About 10 million years ago, Antarctica's Southern Ocean started to get so cold that it scared away most fish in the region. Among the fish that stayed were what are now known as black rockcod, part of a famously sturdy family of Antarctic fish. But the black rockcod's future could also now be in jeopardy as Southern Ocean temperatures are projected to shift in the opposite direction due to climate change. [...]
While the national conversation around childhood obesity often focuses on rising health care costs, new research co-authored by Ball State University economist Dr. Maoyong Fan suggests the crisis may also be limiting the "American Dream." The study finds that childhood obesity carries a lifelong "mobility penalty," reducing an individual's likelihood of moving up the economic ladder and living in higher-opportunity neighborhoods as an adult. [...]
Antarctic scientists have trialed a DNA "barcoding" technique that could improve biosecurity measures that help protect polar ecosystems from invasive marine species. The research, led by Australian Antarctic Program scientists, used environmental DNA (eDNA) in water samples to detect species known to hitchhike on ships' hulls. [...]
Kombu (Saccharina japonica) is a brown seaweed extensively cultivated and consumed in Japan, Korea and China. Despite its nutritional value, its strong fishy and grassy odor can deter some consumers. Additionally, many of kombu's nutrients are locked inside rigid cell walls and dense networks that the human digestive system cannot easily break down. As a result, much of this treasure trove of nutrients passes through the body without being absorbed. [...]
Quantum computers—devices that process information using quantum mechanical effects—have long been expected to outperform classical systems on certain tasks. Over the past few decades, researchers have worked to rigorously demonstrate such advantages, ideally in ways that are provable, verifiable and experimentally realizable. [...]
What do coffee, sugar, wheat, soy, eucalypts and paperbarks all have in common? [...]
Carbon dioxide (CO₂) connects us to the natural world: What we breathe out becomes fuel for forests. But inside our own bodies, CO₂ has a secret life. It sparks chemical reactions, shapes metabolism, and may even act as a signaling molecule—and a new tool is finally letting researchers watch it glow in action. [...]
Standing on the coast and looking out to sea, you cannot detect the changes with the naked eye. But in northern Germany, sea levels are rising, as is the risk of flooding for the lower-lying coastal regions. [...]
New research emerging from SFUSD's Shoestrings program reveals informal exclusionary discipline is a widespread problem—but there are solutions. When San Francisco Unified School District created the Shoestrings program—an effort to reduce racial gaps in early childhood discipline—district leaders knew they were taking on an important challenge. What they didn't expect was that this work would reveal a new problem affecting schools across the country. [...]
Researchers at Murdoch University have found that artificial waterbodies could play a crucial role in slowing the decline of Carter's freshwater mussel (Westralunio carteri), a vulnerable species of freshwater mussel found only in southwestern Australia. [...]
Houseplants and more advanced plant systems, such as indoor living walls and hydroponic towers, have the potential to raise indoor humidity, boost thermal comfort and help create healthier, more climate-resilient buildings, according to new research led by the University of Surrey's Global Center for Clean Air Research (GCARE). [...]
When the supercontinent Pangea began to fragment around 200 million years ago during the Early Jurassic, it reshaped the face of the planet. Vast new oceans opened, continents drifted apart and the familiar geography of today slowly emerged. For decades, many geoscientists have suggested that this dramatic breakup was fueled by an accumulation of heat beneath the supercontinent, a kind of planetary "thermal insulation" effect that caused the underlying mantle (the thick layer of rock between Earth's crust and its core) to grow unusually hot. [...]
The humble breadcrumb could hold the key to cutting out fossil fuels from one of the chemical industry's most widely used reactions, according to a new study. Scientists have found a one-pot microbial formula that uses waste bread to replace fossil fuel-derived hydrogen in hydrogenation—a chemical reaction used extensively to manufacture foods, pharmaceuticals, plastics and other everyday products. [...]
Researchers at ETH Zurich have now discovered for the first time that large blackwater lakes in the extensive peatlands of the central Congo Basin are releasing ancient carbon. To date, climate researchers had assumed that carbon was stored safely for millenia in the peat. How the carbon is mobilized from the peat to the lake, where it is finally released to the atmosphere, is still unknown. Climate changes and altered land use, especially the conversion of forest to cropland, could exacerbate this trend—with consequences for the global climate. [...]
