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Science News

Latest science news, discoveries and scientific developments.

'Silent' vultures turn out to use a wide range of sounds to communicate
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'Silent' vultures turn out to use a wide range of sounds to communicate

Vultures were long thought to make few and fairly simple sounds. Yet no one had investigated in detail how the birds use sound to communicate. For his master's thesis in Jorg Massen's Vulture Cognition Lab, Connor Proudfoot studied the critically endangered Rüppell's vulture. He and his colleagues found that the birds produce a wide range of complex sounds, which they use in a range of social situations. The findings, published today in PLOS One, could help improve the success of captive breeding programs and shed light on the evolution of communication.

📅 2026-10-21 18:00:01    •    Phys.org
Ukrainian media coverage casts land as both lifeline and danger zone
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Ukrainian media coverage casts land as both lifeline and danger zone

An international team led by Alexander Vorbrugg analyzed (online) media reporting on war-related land changes in Ukraine. The study asked: How is damage to land represented? What knowledge do these representations draw on? How does the war affect the symbolic meaning of land and visions of the future? How are material damage and destruction translated into the media discourse? What ideas of landscape does this create?

📅 2026-10-21 17:40:16    •    Phys.org
Ultrafast light can control ferromagnetism without relying on heating
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Ultrafast light can control ferromagnetism without relying on heating

Despite being known for more mundane uses such as sticking notes to refrigerators or keeping bags shut, magnetization is one of the most fundamental and useful properties of a material. Indeed, it forms the physical basis for storing most of our digital information, encoding the bits used in hard drives, computer memories and credit cards.

📅 2026-10-21 17:40:04    •    Phys.org
Better data analysis links to stronger marketing and innovation in Thai retail sector
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Better data analysis links to stronger marketing and innovation in Thai retail sector

A study of 500 Thai retailers has found that businesses with stronger big data analytics capabilities tend to be better at identifying market needs, innovating and executing effective marketing strategies. Moreover, large retailers report higher capability levels than smaller firms, according to research published in the International Journal of Services and Operations Management.

📅 2026-10-21 17:40:01    •    Phys.org
Methane emissions in Baltimore show seasonal, daily trends
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Methane emissions in Baltimore show seasonal, daily trends

Natural gas leaks are a significant source of methane emissions in cities, but it can be hard to pinpoint exactly where and why they happen. And methane, a potent greenhouse gas that is the main chemical component of natural gas, has been historically undercounted or omitted in emissions estimates, according to a team of atmospheric and climate science researchers in the Penn State College of Earth and Mineral Sciences.

📅 2026-10-21 17:20:17    •    Phys.org
Childhood experiences of war loom large over CEOs' decision-making
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Childhood experiences of war loom large over CEOs' decision-making

The trauma of war has long-lasting reverberations, influencing business decisions made decades later, argue Eun Hye Jo and Jenny Jung-Wha Lee, accounting professors at Costello College of Business based at George Mason University Korea.

📅 2026-10-21 17:00:28    •    Phys.org
Two-in-one tool tracks viral RNA inside live infected cells in real time
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Two-in-one tool tracks viral RNA inside live infected cells in real time

Viruses are sneaky intruders, hijacking the internal machinery of host cells and replicating out of sight. Understanding these dynamics is the first step to developing effective antiviral strategies that could stop infections, but scientists have largely been left in the dark because there are limited tools to study how viruses move in space and time inside live infected cells, according to Joyce Jose, associate professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at Penn State.

📅 2026-10-21 17:00:13    •    Phys.org
Reindeer grazing changes plant roots in pine forests
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Reindeer grazing changes plant roots in pine forests

Reindeer grazing changes the vegetation of northern pine forests below ground as well as above it. In a recent study in Finland, trees and understory vegetation in grazed forests had nearly 30% less shallow-root biomass than those in ungrazed areas. Root structure also changed, which may affect the ability of plants to take up water and nutrients. The research is published in the journal Oikos.

📅 2026-10-21 16:40:09    •    Phys.org
Reexamined Viking 2 signal reveals possible marsquake from region active decades later
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Reexamined Viking 2 signal reveals possible marsquake from region active decades later

Earthquakes and the seismic waves they generate provide some of the best clues to Earth's interior. To extend that success to other worlds, scientists placed seismometers on the Apollo missions to the moon and on the Viking Mars landers, which reached Mars in 1976. Though the Apollo detectors proved a resounding success, Viking's results on Mars were less clear: Viking 1's seismometer failed to deploy properly, and Viking 2 recorded only two ambiguous events.

📅 2026-10-21 16:40:06    •    Phys.org
Uranium from World War II reveals how close the Nazis were to an atomic bomb
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Uranium from World War II reveals how close the Nazis were to an atomic bomb

The Nazis were far from completing a working reactor for their atomic bomb program, despite claims by the project's leader that it was almost ready, a new study finds. The German physicist Werner Heisenberg wrote in 1947 that the reactor for the "Nazi bomb" project ‪— which culminated in Germany's B8 nuclear reactor ‪— was almost finished at the end of World War II.Heisenberg, who led the reactor's development, claimed the reactor was "just insufficient" to create a self-sustaining fission reaction and that it lacked only a "relatively small amount of uranium" to work.If it had worked, the B8 reactor would have confirmed that a fission chain reaction was possible, marking a key step toward t...

📅 2026-10-21 16:32:23    •    Live Science
How life on Earth experiences climate change
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How life on Earth experiences climate change

Climate change can look very different at the scale of a forest, field or hillside. A new review shows how changes in vegetation and atmospheric conditions can cause local microclimates to warm at very different rates from the regional climate—and why this matters for understanding how biodiversity will respond to climate change.

📅 2026-10-21 16:20:23    •    Phys.org
Migratory birds spread avian influenza to Greenland's polar bears
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Migratory birds spread avian influenza to Greenland's polar bears

Migrating birds that breed in the Arctic are spreading avian influenza to polar bears in eastern Greenland, according to a new study that found evidence of infections in bear blood samples acquired from Greenland Inuit subsistence hunters.

📅 2026-10-21 16:20:10    •    Phys.org
Light-based method could offer first way to detect hypothetical 'mirror life'
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Light-based method could offer first way to detect hypothetical 'mirror life'

Scientists have proposed what they believe is the first method for detecting "mirror life"—a hypothetical form of life made from molecular building blocks that are the mirror image of those found naturally on Earth. Researchers at the University of Strathclyde and the Department of Chemistry at Durham University have outlined a new approach that could identify mirror organisms using molecules which emit left- and right-handed light.

📅 2026-10-21 16:00:14    •    Phys.org