Nautilus and Allonautilus cephalopods and their extinct ancestors have been drifting through the mesophotic zone of the ocean for more than 500 million years. Researchers have spent the last 40 years trying to understand how these mysterious "living fossils" thrive in areas with limited nutrients. [...]
Tropical forests are hot, steamy places. But when large numbers of trees are cut down, they get even hotter. Our recent research in Nature Climate Change shows that clearing large areas of the rainforest exposes hundreds of millions of people to higher temperatures, increasing heat stress (when the body's way of controlling temperature fails) and, in some cases, contributing to death. [...]
A major new study suggests people's direct experience with artificial intelligence has little impact on their views about its role in government decision-making—while factual information about the technology can significantly shift public opinion. Professor Yotam Margalit (King's College London) and Dr. Shir Raviv (Tel Aviv University) tracked the attitudes of more than 1,500 workers in a controlled experiment designed to mimic real-world interactions with AI systems. The work is published in the British Journal of Political Science. [...]
In the world of advanced materials, the ultimate goal is to create a substance that possesses the adaptability of biological tissue: it must be strong enough to maintain its shape, yet fluid enough to be molded. The research team at National Taiwan University (NTU) has achieved this balance by developing a sophisticated CGB hydrogel system, with their findings recently published in the journal Carbohydrate Polymers. [...]
Scientists call for a major acceleration in coral assisted evolution research to help reefs cope with rapidly warming oceans. The study, published today (30 March), was led by Dr. Adriana Humanes, Newcastle University and Dr. Juan Ortiz, Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS). It highlights fundamental changes needed to generate knowledge fast enough to make these methods effective. The international team of 28 experts identified promising discoveries that highlight the potential of assisted evolution to help mitigate the impact of climate change in reefs. [...]
"It takes a village to raise a child" doesn't apply merely to humans. Many species of mammals, birds, fish, and various invertebrates have evolved complex social care systems known as cooperative breeding. In these animal societies, offspring receive attention not only from their parents but also from other group members called helpers. [...]
People using other people's ideas, words and creations without acknowledgment is a widespread problem. Plagiarism occurs everywhere from restaurant menus to political speeches and music. [...]
The four astronauts on NASA's Artemis 2 mission began their fifth day journeying to the moon on Sunday, after already taking in sights of the lunar surface never before seen by human eyes. [...]
A team of US astronomers has carried out one of the deepest analyses to date of a sample from the asteroid Bennu, revealing new details about how water and organic material interacted during the earliest stages of the solar system. [...]
The Artemis II astronauts are already the champions of a fresh new era of lunar exploration. Now it's time to set a new distance record. [...]
The study of dinosaurs has been through a revolution in recent decades. The story began half a century ago, when Robert McNeill Alexander, a professor of zoology at the University of Leeds, showed how the speed of an animal could be calculated from the spacing of its footprints and its body size. [...]
Designed to hunt for new alien worlds, NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has serendipitously observed the rising outburst of a black hole X-ray binary known as AT 2019wey. The observations, which may help us better understand the nature of this system, were presented March 25 on the arXiv pre-print server. [...]
For some time, astronomers have theorized that there is a connection between planetary mass and rotation. In the solar system, Jupiter and Saturn both rotate rapidly, completing a rotation in roughly ten hours, while accounting for a significant fraction of the solar system's rotational energy. Using the W.M. Keck Observatory on Maunakea, Hawai'i, a team of astronomers tested this predicted relationship by studying 32 gas giants and brown dwarfs in distant star systems—6 giant planets larger than Jupiter and 25 brown dwarf companions. [...]
Algae blooms make a pond's surface shine in mesmerizing green hues. But if the microorganisms responsible are cyanobacteria, they can also release toxins that harm humans and wildlife alike. A team reporting in ACS ES&T Water has designed a "set it and forget it" system for distributing algaecide using specialized buoys tethered at the site of a bloom. In tests, the buoys removed nearly all cyanobacteria without the need for frequent reapplication. [...]
This image captured by U.S.-Indian Earth satellite NISAR on Nov. 10, 2025, shows Washington's Mount St. Helens. The image is cropped from a much larger swath spanning the Pacific Northwest on a cloudy day; NISAR's L-band SAR instrument is able to peer through the clouds at the surface below. [...]
