Interactions among viruses can help them succeed inside their hosts or impart vulnerabilities that make them easier to treat. Scientists are learning the ways viruses mingle inside the cells they infect, as well as the consequences of their socializing. [...]
Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) researchers have created a new carbon-negative building material that could transform sustainable construction. The breakthrough, published in the high-impact journal Matter, details the development of enzymatic structural material (ESM), a strong, durable, and recyclable construction material produced through a low-energy, bioinspired process. [...]
The story lines of every episode of legal TV dramas, from Law & Order to Perry Mason, revolve around five key narrative moments: the crime, the arrest, the plea, the verdict, and the offender's emotional response to what they've done. [...]
Sick young ants release a smell to tell worker ants to destroy them to protect the colony from infection, scientists said Tuesday, adding that queens do not seem to commit this act of self-sacrifice. [...]
If you ever find yourself on Macquarie Island—a narrow, wind-lashed ridge halfway between Tasmania and Antarctica—the first thing you'll notice is the wildlife. Elephant seals sprawl across dark beaches. King penguins march up mossy slopes. Albatrosses circle over vast, treeless uplands. [...]
More and more phones, televisions, smart speakers, and cars are embedded with automated speech-recognition technologies that transcribe speech into written words. These technologies enable the devices to understand what songs we want to listen to, where we want to drive, and whom we want to message. [...]
How much the planet warms with each ton of carbon dioxide remains one of the most important questions in climate science, but there is uncertainty in predicting it. This uncertainty hinders governments, businesses and communities from setting clear emission-reduction targets and preparing for the impacts of climate change. [...]
The Amazon rainforest has yielded yet another new species, according to a recent study published in Zootaxa. Discovered in the mountains of the Serra do Divisor National Park (SDNP) in Brazil, this ground-dwelling bird has been identified by a research team as a new species of Tinamus, a genus of birds in the Tinamou family Tinamidae. [...]
This week, JPL scientists reported that glaciers speed up and slow down at predictable intervals. CERN's ATLAS experiment detected evidence for the decay of a Higgs boson into a muon-antimuon pair. And researchers discovered that exercise slows tumor growth by shifting glucose uptake to muscles. [...]
Goldenberries taste like a cross between pineapple and mango, pack the nutritional punch of a superfood, and are increasingly popular in U.S. grocery stores. But the plants that produce these bright yellow-orange fruits grow wild and unruly—reaching heights that make large-scale farming impractical. [...]
What can mapped drainage systems on Mars teach scientists about the red planet's watery past? This is what a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences hopes to address as a team of scientists from the University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin) conducted a first-time mapping study involving Martian river basins. This study has the potential to not only gain insight into ancient Mars and how much water existed there long ago, but also develop new methods for mapping ancient river basins on Mars and potentially other worlds. [...]
In a recent study, researcher Dr. Hui Zhou and his colleagues conducted a genetic analysis of the genomes of individuals associated with the ancient Hanging Coffin tradition in Southeast and Southern Asia. In addition, they sequenced the genomes of modern-day Bo people to determine their genetic relationship to the ancient Hanging Coffin practitioners. [...]
Only 7% of Europe's original area of peatlands remain. What's more: their climate boundaries are shifting. An international study led by Wageningen University as part of the WaterLANDS project analyzed the current distribution of peatlands and mapped their likelihood of remaining under future climate scenarios. They conclude that climate change will massively impact peatland functioning except for the most cool and wet parts of northern Scandinavia, Ireland, Scotland and in the mountains. [...]
A flagship study that declared the weedkiller Roundup posed no serious health risks has been retracted with little fanfare, ending a 25-year saga that exposed how corporate interests can distort scientific research and influence government decision-making. [...]
A new study from UNC-Chapel Hill researchers shows that advanced artificial intelligence tools, specifically large language models (LLMs), can accurately determine the locations where plant specimens were originally collected, a process known as georeferencing. [...]
In the canopies of a South American rainforest, a tiny soldier termite has stunned a team of international scientists with its whale-like features. [...]
Spain's government said Friday it had not ruled out an accidental laboratory leak as the cause of an outbreak of African swine fever that has rocked the country's lucrative pork industry. [...]
Billions of alkaline-loving microbes could offer a new way to protect nuclear waste buried deep underground. This approach overcomes the limitations of current cement barriers, which can crack or break down over time. [...]
Why does plastic turn brittle and paint fade when exposed to the sun for long periods? Scientists have long known that such organic photodegradation occurs due to the sun's energy generating free radicals: molecules that have lost an electron to sunlight-induced ionization and have been left with an unpaired one, making them very eager to react with other molecules in the environment. However, the exact mechanisms for how and why the energy from the sun's photons get stored and released in the materials over very long periods have eluded empirical evidence. [...]
Syntax Bio, a synthetic biology company programming the next generation of cell therapies, has published new research in Science Advances detailing the company's CRISPR-based Cellgorithm technology, which lays the groundwork for programmable control of gene activity in human stem cells and offers an alternative to the slow, variable manual processes researchers use today. [...]
Professor Neil Thurman and Sina Thäsler-Kordonouri from the Department of Media and Communication (IfKW) at LMU have published comprehensive findings on the perception and professional use of artificial intelligence by journalists. [...]
A new study provides a crucial roadmap for Japan to address an escalating ecological challenge while advancing food sustainability: overcoming the psychological barriers to game meat consumption. [...]
Astronomers have captured images of two stellar explosions—known as novae—within days of their eruption and in unprecedented detail. The breakthrough provides direct evidence that these explosions are more complex than previously thought, with multiple outflows of material and, in some cases, dramatic delays in the ejection process. [...]
The carbon cycle in our oceans is critical to the balance of life in ocean waters and for reducing carbon in the atmosphere, a significant process to curbing climate change or global warming. [...]
The copper isotope Cu-64 plays an important role in medicine: It is used in imaging processes and also shows potential for cancer therapy. However, it does not occur naturally and must be produced artificially—a complex and costly process. [...]
A team from the Faculty of Physics and the Center for Quantum Optical Technologies at the Center of New Technologies, University of Warsaw has developed a new method for measuring elusive terahertz signals using a "quantum antenna." [...]
Many bird species have moved toward colder areas in the mountains of Europe as the climate has warmed over the past two decades. Sunny southern slopes attract birds to live at higher elevations than do shadier northern slopes. [...]
A research team from the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, has demonstrated ultrafast and highly reversible all-slope sodium storage using specially engineered hard carbon anodes. [...]
There is high global demand for critical metals, and many countries want to try extracting these sought-after metals from the seabed. An international study, which has discovered large numbers of new species at a depth of 4,000 meters, shows that such mining has less of a negative impact than expected. However, species diversity declined by a third in the tracks of the mining machine. [...]
Generative artificial intelligence (AI) such as ChatGPT has arrived in classrooms and sparked an intense debate about its role in education. These technologies raise the fundamental question of which human skills will still matter in the future. [...]