Stay informed about scientific discoveries, research developments and new findings from around the world.
A new study from UCLA provides insights into how the January 2025 Eaton fire affected air quality downwind, showing how levels of toxic airborne contaminants spiked and then dissipated as the burning died down. The research is published in the journal ACS ES&T Air.
Rainfall from Hurricane Helene produced a short-term spike in microplastics at three sites in western North Carolina, with microplastic deposition three to 22 times higher than before the storm.
In the search for extraterrestrial life, it makes sense to first look for rocky planets with an atmosphere, like Earth. Without an atmosphere, a planet can't have surface water. But of the more than 6,300 exoplanets cataloged thus far, the vast majority are not rocky, and only a handful of the rocky worlds appear to have an atmosphere.
A new study from the University of Bath sheds light on critical U.S. intelligence failures ahead of the 9/11 attacks, including evidence that changes how the CIA's repeated failure to share information with the FBI about two hijackers should be understood.
Curtin University scientists have uncovered an important missing piece in the puzzle of how some coral reefs can recover from climate events, providing information that could help guide future conservation and restoration efforts.
With deepfakes on the rise, forgery and deception are often viewed as distinctly modern problems—a new era of misinformation made possible by artificial intelligence. One of the first alarming cases occurred at the start of the war in Ukraine, when a doctored video appeared to show President Volodymyr Zelenskyy telling his soldiers to lay down their weapons.
Coastal flooding may seem unpredictable, a natural disaster that occurs randomly. But UCF researcher Ivan Haigh has found that recurrent coastal floods occur at highly predictable times.
The University of Rhode Island has made one of the world's longest-running beach survey efforts available online through Rhode Island Beach Dynamics Over Decades, a new public website.
As Arctic sea ice retreats, new shipping routes, expanding resource development and growing geopolitical competition are transforming one of the world's least-monitored regions. Scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory have established one of the first long-term acoustic baselines for the Arctic's underwater soundscape. This work strengthens the detection and interpretation of earthquakes, underwater and nearshore detonations, ship traffic and other events of national security interest.
A South Korean research team has developed an environmentally friendly ammonia synthesis process that reduces carbon emissions using a membrane that selectively transports hydrogen.
Strike a bell, and it rings with a pitch and a fading that tell you about the bell: its size, its shape, the metal it is made of. Black holes ring too. When two merge, the newborn black hole shivers and sheds gravitational waves in a brief, dying chord, and since 2015, gravitational-wave detectors have been listening. The notes of that chord, which physicists call quasinormal modes, depend only on the black hole's mass and spin and on the law of gravity itself. Change the law, and the chord changes.
A modeling study involving researchers from Sultan Qaboos University found that sea surface temperature and Oman's terrain influenced simulations of Tropical Cyclone Shaheen through different mechanisms, affecting its intensity, track and rainfall distribution. The researchers chose Tropical Cyclone Shaheen, which directly affected northern Oman in October 2021, as a case study to examine how changes in environmental and surface conditions influence regional weather model simulations.
In her doctoral dissertation, M.Sc.Admin. Liisa Varumo examines the environmental justice of market-based and place-based conservation approaches and how these approaches can contribute to just sustainability transformations in biodiversity conservation.
When landfills and wastewater treatment plants create methane as a byproduct, much of it is simply burned and its value is lost. But the gas is an energy-rich resource that could be recycled as a fuel, chemical feedstock or bioproduct. Capturing and converting waste methane offers an opportunity to recover energy and create useful products from an otherwise wasted gas stream.
Archaeologists have unearthed a monumental 2,700-year-old tomb at Vulci, an important ancient Etruscan town north of Rome. Despite repeated attempts by tomb robbers to loot this burial over the centuries, the tomb still contained a massive collection of grave goods, including weapons, gold and bronze plates, chariot parts, a rare pair of women's shoes, and a complete banquet set.The burial, nicknamed the Tomb of the Stone Chamber, was excavated this summer, according to a translated statement from the Italian Superintendency of Archaeology, Fine Arts and Landscape for the Province of Viterbo and Southern Etruria (SABAP-VT-EM). But the discovery builds on work that French archaeologists carri...
A cell's ability to repair its damaged DNA is one of the most fundamental processes in biology, helping protect us from diseases like cancer. Over the years, researchers have unraveled many of the mechanisms cells use to repair DNA, ultimately leading to precision cancer treatments.
New research from Northwestern Pritzker School of Law suggests that public sentiment associated with "tough on crime" politics may be tied to increases in the number of people admitted to state prisons during election years.
Biochemists at the University of Wisconsin–Madison are using AI to tackle one of modern medicine's most pressing challenges: the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections. Using data collected in their lab, biochemistry professor Vatsan Raman and his team built an AI model to identify new possibilities for fighting bacteria with one of their natural enemies. Their findings, published in the journal Cell Systems, could help accelerate the development of alternatives to traditional antibiotic drugs.
A new post office policy that might sound like a technicality—one truck per day to rural post offices instead of two—could result in the rejection of tens of thousands of mail-in ballots in November, according to a new report from the Brookings Institution.
Researchers at the College of Veterinary Medicine and the Baker Institute of Animal Health have published the first molecular characterization of Marfan syndrome in domestic cats in a paper in the Sept. 19 issue of Scientific Reports.
Tiny insects called aphids inject hundreds of mysterious proteins into plants, hijacking the plants' own genomes to build galls: structures made of plant tissue but constructed to the insects' specifications to house and feed their offspring.
During NASA's SpaceX Crew-13 mission aboard the International Space Station, astronauts will support a series of biomedical and human performance investigations, including a new collaborative effort to study how spaceflight affects blood flow and clotting. NASA also is testing crew members' manual piloting skills, evaluating methods to counter vision and brain changes, gathering essential health data to inform future missions, and measuring forces astronauts experience during their return to Earth to help refine re-entry hardware and procedures.
Superconductors can carry electrical current without resistance, but only up to a maximum value known as the critical current. The critical current is a crucial figure of merit for applications, and materials science has long been focused on increasing this limit. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter (MPSD) have now shown that, in type-II superconductors, this conventional limit can be exceeded when the current is applied for only a few picoseconds.
New analyses of ancient cattle, sheep and goat bones on Madagascar suggest the rapid spread of introduced livestock on the island 1,200 years ago coincided with forest loss and population declines of large native herbivores.