Explore the latest scientific discoveries, science news, breakthroughs and developments from around the world.
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.