Explore the latest scientific discoveries, science news, breakthroughs and developments from around the world.
Artificial intelligence is helping Texas A&M AgriLife Research scientists fast-track answers to a long-standing question in human biology: What do hundreds of mystery proteins in the mitochondria actually do?
When a company suffers a cyberattack, leaks customer data or faces a major public scandal, telling the truth is essential. But new research suggests it is not enough on its own: organizations also need to communicate early, treat people with respect and show how they intend to put things right.
A new study has found that a self-reinforcing interaction between temperature, soil moisture and atmospheric pressure is being triggered at high temperatures, making extreme heat waves 10% hotter than they would otherwise be. The study was published in Science Advances and led by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA).
Researchers at the Francis Crick Institute have identified a specialized lipid barrier in the fruit fly pupa that protects against dehydration in dry and hot environments. Their findings also expose the lipid barrier's limit, suggesting that insects in some regions of the world may struggle to adapt to climate change.
Using data from a 1950s Russian experiment, researchers are getting “to the heart of brain programming” in foxes
A battery material can look perfect in the lab and still fail in a real battery. That is the puzzle facing researchers working on solid electrolytes, the materials seen as key to safer, longer-lasting batteries.
Food spoilage causes chemical changes that are not always easy to detect by appearance alone. To provide a clearer indication of freshness and quality, researchers at Kyushu University have developed a smart packaging film that changes color and glows under ultraviolet (UV) light as meat loses freshness. Tested with refrigerated mutton, the film responds to compounds released during spoilage, offering two ways to track changes in food quality. The findings are published in the Chemical Engineering Journal.
We live in a noisy world. Whether it is the roar of traffic, the rumble of ships or the hum of heavy industry, there is often no escaping noise unless you are a hermit on a desert island.
This year may be seen as a turning point in the climate crisis. The U.N. has accepted that global warming is going to exceed 1.5°C, while climate scientists have concluded that the rate of warming has effectively doubled over the past decade.
Enzymes are biology's tiny chemists. They help build, break and rearrange molecules quickly and precisely. In the lab, scientists have long put enzymes to work making useful chemicals. But nature's enzymes cannot do every reaction a researcher might want. Sometimes scientists need an enzyme to take on a job it did not evolve to do. That's where enzyme engineering comes in—researchers make changes to an enzyme, test how those changes affect what the enzyme does and look for versions that work better.
During four days on Washington's Olympic Peninsula, I saw an Olympic marmot, a species found nowhere else on Earth; four bumblebee species working the same lavender plant; three western hermit crab species new to me; and five orcas slicing through the dark water off Ediz Hook. Any one of them could have been the trip's highlight.
Optical cavities are pairs of light-trapping mirrors and underpin the operation of lasers, atomic clocks and many types of precision sensors. If the distance between the mirrors is changed rapidly enough, some theories predict that the waves inside them should bunch together into short, intense pulses. So far, however, this prediction has never been tested directly.