More than 50 years after humans first flew around the moon, Artemis astronauts will repeat the feat on Monday and use the most basic instrument to study it: their eyes. [...]
The early universe is absolutely so far outside our understanding of how the world works it's hard to describe in words. Back then, the cosmos wasn't filled with stars and galaxies but with a boiling soup of quarks and gluons, with a few microscopic black holes thrown in, occasionally detonating like depth charges. That's the early universe theorized by a new paper, available in pre-print from arXiv, from researchers at Vrije Universiteit Brussel and MIT anyway. [...]
The Artemis astronauts have taken in sights of the moon never before seen by human eyes, crew members reported on Sunday as their spacecraft crossed the two-thirds mark on their journey to a long-anticipated lunar flyby. [...]
Now more than halfway to the moon, the Artemis II astronauts prepared for their historic lunar fly-around to push deeper into space than even the Apollo astronauts. [...]
Humans have always imagined the natural world. From Ice Age cave paintings to the modern day, we depict the animals and landscapes we value—and ignore those we don't. [...]
Insects make up to 90% of all animal species on the planet, and most of them can be found in the tropics, the regions around the equator. Yet we still know surprisingly little about how these species will cope with rising temperatures driven by climate change. [...]
In about 5 to 8 billion years, our sun is expected to evolve into a white dwarf—an extremely dense, Earth-sized stellar remnant that has exhausted its fuel and shed its outer layer. But while our sun is a solitary star, research over the past 15 years has demonstrated that binary or multi-star systems are far more common than astronomers once thought. When a dense and compact remnant like a white dwarf is involved in a binary system, it often "snatches away" material from its companion star. This process, called accretion, usually emits X-rays in what is considered a "signature" signal. [...]
Extreme heat kills more people in the U.S. each year than hurricanes, floods, and tornadoes combined. But how can we address a seemingly natural force? Heat can often seem solely weather-related, with policies trying to find a solution through temperature metrics, cooling technologies, and alerts. However, a new report from the Vanderbilt Cultural Contexts of Health and Wellbeing Initiative (VU-CCH) suggests that extreme heat is not just a climate issue, but also a social one. [...]
Animal life is extraordinarily diverse and complex, having colonized almost all environments on Earth—from hostile hydrothermal vents in the deep sea to the skies across our continents. But the planet was not always teeming with complex animal life. For the first 3.7 billion years after it originated, life was small, simple and largely confined to the oceans. This microbe-dominated world was a tumultuous place, with several major swings in its climate. [...]
Humor plays a vital role in helping older adults cope with the challenges of aging and staying socially connected, according to new research. [...]
A quick heart trace taken during a warm-up trot could identify racehorses at risk of cardiac arrhythmias during high-intensity exercise, according to a new study led by the University of Surrey. The screening method analyzes short, routine electrocardiogram (ECG) recordings that could be used to help prevent cardiac events in otherwise healthy horses, where no obvious signs of arrhythmia have been detected. [...]
Newly discovered fossils have given scientists their first real glimpse of when Earth made a crucial transition from plants and unrecognizably simple animals to the complex creatures that took over the world and would eventually lead to us. [...]
It's a well-established fact that forests and water are deeply connected. For decades, paired-watershed experiments—a scientific method for evaluating land-use impacts on water quantity or quality—have shown that when we lose forests, the total amount of water flowing through our rivers tends to rise. [...]
A research team has, for the first time in the world, elucidated the microscopic mechanism by which quantum order is lost and collapses in "open quantum environments" existing in nature. Since perfectly isolated quantum systems cannot exist in reality, this study is expected to provide a decisive breakthrough in bridging the gap between ideal quantum theory and quantum technologies that must operate in real-world environments. [...]
The butternut tree, a close relative of black walnut prized for its pale wood and wildlife value, is on the brink of disappearing from North American forests. A new study from Virginia Tech offers hope that the species could regain its foothold with help from modern data science. By mapping climate and soil conditions linked to natural disease resistance, researchers are guiding restoration strategies that could help this native species recover across the eastern United States. [...]