Why are cities usually warmer than rural areas? Scientist have long known that cities retain heat more than rural areas, a phenomenon known as urban heat island (UHI), which is largely due to the impact of anthropogenic heating, or human-caused heating. | Continue reading
In the ever-changing digital landscape, bloggers have risen to prominence as influencers, playing an important role in helping consumers pick and choose the products and services on which they want to spend their time and money. However, even with the many disparate social media … | Continue reading
Pigmented rice is known to be much more nutritious than white rice and could be an important resource to improve human health and combat malnutrition. However, improved yield and agronomic traits are needed if these varieties, which include black, brown and red, are to become wid … | Continue reading
Researchers at the University of Oklahoma led a study recently published in Science Advances that proves the principle of using spatial correlations in quantum entangled beams of light to encode information and enable its secure transmission. | Continue reading
Researchers have detected complex organic molecules in a galaxy more than 12 billion light-years away from Earth—the most distant galaxy in which these molecules are now known to exist. Thanks to the capabilities of the recently launched James Webb Space Telescope and careful ana … | Continue reading
Miami summers are hot and humid, but is climate change making them dangerous? | Continue reading
The Human Genome Project (HGP), the world's largest collaborative biological project, was a 13-year effort led by the U.S. government with the goal of generating the first full sequence of the human genome. In 2003, HGP produced a genome sequence that accounted for more than 90% … | Continue reading
So far, astrophysicists have only detected gravitational waves from binary systems—the mergers of either two black holes, two neutron stars or one of each. Although astrophysicists theoretically should be able to detect gravitational waves from a single, non-binary source, they h … | Continue reading
The cause of global warming is showing no signs of slowing as heat-trapping carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere increased to record highs in its annual Spring peak, jumping at one of the fastest rates on record, officials announced Monday. | Continue reading
Fungi play a vital and previously neglected role in the complex tapestry of marine ecosystems, a study by Eva Breyer and Federico Baltar of the University of Vienna reveals. The results have now been published in the journal Trends in Ecology & Evolution. | Continue reading
The assembly of the volant bird body plan from the ancestral bulky dinosaurian condition is an enduring topic of evolutionary biology. The body plan of volant birds demonstrates a pronounced decrease in body size and proportionate elongation of the forelimbs. Given the scaling re … | Continue reading
Where there's smoke, there's fire—and with tools ranging from fire tower lookouts to satellites, a forest fire can be readily detected. | Continue reading
When you walk into a veterinarian's office, you expect to see photos of furry friends, anatomy charts, and a computer upon which your doctor will make notes about your pet. When you walk into Dr. Kate Barnes' office, you see all of this with a futuristic touch of 3D printers. | Continue reading
Tales of people reading on social media about suspect, off-label uses of ivermectin to ward off COVID-19, ingesting the livestock dewormer and then suffering gastrointestinal distress might seem like the pinnacle of the 2021 zeitgeist. According to a new theory by two College of … | Continue reading
This moody image shows a galaxy named Messier 85, captured in all its delicate, hazy glory by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Messier 85 slants through the constellation of Coma Berenices (Berenice's Hair) and lies around 50 million light-years from Earth. It was first disco … | Continue reading
The accelerating loss of biodiversity and increasing rate of species extinction is a major threat to ecosystems around the globe. And yet, quantifying those losses at a large scale hasn't been possible, in large part due to a lack of the required infrastructure. But a new study r … | Continue reading
In a new study published in the journal Environmental Science and Ecotechnology, researchers from Tianjin University evaluate the environmental sustainability and socio-economic costs of recovering phosphorus (P) from sewage sludge by replacing current-day treatments (sludge trea … | Continue reading
While infectious fungal plant diseases relentlessly wreak havoc on many crops, they are also picky when choosing their hosts. Each fungus generally exhibits a specific host range, but the mechanism of this specificity has not been well understood. | Continue reading
Carbon-based stimuli-responsive nanomaterials are gaining much attention due to their versatility, including disease diagnosis and treatment. They work under endogenous (pH, temperature, enzyme, and redox) or exogenous (temperature, light, magnetic field, ultrasound) stimuli. Car … | Continue reading
Researchers at the Australian Catholic University, Australia; Columbia University, New York; and the University of Massachusetts teamed up to investigate secondary forest growth in previously deforested areas. In their paper, "Collective property rights lead to secondary forest g … | Continue reading
Agricultural Research Service and Washington State University scientists have developed an innovative web app called BRIDGEcereal that can quickly and accurately analyze the vast amount of genomic data now available for cereal crops and organize the material into intuitive charts … | Continue reading
How do today's Indigenous communities of South America trace back to the history of human migration and contact in the continent? An international team has worked to reconstruct the legacy of Chile's largest Indigenous community, the Mapuche, in a quest to strengthen their repres … | Continue reading
In the wake of natural disasters, survivors' losses of education and lifetime earnings may be comparable to the cost of property damage, according to a new study in Nature Human Behaviour co-authored by R. Jisung Park, an assistant professor at Penn's School of Social Policy & Pr … | Continue reading
AI, machine learning, and ChatGPT may be relatively new buzzwords in the public domain, but developing a computer that functions like the human brain and nervous system—both hardware and software combined—has been a decades-long challenge. Engineers at the University of Pittsburg … | Continue reading
