Spring in the forest: Many insects, particularly caterpillars, hatch just when the trees' nutrient-rich leaves are still young and soft. This means they find a table laden with food and can start eating straight away. If oak trees are heavily infested by caterpillars in a given year, they react to this the following spring: they delay their leaf emergence by three days. This is unfavorable for the caterpillars. After hatching, they are literally faced with empty plates, because the oak leaves are still firmly hidden in the buds. [...]
Across much of India, an energy crunch caused by the Iran war has prompted long queues for cooking gas cyclinders. That's not a problem for Gauri Devi. [...]
The wreckage of a U.S. Coast Guard ship lost in a deadly attack more than a century ago, during World War I, was been discovered off the coast of England. [...]
The kiwi, New Zealand's sacred national bird, vanished from the hills around Wellington more than a century ago. Now the capital's residents are waging an improbable citizen campaign to return the endangered flightless birds to the city. [...]
The widespread adoption of artificial intelligence (AI)—particularly in "hidden" everyday applications—is creating a new and distinct form of digital inequality. This is the warning of communication researcher Professor Sai Wang and her colleagues at the Hong Kong Baptist University, who analyzed data on more than 10,000 Americans' engagement with AI in a paper published in the journal Information, Communication & Technology. [...]
One of the most powerful radar systems ever launched into space has mapped the ground moving beneath one of the fastest subsiding capitals in the world: Mexico City. The findings show how quickly and reliably the NISAR (NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar) satellite can track real-time changes across Earth's surface from orbit, unhindered by clouds or vegetation that impede optical sensors and higher-frequency radars. [...]
Artificial intelligence is transforming our world and financial services are no exception. AI is reshaping the personal banking sector, but where does it currently stand on gender parity, transparency, and fairness? [...]
What people see on screen can shape what they do off it. When actors such as James Dean and Marlon Brando lit cigarettes in 1950s rebel films, smoking came to signify cool, defiance and desire for an entire generation. [...]
Researchers from the Department of Physical Chemistry at the Fritz Haber Institute and Freie Universität Berlin have revealed the arrangement of water molecules at the interface between liquid water and air. Their findings help to better understand interfacial chemistry, which is largely determined by the specific arrangement of the water molecules. Published in Science Advances, the study shows that one parameter in particular—one that has been neglected until now—is of fundamental importance: the water twist. [...]
As digital tools become more common in teamwork, many organizations hope they can help teams collaborate more effectively. But a new study suggests that some uses of tools—such as providing real-time feedback on collaboration via specific metrics—do not necessarily improve how teams work and in some cases may even make performance worse. [...]
While the world is a big place, humans are making greater and greater demands on the same areas of land. "This means that, unless we use the same land to serve multiple needs and coordinate this effort through planning, it is unlikely that we will have enough land for conservation, food and energy," said Grace Wu, a professor in UC Santa Barbara's Environmental Studies Program. [...]
Each animal species has an optimal temperature at which it can metabolize food and its immune system can best fight off pathogens. [...]
A century after their discovery, cosmic rays—particles of extreme energy originating from the far reaches of the universe—remain a mystery to scientists. The DAMPE (Dark Matter Particle Explorer) space telescope is tackling this phenomenon, particularly investigating the role that dark matter may play in their formation. This international mission, which includes the University of Geneva (UNIGE), has made a major breakthrough by highlighting a universal feature of these particles. The results are published in the journal Nature. [...]
Long an emblem of the summer road trip, squashed bugs on the car have become less numerous over the years, many people say—causing concern about the health of the world's insect populations. [...]
Climate change threatens to cause increasingly extreme and variable temperature swings, affecting everything from urban infrastructure to global food supplies. In the animal kingdom, the hardest hit may be the youngest and smallest songbirds, according to new research. [...]
Researchers at the Niels Bohr Institute have broken a longstanding barrier by managing to send single photons—that can't be copied or split and thus are secure—in the network of optical fibers we already have. This opens up a broad range of applications relying on secure quantum information. The research is published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology. [...]
