The tide has turned on the conservation success story of the southern right whale. Once considered a global conservation success story, the species is now emerging as a warning signal of how climate change is impacting threatened marine life, according to new research led by scientists from Flinders University and Curtin University with international collaborators in the US and South Africa. [...]
On a misty winter's day in the English midlands, engineers struggled to drag stranded narrowboats from a waterless, mud-filled canal that collapsed weeks earlier, in a delicate, multi-million-pound rescue operation. [...]
Human-caused climate change had an important impact on the recent ferocious wildfires that engulfed parts of Chile and Argentina's Patagonia region, making the extremely high-risk conditions that led to widespread burning up to three times more likely than in a world without global warming, a team of researchers warned on Wednesday. [...]
The Trump administration on Thursday will revoke a scientific finding that long has been the central basis for U.S. action to regulate greenhouse gas emissions and fight climate change, the White House announced. [...]
Unchecked use of technology and pandemic isolation have "reshaped" how teenagers develop—but it's not too late to intervene. This is the stark warning of educator Amber Chandler, who suggests teens are struggling with unprecedented levels of anxiety in this "scared new world," which presents a major challenge for parents and schools. However, the teacher says children can learn to flourish and thrive if given the right support. [...]
Apart from a few exceptional cases, chemistry is often perceived as difficult, abstract and removed from real life. This affects students' motivation and choices, discouraging them from pursuing academic and professional careers in this important and, in fact, fascinating field. [...]
A new study sheds light on how farmer-led collaboration can help create the conditions to address biodiversity loss in agricultural landscapes. The research looks at "farmer clusters"—groups of farmers working together across landscapes to support biodiversity-sensitive farming—and explores how these collaborative initiatives evolve over time, what shapes their success, and why some mature more effectively than others. [...]
Powerful companies may be dragged into court for human rights harms they claim to know nothing about, according to a new study from the University of Surrey. The researchers argue that global businesses can no longer hide behind complex corporate structures and that major companies risk legal responsibility for labor abuse and even climate damage linked to their global operations. [...]
When it comes to national politics, Americans are fiercely divided across a range of issues, including gun control, election security and vaccines. It's not new for Republicans and Democrats to be at odds over issues, but things have reached a point where even the idea of compromising appears to be anathema, making it more difficult to solve thorny problems. [...]
NASA's plans to get the first human spaceflight of the year off the pad have to hold off until at least Friday because of weather constraints along the flight path needed in case of emergency. That delay, though, opens the door for a national security mission aiming for liftoff on Thursday morning. [...]
More than a year after the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires, the economic aftershocks of the disaster still permeate the lives of the people who survived it. Fewer than a dozen homes in some of the city's hardest-hit neighborhoods have been fully rebuilt. Families remain scattered across temporary rentals, and many are still grappling with letters from their insurers announcing higher premiums, reduced coverage or no renewal at all. [...]
Researchers from the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), in collaboration with researchers from the Institute of Semiconductors of CAS, revealed anomalous oscillatory magnetoresistance in an antiferromagnetic kagome semimetal heterostructure and directly identified its corresponding topological magnetic structures. The results are published in Advanced Functional Materials. [...]
Women are being forced to change their behaviors due to the high levels of flashing and cyberflashing they are exposed to, according to new research co-led by the Durham University Law School. Cyberflashing—generally sending images of a penis to someone without their consent—is "alarmingly common" in the lives of young women with nearly half saying they had experienced it. [...]
Two next-generation satellite missions announced Thursday will help NASA better understand Earth and improve capabilities to foresee environmental events and mitigate disasters. [...]
A new study has found that L1td1, a protein evolutionarily co-opted from the Long interspersed nuclear element 1 (LINE1) retrotransposon, functions as a critical "gatekeeper" restricting pluripotent stem cells (PSCs) from reverting to a totipotent state. The research demonstrates that loss of L1td1 triggers the reactivation of totipotency-associated genes and endogenous retroviruses (ERVs), prompting cells to spontaneously regress to a totipotent-like (or 2-cell-like) state that mirrors the earliest stages of embryogenesis. Notably, the study identifies L1td1 as a key post-transcriptional regulator that suppresses endogenous viral elements to sustain pluripotency. [...]
Plastic pollution has become a major global environmental concern as modern societies rely increasingly on plastic products. Much of this plastic waste eventually reaches the ocean, with rivers acting as the main transport routes from urban, agricultural, and other landscapes, thereby affecting the lives of marine organisms. [...]
Women in the UK who use online banking tools are nearly five times as likely to manage their household finances and about twice as likely to have the final say in major financial decisions, compared with women who don't bank online, a new UCL-led study has found. Using nationally representative data of heterosexual couples aged 20–64 from the United Kingdom Household Longitudinal Study, researchers show how online banking enhances its users' financial influence within their relationship, making them more likely to manage the couple's money and have the final say in major financial decisions. [...]
