The vast majority of stars have planets. We know that from observations of exoplanetary systems. We also know some stars don't have planets, and perhaps they never had planets. This raises an interesting question. Suppose we see an old star that has no planets. How do we know if … | Continue reading
We have a pretty good idea of what lurks within our solar system. We know there isn't a Mars-sized planet orbiting between Jupiter and Saturn, nor a brown dwarf nemesis heading our way. Anything large and fairly close to the sun would be easily spotted. But we can't rule out a sm … | Continue reading
Australia's wildlife is increasingly threatened with extinction. One key driver of this is habitat clearing and fragmentation. An associated factor is the expansion of our road network, particularly the upgrade and duplication of our highways. | Continue reading
Since late 2020, the La Niña climate pattern has led to two years of above-average rainfall across much of Australia, and severe floods in parts of the country. | Continue reading
We do not often think about the labor that goes into bringing our favorite fruits and vegetables to our table. For farmers, growing healthy crops involves repetitive tasks such as weeding and spraying while the crop is growing. These tasks are not only repetitive, they are also c … | Continue reading
Powerful storm systems triggered flash flooding across the U.S. in late July, killing at least 28 people in eastern Kentucky as floodwater engulfed homes and set off mudslides. Record rainfall also inundated St. Louis neighborhoods, and another deluge in Nevada flooded the Las Ve … | Continue reading
Birmingham scientists have revealed a new method to increase efficiency in biocatalysis, in a paper published today in Materials Horizons. | Continue reading
Engineers at Caltech have developed a switch—one of the most fundamental components of computing—using optical, rather than electronic, components. The development could aid efforts to achieve ultrafast all-optical signal processing and computing. | Continue reading
Over the past 60 years, the global forest area has declined by 81.7 million hectares, a loss that contributed to the more than 60% decline in global forest area per capita. This loss threatens the future of biodiversity and impacts the lives of 1.6 billion people worldwide, accor … | Continue reading
Portugal and France on Sunday battled major forest fires as temperatures rose sharply this weekend. | Continue reading
The largest fire in California this year is forcing thousands of people to evacuate as it destroys homes and rips through the state's dry terrain, whipped up on Sunday by strong winds and lightning storms. | Continue reading
Concealed behind trees near Lake Michigan, two scientists remotely manipulated a robotic owl on the forest floor. As the intruder flapped its wings and hooted, a merlin guarding its nest in a nearby pine darted overhead, sounding high-pitched, rapid-fire distress calls. | Continue reading
There was no reported damage in a western Philippine region where debris from a rocket that boosted part of China's new space station reportedly fell, a Filipino official said Monday. | Continue reading
Lumbering through the forested wetlands of Bulgaria around six million years ago, a new species of panda has been uncovered by scientists who state it is currently the last known and "most evolved" European giant panda. | Continue reading
Rocks the size of fridges have been tumbling from Mont Blanc as summer temperatures soar, scaring away many hikers from Western Europe's highest mountain. | Continue reading
California claims to know how much climate-warming gas is going into the air from within its borders. It's the law: California limits climate pollution and each year the limits get stricter. | Continue reading
Little snow cover and glaciers melting at an alarming rate amid Europe's sweltering heatwaves have put some of the most classic Alpine hiking routes off-limits. | Continue reading
More than 1,000 years after his death in what is now Poland, a European king whose nickname lives on through wireless technology is at the center of an archaeological dispute. | Continue reading
A Chinese booster rocket made an uncontrolled return to Earth on Saturday, leading US officials to chide Beijing for not sharing information about the potentially hazardous object's descent. | Continue reading
Chemicals leaking from plastic waste make bacteria grow faster in European lakes, according to research published Tuesday that authors said could provide a natural way to remove plastic pollution from freshwater ecosystems. | Continue reading
This luminescent image features multiple galaxies, perhaps most noticeably LEDA 58109, the lone galaxy in the upper right. LEDA 58109 is flanked by two further galactic objects to its lower left—a galaxy with an active galactic nucleus (AGN) called SDSS J162558.14+435746.4 that p … | Continue reading
After being installed on the exterior of the International Space Station, NASA's Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation (EMIT) mission has provided its first view of Earth. The milestone, called "first light," took place at 7:51 p.m. PDT (10:51 p.m. EDT) on July 27 as th … | Continue reading
Hundreds of miles apart, but still connected by the same stubborn weather system, urban St. Louis and rural Appalachia are showing how devastating flash flooding can be when souped-up storms dump massive amounts of rain with no place to go. | Continue reading
Trapped homeowners swam to safety and others were rescued by boat as record flash flooding killed at least 16 people in Kentucky and swamped entire Appalachian towns, prompting a frenzied search for survivors Friday through some of the poorest communities in America. | Continue reading
Similar to humans, chimpanzees use communication to coordinate their cooperative behavior—such as during hunting. When chimpanzees produce a specific vocalization, known as the "hunting bark," they recruit more group members to the hunt and capture their prey more effectively, re … | Continue reading
