California's Bay Area may be a culinary hot spot for people, but food options for fish in the San Francisco Estuary have been limited and declining in recent decades. A new study from the University of California, Davis, shows there is a part of the estuary that is teeming with fish food—the managed wetlands of Suisun Marsh. [...]
Hygiene in everyday items that touch the body—such as clothing, masks, and toothbrushes—is critically important. The underlying principle of how graphene selectively eliminates only bacteria has now been revealed. In Advanced Functional Materials, a KAIST research team presents the potential for a next-generation antibacterial material that is safe for the human body and capable of replacing antibiotics. [...]
Wildfire smoke is teeming with them. Researchers have employed them to develop energy-dense biofuels like rocket, marine, and jet fuels. Scientists have engineered rice paddies that interact differently with them, causing lower methane "burping." They can be used to extract valuable metals like lithium and copper from plants like seaweed. [...]
With artificial intelligence (AI) as an essential tool, San Diego State University researchers have discovered surprising similarities among ancient writing systems from Africa and the Caucasus region of Eurasia. Their study suggests that the Armenian alphabet may be more closely related in structure to the ancient Ethiopic writing system than linguists and historians previously thought. The paper is published in the journal Digital Scholarship in the Humanities. [...]
Ribonucleic acids (RNAs) serve as messengers between DNA and protein production, and perform a wide variety of regulatory functions across different cellular processes. This makes them an interesting target for drug designers. Molecular genetics researcher Danny Incarnato (University of Groningen) studies how small-molecule drugs could interfere with RNA structure and function. In a new paper published on March 23 in the journal Nature Communications, he shows that small molecules that bind to RNA only rarely affect its function, while molecules that change RNA structure have a bigger effect. [...]
CERN scientists on Tuesday pulled off the unprecedented feat of transporting antiprotons by road, successfully test-driving the world's first antimatter delivery system, with an eye to one day supplying research labs across Europe. [...]
While humans often struggle to find a partner who is both physically attractive and a reliable co-parent, yeast may already have cracked the formula for the perfect match. When choosing mates, these single-celled organisms tend to pick partners that may increase the chances of their offspring's success, according to a new study by scientists at the Weizmann Institute of Science, published in Cell Reports. [...]
Astronomers from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and elsewhere report the discovery of a binary system consisting of two brown dwarfs undergoing stable mass transfer. The detection of the system, designated ZTF J1239+8347, was made with the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) and is detailed in a paper published March 18 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. [...]
For more than 40 years, the Golden State Killer haunted California. A serial rapist and murderer active in the 1970s and '80s, he eluded detectives for decades. By 2018, hope of identifying him was fading, until a woman—curious about her ancestry—spat into a plastic tube and mailed it to a genealogy company. [...]
There is a place in northern Chile, 3,500 meters above sea level in the Andean Altiplano, where almost nothing survives. The Salar de Pajonales is a salt flat of savage extremes temperatures swinging from −23°C to 26°C, solar radiation among the highest measured anywhere on Earth, annual rainfall that barely registers, and winds that rip across the surface at over 100 kilometers per hour. And yet, life is there. [...]
Using NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), an international team of astronomers has discovered an extrasolar planet orbiting TOI-4616—a nearby M-dwarf star. The newfound alien world, which received designation TOI-4616 b, is slightly larger than Earth. The finding was reported in a research paper published March 11 on the arXiv pre-print server. [...]
Neanderthals split into distinct regional groups that developed genetic differences far sooner than modern human populations typically did, according to a study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. These findings were based on the analysis of a newly sequenced 110,000-year-old Neanderthal genome, which researchers compared with previously mapped DNA from several other Neanderthal remains. [...]
Hair damaged by dyes, bleaching or harsh sunlight has just got special treatment. Green chemistry researchers at Flinders University are experimenting with plant-based oils to develop a promising new structural keratin-type repair application to reduce breakage and improve hair health. [...]
The world is struggling to deal with ever-growing quantities of waste. A new World Bank Group report, What a Waste 3.0, shows that more than 2.6 billion tonnes of municipal solid waste (which includes rubbish from households, businesses and street cleaning) were generated in 2022. That figure is projected to rise to 3.9 billion tonnes by 2050. The good news is that the share of waste that is mismanaged is expected to fall over that period, from around 30% to around 20%. [...]
