NASA's Curiosity Mars rover captured this panorama of boxwork formations—the low ridges seen here with hollows in between them—using its Mastcam on Sept. 26, 2025, the 4,671st Martian day (sol) of the mission. These boxwork formations were created billions of years ago when water leaked through rock cracks. Minerals carried into the cracks later hardened; after eons of windblown sand eroding away the softer rock, the hardened ridges were left exposed. [...]
Six planets are linking up in the sky at the end of February, and most will be visible to the naked eye. [...]
LEDs no wider than a human hair could soon take on work traditionally handled by lasers, from moving data inside server racks to powering next-generation displays. New research co-authored by UC Santa Barbara doctoral student Roark Chao points to a practical path forward. The study is published in the journal Optics Express. [...]
Probability underpins AI, cryptography and statistics. However, as the philosopher Bertrand Russell said, "Probability is the most important concept in modern science, especially as nobody has the slightest notion what it means." [...]
Southwest Research Institute was part of an international team that demonstrated how complex organic molecules (COMs), key chemical precursors to life, could have been incorporated into Jupiter's Galilean moons during their formation. The team's findings have resulted in complementary studies published in The Planetary Science Journal and Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, offering new insights into the potential for life in the Jovian system. [...]
Extracellular vesicles (EVs) are tiny biological bubbles that carry nucleic acids and proteins between cells, playing an essential role in tissue repair, neuroprotection and immune health. By isolating the surface proteins of these bubbles, researchers can understand more about their biology and build tools to transform extracellular vesicles into next-generation drugs for cancer, neurological conditions and other diseases. [...]
Plant owners with a so-called green thumb often seem to have a more finely tuned sense of what their plants need than the rest of us. A new "smart lighting" system for indoor vertical farms grants this ability on a facility-wide scale, responsively meeting plants' needs while reducing energy inefficiencies, clearing a path for indoor farms as an energy-efficient food security strategy. [...]
A research team at King's College London has isolated a new form of aluminum—a highly abundant metal, that could provide a far cheaper and more sustainable alternative to commonly used rare earth metals. Dr. Clare Bakewell, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Chemistry, and her lab developed highly reactive aluminum molecules able to break apart tough chemical bonds. Published in Nature Communications, their work has also unlocked molecular structures that have never been observed before, which creates the potential for new kinds of reactive behavior. [...]
Rice, maize, and cassava crops cumulatively account for approximately 11% of total global deforestation—exceeding that of cocoa, coffee, and rubber—according to an analysis between 2001 and 2022, published in Nature Food. These staple crops should not be overlooked in global efforts to reduce deforestation, the authors argue. [...]
Researchers at the University of Waterloo have discovered a way to turn plastic waste into acetic acid, the main ingredient of vinegar, using sunlight. The breakthrough offers a promising new approach to reducing plastic pollution through photocatalysis, while simultaneously creating a useful, value-added chemical product through a process inspired by nature. [...]
For many animals, siblings are a key component of their social environment during early life. Previous research has shown that the early social environment is important, but it has not yet been clear whether the number of siblings or the nature of their interactions is the decisive factor. "The early social environment is often treated as a single, uniform factor," says Bruno Camargo dos Santos, behavioral ecologist of Wageningen University & Research and lead author of a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "We wanted to experimentally disentangle what exactly makes the difference." [...]
New research has revealed that women and children were deliberately targeted in one of the largest prehistoric mass killings discovered in Europe. Archaeological investigations at the Gomolava burial sites in northern Serbia uncovered a grave containing the remains of more than 77 individuals, most of them women and children. [...]
What makes one bat take risks and venture far from its roost in search of food, while another stays close to familiar, safer areas? A new study from Tel Aviv University's School of Zoology reveals that the environment in which a bat is raised during the first months of its life largely determines how it will behave in the wild, sometimes even more than its innate personality. [...]
Scientists have observed a new microscopic mechanism enabling precise control of the magneto-optical properties of excitons in alloys of two-dimensional semiconductors. This discovery opens up tangible prospects for technological applications in devices exploiting valleytronics. The research findings were published in the journal Physical Review Letters. [...]
Natural muscle fibers are made up of spring-like proteins that can contract and stretch without losing their original form, dissipate mechanical energy as heat and maintain incredible tensile strength for all sorts of physical functions. Engineers at Washington University in St. Louis have replicated these proteins using synthetic biology approaches to create a new category of biomaterials for use in medicine, textiles and agriculture. [...]
With the current U.S. federal administration abandoning its leadership role in the fight against climate change, international efforts by governments to mitigate global warming appear to have stalled, at least for now. But according to Adelina Barbalau, an expert on climate finance in the Alberta School of Business, hope may lie elsewhere—in the global marketplace and the opportunities for multinational companies to pick up the slack. [...]
