Latest science news, discoveries and scientific developments.
Modern space exploration hasn't quite reached "Star Trek" levels of boldly going where no one has gone before. But if, like the denizens of the USS Enterprise, astronauts one day want to land on an uncharted planet, they'd first want to know what's on—and under—the surface.
Tiny skeletal plates recovered beside fossil whale bones in southern Denmark offer a rare glimpse of life around a whale carcass approximately 9.5 million years ago. Researchers have identified a new species of brittle star, Ophiura huebnerjenseni, from the Gram Clay Pit and suggest it represents the first fossil record of brittle stars associated with a whale fall.
The kids are not all right on the future. For the first time in the 26-year history of the Harvard Youth Poll, more respondents expect to be worse off financially than their parents (27%) than better off (25%).
The Southern Ocean may seem far removed from the North Pacific or the Gulf of Maine, but its waters are linked to all the world's major ocean basins through a vast circulation system.
Chinese researchers have developed a new way to improve sodium–sulfur battery performance by changing the atomic structure of a catalyst. Led by professors Wang Hui and Zheng Fangcai from the High Magnetic Field Laboratory at the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the study is published in Angewandte Chemie.
Imagine shuffling a deck of cards where some of the cards are fading just because of the way they interact with the external environment as you shuffle them. Your job is to figure out the interplay between the shuffling, or "imposed randomness," due to the way you shuffle your cards and how that relates to the fading as cards are exposed to the external environment.
Waste dumped into the Tijuana River can travel seven times farther than expected before becoming airborne and affecting San Diego's air, at least 20 miles (32 kilometers) from its source, according to new UC Riverside research.
The new study by Newcastle University and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) offers a practical roadmap for tracking progress toward halting species extinctions by 2050. It guides users from understanding where species are most at risk in a given area, through taking action to reduce species threats, to measuring the real-world impact of conservation efforts on reducing species extinction risk over time.
There have been decades of regulations to make vehicles greener and improve air quality in London and Beijing, as well as a popular shift toward less polluting road transport. Now, total emissions of harmful air pollutants from vehicle exhausts are lower than those from cooking in the centers of these two megacities, a study has found.
A new evolutionary theory suggests changes in body size, rather than competition for food and habitat, may drive the earliest physical differences between species.
Have you ever felt like you know exactly what you want to say, but just can't get the words out? Having a word on the tip of your tongue can be frustrating at the best of times, but for people with communication difficulties, it can be a constant struggle to find the right words, make sentences and connect with others.
About 300,000 years ago, the emergence of the first Homo sapiens in Africa was accompanied by major cultural and technological changes, marking the beginning of a new archaeological period, the Middle Stone Age. At that time, African landscapes were also undergoing profound transformations. To understand how the earliest members of our species lived and adapted, it is therefore essential to reconstruct the environments in which they lived.
Finding a signal from an extraterrestrial civilization takes more than just pointing a telescope in the right direction. We may also need to listen at exactly the right time.
Autumn walks in Britain are glorious, as the foliage changes color and cool, crisp air begins to bite. However, some of these European trees hide a much darker secret. For example, the yew tree's lovely red arils—the cup-shaped coverings around the seeds—carry toxins that may have been used to poison arrow tips in the past.
Two recent review articles in the journals Trends in Ecology & Evolution and Fish and Fisheries, to which researchers from the Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries (IGB) contributed, focus on the influence of humans on the diversity of fish behavior and on how management can help preserve this diversity.
Researchers from the Faculty of Physics at the University of Warsaw, the Military University of Technology (Poland), IBM Research Zurich and the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) have observed a new quantum state of matter known as a supersolid in an exciton-polariton Bose-Einstein condensate. Remarkably, the phenomenon occurs not at temperatures close to absolute zero, but at room temperature. The results have been published in Science Advances.
The more than 100 bacterial species of the genus Vibrio are important in marine ecosystems because they contribute to the carbon cycle and other ecological processes, but they can also be significant pathogens for both humans (they can cause cholera) and animals (they can drastically reduce productivity in fish and crustacean farms [e.g., prawns] or cause coral bleaching). Identifying and quantifying Vibrio species in marine and estuarine water samples is complex because identification errors may occur when using molecular methods that lack sufficient resolution.
Researchers have recently developed a standardized workflow for analyzing DNA methylation in individual cells. The protocol combines an improved laboratory procedure with an automated data analysis tool, making it easier to study differences between cells. Published in Nature Protocols, the study was led by researchers from the Institute of Health and Medical Technology at the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
For a comprehensive understanding of the content of millions of Arabic manuscripts held in libraries around the world, it is crucial for scholars to first examine what their marginalia reveal, according to a new study published in the Journal of Islamic Thought and Civilization.
To guard proprietary know-how, many firms separate their inventors into independent groups so that no single employee sees too much of the organization's knowledge. New research published in Strategic Management Journal finds that when U.S. states strengthened trade secret law, high-tech firms relied less on this kind of compartmentalization and connected their inventors more broadly—and the inventions that followed had greater technological impact.