Conventional spontaneous Raman spectroscopy of interfacial molecules typically requires plasmonic or electronic enhancement, limiting accessible systems. A nonlinear coherent Raman method now enables direct, high sensitivity detection without such requirements. [...]
On July 29, 2025, a magnitude 8.8 earthquake occurred near the Kamchatka Peninsula. It was so powerful that it ranks as the sixth-largest earthquake ever recorded by modern instruments. Using this giant earthquake as a learning opportunity, researchers at Tohoku University's International Research Institute of Disaster Science (IRIDeS) combined multiple datasets in order to reconstruct the movement of the faults (fractures in the earth's crust). Their analysis, published in Geoscience Letters, could help us better understand the tsunami risks faced by local communities, and how to protect them. [...]
Tiny plankton shells used to reconstruct past polar ocean temperatures may contain two different chemical stories, a new study by iC3 researchers has found. The work shows that Neogloboquadrina pachyderma, a key species in polar climate archives, can grow an outer shell crust with a different chemical make-up from the shell beneath it, even when both are grown in the same conditions. [...]
Extracellular vesicles, or EVs, are tiny membrane-bound particles released by nearly all cells. They carry proteins, RNA, lipids, and other biological cargo that reflect the condition of their parent cells. Because EVs circulate in blood, urine, and other body fluids, scientists see them as promising biomarkers for diagnosing diseases without invasive biopsies. However, traditional laboratory methods such as Western blotting and ELISA analyze EVs in bulk, averaging signals across millions of particles and often missing rare but clinically important subpopulations. [...]
As rain falls, lurking within stormwater runoff are hidden microplastics, polluting the water sources they drain into. Even though microplastics originate in urban environments such as cities, existing data sets focus on marine and coastal areas. Without data sources on microplastics in cities, scientists are unable to develop models for predicting stormwater runoff that deal with this pollution. [...]
Brands and retailers could increase their sales by simply using more transparent packaging for desirable items, according to new research co-authored by Bayes Business School and Vienna University of Economics and Business. The findings are published in the International Journal of Research in Marketing. [...]
As the spread of infectious diseases accelerates, technologies that can accurately distinguish multiple viruses in a single test are becoming increasingly important. KAIST and an international research team have developed a new diagnostic technology that simultaneously identifies various viruses and variants by controlling the "speed" of gene scissors. [...]
An international research team has achieved an important milestone for astrophysics at GSI/FAIR in Darmstadt: In the CRYRING@ESR storage ring, scientists were able to measure nuclear reactions at extremely low energies for the first time, mirroring the conditions inside stars. This novel experimental approach lays the foundation for decoding the formation of elements in the universe with even greater precision in the future. [...]
The old maxim "location, location, location" may be as important in the social media landscape as it is in real estate. When a social media post about a user's personal experiences, feelings or beliefs includes geographic information, that location cue may affect how much readers like and empathize with the poster, according to a study led by Penn State researchers. [...]
Just as the human body relies on organs such as the heart or liver for essential functions, cells depend on their own tiny organs, or organelles, to carry out vital tasks, including transporting nutrients, removing waste, and regulating genetic activity. [...]
When a gene is turned on in a cell, it creates a ripple effect along the DNA strand, changing the physical structure of the strand. A new study by MIT researchers, appearing in Science, shows that these ripples can stimulate or suppress neighboring genes. These effects, which result from the winding or unwinding of neighboring DNA, are determined by the order of genes along a strand of DNA. Genes upstream of the active gene are usually turned up, while those downstream are inhibited. [...]
How do our genes determine our appearance and our susceptibility to disease? This question is central to biomedical research, and today we can sequence thousands of human genomes to identify these genes. However, genes work in complex networks. [...]
Though it's largely a hereditary trait, siblings often grow to be different heights. But even if they end up topping out at the same stature, they may take different paths to get there. As they progress through childhood, growth spurts can come at varying ages with varying intensities. [...]
Researchers at Yale, Google, and the University of California-Santa Barbara have created a device that simulates the quantum "tunneling" behavior of protons that occurs in chemistry, a process so common it occurs in everything from photosynthesis to the formation of human DNA. [...]