Latest science news, discoveries and scientific developments.
As temperatures rise and development expands, the number of homes and other structures damaged or destroyed by wildfires across the U.S. is on pace to triple by midcentury, my colleagues and I found in a study just published.
Hundreds of millions of metric tons of plastics are produced every year, and most of them end up sitting in landfills or polluting natural environments after use. These plastics endure for dozens to hundreds of years. But some scientists are on the lookout for solutions to this problem. And now, one team of researchers might have found a potential solution in bee nests. Their study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows that a natural plastic made by bees may offer design lessons for plastics that degrade naturally in far less time.
Conventional chemotherapy treatments often attack not only cancer cells but also healthy tissue, leading to severe side effects such as hair loss or nausea. The team led by Dr. Thomas Ward from the Department of Chemistry and the Swiss Nanoscience Institute (SNI) at the University of Basel is therefore pursuing an approach that uses artificial metal compounds as catalysts that specifically bind to tumor cells and then convert so-called prodrugs into the active ingredient at the tumor site.
Researchers have developed a new approach that uses synthetic DNA molecules to target cancer-linked genes directly, opening new possibilities for future treatments, diagnostics and biological research.
Some bird species act as "double mutualists" for a common mistletoe, both pollinating its flowers and dispersing its seeds. These double mutualists play an effective role in mistletoe reproduction.
Expert Counter-Strike players could make ideal candidates for fast-paced emergency service response jobs requiring split-second decision-making, according to a new University of Sheffield study aiming to debunk myths about video games.
Modern calculators have many buttons, including ones for sine, square root, pi and exponents. But it’s possible just two could suffice
In a short space of time, artificial intelligence has become a whiz at designing proteins, molecular machines that perform various functions such as speeding up reactions, producing fluorescent signals and breaking down plastic. But getting AI to design the specific protein you want usually requires the user to have a strong understanding of molecular structures and geometric constraints to guide the models correctly.
AI is screening résumés, prompting some managers to hire fewer entry-level workers and leading others to expect beginners to tackle more advanced work, Northeastern University's AI & Society Survey found. The report is the latest in a series that opened with an analysis of how people across the political spectrum view AI training.
In 2025, a local crabber reached out to professor Romuald Lipcius with some news: He'd been catching stone crabs in the Chesapeake Bay. Native to Florida, the species had reached its northernmost documented occurrence to date. News got out, and William & Mary's VIMS & Batten School were flooded with additional sightings from the public. Some were legitimate; many were mistaken identities.
A study published in Nature Communications, led by professor Jurriaan Ton and Dr. Adam Hannan Parker at the University of Sheffield, has identified mechanisms by which plants maintain and reset stress memory from past infections. This immune memory enables plants to defend themselves more effectively against harmful bacteria and mildews, which are increasingly threatening our crop and food production.
An open-source software tool to help find a sweet spot between competing environmental and development demands has been launched by researchers at the University of Queensland.
Visigothic and Vandal forces marched into Italy and conquered Rome; the Huns spread fear and terror on their campaigns through Western Europe; the Franks expanded their domain southward—the fifth century was an era of profound, often violent upheavals in Europe, and at the same time one of great mobility. Researchers from the Institute of Clinical Molecular Biology (IKMB) at Christian-Albrechts-University in Kiel and the Lower Saxony Institute for Historical Coastal Research (NIhK) have now identified a specific example of this mobility in the Fallward burial ground in what is now the district of Cuxhaven.
With their mysterious glow and swirling veils of color, auroras enchant even experienced researchers. When a particularly intense solar storm reached Earth on the night of May 10, 2024, and relevant websites predicted auroras even for southern Lower Saxony, several researchers from the Technical University of Braunschweig, the Fraunhofer Institute for Surface Engineering and Thin Films IST, the University of Göttingen, and the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) took to the outdoors.
Should an area be fenced off, should animals be sterilized or relocated—or, as a last resort, selectively culled? As the long-running controversy over white-tailed deer in the Montreal suburb of Longueuil's Michel-Chartrand Park has shown, managing wildlife in peri-urban parks isn't just about the science. Emotions, trust and how decisions are communicated also play a role.
If a dangerous asteroid were headed toward Earth, one defense could be a nuclear detonation to blast one side with X-rays and nudge it off course. But new simulations suggest that for a lumpy, irregular asteroid, exactly where those X-rays hit could make a huge difference.
W.E.B. Du Bois' standing as a distinguished social scientist, with a distinguished body of work, has been subjected to the same marginalizing forces he examined in his pioneering scholarship on race, culture and Black social thought.
A newly identified Arctic Ocean bacterium may have an unusual way of making the building blocks it needs to grow. Using acetone, a common chemical in seawater, the bacteria incorporate carbon dioxide (CO₂) into their metabolisms, allowing them to survive in waters where nutrients and usable organic matter are scarce.
High temperatures change how mealybugs feed, and that could help explain why some pasture mealybug infestations do far more damage than others, according to early findings from Texas A&M AgriLife Research scientists.
New toxicology tests of Incan mummies found the kids were given not just cocaine but also alcohol and chemicals found in ayahuasca before the ceremony