paralyzed daily life as we know it. Even when the spread of this highly infectious disease has been stemmed, the world will face huge challenges getting back to normal. To help support experts working in Europe's research centers an … | Continue reading
Carefully wrapped inside this donut-shaped bag is a 35-m diameter parachute that will endure a frenzied six-minute dive into the Martian atmosphere. | Continue reading
Demand for oil has collapsed due to the coronavirus pandemic just as supply is about to strengthen because of a dispute between Russia and Saudi Arabia. As a result, oil prices have sunk to levels not seen since 2002. | Continue reading
Collagen is the glue that holds bodies together. It can be found in skin, bones, muscles, cartilage, ligaments, hair, nails—in short, in almost every tissue. In some tissues like the skin, collagen proteins form fibrous networks that are very elastic. But why these networks are s … | Continue reading
Researchers from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, working with Spanish, French and German colleagues, have determined and analyzed the high-resolution structure of a protein from the recently discovered heliorhodopsin family. Microbial rhodopsins play a key role in … | Continue reading
A research team led by Washington State University has found that while drylands around the world will expand at an accelerated rate because of future climate change, their average productivity will likely be reduced. | Continue reading
A new study by researchers at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST) found that human-induced environmental stressors have a large effect on the genetic composition of coral reef populations in Hawai'i. They confirmed that ther … | Continue reading
Evolution is a tinkerer, not an engineer. "Evolution does not produce novelties from scratch. It works with what already exists," wrote Nobel laureate François Jacob in 1977, and biologists continue to find this to be true. | Continue reading
Consumer stockpiling and hoarding took center stage in recent months as the COVID-19 virus has spread around the world, and with it, panic buying on the part of millions. News broadcasts and social media feeds have been filled with examples of the worst aspects of human nature. | Continue reading
One way to change the properties of a material is to stretch it just a wee bit, so its atoms are farther apart but the bonds between them don't break. This extra distance affects the behavior of electrons, which determine whether the material is an insulator or a conductor of ele … | Continue reading
Researchers know that people are motivated to be vegetarian for different reasons—the most common in western cultures being health, the environment and animal rights. But how compelling are these different factors for nonvegetarians? | Continue reading
Low-carbon technologies that are smaller scale, more affordable, and can be mass deployed are more likely to enable a faster transition to net-zero emissions, according to a new study by an international team of researchers. | Continue reading
Backed by experimental data from a laboratory machine that simulates the huge forces involved in glacier flow, glaciologists have written an equation that accounts for the motion of ice that rests on the soft, deformable ground underneath unusually fast-moving parts of ice sheets … | Continue reading
The same basic tools that allow computers to function are now being used to control life at the molecular level. The advances have implications for future medicines and synthetic biology. | Continue reading
An unusual skullcap and thousands of clues have created a southern twist to the story of human ancestors, in research published in Science on 3 April. | Continue reading