The National Park Service says scientists are trying to discover the cause of death of a whale calf belonging to "one of the rarest marine mammals" on earth after it was found stranded on a beach on North Carolina's Outer Banks. [...]
Vickie Hicks, who weaves intricate sweetgrass baskets in Charleston, South Carolina's historic city market, remembers climbing onto the table at her grandmother's booth downtown when the floodwaters rushed by. [...]
Wear a mask. Stay six feet apart. Avoid large gatherings. As the world awaits a safe and effective vaccine, controlling the COVID-19 pandemic hinges on widespread compliance with these public health guidelines. But as colder weather forces people to spend more time indoors, blocking disease transmission will become more challenging than ever. [...]
At the 73rd Annual Meeting of the American Physical Society's Division of Fluid Dynamics, researchers shared new insights into melting icebergs and lake ice formation. [...]
A U.S.-European satellite designed to extend a decades-long measurement of global sea surface heights was launched into Earth orbit from California on Saturday. [...]
Dutch authorities have culled some 190,000 chickens after a highly-contagious strain of bird flu broke out at at least two poultry farms, the agriculture ministry said Sunday. [...]
Skeletal remains of what are believed to have been a rich man and his male slave attempting to escape death from the eruption of Mount Vesuvius nearly 2,000 years ago have been discovered in Pompeii, officials at the archaeological park in Italy said Saturday. [...]
Today, the U.S. Department of Energy's Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility has shipped the final new section of accelerator that it has built for an upgrade of the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS). The section of accelerator, called a cryomodule, has begun a cross-country road trip to DOE's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, where it will be installed in LCLS-II, the world's brightest X-ray laser. [...]
For more than a decade, scientists studying epigenetics have used a powerful method called ChIP-seq to map changes in proteins and other critical regulatory factors across the genome. While ChIP-seq provides invaluable insights into the underpinnings of health and disease, it also faces a frustrating challenge: its results are often viewed as qualitative rather than quantitative, making interpretation difficult. [...]
The rise of online hate speech is a disturbing, growing trend in countries around the world, with serious psychological consequences and the potential to impact, and even contribute to, real-world violence. Citizen-generated counter speech may help discourage hateful online rhetoric, but it has been difficult to quantify and study. Until recently, studies have been limited to small-scale, hand-labeled endeavors. [...]
Pay-to-stay, the practice of charging people to pay for their own jail or prison confinement, is being enforced unfairly by using criminal, civil and administrative law, according to a new Rutgers University-New Brunswick led study. [...]
If songbirds could appear on "The Masked Singer" reality TV competition, zebra finches would likely steal the show. That's because they can rapidly memorize the signature sounds of at least 50 different members of their flock, according to new research from the University of California, Berkeley. [...]
How much information can you get from a speck of purple pigment, no bigger than the diameter of a hair, plucked from an Egyptian portrait that's nearly 2,000 years old? Plenty, according to a new study. Analysis of that speck can teach us about how the pigment was made, what it's made of—and maybe even a little about the people who made it. The study is published in the International Journal of Ceramic Engineering and Science. [...]
Forests can help mitigate climate change, by taking in carbon dioxide during photosynthesis and storing it in their biomass (tree trunks, roots, etc.). In fact, forests currently take in around 25-30% of our human-generated carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Certain rainforest regions, such as the Amazon, store more carbon in their biomass than any other ecosystem or forest but when forests become water-stressed (not enough water in the soil, and/or air is extremely dry), forests will slow down or stop photosynthesis. This leaves more CO2 in the atmosphere, and can also lead to tree mortality. [...]
Multilayer plastic materials are ubiquitous in food and medical supply packaging, particularly since layering polymers can give those films specific properties, like heat resistance or oxygen and moisture control. But despite their utility, those ever-present plastics are impossible to recycle using conventional methods. [...]
The impact of sea surface temperature variations in the tropical Pacific on global climate has long been recognized. For instance, the episodic warming of the tropical Pacific during El Niño events causes melt of sea ice in far-reaching parts of the Southern Ocean via its effect on the global atmospheric circulation. A new study, published this week in the journal Science Advances by an international team, demonstrates that the opposite pathway exists as well. [...]
Freak ice storms following an abnormal weather phenomenon has left 150,000 people without water and electricity in the far eastern Russian city of Vladivostok and prompted a state of emergency. [...]
An Earth-observation satellite developed by European and US space agencies set to lift off Saturday will measure sea level rise, tracking changes threatening to disrupt tens of millions of lives within a generation. [...]
Floods of unimaginable magnitude once washed through Gale Crater on Mars' equator around 4 billion years ago—a finding that hints at the possibility that life may have existed there, according to data collected by NASA's Curiosity rover and analyzed in joint project by scientists from Jackson State University, Cornell University, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the University of Hawaii. [...]
The cell membrane is the cell's outermost line of defense against SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus responsible for COVID-19 disease. [...]
An international team comprising researchers from the University of Bristol, and Hunan and Central South Universities in China, have prepared biocompatible protocells that generate nitric oxide gas—a known reagent for blood vessel dilation—that when placed inside blood vessels expand the biological tissue. [...]
Scientists working with data from the Sloan Digital Sky Surveys' Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment (APOGEE) have discovered a "fossil galaxy" hidden in the depths of our own Milky Way. [...]
In 1838, Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel won the race to measure the first distance to a star other than our Sun via the trigonometric parallax—setting the first scale of the universe. [...]
With the increasing pressure on global carbon emissions and climate change, it is urgent to develop cleaner energy alternatives instead of fossil fuels. Hydrogen is a clean fuel with zero carbon emission because it produces only harmless water when it combusts. However, a technology to produce so-called "green hydrogen" needs to be developed further for practical applications, which employs on water splitting using a renewable energy source. Solar hydrogen is such an ideal technology of producing hydrogen fuel from using sunlight, but in spite of intensive research worldwide in the last decades, the progress has been slow. [...]
Drones are a powerful tool for conservation—but they should only be used after careful consideration and planning, according to a new report. [...]
Although coastlines have widely been proposed as potential corridors of past migration, the occupation of Africa's tropical coasts during the Stone Age is poorly known, particularly in contrast to the temperate coasts of northern and southern Africa. Recent studies in eastern Africa have begun to resolve this, detailing dynamic behavioral changes near the coast of Kenya during the last glacial phase, but studies of Stone Age occupations along western Africa's coasts are still lacking. [...]
Researchers analyzing snow and stream samples from the National Geographic and Rolex Perpetual Planet Everest Expedition have found evidence of microplastic pollution on Mount Everest. While the highest concentrations of microplastics were around Base Camp where hikers and trekkers spend the most time, the team also found microplastics as high up as 8,440 meters above sea level, just below the summit. The findings appear November 20 in the journal One Earth. [...]
A plant used in traditional Chinese medicine has evolved to become less visible to humans, new research shows. [...]
A research team, affiliated with South Korea's Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST) has unveiled a new eco-friendly and low-cost method to synthesize indolopyran, one type of nitrogen ring compound, contained in about 60% of drugs that are recently approved by FDA. [...]
Indonesian wildfires that cause widespread air pollution and vast carbon emissions are a "fixable problem", according to the leader of a project set up to help tackle the issue. [...]