Experiencing a natural disaster in childhood can shape how business leaders approach workplace safety decades later, according to a new Concordia-led study. The study found that CEOs who have lived through events like major earthquakes, floods or hurricanes early in life run firms that prioritize safer workplaces. According to mandatory disclosure statistics supplied to the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), their companies report fewer work-related injuries and illnesses than similar ones run by executives who have not lived through those types of events. [...]
On April 20, 2023, a juvenile great white shark (Carcharodon carcharias) measuring approximately 210 cm and weighing between 80 and 90 kg was incidentally caught by local fishermen off the coast of the eastern peninsula within the Spanish Exclusive Economic Zone. This rare encounter prompted researchers to dive deep into past records spanning from 1862 to 2023, compiling an extensive review now published in the open-access journal Acta Ichthyologica et Piscatoria. [...]
New research led by the University of Michigan is painting a more comprehensive picture of how noise pollution is impacting birds around the world. "The major takeaway from this study is that anthropogenic noise affects many aspects of bird behavior, with some responses more directly tied to fitness," said Natalie Madden, lead author of the new study published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. [...]
Deep soils found in forests may be less effective at storing carbon in the long term than previously assumed, potentially reducing the net climate benefits of tree planting, a University of Stirling professor has warned. Professor Jens-Arne Subke of the University's Faculty of Natural Sciences has co-authored a new commentary with Dr. Thomas Parker of the James Hutton Institute that builds on recent research led by Professor Subke that cautioned that the climate benefits of tree-planting could be overstated if soil carbon losses aren't included in calculations. [...]
Scientists have uncovered new DNA-binding proteins from some of the most extreme environments on Earth and shown that they can improve rapid medical tests for infectious diseases. The work has been published in Nucleic Acids Research. The international research team, led by Durham University and working with partners in Iceland, Norway and Poland, analyzed genetic material from Icelandic volcanic lakes and deep-sea vents more than two kilometers below the surface of the North Atlantic Ocean. [...]
The unveiling by IBM of two new quantum supercomputers and Denmark's plans to develop "the world's most powerful commercial quantum computer" mark just two of the latest developments in quantum technology's increasingly rapid transition from experimental breakthroughs to practical applications. [...]
It's February, and you grab a box of cheap Valentine's chocolate from the grocery store on your lunch break. Later, you're eating it at your office desk when you realize someone else is watching. Suddenly, you feel a flicker of embarrassment. You hide the box away, make a joke or quietly wish they hadn't noticed—not because the chocolate tastes bad, but because you don't want to be judged for choosing it. [...]
In 18th- and 19th-century Ireland, it was common for courting couples to exchange gifts to mark their developing relationships. Many of these items are familiar gifts today: books, cards, items of clothing, jewelry and sweet treats. Others, however, are less familiar. In fact, some of the gifts exchanged by couples in the past might give many today the dreaded ick—especially those items of the hairier variety. [...]
School restrictive smartphone policies may save a small amount of money for schools, primarily by reducing the amount of time staff spend on managing phone-related behaviors, but they make little difference to pupils' quality of life or mental well-being, finds a health economic analysis, published in the online journal BMJ Mental Health. [...]
A Dartmouth study finds that molecular hitchhikers living within bacteria can make their hosts extra resistant to medical treatment by corralling them into tightly packed groups. The findings introduce a previously unknown avenue through which bacterial infections can become more difficult to treat, the researchers say. [...]
Farmers now have more reasons to consider rotating their crops, University of Alberta research shows. Widely used to restore soil health, the agricultural practice boosts the diversity of bacterial and fungal microbes that benefit soil function, according to a new study published in Nature Communications. [...]
What was the political and economic importance of the ancient city Alexandria on the Tigris? How was the city laid out? And what does the material culture of the international trade hub look like? These are the questions that Stefan Hauser, professor of ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern archaeology at the University of Konstanz, and his British colleagues Jane Moon, Robert Killick and Stuart Campbell have been working on since 2016. With the help of modern geophysics methods, thousands of drone images and a systematic surface survey, the researchers concluded that Alexandria on the Tigris had been an impressive metropolis. [...]
If you've ever watched a glass blower at work, you've seen a material behaving in a very special way. As it cools, the viscosity of molten glass increases steadily but gradually, allowing it to be shaped without a mold. Physicists call this behavior a strong glass transition, and silica glass is the textbook example. Most polymer glasses behave very differently, and are known as fragile glass formers. Their viscosity rises much more steeply as temperature drops, and therefore they cannot be processed without a mold or very precise temperature control. [...]
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