Fashion has always been a bit different to other industries. Consumers do not just buy because they need something. They buy because they are bored, influenced or simply browsing. [...]
Forever chemicals don't break down and don't disappear, but Florida International University scientists have developed a safer, cheaper, and reusable solution that could remove these chemicals. FIU chemistry professor Kevin O'Shea and chemistry Ph.D. candidate Rodrigo Restrepo Osorio have created a new cleanup approach that captures and releases PFAS chemicals on demand by using water's own pH level. [...]
Engineers interested in creating artificial cells to deliver drugs to unhealthy parts of the body face a key challenge: for a cell-like system to move, change shape, or divide, it needs a way to generate force on command. [...]
Humans have always been playful. But for much of our history, play has left little trace. Unlike tools or bones, games rarely preserve and the fleeting pleasures they produce are even harder to recover. [...]
In a major advance, researchers at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) have devised a method to grow high-quality 2D magnetic materials (2D-MMs) over centimeter-scale wafers. Earlier approaches in the field were limited to growing micrometer-sized flakes. This advance paves the way for their integration into next-generation electronics and spintronics materials used in hard drives and sensors. [...]
I spent last summer wading through seagrass meadows across Northern Ireland, from the sheltered waters of Strangford Lough to the exposed coast at Waterfoot Bay. I was collecting seagrass leaves and testing them for nitrogen pollution. Every meadow I visited sits inside a marine protected area—a stretch of sea that's been given legal protection to safeguard the wildlife living there. And every single one was polluted beyond the limit for healthy seagrass. [...]
Mercury is a small, rocky planet about which researchers know relatively little. Two missions, taking readings as they passed over the planet, have revealed that Mercury is covered by an iron-poor and sulfur-rich crust. It is also reduced, a chemical state in which the substances have gained electrons. In fact, it's the most reduced planet in the solar system. [...]
In the heart of the Middle Atlas Mountains in central Morocco, a global team of paleontologists and geologists has discovered new remains of a very unusual dinosaur. It belonged to the group called ankylosaurs, plant eaters whose bodies were covered in bony plates. [...]
Picture two materials sandwiched together. The boundary between them may appear flat, but, in reality, it is full of tiny bumps and dents. Suddenly, the materials are hit with a shockwave. If that wave hits a bump in the material interface, it slows down. If it hits a dent, it accelerates forward. This imbalance creates fast, narrow jets of material—called the Richtmyer-Meshkov (RM) instability. [...]
Some lovers try positions that they can't handle—I'm referring to the bones of the wrist, of course. The phrase is a classic mnemonic used to remember the eight carpal (wrist) bones—scaphoid, lunate, triquetrum, pisiform, trapezium, trapezoid, capitate and hamate—whose initials form the memorable sentence. [...]
Luminous fast blue optical transients (LFBOTs) are among the universe's brightest and fastest explosions but their origin is not completely understood. A new study takes a closer look at the galaxies they occur in, offering two important clues about their nature. A paper outlining these results was uploaded to the preprint server arXiv on March 24. [...]
The Perseus Cluster is a massive galaxy cluster located in the constellation Perseus. It is one of the largest structures in the observable universe, comprising more than a thousand galaxies—equivalent to roughly a thousand trillion times the mass of the sun. Hot gases within the cluster, known as the intracluster medium (ICM), emit powerful X-rays detectable by telescopes. These gases are produced by billions of supernova explosions, and their chemical composition reveals how typical supernovae have exploded throughout cosmic history. [...]
The lakes, streams, and ponds you've visited for years are likely looking more brown than they used to. And people who are fishing those waters are likely catching different species and sizes of fish than in the past. [...]
French mathematician Frank Merle, who won a prestigious Breakthrough Prize on Saturday, told AFP that fundamental research must be supported because it is a "foundation stone" for the future. [...]
The world's appetite for propene (propylene) is growing faster than the chemical industry can keep up. This petrochemical product powers the production of acrylonitrile, propylene oxide, high-velocity fuels, and, most importantly, polypropylene plastic—used in everyday food packaging and textiles, as well as in essential medical equipment. [...]
Have you ever wished to drive microscopic matter along an arbitrarily tailored trajectory instead of just a circle? That's exactly what we set out to achieve. [...]