New York ordered drivers off the road and shut down schools on Monday, while residents braced for a massive snowstorm hitting the United States northeast. [...]
Grounded until at least April, NASA's giant moon rocket is headed back to the hangar this week for more repairs before astronauts climb aboard. [...]
Around 250 million years ago, what is today scorching desert in remote northwestern Australia was the shore of a shallow bay bordering a vast prehistoric ocean. Fossils recovered from this region over 60 years ago, and almost forgotten in museum collections, have now shed new light on the earliest global radiations of land-living animals adapting to life in the sea. [...]
The number of days when the weather gets hot, dry and windy—ideal to spark extreme wildfires—has nearly tripled in the past 45 years across the globe, with the trend increasing even higher in the Americas, a new study shows. [...]
Nearly a month after a wastewater pipe broke and spewed hundreds of millions of gallons of raw sewage into the Potomac River just north of Washington, D.C., the latest water testing results from the University of Maryland School of Public Health continue to show high levels of E. coli and S. aureus — commonly called staph, including antibiotic-resistant MRSA. [...]
Recent investigations have uncovered forced labor in agricultural supply chains, illegal fishing feeding supermarket freezers, deforestation embedded in everyday food products, and unsafe conditions in factories producing "sustainable" fashion. These harms were not visible on labels. They surfaced only when journalists, whistleblowers or activists exposed them. [...]
When we dream of landscapes, we might imagine rolling valleys or rugged mountains. But there is a whole landscape hidden from human view: the secret world of the seafloor. [...]
Turning on the "For You" algorithm on X (formerly Twitter) may shift users' political opinions toward more conservative views, suggests research involving nearly 5,000 X users. These effects are shown to persist even after users return to a chronological feed, according to a new paper published in Nature. [...]
Since the pandemic, offices around the world have quietly shrunk. Many organizations don't need as much floor space or as many desks, given many staff now do a mix of hybrid work from home and the office. But on days when more staff are required to be in, office spaces can feel noticeably busier and noisier. Despite so much focus on getting workers back into offices, there has been far less focus on the impacts of returning to open-plan workspaces. [...]
Using commercially available technology and innovative methods, researchers at NBI have pushed the limits of how fast you can detect changes in the sensitive quantum states in the qubit. Their work allows researchers to follow rapid changes in qubit performance that were previously invisible. The study is published in the journal Physical Review X. [...]
Data collected during a rowing challenge around the seas of Great Britain has found significantly higher concentrations of microplastic pollution than previously recorded, a new report finds. The team, which included University of Surrey academic Hannah Davies, rowed more than 2,000 miles in just 50 days as part of the GB Row Challenge 2024, while also collecting crucial data on microplastic pollution, underwater man-made sound, water temperature, salinity and biodiversity. [...]
Over the past decade, southern Australia has suffered numerous extreme weather and climate events, such as record-breaking heat waves, bushfires, two major droughts and even flash flooding. [...]
Rapid technological and scientific advances have fueled a huge wave of innovation over the past decades. The speed of global innovation is known to be dependent on the exchange of knowledge and skills between different nations worldwide. [...]
Herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV-1) infection dramatically remodels the host cell's nuclear structures. Infection leads to the formation of viral replication compartments and to chromatin marginalization to the nuclear periphery. Joint research by the Universities of Jyväskylä (Finland) and Bar-Ilan (Israel) reveals that viral infection also alters the structure of nuclear speckles, which are essential for messenger RNA processing. [...]
Researchers in Belgium have unveiled a striking chemical reaction in which ripples along a frozen reaction front resemble the rays of a shining star. Publishing their results in Physical Review Letters, Anne De Wit and colleagues at the Université Libre de Bruxelles have shed new light on the patterns that emerge in reaction–diffusion systems, offering fresh insight into how similar structures arise in the natural world. [...]
Tiny aerosol particles in the air play a big role in regulating how much sunlight our planet absorbs or reflects, and how clouds form above us. In a recent study, researchers found that extreme heat waves can trigger new particle formation (NPF), even at temperatures as high as 40°C (104°F). [...]
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