An archaeological study reveals how ancient hunter-gatherer groups lived—and survived—more than a thousand years ago in the transition zone between the Pampas and Patagonia in Argentina. The research, carried out by Martínez and colleagues, focuses on the Zoko Andi 1 site (ZA1), located on the lower basin of the Colorado River, a key location for understanding the daily life of these early settlers in the south. The work is published in the journal Latin American Antiquity. [...]
Researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar (IITGN), in collaboration with international partners, have shown that ocean temperature patterns help limit the global spread of droughts. Published in Communications Earth & Environment, the study analyzed climate data from 1901–2020 and found that synchronized droughts affected between 1.8% and 6.5% of global land, far lower than earlier claims that one-sixth of the planet could dry out at once. [...]
New observations of Ganymede reveal a striking similarity between the auroras on the largest moon in the solar system and those on Earth. The international team of astrophysicists, led by researchers from the University of Liège, has produced new results indicating that, despite different conditions, the fundamental physical processes that generate auroras are common to different celestial bodies, and not just planets. [...]
NLP offers powerful opportunities to support the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)—including SDG2 (Zero Hunger). In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Russia-Ukraine war, mounting climate change impacts, and other crises in the 2020s, global food security has suffered and progress towards meeting SDG2 has lagged. Urgent action, backed by evidence-based policymaking, is needed to reverse this trend. [...]
At Rice University, a research lab's signature keepsake has helped perfect a method for growing patterned diamond surfaces that could help decrease operating temperatures in electronics by 23 degrees Celsius. The paper is published in the journal Applied Physics Letters. [...]
Scientists have developed an adaptable materials platform that can safely and efficiently deliver a wide range of genetic medicines, an advance that could accelerate the development of next-generation vaccines, cancer treatments, and gene-silencing drugs. Experts from the University of Nottingham's School of Pharmacy have created a new drug delivery platform that uses modular building blocks that self-assemble with ribonucleic acid- RNA to form nanoscale delivery particles. The research has been published in Advanced Materials. [...]
A technology has been developed that uses robots rather than humans to evaluate the performance of newly developed catalysts. By operating 45 times faster than manual work while also improving precision, it is expected to significantly shorten catalyst development timelines. A research team led by Dr. Ji Chan Park of the Clean Fuel Research Laboratory at the Korea Institute of Energy Research has developed a system that fully automates complex and repetitive catalyst performance evaluation experiments. [...]
Egg yolk may appear runny and uniform, but on the nanoscale, it is one of the most crowded biological fluids in nature. Packed with proteins and fats, it serves as a dense storage reservoir for a developing embryo. Yet the tiny particles responsible for transporting these nutrients—low-density lipoproteins (LDLs)—must remain mobile enough to reach their destinations. How they navigate this complex "nanoscale traffic jam" has long puzzled scientists. [...]
Light powers everything from communications to sensing, yet even tiny imperfections can scatter it and weaken signals. To address this, a team led by the University of Bath—working with the University of Cambridge and international partners—has developed a new structure that keeps light flowing smoothly even through bends, twists or damage, with the potential to operate over unprecedented distances. [...]
Drugs made of mRNA have the potential to transform medicine—if only they could get into cells in one piece. Now, University of Connecticut researchers have shown that packaging mRNA like a virus could smuggle it into cells safely, opening up a new way to deliver mRNA into cells to treat diseases such as cancer. Their research is published in the journal ACS Nano. [...]
When the federal government brings its toughest environmental enforcement actions against polluters, they tend to be in communities of greater wealth, not the most polluted places. That's the takeaway from a new paper co-authored by a Washington State University researcher that examined criminal prosecutions by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency from 2011 to 2020 in every U.S. county. The findings are published in the journal Nature Sustainability. [...]
Sometimes, transporting electrons from one cell to another is a team effort. In electroactive bacteria, that team is a group of proteins that shepherds electrons forward, passing them along like a relay baton, so they can penetrate the thick cell envelope comprising multiple layers of membranes that otherwise are not electroconductive. But how these proteins collaborate to achieve this has not been clear. [...]
Whether in our bodies or in fuel cells, phosphoric acid plays an important role in many chemical processes because it is exceptionally good at transporting charges. Researchers from the Department of Molecular Physics at the Fritz Haber Institute gained new molecular insights into this remarkable property of the small molecule. Their results are published in The Journal of Physical Chemistry A. [...]
For the first time, a much younger version of the sun has been caught red-handed blowing bubbles in the galaxy by astronomers using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. The bubble—called an "astrosphere"—completely surrounds the juvenile star. Winds from the star's surface are blowing up the bubble and filling it with hot gas as it expands into much cooler galactic gas and dust surrounding the star. The sun has a similar bubble around it, which scientists call the heliosphere, created by the solar wind. It extends far beyond the planets in our solar system and protects Earth from damaging particles from interstellar space. [...]