Neanderthals are the closest relatives to modern humans. Comparisons with them can therefore provide fascinating insights into what makes present-day humans unique, for example regarding the development of the brain. The neocortex, the largest part of the outer layer of the brain … | Continue reading
Falls are a serious public health issue, resulting in tens of thousands of deaths annually and racking up billions of dollars in healthcare costs. While there has been extensive research into the biomechanics of falls, most current approaches study how the legs, joints, and muscl … | Continue reading
At least 15 people have died in Kentucky in flash flooding caused by torrential rains that swept away homes and left some residents stranded on rooftoops, the governor of the US state said Friday. | Continue reading
Consumer sentiment was essentially unchanged from June, when it had reached an all-time low for the survey, according to the University of Michigan Surveys of Consumers. | Continue reading
Extreme weather events linked to climate change caused about $65 billion in total losses in the first half of 2022, roughly half of which hit uninsured assets, according to data compiled by Munich Re. | Continue reading
For more than a decade, Congressional Democrats and a growing share of their political base have chased a dream: legislation to combat climate change, large enough to transform our society into one equipped to avert the worst catastrophes of a rapidly warming planet. | Continue reading
Removing several hundred billion tons of carbon from the atmosphere is now considered necessary to avert the worst effects of climate change. Using nature to help achieve that goal, by allowing habitats to regenerate, would seem to offer a win-win solution for the environment an … | Continue reading
A multi-institutional team of researchers and collaborators successfully executed an integrated vessel confinement system (VCS) experiment at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), as part of an experimental campaign to study how nuclear materials react to high explosives … | Continue reading
Our aging cities are badly in need of regeneration. Many established residential areas, the "greyfields," are becoming physically, technologically and environmentally obsolete. They are typically located in low-density, car-dependent middle suburbs developed in the mid to late 20 … | Continue reading
Sustainable fishing is a growing concern worldwide. But how easily can fisheries achieve sustainability? A survey conducted as part of the EU-funded EcoScope project sought to discover what EU fishery stakeholders thought were the main difficulties in sustainably managing Europea … | Continue reading
,Holes in sea ice provide the perfect hunting ground for polar bears looking to catch their main food source—seals. So when rising temperatures cause sea ice to melt, polar bears' existence is threatened, making them the poster species for many climate change reports and document … | Continue reading
A foundational element of plant metabolism is the transport of water from the ground to the leaves. In most plants, this task is facilitated by xylem, a tissue whose structure provides hydraulic pathways that aid the water's upward movement. As plants face stressors such as droug … | Continue reading
Zeta Ophiuchi has had an interesting life. It began as a typical large star about twenty times more massive than the sun. It spent its days happily orbiting a large companion star until its companion exploded as a supernova about a million years ago. The explosion ejected Zeta Op … | Continue reading
More than 1.1 billion people live in Sub-Saharan Africa today, and this number is expected to double by 2050. Yet many governments in the region struggle with providing sufficient schools, hospitals, food and clean water for their populations. Many countries are trapped in a vici … | Continue reading
A roadmap for the future direction of quantum simulation has been set out in a paper co-authored at the University of Strathclyde. | Continue reading
A trio of researchers from James Cook University, working with a colleague from the University of Adelaide, has found metamorphic diamonds in rocks near Australia's northeast coast. In their paper published in the journal Science Advances, Alexander Edgar, Ioan Sanislav, Paul Dir … | Continue reading
You would have heard Australia's environment isn't doing well. A grim story of "crisis and decline" was how Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek described the situation when she launched the State of the Environment Report last week. Climate change, habitat destruction, ocean aci … | Continue reading
The head of Russia's space agency said Friday that the country has not set a date for pulling out of the International Space Station and that the timing would depend on the orbiting outpost's condition. | Continue reading
Women in statistics classes do better academically than men over a semester despite having more negative attitudes regarding their own abilities, according to our recent study in the Journal of Statistics and Data Science Education. | Continue reading
As the highest plateau in the world, the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau has large areas of marshes, which have important effects on the biogeochemical cycle and carbon balance. As an important functional parameter of marsh wetland ecosystem, net primary productivity (NPP) of vegetation is … | Continue reading
Each summer since the release of information about Northern giant hornets being found in Washington state in 2020, Texas A&M AgriLife entomologists have been inundated with questions and reported sightings. | Continue reading
A research team led by Prof. Wu Yuejin from the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science (HFIPS) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has revealed the source of internal mildew in sunflower seeds for the first time and proposed measures to avoid internal mildewing growth and entry of i … | Continue reading
One of the most important elements in photonic chips or quantum chips is the optical waveguide. However, due to limitations in existing fabrication methods, it is tricky to efficiently produce waveguides with high precision control of the 3D cross-section shape and size. To resol … | Continue reading