Quantum computers, systems that process information leveraging quantum mechanical effects, could outperform classical computers on some computationally demanding tasks. Despite their potential, as the size of quantum computers increases, reliably describing and measuring the states driving their functioning becomes increasingly difficult. [...]
Some of the most ancient fossils collected to date were traced back to the Ediacaran period. This is the time interval ranging from around 635 to 541 million years ago, shortly before the time when scientists predict that a wide range of animals started appearing. [...]
Neptune is the solar system's most distant planet, a cold, blue ice giant sitting nearly 30 times further from the sun than Earth. At that remote distance, temperatures plunge to nearly minus 200 degrees Celsius and a single year lasts 165 Earth years. Yet despite its isolation, Neptune is a world whipped by the fastest winds in the solar system and home to one of its most bizarre moons. [...]
Quantum technologies, devices that can process, store, or detect information leveraging quantum mechanical effects, could outperform classical devices in some tasks or scenarios. Despite their potential, verifying that these devices work correctly and truly realize desired quantum states can be challenging, particularly when they cannot be fully examined or inspected. [...]
More than 10,000 Starlink satellites currently orbit Earth. We see them crawling across dark skies, no matter how remote our location, and streaking through images from research telescopes. [...]
Seals are carnivorous marine mammals that are well adapted to hunting for fish underwater, where visibility is poor. In such conditions, seals rely on their highly sensitive whiskers to detect tiny water movements left behind by swimming fish. Like rats and cats, seals also move or "whisk" their whiskers back and forth, but the benefit of this motion was long unclear. New research by University of Groningen Ph.D. student Chinmay Gupta, Professor Ajay Kottapalli, and colleagues shows that active whisking improves sensing, helping seals accurately follow underwater trails. The findings are published in the journal npj Flexible Electronics. [...]
One of the things astronomers find when they look around at galaxies is a correlation between a galaxy's mass and the mass of its supermassive black hole. Contrary to popular belief, these SMBH don't anchor their galaxies; they make up only a small portion of a galaxy's mass. In local galaxies, the ratio of SMBH mass to galaxy mass is about 0.1%–0.5%. [...]
Waterloo scientists have developed a new way to understand how the universe began, and it could change what we know about the Big Bang and the earliest moments of cosmic history. Their work suggests that the universe's rapid early expansion could have arisen naturally from a deeper, more complete theory of quantum gravity. The paper, "Ultraviolet completion of the Big Bang in quadratic gravity," appears in Physical Review Letters. [...]
General relativity stands as one of the bedrock theories in modern physics. Its strange view of relative time and space has been confirmed by countless experimental and observational tests, from rotational frame dragging to the radiation of gravitational waves. But there is reason to believe that it is not the final say on the nature of space and time. [...]
Every spring, Canadian beekeepers await the arrival of queen bees crucial to their industry. The queens that populate Canadian bee colonies through the season largely do not come from Canada at all. [...]
In recent years, residents of Spain, France and the UK have looked up to see an eerie sight: deep orange sunrises and skies thick with a yellowish haze. These hazy skies often deposit "blood rain," rust-colored precipitation that leaves a fine grit on cars and windows. [...]
Parks are vital public spaces. This is especially true if you're a parent with energetic children, or an office worker searching for a peaceful lunch spot. [...]
A stranded humpback whale in Germany 's Baltic Sea looks weaker, and experts fear it won't be able to find its way back to the Atlantic despite several attempts at its rescue this week. [...]
When an invisible entity making up 85% of the universe's mass stumps the greatest scientific minds of our time, awe is an understandable response. [...]
As artificial intelligence (AI) tools become more common across government, new research from the University at Albany's Center for Technology in Government (CTG UAlbany) examines how agencies are using chatbots and what those tools are actually changing in practice. [...]
Both winds and tides inject energy into the ocean. Much of that energy is then transported up to thousands of miles by internal waves: large-scale underwater waves that can travel between ocean basins. Quantifying the amount of energy transported by internal waves and assessing their dynamics are difficult given their location and scale. Still, the question is important because internal wave dynamics interact with the global climate and underwater ecosystems by influencing currents, ocean mixing, and more. [...]