Shuttered windows are a permanent fixture in Salinas, an industrial town on Puerto Rico's southeast coast that is considered one of the U.S. territory's most contaminated regions. [...]
Declines in populations of big carnivores like lions, tigers and wolves may be driven more by rapid human economic development than habitat loss or climate change, according to a new study Tuesday. [...]
The specks are tiny. No, really tiny. Smaller than the diameter of a hair. But they hold billions of years of history that reveal some of the secrets of asteroids. [...]
Authorities in Chile on Saturday raised the alert level and limited access to the area around the Lascar volcano, after an increase in seismic activity raised fears of a possible eruption. [...]
The idea of New York in wintertime conjures up images of Manhattan's Times Square and Central Park shrouded in snow. Not this year. [...]
A camera atop Hawaii's tallest mountain has captured what looks like a spiral swirling through the night sky. [...]
Fluid dynamics researchers use many techniques to study turbulent flows like ocean currents, or the swirling atmosphere of other planets. Arezoo Adrekani's team has discovered that a mathematical construct used in these fields provides valuable information about stress in complex flow geometries. [...]
Some of the world's biggest academic journal publishers have banned or curbed their authors from using the advanced chatbot, ChatGPT. Because the bot uses information from the internet to produce highly readable answers to questions, the publishers are worried that inaccurate or plagiarized work could enter the pages of academic literature. [...]
University of Central Florida College of Optics and Photonics researchers achieved the first observation of de Broglie-Mackinnon wave packets by exploiting a loophole in a 1980s-era laser physics theorem. [...]
Greater diversification could help agriculture withstand climate, economic and geopolitical crises. [...]
Consumer sentiment lifted for the second straight month in January, rising 9% above December but remaining about 3% below a year ago, according to the University of Michigan Surveys of Consumers. [...]
Using ultraviolet germicidal radiation (UVGI) to disinfect indoor spaces is a demonstrably effective way of deactivating various pathogens (including the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus). It deactivates bacteria and viruses by exposing them to high-energy UV radiation through the use of UV lamps. [...]
Five new tree-dwelling snake species were discovered in the jungles of Ecuador, Colombia, and Panama. Conservationists Leonardo DiCaprio, Brian Sheth, Re:wild, and Nature and Culture International chose the names for three of them in honor of loved ones while raising awareness about the issue of rainforest destruction at the hands of open-pit mining operations. The research was conducted by Ecuadorian biologist Alejandro Arteaga and Panamanian biologist Abel Batista. [...]
The JWST is having a problem. One of its instruments, the Near Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph (NIRISS), has gone offline. The NIRISS performs spectroscopy on exoplanet atmospheres, among other things. [...]
On Oct. 5, 2020, the rapidly rotating corpse of a long-dead star about 30,000 light years from Earth changed speeds. In a cosmic instant, its spinning slowed. And a few days later, it abruptly started emitting radio waves. [...]
The fight to preserve Bell Bowl Prairie in Rockford, Illinois, where federally endangered rusty patched bumblebees have been found, ramped up this week, with environmentalists saying they intend to return to federal court. [...]
Wharton professor Christian Terwiesch was sitting with his grown children around the dinner table when the subject of artificial intelligence came up. Both of his kids had been experimenting with the nascent technology in their respective fields: "one of them is interested in design...and the other one is interested in computer science." [...]
A new analysis of seismic data recorded after the massively violent eruption of the underwater volcano Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai, on January 15, 2022, has revealed new and useful information on the sequence of events. Kotaro Tarumi and Kazunori Yoshizawa at Hokkaido University discuss their methods and findings in an article in Earth and Planetary Science Letters. [...]
Researchers at Umeå University have discovered how a certain type of protein moves for DNA to be copied. The discovery could have implications for understanding how antibiotic resistance genes spread between bacteria. [...]
The bright variable star V 372 Orionis takes center stage in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, which has also captured a smaller companion star in the upper left of this image. Both stars lie in the Orion Nebula, a colossal region of star formation roughly 1,450 light-years from Earth. [...]
Research from Washington University in St. Louis exposes the deadly legacy of redlining, the 1930s-era New Deal practice that graded neighborhoods by financial risk and solidified the notion that an area's property value was proportional to its racial composition. [...]
One of the main jobs for the Perseverance Mars rover past few weeks has been collecting carefully selected samples of Mars rock and soil. These samples have been placed and sealed in special sample tubes and left in well-identified places so that a future sample return mission can collect them and bring the Martian samples back to Earth. [...]
Every two to seven years, the equatorial Pacific Ocean gets up to 3°C warmer (what we know as an El Niño event) or colder (La Niña) than usual, triggering a cascade of effects felt around the world. This cycle is called the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) because every El Niño is naturally followed by a La Niña and vice versa, with some months of neutral conditions in between events. The change in sea surface temperature associated with ENSO events might seem marginal, but it is more than enough to disrupt weather patterns globally and even the large-scale circulation of air in the polar stratosphere 8km above the Earth. [...]
The African continent is bursting with biodiversity. In a 2016 report, the United Nations Environment Program wrote: "Africa's biomes extend from mangroves to deserts, from Mediterranean to tropical forests, from temperate to sub-tropical and montane grasslands and savannas, and even to ice-capped mountains." [...]
A team of researchers affiliated with a host of institutions across Spain, working with one colleague from Portugal and another from Austria, has discovered a large number of animal skulls placed by Neanderthals in Spanish cave more than 40,000 years ago. [...]
Small-scale restoration efforts that aim to help meet livelihood needs have the potential to contribute to ecological goals in the central Indian landscape, according to a new study published in Restoration Ecology. [...]
The Colorado River basin, which supplies water to 40 million people in the Western United States, is threatened by historic drought, a changing climate and water demands from growing cities. One potential response involves encouraging individuals to conserve water, and a new study may help identify those most likely to change their behaviors to contribute, according to scientists. [...]
COVID-19 forced people to contend with travel bans, stay-at-home orders and closure of nonessential businesses. A new study in the Journal of Business Research reveals how this significant event affected consumer mobility and shopping habits. And the results are hardly what one might predict. [...]
Mountaineers who venture high into the Colorado Rockies have likely spotted medium-sized, brown-and-pink birds rummaging around on snow patches for insects and seeds. These high-elevation specialists are rosy finches, a type of bird that's evolved to survive in some of the most rugged places in North America. [...]
A machine vision system capable of locating and identifying apple king flowers within clusters of blossoms on trees in orchards was devised by Penn State researchers—a critical early step in the development of a robotic pollination system—in a first-of-its-kind study. [...]