Explore the latest scientific discoveries, science news, breakthroughs and developments from around the world.
Less favorable ocean conditions mean marbled murrelet chicks take longer to leave the nest, making them more vulnerable to predation, according to a new study of the Pacific Northwest seabird by Oregon State University scientists.
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.
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.
An AI ‘virtual author’ can help scientists use a paper’s methods on new data. But it’s not going to match a human author’s expertise.
Climate change and changes in the way land is used are the two biggest threats to wildlife because they change the environment in which animals survive and thrive. Knowing how species respond to these pressures is central to planning conservation actions.
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.
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.
The cyclone’s winds hit 185 miles per hour—the strongest windspeed of any storm this year
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...
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.
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.
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.