News

One wasp species has evolved the ability to recognize individual faces among their peers—something that most other insects cannot do—signaling an evolution in how they have learned to work together.

If the Glasgow meeting fails, it will raise tough questions about the UN climate talks process, says the woman in charge.

A name has been added the U.S. memorial for fallen astronauts, honoring the first commercial spacecraft pilot to die in the pursuit of opening outer space to the public.

That banana peel, turned into graphene, can help facilitate a massive reduction of the environmental impact of concrete and other building materials. While you're at it, toss in those plastic empties.

The design of sophisticated new materials is undergoing brisk technological advancement. Innovations in material science promise transformative improvements in industries ranging from energy to manufacturing.

What can be reused and what can be disposed of? Cells also face this tricky task. Researchers from the Biozentrum of the University of Basel have now discovered a cellular machine, called FERARI, that sorts out usable proteins for recycling. In Nature Cell Biology, they explain how FERARI works and why it is so special.

The international collaborative team of Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology (TUAT, Japan), IIT Ropar (India), Osaka Univ. (Japan) has discovered that "partially miscibility," in which two liquids do not mix completely with finite solubility, is capable of deforming the liquid-liquid interface. This interfacial deformation originates due to the spontaneous motion driven by phase separation between the soluble species, and is a phenomenon that cannot be seen with completely mixed (fully miscible) with infinite solubility or (almost) immiscible with no solubility.

A 16-year-old Indonesian boy suffered a horrific injury to his neck after a needlefish suddenly jumped out of the water and literally pierced his neck clean through, knocking him out of the boat he was fishing from. The freak accident occurred on January 18, when 16-year-old Muhammad Idul and his friend Sari decided to go […]

Two centuries after it was first sighted by Russian explorers, Antarctica is a key site for studying the future of Earth's climate – and for global scientific cooperation.

A team of physicists has discovered an electrical detection method for terahertz electromagnetic waves, which are extremely difficult to detect. The discovery could help miniaturize the detection equipment on microchips and enhance sensitivity.

Cutting emissions of particular gases could improve conditions for plants, allowing them to grow faster and capture more carbon, new research suggests.

A neural network-driven Earth system model has led University of California, Irvine oceanographers to a surprising conclusion: phytoplankton populations will grow in low-latitude waters by the end of the 21st century.

Using the latest satellite technology from the European Space Agency (ESA), scientists from the University of Bristol have been tracking patterns of mass loss from Pine Island—Antarctica's largest glacier.

The time it takes for species to respond to conservation measures—known as an 'ecological time lag' - could be partly masking any real progress that is being made, experts have warned.

Many cells are covered with mysterious large holes, pores that have been associated with the sense of taste as well as Alzheimer's disease, depression, and even asthma. Knowing the structure of these varied holes will help researchers better understand this range of associations and provide a blueprint for developing new therapies.

The materials the United States and other countries plan to use to store high-level nuclear waste will likely degrade faster than anyone previously knew because of the way those materials interact, new research shows.

Metamaterials have properties that depend on their shape and architecture. Researchers at AMOLF, Leiden University and Tel Aviv University have found a new way of designing these metamaterials and their properties by deliberately incorporating small errors. They have published their results in Nature Physics.

Methane is present in the natural gas that is abundant in the Earth's crust, and has found many uses in modern applications, mainly as a burning fuel. Alternatively, methane can be converted into a useful mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide, called "synthesis gas," by reaction with carbon dioxide in what is referred to as dry reforming of methane (DRM). This DRM reaction is described as "uphill" because it requires the consumption of external energy; thermal reactors have to be at a high temperature of more than 800 degrees Celsius for efficient conversion. Reaching such high temperatures requires burning other fuels, resulting in massive greenhouse gas emissions, which are the leading cause of climate change. In addition, the use of high temperatures also causes the deactivation of commonly used catalysts due to aggregation and carbon precipitation (so-called coking).

A material revolution replacing cement and steel in urban construction with wood can have double benefits for climate stabilization, a new study shows. First, it can avoid greenhouse gas emissions from cement and steel production. Second, it can turn buildings into carbon sinks as they store the CO2 taken up from the air by trees that are harvested and used as engineered timber. However, while the required amount of timber harvest is available in theory, such an upscaling would clearly need careful, sustainable forest management and governance, the international team of authors stresses.

Concrete and steel come with massive emissions. So let's ditch them and build towers out of wood. Yes, wood.

When two neutron stars slammed together far off in space, they created a powerful shaking in the universe — and their echoes could violate Einstein's theory of relativity.

"Think what we can do if we teach a quantum computer to do statistical mechanics," posed Michael McGuigan, a computational scientist with the Computational Science Initiative at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory.

The wide-scale introduction of large herbivores to the Arctic tundra to restore the "mammoth steppe" grassland ecosystem and mitigate global warming is economically viable, suggests a new paper from the University of Oxford.

New international research led by the University of St Andrews presents a novel way to understand the structure and formation of our oldest continents.

New research has identified a body of sediments that may have been deposited by a giant flood ending the Messinian Salinity Crisis. These sediments were transported by a massive flow of water and were deposited along the lee side of a submarine volcano located in the eastern Alboran basin.