A paper published in the journal Science Advances is adding to the growing body of research showing that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) is weakening. In this new study, instead of relying mainly on computer models, scientists used two decades of direct ocean measurements to confirm the decline. [...]
Big names from the worlds of film, technology, music and sports gathered on Saturday in Santa Monica, California, for the Breakthrough Prizes, popularly known as the "Oscars of Science." [...]
Blue Origin, the U.S. space company of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, successfully reused and recovered a booster for its New Glenn rocket on Sunday, confirming its mastery of a technical feat that could boost its launch cadence and expand its rivalry with SpaceX. [...]
On contaminated land that is too dangerous for human life, the world's wildest horses roam free. [...]
A research team led by Lea Lorenz of the RPTU University Kaiserslautern-Landau and Sven Kachel of the University of Kassel conducted a comprehensive meta-analysis that examined how men react to situations in which their masculinity is called into question. To this end, the team systematically organized and analyzed 123 experiments, predominantly from Western countries, involving 19,448 men. [...]
Protein engineering is a field primed for artificial intelligence research. Each protein is made up of amino acids; to optimize a protein function, researchers modify proteins by switching out one of 20 different amino acids for another. For a protein that is just 50 amino acids in length, this leads to approximately 1.13x1065 potential combinations to test—that's 113 followed by 65 zeroes, or five times as many zeroes as a trillion has. [...]
Researchers in the UC Santa Barbara Materials Department have uncovered the elusive quantum mechanism by which energetic electrons break chemical bonds inside microelectronic devices—a detrimental process that slowly degrades performance over time. The discovery, published as an Editors' Suggestion in Physical Review B, explains decades-old experimental puzzles and moves scientists closer to engineering more reliable devices. [...]
Coastal landscapes are constantly being reshaped by natural forces, and as climate change causes more frequent storms and sea level rise, that change will only intensify. Because these areas are densely populated with homes, tourist destinations, and industries, understanding how and where the coast will change is a pressing issue. However, reliable predictions that lead to actionable knowledge are rare. [...]
Last year, tungsten diselenide (WSe2) had its magic moment. Two independent research groups discovered "magic angles" at which two atom-thin layers of the unique semiconductor, when twisted relative to one another into what's known as a moire pattern, can superconduct electricity. Cory Dean and his colleagues at Columbia documented superconductivity at a 5° twist angle; upstate at Cornell, Jie Shan and Kin Fai Mak's team saw it at around 3.5°. Until then, graphene was the only other moire material capable of the feat. [...]
Spatially distributed prediction of streamflow and nitrogen (N) export dynamics is essential for precision management of agricultural watersheds. While temporal deep learning models have shown strong basin-scale performance, their ability to generalize spatially is limited, particularly under data-scarce conditions. To address this gap, a team of researchers led by the Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation (CABBI) propose HydroGraphNet, a knowledge-guided graph machine learning framework integrating process-based knowledge and explicit spatial learning into temporal modeling. [...]
The outbreak of a mysterious and deadly disease in finches in British gardens in 2005 set alarm bells ringing for conservationists. A decade later, the extent of that disease in greenfinches and chaffinches was reported. And now, bird scientists are beginning to understand how feeding birds in our gardens might be linked to their health and survival. [...]
When people consider what causes high blood pressure, they often think of lifestyle factors, such as eating salty foods, lack of exercise or smoking. However, an unexpected source of salt might also be raising blood pressure for millions of people: the water they drink. [...]
Every 25 minutes in the United States, a baby is diagnosed with neonatal abstinence syndrome (NAS), a condition that occurs in newborns who have been exposed to opioids in the womb and develop withdrawal after birth, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Historically, research has focused on the impact of NAS—also known as neonatal opioid withdrawal syndrome—on the health and development of young children, which has found that prenatal opioid exposure is associated with increased risk for adverse developmental, cognitive and behavioral outcomes in early childhood. [...]
The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) has successfully completed the largest high-resolution 3D map of the universe ever made, a major milestone in understanding the force driving cosmic expansion. The milestone was reached when DESI's 5,000 fiber-optic sensors captured their final scheduled observations, targeting a region of sky near the Little Dipper. [...]