Mycorrhizal fungi have been supporting life on land for at least 450 million years by helping to supply plants with soil nutrients essential for growth. In recent years, scientists have found that in addition to forming symbiotic relationships with nearly all land plants, these f … | Continue reading
Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen, Germany, have uncovered the molecular secrets of a methane-generating microbe that can transform sulfate into sulfide—a ready-to-use cellular building block. This discovery opens up exciting opportunities i … | Continue reading
Industrialized nations responsible for excessive levels of carbon dioxide emissions could be liable to pay a total of $170 trillion in compensation or reparations by 2050 to ensure climate change targets are met, say researchers. | Continue reading
Researchers at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M) and the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM) have discovered a phase shift between chaotic states that can appear in herds of animals and, in particular, in swarms of insects. This advance may help to better understand … | Continue reading
Whales have long fascinated us with their size and beauty. Once we stopped whaling, their populations have begun to recover, in a major win for conservation. | Continue reading
As Earth's climate continues to warm due to the emission of greenhouse gasses, extreme and anomalous weather events are becoming more common. But predicting and analyzing the effects of what is, by definition, an anomaly can by tricky. | Continue reading
Identifying whether and how a nanoparticle and protein will bind with one another is an important step toward being able to design antibiotics and antivirals on demand, and a computer model developed at the University of Michigan can do it. | Continue reading
Tens of thousands of asteroids—that we know of—are roaming our solar system. These are building blocks made up of metal, silicates, and ice left over from the beginning of time when the planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune) and their moons we … | Continue reading
A Freie Universität Berlin research team headed by quantum physicist Professor Christiane Koch has demonstrated how hydrogen molecules behave when they collide with noble gas atoms such as helium or neon. In an article published in the journal Science, the researchers describe ho … | Continue reading
A team of researchers from Nanjing University has developed a probiotic nanozyme hydrogel to regulate the vaginal microenvironment for Candida vaginitis therapy. Candida vaginitis, a common fungal infection that affects about 75% of women worldwide, is known for its high recurren … | Continue reading
Researchers at North Carolina State University have identified significant differences in the gut microbiome of female southern white rhinos who are reproducing successfully in captivity, as compared to females who have not reproduced successfully in captivity. The work raises qu … | Continue reading
Awash in a rowed sea of its brethren, a corn leaf relegated to the lowest rung of its stem spends much of a June afternoon doused in shade cast by the higher-ups. | Continue reading
A new form of low-cost, 3D-printed water pollution sensor could make a splash in the world of environmental monitoring, its developers say. | Continue reading
Genes that make bacteria resistant to antibiotics are much more widespread in our environment than was previously realized. A new study published in Microbiome by researchers from Chalmers University of Technology and the University of Gothenburg in Sweden shows that bacteria in … | Continue reading
Material scientists from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, the University of California, Irvine and Edwards Lifesciences have developed a way to 3D print nanoscale glass structures at much cooler temperatures than prior methods. | Continue reading
Off the spectacular Greek tourist island of Santorini, divers drag deadly "ghost nets" from the depths of the Aegean Sea which have claimed the lives of thousands of fish. | Continue reading
A group of biochemical engineers, Siavash Ahrar, Manasi Raje, Irene Lee and Elliot Hui at the University of California, Irvine, has developed a finite state machine (FSM) implemented as a pneumatic circuit using microfluidic valves to build a lab-on-a-chip. Their work is publishe … | Continue reading
We know very little about insect evolution despite them inhabiting every kind of environment on our planet. At a time when the future of many insect species is threatened, researchers are looking to advance their knowledge of insects, by looking into their evolutionary past. | Continue reading
The One Health approach considers a close link between the health of all living organisms and aims to bring them into a sustainable balance. However, the smallest organisms living in the soil, the so-called soil microbiome, have been largely ignored in this approach so far. Resea … | Continue reading
Every day, millions of cells die in our body. Cells do not simply burst at the end of their lives but rather, a specific protein serves as a breaking point for cell membrane rupture. Researchers at the University of Basel have now been able to elucidate the exact mechanism at the … | Continue reading
A team of researchers from EPFL have found a way to use the phenomenon of strong gravitational lensing to determine with precision—about three times more precise than any other technique—the mass of a galaxy containing a quasar, as well as their evolution in cosmic time. Knowing … | Continue reading
Outside atomic nuclei, neutrons are unstable particles, with a lifetime of about fifteen minutes. The neutron disintegrates due to the weak nuclear force, leaving behind a proton, an electron, and an antineutrino. The weak nuclear force is one of the four fundamental forces in th … | Continue reading
Numerous organisms are equipped with circadian clocks (internal body clocks) that help them adapt to daily environmental changes in light and temperature. For synchronizing the clock phase (timing) with these environmental rhythms, the circadian clock alters its phase in response … | Continue reading
Using NASA's Neil Gherels Swift Observatory, Indian astronomers have observed a blazar known as OJ 287. Results of the observational campaign, published May 25 on the arXiv pre-print server, shed more light on the spectral changes of OJ 287, improving our knowledge about the beha … | Continue reading