News

This summer, America celebrated the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, widely recognized as the formal founding of our nation and one of the early stages of establishing a democratic government.

A new study from Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management found that research proposals showing stronger signs of AI-assisted writing were four percentage points more likely to receive funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Up to 96% of the Sun will be covered by the Moon in the UK, while parts of Spain, Greenland, Iceland, Portugal and Russia will see a total eclipse.

Up to 96% of the Sun will be covered by the Moon in the UK, while parts of Spain, Greenland, Iceland, Portugal and Russia will see a total eclipse.

A wild cannibalistic sexual behavior in spiders has a simple genetic explanation, new study finds.

After a heavy rain, rivers often turn brown with sediment, sand, silt and soil washed from the landscape that play a vital role in shaping rivers.

Fluorescent protein imaging is an indispensable tool in life science research, enabling visualization of protein movement and localization, gene expression, signaling pathways, protein-protein interactions and more. For simultaneous analysis of multiple proteins (i.e., multiplex imaging), a variety of fluorescent proteins that emit different colors (blue, green, yellow and red) have been developed.

Capturing carbon or storing hydrogen to combat global warming requires compressing gases into sponge-like porous materials. Until now, gas molecules were thought to adsorb in a disordered manner throughout the pores. But what if invisible gas molecules could be lined up in regular order—like ice crystals or LEGO bricks?

Researchers say a spike in temperatures during an ice age 304 million years ago could inform what climate scientists are learning about rapidly changing conditions today.

Inspired by whalesong.ScienceAlert stories are written, fact-checked, and edited by humans, never generated by AI. Don't miss a story, subscribe here.

In the Midwestern summer, humans and plants have to breathe through the heat and humidity. Researchers hope that a retooled crop plant—one with an improved ventilation system within its leaves—could thrive while avoiding drought stress by reducing "crop sweat." Thanks to next-generation imaging technology powered by Argonne National Laboratory's particle collider beamline, a team of scientists now has precise schematics of the leaf's interior and can refine approaches to breeding hardier crop plants.

A new celestial map not only catalogs a variety of cosmic objects but also serves as a pointer for other telescopes on Earth and in space.

A University of Kansas physicist played a leading role in a CERN study showing that two rival explanations for how gluons behave inside atomic nuclei can now be experimentally distinguished.

Scientists from the Centre for Crop and Food Innovation (CCFI) at Murdoch University have participated in a landmark proof-of-concept research project demonstrating how pangenome-guided breeding strategies can reunite two traits that usually involve trade-offs: stress tolerance and yield.

Understanding how marine ecosystems respond to a warming ocean requires detailed records of past temperatures. An international research team led by Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) and the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry (MPIC) in Mainz has found a new way to reconstruct daily seawater temperatures over a four-month period.

Researchers at the Department of Energy's (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and the University of Tennessee (UT), Knoxville, have made an advance by using a natural substance from fungi called chitin to create hydrogels that are significantly stronger and tougher. This new material could lead to safer medical devices, longer-lasting coatings and other innovations that improve everyday technology and health care.

A vaccine only protects a whole community if enough people get it, including those who would stay safe anyway once their neighbors are covered. The same tension runs through climate action and social movements: The shared payoff arrives only when enough people pitch in.

Residents are being urged to prepare for additional severe storms in the coming days, as officials also report at least one fatality.

Like a collage made of layered sheets of colored cellophane, a vibrant new image layers observations of a famous star-forming nebula from NASA's space telescopes. The resulting cosmic "craft" reveals new details about the star-forming region known as 30 Doradus, or the Tarantula Nebula.

From nuclear energy to lab-grown meat, the list of effective but unpopular climate solutions is long. A new University of Colorado Boulder study sheds light on why people reject or accept some proposed sustainability technologies: If it doesn't seem natural, they won't go for it. And that holds across political ideologies.

When MIT historian Tristan Brown first examined a Chinese tea chest label displayed as a relic of the Boston Tea Party, he had no reason to doubt its story.

New research introduces a contactless way to see how mirror-image materials respond differently to circularly polarized light, without first building them into a complete electronic device. The researchers developed a novel method based on light-induced charge separation that allows researchers to directly probe how the material's structure acts like a microscopic filter, influencing how electrons separate and move.

Nearly 30 years ago, a simple question sent University of Washington researchers into the Puget Sound lowlands to look for birds. With Seattle's population swelling and housing developments pushing into once-forested suburbs, researchers wanted to know how land conversion was affecting birds and whether the type of development mattered.

A new study led by University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign scientists reveals critically low genetic variation in one of the country's primary breeding stocks for corn. The finding relates specifically to grain yield in intermediate-maturity hybrids, which dominate commercial production in the U.S. and represent nearly a third of the world's corn production. The researchers say it's a crisis waiting to happen.

Insidious.ScienceAlert stories are written, fact-checked, and edited by humans, never generated by AI. Don't miss a story, subscribe here.